As the Eaton Fire burned two blocks away from Bee Rooney’s rental unit in Pasadena, California, ash, soot, and smoke came billowing in through the drafty windows and doors. Their landlord did not call to check in on the uninhabitable unit. Rooney was displaced for six weeks before being able to safely return home.
Across the country in Branford, Connecticut, Holly Hackett was getting sick from poorly insulated windows and a malfunctioning heating system. She was struggling to pay her heating bills, which were upwards of $350 a month for her small studio apartment. She knew she and her neighbors—who live in elderly and disabled housing—would be better off with heat pumps and insulation, but she feared her landlord’s plan was instead to defer maintenance and eventually flip the building.
Desperate for safety, both tenants turned to a trusted source: the local tenant union.
Despite a federal government hostile to climate and housing progress, tenants know what they need to do to win safer and more affordable homes and are taking action. They’re building durable organizations and creating a blueprint for how to organize effectively amid the climate crisis. I work at the Climate and Community Institute, where we research how the climate crisis impacts tenants and how to advance organizing strategies and policies to realize housing and climate justice together.
Tenants Are on the Front lines of the Climate Crisis, With Few Protections
The climate crisis is making an already painful housing crisis even worse for tenants. Over 40 percent of the country’s 44 million rental housing units are located in areas facing immediate risk from climate-related disasters. Black and brown tenants are disproportionately at risk. Extreme weather exacerbates long-standing housing quality concerns, like indoor air quality and mold growth. Climate change is also making renting more expensive with rising utility bills from heat waves, post-disaster rent gouging, and skyrocketing insurance premiums that put the already scarce stock of affordable housing further in peril.
The quality and stability of tenants’ homes is largely left to the whims of their landlords. Limited tenant protections mean that a tenant who asks for changes might be met with a retaliatory eviction notice. Climate and Community Institute’s research shows that climate policies like the Inflation Reduction Act have the potential to begin to make some progress at the housing-climate intersection, but that landlords are not incentivized to use IRA funds to improve conditions, and that even if they do, they could pass those costs to tenants without protections.
The rise of tenant unions reflects the urgency to build a new kind of power to contest the forces of real estate capital that keep homes from being affordable and safe. Tenant unions primarily organize around issues of safety, affordability, and unresponsive landlords. But as rental markets respond to climate risks, organizing around safety and affordability has also meant organizing around climate justice.
Organizing for Tenant Safety in the Wake of Disasters
Tenant unions are proving to be an effective vehicle for advancing tenant protection policies and preventing displacement when disaster strikes.
In Pasadena, California, for example, tenants struggled with visible ash and soot buildup in their units and common spaces after the recent wildfires. Rooney, a member of the Pasadena Tenants Union, told Climate and Community Institute that when tenants spoke up about these problems, their landlords often dismissed or ignored their requests—or worse, threatened eviction. In response, the Pasadena Tenants Union (PTU) stepped in, partnering with mutual aid efforts led by organizers in the LA area and cleaning professionals to train tenants on how to get ash out of apartments. They used crowdsourced funds to purchase air scrubbers, HEPA vacuum cleaners (which filter particulates in the air), and PPE (personal protective equipment). Within a few weeks, they were able to make 20 apartments habitable again, with hundreds more tenants requesting support. PTU has also been helping tenants organize their buildings to collectively demand repairs from landlords. Next door in Los Angeles, the LA Tenants Union amplified mutual aid efforts for tenants who had lost work because of the fires.
In Asheville, North Carolina, Nick MacLeod, executive director of the North Carolina Tenants Union, said that public housing tenants in the Western North Carolina Tenants Network got notice from their local housing authority that the rent was still due mere days after Hurricane Helene hit. Tenants—many of whom were elderly and homebound—were without functioning water, sewage systems, and internet. They could not afford to put their limited incomes toward rent during the crisis. But in North Carolina, tenants can’t withhold rent, even if their homes lack basic necessities. Tenants in this complex had organized together in the past and formed a tenants union. They knew it would be stronger to make demands together than alone. They were able to successfully organize to get rent payments canceled in the wake of the hurricane and win a temporary eviction freeze for all tenants living in apartments owned by the Housing Authority of the City of Asheville.
Tenant-led organizations are also leveraging their power to collectively enforce the laws that do exist to protect tenants and demand more protections. In North Carolina, organizers advocated for an eviction moratorium for private-market tenants after Hurricane Helene, although none was ultimately granted. They also created a new data-scraping tool, MacLeod says, to pull from public eviction court records. This allowed them to paint a more comprehensive picture of eviction proceedings in the state. In Los Angeles, tenant organizers and volunteers with an effort now called The Rent Brigade crowdsourced reports of rent gouging immediately after the disasters. They also scraped Zillow to find 1,343 distinct instances of rent-gouging that occurred between Jan. 7 to Jan. 18. A robust network of organizations, including the Keep LA Housed Coalition and the LA Tenants Union, advocated for a post-disaster eviction moratorium. In late February, their efforts paid off—Los Angeles approved a six-month ban on evictions of tenants impacted by the fires.
In both contexts, having a pre-existing tenant union infrastructure proved essential for quickly and strategically mobilizing support. Rooney told me the Pasadena Tenants Union had knocked on 40,000 doors in the previous few years, cultivating a strong network and trusted reputation among tenants. PTU had also already worked collectively to win rent stabilization in 2022, creating a template for how to fight for policy change. In North Carolina, the residents had already established a tenants union at their public housing complex, giving them experience fighting together for better living conditions, identifying leaders within their buildings, and having one another’s backs when issues arose.
As rental markets respond to climate risks, organizing around safety and affordability has also meant organizing around climate justice.
The fundamentals of tenant organizing—knocking on neighbors’ doors, developing leaders, taking collective action, and advancing campaigns for protections from a landlord or government—built trust and strategic muscle in California and North Carolina that could then be leveraged efficiently in these crises. Just as workers have built enduring power through labor unions, tenants are also trying to build durable organizations that withstand time and could help them respond to future disasters. Ryan Bell, a Pasadena-based organizer with Tenants Together, says: “We know these crises will escalate and get more frequent, so by organizing with our community in the wake of the fires, we’re not just solving this crisis but we’re thinking about how this works for the next one.”
In fact, tenants are already organizing to minimize the harm of the next disaster. In New Bern, North Carolina, MacLeod says that tenants in the Craven Community Tenants Union are organizing to win climate resilience upgrades like storm drains to prevent chronic flooding problems. In the process, people are forming stronger ties with their neighbors and learning how to take action together, building the resilient social networks they will need amidst the climate crisis.
“Disaster and climate resilience organizing and tenant organizing are one and the same,” says Nick MacLeod of the North Carolina Tenants Union. “And none of this is possible without the tenant organization that was built before the storm.”
Demanding green and healthy homes without displacement
Tenants aren’t just organizing through crises. They are also looking ahead to greener futures, setting their sights on energy efficiency and decarbonization goals.
Hackett lives at Parkside Village II, a building represented by the Connecticut Tenants Union. Health and environmental justice are at the center of the residents’ goals. Many of the tenants in this 40-unit public housing development are older and live with disabilities. They believe that the development’s bad heating and poor insulation make them sicker. For tenants, the dream is solar power, insulated windows, and energy-efficient heat pumps. But without control over their own living conditions, they knew that was a long shot. In response, Hackett and her neighbors organized to get tenants elected and appointed into leadership positions on the local housing authority board that oversees the property’s finances. They were successful. As of last fall, two tenants sat on the board, including Hackett (though she has since left). This win is enabling them to consider larger energy-efficiency upgrades and also creates a formidable protective layer against having their public housing complex sold to a private developer.
[RELATED ARTICLE: We Need a Plan for Decarbonization that Doesn’t Displace Renters]
Tenant organizers in Los Angeles are also taking the task of decarbonizing rental housing seriously. Last year, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) and allied organizations successfully campaigned to close the “substantial remodel” provision of Los Angeles’s just cause eviction ordinance that permits landlords to evict tenants in order to renovate a unit or building. This win paves the way for green upgrades in rental housing that won’t come with an eviction notice.
As tenants confront the difficulties of winning green repairs within the private rental market, organizers are also setting their sights on green social housing policies. In New York, Rhode Island, Seattle, and California, advocates are pushing for new policies to enable the public sector to acquire, retrofit, and construct rental homes to be climate-resilient, community-controlled, permanently affordable places to live.
Toward a National Tenants Climate Agenda
Tenant unions are proving to be a trusted network by and for tenants to win resiliency repairs to their homes and better living conditions after disasters. In the years ahead, the question will not be whether tenants are in harm’s way, but how they can organize at scale to demand the homes and protections they need.
The scale of the combined housing and climate crises begs the question of whether tenants can organize quickly and effectively enough to usher in a new era of tenants rights and green social housing. Organizers are experimenting and honing their methodology to scale their work. The Tenant Union Federation, founded in 2024, is experimenting with national coordination of tenant unions to build more power across state lines against the forces of real estate capital. Right to the City is integrating climate justice more explicitly into its policy and organizing frameworks. And at the state level, coalitions like the California Green New Deal Coalition and Housing NOW! California are building alliances across the tenant, environmental, and climate justice movements to win policy solutions that benefit everyone.
As the federal government floats severe cuts to FEMA and HUD, blocks decarbonization resources, and targets immigrants and transgender people, tenants will be faced with mounting crises that will make housing stability even more challenging and create new barriers to tenant organizing. But all of this also increases the importance of having organized networks of tenants continuing their work at the intersection of housing and climate change, and raises the stakes for effectively doing this work.
For tenants like Hackett, this is no time to give up—she is as determined as ever to make her building a green and healthy place to live. “If we have housing that’s infested with mold, mice, and dirty forms of energy, we’re in big trouble,” she says. “The role of the tenant union organizing around cleaner energy cannot be separated from organizing around housing because it’s all about our health and the overall environment. It’s extremely important for people to understand that those of us who are older, disabled, and low-income are not throwaways. We matter, and we know what we need to do.”
About the Author
Comments