Foundations Buoy a New Movement of Renters’ Activism

After years of rising rents, a group of fed-up Kansas City, Mo., renters came together in 2019 to form KC Tenants, armed with an annual budget of $30,000 and demands for a bill of rights to protect renters from rising prices, unjust evictions, and landlord abuse.

Four years and one pandemic later, KC Tenants is a nonprofit tenants union with a budget that grew almost twentyfold and a track record of advocacy victories. For instance, the group got its bill of rights enacted by the city and is working for more changes, including making sure all tenants have the right to a lawyer when facing evictions.

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Tenants unions are membership-based groups that advocate for the collective rights of renters, often at the building, neighborhood, or citywide level. Many tenants unions operate similarly to labor unions by charging member dues, offering member benefits, and appointing particularly active members as tenant leaders, who may lead collective negotiations with landlords or spearhead a broader advocacy campaign.

The progress at KC Tenants comes as a growing number of foundations are working with a revitalized tenants movement to confront the nation’s housing crisis. The current wave of housing organizing is the country’s most significant since the 1970s, when a combination of inflation and momentum from the civil-rights movement led to rent strikes across the country and the implementation of policies like rent control.

Now rents are rising once again, and tenant organizers, who led the fight for pandemic-era eviction moratoriums, have turned their sights toward new permanent protections for tenants.

The pandemic “exposed a live wire about the lack of protections and vulnerabilities tenants face,” says Jennifer Angarita, deputy director of Funders for Housing and Opportunity, a group of grant makers. After losing their jobs at the beginning of the pandemic, many tenants struggled to pay rent and would have lost their homes without eviction moratoriums.

Angarita says an increase in national grant makers’ support for local tenant movements is part of a broader shift in philanthropy that prioritizes support for the people most closely affected by social issues.

In 2021, HouseUS, a national organizing fund that supports local tenants movements, launched with $7.5 million. It received $5.5 million from the Ford Foundation and $2 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which has since awarded another $4 million. The fund — which supports KC Tenants, Colorado Homes for All, the Nevada Housing Justice Alliance, and others — has continued to attract money from other large foundations. It raised more than $4 million in the past three years from grant makers such as the Oak Foundation, which has provided $2 million, and the Melville Charitable Trust, which gave $200,000.

“Nothing pulls people in quite like momentum,” says Kevin Simowitz, co-director of HouseUS.

The national tenants movement has helped make changes across the nation:

• This year, Keep LA Housed, Inquilinos Unidos, and others won Los Angeles City Council approval for protections that require landlords to provide clear causes, like nonpayment of rent, for evictions and relocation assistance for tenants displaced by rising rents.
• In New York, Housing Justice for All, a coalition of nonprofits, successfully fought for new laws and protections such as limitations on security-deposit charges and requirements to notify tenants before making certain rent increases.
• The Miami Workers Center, a tenant collective, won approval for a countywide bill of rights protecting renters from housing discrimination based on prior evictions and a guarantee they’ll be notified if a building shifts ownership.

“Communities have been preparing for a moment when they can realize change, and I think we have it now,” says Meshie Knight, senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “I see philanthropy as being able to contribute to that reimagination of a new and more equitable future.”

Growing Momentum

During the pandemic, KC Tenants became an advocate for emergency tenant protections, including a temporary eviction moratorium in the state. The group, with a budget of nearly $600,000 from both local and national grants, now employs seven full-time staff members, plus a cadre of tenant members who’ve led protests outside of judges’ homes, chained themselves to courthouse doors, and pursued more traditional legislative advocacy in an effort to keep renters in their homes.

“We were engaging in direct action to shut down evictions by whatever means we could find,” says Tara Raghuveer, founding director of KC Tenants. “Along the way, we started organizing neighborhood tenant unions.”

It’s that kind of nimbleness — and those victories — that convinced some foundations that tenant unions should continue their work even after the spread of Covid eased.

Lynne Sladky, AP

At Ford, which is among the grant makers that gives the most for housing, support for tenant groups came as part of a shift in thinking about how philanthropy can make more of a dent in dealing with the struggles many working-class and middle-class Americans face as they seek a place to live. In the past, the fund’s housing grants focused on increasing the quantity of affordable housing through land-use and development efforts. Now many of its housing grants go to organizations that advocate for tenants as part of a broader push for racial and economic justice, says Ethan Frey, program officer for civic engagement and government at Ford.

He says the foundation’s restructuring emerged from the sentiment that “more work needed to be done to build political will and make more transformative changes to our housing system.”

“We’ve been really excited about the emergence of groups like KC Tenants,” he says.

Rural Work Begins

While previous waves of tenant organizing were often led by national tenant organizations, local tenant unions have largely spearheaded the movement in recent years, Frey says. That’s because many local groups grew from the ground up during the pandemic, when they went from organizing buildings to generating momentum for citywide eviction protections.

KC Tenants proved especially successful at building momentum through its confrontational pandemic-era tactics — the group disrupted 919 evictions during a Zero Eviction January campaign in 2021 — and the leadership of advocates like Raghuveer, who is a seasoned national housing organizer.

In 2021, the HouseUS fund began ramping up its support for Missouri tenant movements outside of Kansas City in an effort to increase tenant organizing in other parts of the state.

With the guidance and financial oversight of KC Tenants, HouseUS has provided $100,000 per year since 2021 to help create a nonprofit tenants union in Cape Girardeau, which is in rural southeast Missouri.

It’s been an uphill battle to persuade rural tenants to join the union, says Aaron Lerma, an organizer leading the campaign. Many tenants were concerned about being blacklisted from renting in the small city.

However, Lerma says, he’s seeing a growing willingness among residents to help direct what comes next — and a sense that it might lead to real change.

Sam Blaufuss

“That sense of fear has also contributed to a lot of hopelessness in our communities,” Lerma says. “We have to generate our own hope about what’s possible.”

Lerma spent six months knocking on doors before holding the group’s first meeting in June 2022. At that meeting, tenants shared their priorities for improving housing conditions. The leaders of Cape Girardeau tenants have been able to build credibility with other residents not only through policy work but also through being an advocate for tenants. For instance, when Cape Girardeau renters are evicted or a landlord refuses to make repairs, they now have someone to call.
The group recently negotiated an agreement with the town’s inspection-services supervisor to restructure Cape Girardeau’s code-inspection department. The town plans to hire more inspectors so it can do more to enforce safe housing standards. Cape Girardeau Tenants, which now has around 60 members and 10 tenant leaders, is considering what’s next, including the possibility for a tenants bill of rights.

Denise St. Omer is a board member of the Kansas City-based Hadley Project, which provides funding to community nonprofits, including KC Tenants. The project was an early supporter of the tenant group before there was much funding from major foundations. She says work done by community groups like KC Tenants helped change the future.

“We have short historical memories, but the rights and privileges that we take for granted now came about as a result of grassroots organizing that was deeply unpopular at the time,” St. Omer says, adding, “These are individuals experiencing housing instability. They’re not being invited to participate in the decision-making process. They have to use their collective power to get a seat at the table.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.