Summary

A fill-in handbook for tenants organizing their own building — from the first house meeting through a collective negotiation with the landlord, written for US renters with no prior organizing experience.

Body

The handbook walks tenants through five steps: (1) hold a house meeting and map the issues, (2) form a tenants’ committee and pick a contact team, (3) build a demand list, (4) present the demand collectively, (5) escalate if the landlord does not respond. It includes sample meeting agendas, a “know your rights” insert for repairs and harassment, and a collective letter template. The handbook is written in plain English and assumes the reader has never organized before. License status: ARR (free PDF); quote sparingly and link out. [source: tenant-union-handbook]

Use it for

Starting a building or block-level tenant association; running a first house meeting; drafting a collective demand letter.

Related

• affinity-groups
• coalition-building
• constructive-programme
• distributed-organizing
• leadership-development
• one-to-ones
• public-narrative

Open Questions

None yet.

Sources & verification

• tenant-union-handbook — grounding: secondary — RAW (license unverified, default link-only)

Verified 2026-07-01 by llm-qc.