Tenant Organizing
Definition
Tenant organising is the practice of building collective power among renters of a building, block, or city to negotiate with landlords, press for repairs, fight displacement, and (in extreme cases) strike rent.
It is the dominant urban-community-organising form of the 2020s, with both older lineages (the post-war tenant-union movement in US cities, the German Mieterverein and Mieterbewegung tradition, the British tenants’ federation) and newer campaigns (the NYC tenant-union wave of 2018–2022, the Berlin Kotti & Co, the UK Acorn group).
Practitioner guides (the Commons Library’s tenant-organising hub, the Right to the City Alliance, the UK Rent Strike Network) treat the building association (a stable, regular, in-person meeting of the building’s tenants) as the active ingredient — without that, a tenant campaign is a media campaign, not an organising one. The Commons Library covers community-organising and tenant-organising as part of its full arc of campaign-strategy, organising, digital campaigning, communications, and fundraising materials — the standing practitioner reference for the building-association-as-active-ingredient claim. [source: commons-library]
Full page: [[tenant-organizing]].
FAQ
What is tenant organizing?
Tenant organizing is the practice of building collective power among renters of a building, block, or city to negotiate with landlords, press for repairs, fight displacement, and (in extreme cases) strike rent. The full-page version of this definition lives on [[tenant-organizing]].
What is the lineage of the practice?
It is the dominant urban-community-organising form of the 2020s, with both older lineages (the post-war tenant-union movement in US cities, the German Mieterverein and Mieterbewegung tradition, the British tenants’ federation) and newer campaigns (the NYC tenant-union wave of 2018–2022, the Berlin Kotti & Co, the UK Acorn group). The practice spans continents and political systems [source: commons-library].
What is the active ingredient?
Practitioner guides (the Commons Library’s tenant-organising hub, the Right to the City Alliance, the UK Rent Strike Network) treat the building association (a stable, regular, in-person meeting of the building’s tenants) as the active ingredient — without that, a tenant campaign is a media campaign, not an organising one. The Commons Library covers community-organising and tenant-organising as part of its full arc of campaign-strategy, organising, digital campaigning, communications, and fundraising materials [source: commons-library].
What makes a building association the active ingredient?
A building association is the active ingredient because it produces the relational base the campaign depends on — stable, regular, in-person meetings build the trust and shared commitment that let the tenants act collectively. A tenant campaign without a building association has a media presence but no relational base; with one, the campaign has the infrastructure to escalate and sustain pressure on the landlord.