From coast to coast, in communities large and small, tenants are organizing together into tenant unions to leverage their collective power. This movement is both a response and the solution to our current, but deeply rooted, housing crisis. Tenant-led housing solutions provide necessary alternatives to the predominance of supply-side “abundance” solutions that do not address the true cause of the housing crisis: the power imbalance between those who live in and those who own property. Part I explores motivations for tenant organizing: neglected maintenance, rising unaffordable rents, and unfair courts. Tenants organize to resist the subordination of housing’s use-value to its exchange-value. Current landlord-tenant law perpetuates rather than addresses this power imbalance, functioning as infrastructure for racial capitalism. Part II draws from movement organizers and lawyers to develop a power-building theory guiding legal engagement with tenant movements. This requires lawyers to abandon individual rights-focused thinking and expert-centered advocacy, instead supporting deep organizing that builds the collective power of the multiracial working class. The necessary law and policy reforms to achieve this transformation are “non-reformist”— those that strive for the mutually reinforcing aims of advancing a critique of political economy and building pathways for collective power. Part III describes the contemporary tenant power movement through experiences of tenants and organizers nationwide. It examines how organizing increases access to justice while building power, pursues ambitious goals challenging capitalist housing systems beyond existing legal frameworks, and identifies legal and policy reforms lawyers can advance alongside organized tenants.

Continue reading Law, Political Economy, and Organizing for Tenant Power