The hallways of apartment buildings have become a new front in the climate fight, where tenant unions are battling for survival against the twin threats of negligent landlords and rising heat.
Kansas City was hot and humid this summer, regularly in the upper eighties and nineties, and often feeling hotter than that. During that time, tenants at complexes like Bowen Towers and The Villages regularly lost air conditioning, an amenity that Kansas City landlords are not required to provide their tenants, even as temperatures continue rising with each passing year. Single moms and young workers and retired seniors did their best with fans and spray bottles. If they were lucky, and if their property manager felt like easing their struggle, they got a window unit.
The climate crisis is making it harder to be a tenant in America, and more urgent than ever to organize a tenant movement to contend with the forces of real estate and fossil fuel capital.
The rental market is a catastrophe generations in the making. The rent is too high and housing quality is dangerously poor. Tenants are paying more money than they’ve ever paid for worse conditions than they’ve ever endured. More than one-in-seven units in the American rental housing market have substantial quality issues, like broken windows or heat, according to the Government Accountability Office. While tenants deal with leaky roofs, mold, pests, sewage backup, and poorly insulated homes, their landlords take ever-larger shares of their monthly income in rent. The quality of tenants’ homes is in the hands of their landlords, putting tenants in a posture of powerlessness when it comes to demanding upgrades. And if the landlord does make repairs, they’re often accompanied by a rent hike.
The escalating climate crisis is worsening the crisis tenants face in their homes: the climate crisis is the biggest displacement threat worldwide, and those displaced by climate events struggle to find housing in the communities where they land. Real estate development –– from manufacturing to transportation of materials and construction –– relies on fossil fuels, accelerating the already painful climate crisis. Residential buildings in the United States are responsible for over 15 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Over a third of U.S. households can’t afford their monthly utility bills, a burden felt disproportionately by nonwhite tenants, and utility shutoffs are a leading cause of homelessness. All of this will intensify –– soon. Over 40 percent of the country’s 44 million rental housing units are located in areas facing immediate risk from climate-related disasters.
Absent meaningful action from the government, the question is not whether tenants will revolt, but whether the revolt will be from a place of desperation or a place of power. And around the country, tenants are organizing to ensure the latter. In the last month alone, tenants have gone union in mobile home parks in Montana, senior buildings in Connecticut and Michigan, in red counties in Kentucky, in utility-burdened communities in California, to name a few.
Tenant unions seek a different system entirely, one where homes are not treated as commodities but guaranteed as public goods, and where our lives are not reduced to line items in a landlord’s budget. This vision isn’t a radical fever dream; it is the only way out of this mess. Ultimately, achieving this vision will require rejecting the market as we know it today and creating publicly-backed, nonmarket alternatives.
Unions are uniting across geography, and aligning through the Tenant Union Federation, a national union of tenant unions, which we launched last year. Drawing inspiration from labor and community organizing histories, but also responding to contemporary market conditions, tenant unions are getting serious about building a new kind of power to contest the forces of real estate and fossil capital.
Tenant unions do not primarily organize with the goal of ending the climate crisis. Rather, the goal of a tenant union is for tenants to build and wield enough collective power to have agency and control over their homes. But as the climate crisis escalates, the tenant union is a promising vehicle for working class people to channel that agency towards saving their homes from disaster, and towards combatting fossil capital, too. From the coastal community of Branford, Connecticut to wildfire-stricken Pasadena, tenants are coming together to organize. And when we organize, if we organize with strategy, we win.
Based on our experience working with tenant unions across the country, we see five major trends emerging that position those unions to lead the fight against climate change:
- Win repairs that keep tenants safe in extreme weather. Most commonly, tenant organizing wins take the form of building repairs. This can and often does include key energy-efficiency upgrades that can better weatherize apartments, including sealing windows and doors and fixing holes in ceilings. For example, tenants in Kentucky in a building with a broken roof organized and won significant roof repairs that mean they are now safer in the face of intense rains and extreme heat. In other cases, it means securing air conditioning amidst sweltering heat waves.
- Make escalating utility bills more affordable. Tenants organizing wins cheaper utility bills. In Independence, Missouri, tenants went on an eight-month rent strike and won commitments to repair the broken HVAC and a $75 monthly utility reduction until repairs were completed. They also won a rent increase cap and did not have to pay a dime in back pay from the strike. In Los Angeles, tenants organized with the Debt Collective and went on a utility strike in June after seeing their utility costs unfairly go up from the landlord’s switch to a Ratio Utility Bills System, They won a collective $25,000 from the landlord as a result, with some tenants getting over $700 back in their pockets.
- Build durable and effective networks for when disaster strikes. In the process of organizing with neighbors, tenants are forming stronger ties and learning how to take action together, which in turn builds the resilient social networks needed when disaster strikes. Knowing your neighbors and living in one place over time actually decreases chances of dying from extreme heat or being vulnerable during disasters, and tenant organizing creates those life-saving connections. As tenants in Asheville reflected on the role of their union during Hurricane Helene with us, they emphasized that the tenant network already in-place from tenant union organizing expedited their ability to get critical services like medication and water. This, in turn, allowed them to quickly work together to develop shared demands around rent cancellation in public housing.
- Advance strategies to win non-market housing. For many tenant unions, community and public control of our homes is not just a path out of corporate greed, but also an essential step towards decarbonization and repairs by aligning the incentives to invest in our homes. In Branford, Connecticut, a local union of the Connecticut Tenants Union has taken essential steps towards governing their own housing authority board to gain control of financial decisions and oversight for their building. For them, this organization has two goals: keeping their public housing public, and preserving adjacent land from speculative development that would worsen flooding. With concerns of flooding, they do not want to see developers razing through essential lands for luxury developments. In Montana, mobile home park tenants affiliated with the Bozeman Tenants Union are organizing for a resident owned community to preserve affordability and have control over their own climate resilience and conditions upgrades.
- Build the political power needed to win demands from the state. As tenants work to organize in their buildings, they are also eyeing city, state, and federal policies to decarbonize and decommodify their homes. In Los Angeles, for example, tenants won a ban on “renovictions” to ensure that repairs do not lead to displacement for tenants. In Rhode Island, tenants with Reclaim Rhode Island and the Rhode Island Tenants Union are winning stepping stones to social housing like a statewide land bank and $10M public developer bond measure for energy-efficient housing. And they’re actively organizing for more. And in NYC, tenants with the Tenant Bloc just mobilized for Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who ran on a promise of rent freezes and new investments to improve the conditions of affordable housing in New York, all of which will have implications for staying safe and rooted in the escalating climate crisis.
The compounded climate crisis, housing crisis, and rise of fascism within our own borders make the stakes unimaginably high at this moment, especially so for the poor. Emerging through uncertainty will require rigor, experimentation, and real strategy to contend against the co-conspiring forces of real estate and fossil capital.
As we work with tenants organizing across the country, we find ourselves remembering the Paulo Freire quote: “What can we do today in order to do tomorrow what we cannot do today?” What we can do now is organize with our neighbors, down the hall and across state lines, so that tomorrow we can live in a world with clean, affordable and safe homes –– for ourselves, for our neighbors, for us all.
