In the face of a hostile legislature and stalled policies, Miami tenants have stopped asking politicians for help and started building their own power—by turning corporate landlords’ financial records into weapons.
The housing crisis in Florida has only worsened in recent years. Tenants face increasing pressure to make rent and attempts to shore up protections for renters have been quickly snuffed out by the Republican supermajority state legislature. As the state and Miami-Dade County have moved further to the right, we have seen our elected officials distance themselves from organizations like ours, aside from the occasional photo op, and shift closer to corporate interests.
The combined impacts of climate change, real estate speculation, and an influx of wealthier transplants led to a nearly 40% increase in rents across Florida between 2019-2023. In Miami, working-class Black and immigrant tenants are being pushed out of previously affordable areas as sea level rise leads to more flooding along wealthier coastal areas. Rental properties nationwide are aging, making them more prone to structural problems and vulnerable to extreme weather. Nearly 4 million renter households in the U.S. live in substandard housing, and one in four rental units are in regions highly vulnerable to severe weather events such as hurricanes. In Miami, tenants feel the impact when an average rainstorm brings floodwaters to their door, and when their landlord is slow to repair the air conditioning unit in 90 degree weather. While those in power make it harder for Miami’s tenants to decide what happens to their communities, we are more at risk than ever of losing habitable and affordable rental housing.
At the end of last year, we faced a crossroads in our two policy campaigns: a county-level Right to Counsel for evictions and a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. Neither had successfully picked up a legislative sponsor, and our membership base was supportive but not excited about them. If they weren’t outright ignoring us, county commissioners and their staff were telling us that trying to pass protections was pointless at the moment. They referred to our successful Miami-Dade Tenant Bill of Rights campaign as an example. The 2022 ordinance, along with all others across the state, were preempted in the following legislative session. Pushing forward with either campaign would likely require watering the legislation down to make it more politically palatable, but this would further dampen members’ interest in the campaigns.
Instead, we put the campaigns on ice. In January, we developed a plan to identify what would actually move community members in this moment. Inspired by the successful corporate landlord campaigns of KC Tenants, Connecticut Tenants Union, Inquilinxs Unidxs and others, we decided to research the landscape of corporate landlords in Miami-Dade County. With a list of corporate landlords in hand, our organizers began scoping out buildings. Our goal was to identify which landlords were the worst offenders that were also receiving public subsidies or incentives double dipping on our rent and our taxes.
In order to avoid developing campaigns that were failing to ignite the base, we looked to the Participatory Action Research (PAR) framework, inspired by Paulo Freire’s popular education principles. For many of us in movement, Freire has inspired a key tenet of our work: the people closest to the problems are those closest to the solutions. We created the PAR Fellowship where 10 of our members would be trained in PAR concepts to develop their leadership and to collect the surveys that would be the core of the research. In March and April this year, they collected 1,088 surveys across 45 buildings of 12 landlords. At every stage, members participated in and gave feedback on our research questions and gave us valuable insight from the field.
The research made it clear what is top of mind for many tenants: rent increases and living conditions issues. A few of our findings:
- 90% of tenants named rent increases as their top complaint and said they could not afford more increases.
- 83% of tenants interviewed had at least one major living conditions issue.
- Only 7.4% of tenants said they were happy with their landlord or property manager.
- 1 in 4 tenants told us they do their own repairs or pest control.
- In interviews, nearly half of tenants brought up the topic of rent control or rent stabilization regarding increases.
To dig deeper and to identify potential leaders in the buildings, we conducted 53 interviews and three focus groups with tenants. The interviews put into stark relief many tenants’ dilemma. They are tolerating slumlord conditions because the alternative is heading to a shelter –– or the street. There is a shortage of over 90,000 units with rents that are affordable to Miami renters making 80 percent or below of the Area Median Income. While they know they aren’t getting their money’s worth and don’t want to live somewhere with mold, leaks, roaches, and major structural issues, they can’t just pick up and leave. Many need to stay for work, to be near family, or for their children’s school. That precarity also makes it less likely that tenants will report problems or try to enforce the state’s rent withholding statute, which permits tenants to withhold rent if a landlord is refusing to make a repair required by law.
We gained insights into tenants’ relationships with each other, a key indicator of how difficult it might be to organize. About 70 percent of tenants told us they don’t know or don’t talk to their neighbors. While most cited exhaustion from work, some associated socializing with gossip or drama. It highlighted the need to support the development of social bonds between tenants with events like cookouts, block parties, and game or movie nights. It also made us aware of potential conflict between tenants across racial lines, immigration status, religion, and other identifiers.
Investigating local corporate landlords also gave us more ammunition to agitate tenants. While looking into one landlord’s financials, we discovered they only paid two to four cents of each dollar of tenants’ rent toward maintenance. The landlord kept a third of tenants’ rent after expenses while taking advantage of federal and local tax breaks. Having tangible, fact-checked information has helped us initiate longer conversations with tenants, which is especially helpful in a region where most low-income tenants are immigrants and fear of immigration enforcement is heightened.
Pivoting to a research year changed the nature of our work. We became less public facing and more focused on internal structures. Doing so has clarified what is working, what isn’t, and what needs to change to implement the “Action” piece of the PAR project: building and launching strike-ready tenant unions. Our new report, Our Money, Their Monopoly: How Corporate Welfare Exploits Miami Renters, allows us to begin rewriting the pro-corporate narratives that have only deepened as billionaires like Ken Griffin and Jeff Bezos make themselves at home here.
Unfavorable political conditions and increased consolidation of power by the ultrawealthy require us to be innovative and even more determined to organize. Even in states where the law doesn’t reflect what our communities actually need, we can refuse to back down. Through gaining a deeper understanding of the terrain and our targets, we can build a new plan to move forward in a red-trifecta state.
