As prospective homebuyers are squeezed out of the housing market by elevated mortgage rates and rising home prices, there’s been a growing demand for single-family rentals. This type of housing is intended for one household and includes standalone or detached homes, townhomes, and even duplex units. More than 14 million households live in single-family rentals, according to a report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies.
While these renters face many of the same challenges as those who live in multifamily buildings—including rising rents, neglected repairs, and unaccountable landlords—a similar organizing approach doesn’t always work. For instance, when properties are spread out across communities, tenants can’t readily connect with one another, making it difficult for them to unite and organize to hold their landlords accountable.
But tenant organizers say it’s not only possible to win more protections for renters who live in single-family homes—it’s ever more necessary to do so.
A Bigger Geography
Jessica Moreno, a community organizer with Action NC, first tried to organize single-family renters in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the surrounding areas between 2021 and 2022. At the time, Action NC was one of several organizations participating in a nationwide campaign called Renters Rising, which sought to empower tenants who live in corporate- and investor-owned properties.
Action NC and other groups procured lists of corporate landlords from Popular Democracy, a network of economic and racial justice organizations that co-led the campaign, to identify a common landlord to organize against.
What they found was many different corporate landlords across the city and county. “They are dispersed, which made the organizing slow, and building relationships among neighbors in similar situations challenging,” says Moreno.
Though there was interest from some tenants, organizing them over a sustained period of time to act as a united front proved too difficult. “We just weren’t able to get to that next step of getting a group of people together.”
It’s the most-cited obstacle when organizing tenants living in single-family rentals: geography. In residential settings where tenants are more spread out, canvassing is more labor-intensive, and helping tenants build community with other tenants is more challenging.
“There could be 30 homes owned by corporate landlords, but [they’re] divided between 10 corporate landlords,” says Moreno. “You want to have a bunch of people with the same target.”
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While the same density challenge isn’t shared in every city across the nation, the distance—and isolation—is a challenge unique to organizing in single-family rentals.
“In general organizing, a lot of times, people feel some security or solidarity [with their neighbors], knowing that ‘We’re all in this together, so we’re all taking this risk,’” says Jordan Ash, housing director at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, which has been providing research support for organizers taking on corporate landlords. “With single-family rentals, people don’t have those relationships already.” They’re not seeing their collective power, says Ash.
Organizers working to mobilize renters who live in single-family homes must first create the opportunity—and provide the space—for tenants of the same landlord to connect with one another. That comes more naturally for renters who have access to shared spaces in a multifamily building.
And that first task of creating space for tenants to connect with one another requires significantly more groundwork, which can be difficult for tenant groups to overcome, especially if their resources are already threadbare. Moreno was often the sole organizer on the Renters Rising campaign in Charlotte, and in organizing tenants who live in single-family rentals at Action NC.
“Knocking on doors is expensive,” says Moreno. “We pay people $20 an hour for five or six hours, and maybe you get a good three hours of canvassing, plus miles. So, if I send two people at a time—because you’re going to cover a whole neighborhood—one person has to drive because the houses are so far apart. There’s two houses on this street, but you got to go to the other street to find one house, and the other street to find another three. And one house is at the beginning of the street, and the other two houses are at the very end. It wasn’t a walkable list.”
Costs are also a perennial issue for any organizing, says Sara Myklebust, research director at the Action Center on Race and the Economy’s (ACRE) Bargaining for the Common Good, a network of unions, community groups, racial justice organizations, and student organizations. “There’s just not a lot of funding put into housing organizing, period,” she says. “And when you need even more people because things are spread out and the companies are so big, it’s resource-intensive.”
It also takes significant resources to identify which properties in each neighborhood are owned by corporate landlords. Identifying the owners of the homes requires a bit of investigative work, as well as access to information that’s not readily—or voluntarily—made public.
Corporate landlords often shield their holdings behind LLCs, and Myklebust says that they sometimes have individual LLCs for each home, making them even more difficult to identify. What’s more, publicly available property information at one county’s assessor’s office may likely vary at another. And when their databases organize properties by individual parcel numbers and not by owners, it’s even harder to understand who owns what.
In the single-family homes, I found that people were [also] dealing with absent landlords and repairs not being made, but the residents had the ability to just fix the thing that they’re dealing with.”
Jessica Moreno, Action NC
And then, of course, there’s the work of galvanizing tenants who may feel like their identity as renters is only temporary.
Moreno says many tenants she encountered while canvassing were looking to buy a home in the near future. “Some people didn’t care enough,” she says. “‘I’m just here for two years. I’m gonna buy my house. I’m gonna move next year.’”
Ultimately, for Moreno, tenants who rent single-family homes differ most from tenants in multifamily buildings or mobile communities not in the issues they face, but in their need to organize to address these issues.
“For working class and poor [people] in mobile home communities, getting their car towed will destabilize the family, whereas in the single-family homes, I found that people were [also] dealing with absent landlords and repairs not being made, but the residents had the ability to just fix the thing that they’re dealing with,” she says. “Residents in low-income housing don’t have the economic resources.”
Taking on a Giant
Mobilizing enough tenants to pursue a landlord is a pitfall for organizing single-family tenants, but it can be done. There are ready examples of wins, says Katie Goldstein, director of FightBack, an initiative at Popular Democracy to defend communities from regressive policies.
Goldstein says that the Renters Rising campaign strategy to organize tenants in these single-family rentals was borrowed from labor organizing. “Going after the targets directly has resulted in quite a bit of service improvements, some actual contracts with landlords to make it so the rents are more stabilized, or no evictions, no-fault evictions—things like that,” she says.
Myklebust agrees. “You can figure out different ways to be able to engage [corporate landlords], including where they’re getting their money and where their funding sources [are],” she says, pointing to one particular example: the Progress Residential campaign in Minneapolis.
When Minneapolis-based Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia began organizing tenants on the city’s north side in 2021, they didn’t realize that their efforts would amount to one of the largest organizing campaigns in the country aimed at private-equity owners of single-family homes.
The group recruited researchers to investigate which landlords in North Minneapolis initiated the most evictions during the pandemic, expecting to encounter much of the same as they had before: local slumlords.
Instead, the group found Progress Residential, a real estate investment venture that is competing to become the largest corporate landlord of single-family homes in the country.
“We just decided to take on the biggest [landlord], not knowing at the time that it was a private-equity firm,” says Chloe Jackson, an organizer who led the campaign.
Jackson says the group went to every single home in North Minneapolis that the company owned—more than 200 out of the approximately 600 homes in the Twin Cities metro area. They scoured neighborhoods street by street, finding one with six Progress-owned homes and the next with none. Tenants they encountered complained of mold, lead paint, flooding, pest infestations, and electrical issues, all of which had gone ignored.
You just have to have a location for people to come and meet at a set time and go from there. That’s what we did.”
Chloe Jackson, Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia (United Renters for Justice)
But from there, the same organizing strategies used for multifamily buildings were applied. “You just have to have a location for people to come and meet at a set time and go from there,” says Jackson. “That’s what we did: We brought [tenants] together.”
From those meetings, tenants decided to go on a rent strike and put their rent in escrow to force Progress Residential to address their longstanding issues and pressure the company’s investors. Their actions caught the attention of the state attorney general, who sued the company (under its former name, Havenbrook Homes) for defying the federal eviction moratorium and for overall neglect of the properties. A settlement was reached in 2024 that allowed tenants to terminate their leases early, forgave past due rent, and forced the company to sell off all its properties in the city.
According to Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia, the campaign effectively drove the company not only out of the neighborhood but also out of the state.
“They [were] really successful,” says Myklebust, who, along with a colleague from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, led the research for the campaign.
The attention that the campaign received and the concessions that Progress Residential was forced to make are all the more reason to replicate the strategy elsewhere, says Myklebust. Instead of finding a landlord with multiple properties in a local market, Myklebust recommends scaling the Progress Residential campaign and recruiting national partners to identify and engage a company working across geographies.
In order to do so, however, organizers must better understand who these companies are trying to target and why.
A Distinct Connection to Homeownership
Unlike the single-family rental tenants that Moreno encountered in Charlotte, North Carolina, tenants who organized against Progress Residential in Minneapolis lived in lower-income neighborhoods.
“For the most part, the homes that large investors have been buying recently are not in the core city, [and they] are not in the lowest-income neighborhoods,” says Ash of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. “They are definitely in what would be considered the starter home price range.”
But organizers and researchers like Ash are careful not to make any sweeping assumptions about this segment of renters without readily—and publicly—available data on them, especially as the renter landscape is constantly evolving.
From what she’s seen, Goldstein says, the racial and socioeconomic profiles of single-family rental tenants vary across housing markets. In addition to the segment of renters priced out of homeownership, she says, “We’ve seen that corporate landlords are definitely targeting working-class, Black, and Brown neighborhoods as a way of trying to increase rents and accelerate gentrification”—much like they are doing in multifamily buildings.
Many elected officials care much more about single-family rentals than they do about apartment buildings, not [out] of concern for the tenants, but because of [their] impact on homeownership.”
Jordan Ash, Private Equity Stakeholder Project
People are not only moving into single-family rental homes because these homes may be all that’s available at the right price point or because they’re located in the right neighborhood; they are also moving to these homes because this is how they can best access some version of the American Dream, says Myklebust. “People want more space, and single-family rental homes in the suburbs across the country often fill that gap.”
The fact that the American Dream of homeownership is becoming increasingly out of reach for more Americans may be why elected officials now seem more motivated to rein in investors, who bought 34 percent of all single-family homes sold in the third quarter of 2025, the highest in at least five years, according to the latest Investor Pulse report from CJ Patrick Company and BatchData.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he would move to ban institutional investors from buying up single-family homes in an effort to reduce home prices. “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it,” he wrote. “People live in homes, not corporations.”
In May 2025, Sen. Jon Ossoff launched a probe into corporate landlord ownership of single-family rentals across Georgia, after a report found that more than one-third of single-family homes in metro Atlanta were owned by out-of-state companies. That’s nearly 10 times the national average.
In February 2025, the HOPE (Humans over Private Equity) for Homeownership Act was introduced in the Senate to impose tax penalties on hedge funds and private-equity firms for buying up single-family homes or failing to “fully sell off their currently owned single-family homes each year over a 10-year period.” Among the act’s endorsers is the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.
“Many elected officials care much more about single-family rentals than they do about apartment buildings, not [out] of concern for the tenants, but because of [their] impact on homeownership,” says Ash. “It has a different impact than private equity ownership of apartment buildings.”
That’s not enough assurance for organizers to rely on government officials to address the needs of these renters. But it does signal to tenant organizers and advocates that now is the time to address the presence of large corporate landlords in communities across the U.S.
A Collective ‘Imperative’
Although investors who own 1,000 homes or more account for only 2 percent of the single-family rental inventory, metro areas with the highest single-family rent increases are the same areas in which single-family rental companies have the greatest presence, according to a report co-authored by ACRE, the Center for Popular Democracy, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, and Renters Rising. Unsurprisingly, these are areas where the 2008 foreclosure crisis devastated homeowners, especially homeowners of color.
“Corporate actors are buying up a lot more rentals where there are super lax housing laws, [where] they’re probably not going to be passing rent control anytime soon,” says Goldstein. “They go to places where there’s less likely to be a progressive organized constituency so [that] they can make as much money as possible.”
“The folks [who] are behind these companies are some of the richest people in the world, and they’re able to control a lot of different parts of our lives,” says Myklebust. “We have to think through and figure out how we can take on these folks.”
When asked how to do so, Myklebust pointed to the Progress Residential campaign—and the labor movement.
“It really does have to be, pick one of the larger companies, focus in on that company, look for partnerships with unions that already have a base—[with members who] may live in these homes—and be creative about how to get the resources needed to do the work,” she says. “We’re just going to be [stuck] on a hamster wheel taking on the lowest rung of companies.”
And it will take that level of multiparty coordination to take on a real estate giant, says Ash. “With organizing against a single-family rental company, it has to be very deliberate,” he says.
“Given our resources and what needs to happen, we need to decide which of these companies makes the most sense to be engaging with and figure out how to do that in a collective way as a movement,” Myklebust says. “It is imperative that we figure it out.”
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