This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Shelter in a Federal Storm: State and Local Housing Solutions for a Time of Federal Hostility
For tenant organizers across the United States, organizing strategies are significantly informed by local conditions. Depending on the preferences and established positions of governors and state legislators, preexisting state laws and regulations, and a locality’s cultural and historical context, a successful approach to tenant organizing in one state or locality may be relatively ineffective in another.
“When you talk to people in LA, New York, other cities, you’ve got to really contextualize the difference between organizing in the South and organizing in those places,” says Josh Poe, an organizer with the Kentucky Tenant Union. “Corporate landlords come to the South because there’s no regulation. There’s very little tenant laws protecting tenants, so doing this in the South, it’s a lot like labor organizing 100 years ago. … Two of our leaders got assaulted by the property management company. We’ve had guns pulled on us. I’ve been threatened.”
For this piece, Shelterforce spoke with tenant organizers in six states about the strategies they have found effective in 2025 and 2026.
In some places, this has meant an approach that focuses less on direct action and more on data and discussions with officials. In others, it has meant a shift in emphasis away from policy campaigns or government organizing targets to focus on formation of building-level tenant unions that act in solidarity with each other and target landlords directly.
Economic Leverage, Just Like Labor
In many states, tenant organizers must contend with state-level preemptions that block localities from passing tenant protections they would otherwise seek. Fighting preemption adds another fight before local policy campaigns can succeed, one that must follow state legislative timeframes, some of which operate on two-year cycles. Many of those states’ tenant organizers are shifting priorities to focus more on organizing building-level tenant unions.
In Colorado, municipalities are prohibited from enacting rent stabilization, and there is no state-level limit on how much landlords can increase rent. For years, Colorado Springs Tenants (COST) had been pushing for other municipal policies to protect tenants and incentivize the construction of new housing. But the union recently realized that “developers were never going to build enough housing to devalue their own assets on the market,” says Will D. Smith, lead tenant organizer for COST.
So, COST decided “the only way to actually get affordable rents in Colorado Springs was to have tenants directly engage in economic battles with their landlords,” says Smith. The group is focusing on shoring up economic and political power by creating unions in apartment buildings where a majority of residents sign on to be members. (Organizers call this a majority-tenant union.) “Tenants ultimately pay the landlord’s mortgage,” says Smith, “so if tenants can coordinate and withhold rent, they actually have a lot of leverage over their landlords.”
The Connecticut Tenants Union (CTTU) has similarly rebalanced its energy, increasing its commitment to building-level organizing over the past few years. Organizers initially focused much of their effort on a rent stabilization campaign, which was referred to a task force for more study in 2023. CTTU has also been pushing for a Just Cause law, an ongoing effort that has progressed slowly.
Working with a local SEIU chapter, CTTU developed a strategy in 2023: organizing tenants in a single building, running a union card drive, and securing a majority (or supermajority) before officially launching a building-level union. That approach was experimented with by a number of tenant organizations around the country, including the Tenant Union Federation, which formed in 2024 and of which CTTU was a founding member.
We want to normalize tenants negotiating … contracts with their landlords exactly the way labor unions do.”
Josh Poe, organizer with the Kentucky Tenant Union
Many of the tenant organizers interviewed for this piece note that this strategy looks a lot like labor organizing—and that it’s adopted from that realm. Just as workers’ leverage resides in their ability to withhold the economic value they generate for employers, tenants’ leverage stems from rental payments that underpin landlords’ wealth and profits. “We want to normalize tenants negotiating those contracts with their landlords exactly the way labor unions do,” says Poe.
This approach has produced results. “There has never been a collectively bargained lease in the South that we are aware of,” Poe told Shelterforce in February. But only a few weeks later, the Kentucky Tenant Union won its first collectively bargained leases for some of its members after months of organizing against corporate landlord OSPM.
In November 2025, COST announced the formation of the Aviator Tenant Union in Colorado Springs after a majority of residents in the 120-unit Aviator Apartment Homes signed union cards. The building’s landlord, Life Bridge Capital, a “Christ-centered impact invest[or],” has refused to recognize the union, said Smith. Life Bridge Capital did not reply to requests for comment. Nonetheless, Smith says, immediately after the press conference announcing the union, “We instantly started seeing maintenance workers from other properties that Life Bridge owned coming on the property to make major fixes. … Our tenant leaders started noticing and texting us. … ‘My maintenance orders are being fixed. I’ve had black mold forever, and now all of a sudden, they fixed it.’”
“We didn’t get Life Bridge to the bargaining table,” says Smith, “but we scared the shit out of them.”
COST has also catalyzed the formation of two majority public housing tenant unions, the Centennial Plaza Tenants Association and the Acacia Park Tenants Association. Organizing public housing tenants requires a different approach than organizing against private landlords. “What you’re looking at, in a rent strike calculation,” says Smith, “is whether you can hurt [a landlord’s] bottom line by digging into their mortgage payment, putting them in the red so they can’t pay their mortgage. That’s not really something we can do with a housing authority.”
Nonetheless, public pressure can carry more weight with public entities. In under six months, following letter-writing and media efforts, the two public housing unions got the executive director of the Colorado Springs Housing Authority to sit down with them at the bargaining table and locked in a number of quality-of-life improvements, including improved elevators and fixes for water issues. “I’ve talked with other organizers, and apparently this is really unheard of,” says Smith. “Public housing authorities usually don’t want to negotiate with tenants.”
Organizing Across Housing Portfolios
An extension of organizing individual buildings is simultaneously organizing multiple buildings owned by the same landlord. Typically, organizers will target a landlord that has been maintaining poor conditions across their buildings. The goal is to build greater economic leverage to pressure the landlord to come to the table and lock in agreements that better serve tenants.
This is the strategy that the Tenant Union Federation (TUF) trains organizers in through its intensive Union School training. “The first step is mapping your property,” says Grace White, a campaign organizer with TUF. You’re gathering key information about the property, about the landlord. If you live in the building that you’re organizing, you’re thinking about who do you already know. How are people already organized within communities in the property?”
The training goes through a series of steps to build power and escalate pressure. Organizers are encouraged to pause or redo a step before proceeding if they don’t hit certain benchmarks, which TUF organizers call structure tests, or stop-and-go tests. “If you cannot get 65 percent of people in your property to join a union, that’s a stop,” says White. “And you don’t move forward until you get [that] 65 percent.”
This was the strategy deployed against OSPM in Kentucky: simultaneously organizing four OSPM buildings, Ridgeway Park, Regency Park, Robinwood Park, and Maple Grove. The tenants were motivated by poor conditions in both places. “We had several people [who] went years without air-conditioning,” says Kimberly Barr, vice president of the Maple Grove Tenant Union. “We have mold in almost every single apartment … [and] just general maintenance not being done.”
OSPM came to the table in March. It formally recognized the union, established a schedule for repairs, and agreed to a 10-day grace period for rent payments, among other tenant benefits.
OSPM did not reply when asked for comments or further clarity on this matter.
In Connecticut, CTTU focused on organizing four Alpha Capital–owned buildings—one in East Lyme and three in New London. When Alpha Capital bought the East Lyme building, it began raising rents by $800 to $900 a month, says Luke Melonakos, vice president of the CTTU. The residents were “mostly retirees living on Social Security and their pensions.” The tenants there managed to rein in their rent increases through another mechanism, by setting up a fair rent commission, which is a tool available to renters in Connecticut, where a municipal board can be set up to make legally-binding decisions over rent increases. The fair rent commission deemed that Alpha Capital’s rent increases had been too great. The building is still unionized, with tenants expressing a desire for a less bureaucratic way of building leverage moving forward, according to Melonakos. By then, Alpha Capital had purchased several buildings and issued nonrenewal notices to tenants in New London. Three of the New London buildings formed building-level unions, and they are working together with the East Lyme building.
Alpha Capital did not respond to requests for comment on these claims.
A TUF Campaign Against Capital Realty
TUF took the portfolio approach national. The first portfolio TUF organized was intended to build leverage against a federal regulator rather than against a single landlord, but in the second Trump administration, that approach seemed less likely to be effective. Still, tenants in two of the buildings that went on strike during the 2024 campaign that focused on the federal regulator—Independence Towers and Quality Hill in Kansas City, Missouri—secured agreements with their corporate landlords and didn’t have to pay back rent withheld during the strike. During that campaign, tenants in Michigan, North and South Carolina, Illinois, Kentucky, and Montana also organized into majority unions, but they did not escalate to the point of rent strikes.
TUF is currently running a national campaign—launched in September 2025—against private equity landlord Capital Realty Group. Poe says Capital Realty became a target after several founding members of TUF worked with tenants experiencing poor conditions in buildings owned by the company. In Louisville, Kentucky, there is a tenant union at the Capital Realty–owned American Village apartment building. In Kansas City, Missouri, multiple Capital Realty buildings are organized, and CTTU has organized two located in New Haven, Connecticut: Park Ridge and Sunset Ridge. According to TUF and organizers interviewed for this piece, the collective goal is to get Moshe Eichler, Capital Realty’s president, to the negotiating table.
Even if that top-level negotiation hasn’t happened yet, tenant organizers are making demands at the building level at Capital Realty–owned buildings. These demands include repairs, property improvements, and improved property management standards, according to White. Tenants have gone to court against Capital Realty as well.
In Louisville, in the above-mentioned American Village Apartments, tenants have secured a temporary restraining order, preventing property managers from entering units without adequate notice, a practice that organizers say was prevalent. And at Sunset Ridge in Connecticut, organizers have taken the landlord to court, alleging retaliation.
Capital Realty did not reply to requests for comment.
Challenging Tax Breaks as Leverage
Beyond establishing building-level tenant unions and threatening collective action or rent strikes, there are other ways to put economic pressure on landlords. In Tennessee, the Memphis Tenants Union has gone after landlord tax breaks.
Shortly after the union formed in 2021, the epicenter of its organizing quickly became a 296-unit building called Memphis Towers. Although organizers won some smaller victories, such as securing the replacement of a hot water boiler, Alex Uhlmann, co-director of the union, says the owner of Memphis Towers—an out-of-state corporate landlord called Millennia Housing Management—resisted making bigger repairs or addressing safety requests, including 24-hour front desk security and key-card door locks. When contacted about the claims in this piece, Millenia declined to comment.
Memphis is a city run by “fairly conservative” Democrats in a state that has preempted and sometimes reversed policies that would benefit tenants, says Uhlmann. But in that context, Uhlmann and other organizers discovered that a point of leverage might be the tax breaks Millenia receives, particularly those it receives from a somewhat obscure entity, the Health, Educational, and Housing Facility Board. “The idea behind those tax breaks—at least in theory—was that tenants would be receiving extra benefits that affordable housing residents don’t always receive,” says Uhlmann. “The reality is they’re subsidizing some of the worst landlords in the city.”
After learning how important these tax breaks were to corporate landlords’ business model and that landlords were not upholding promises made in relation to these tax breaks, housing organizers targeted the board that offered them. “After six months of going to these meetings, continuously, to escalate and build pressure, [and] bringing [in] other groups to sign letters of support … we got the board to threaten to take away the tax breaks from Millennia,” says Uhlmann. As a result, major improvements were made to Memphis Towers—new amenities such as a community room were also added—and Millenia’s partner, the Richman Group, took over the building and its management to protect its investment. The Richman Group did not comment or reply when asked for details. “That money was so important to [The Richman Group] that they quickly … met our demands,” says Uhlmann.
Having succeeded with this approach, the Memphis Tenants Union intends to challenge tax breaks for other buildings with poor conditions. According to research by the University of Memphis, there are over 100 buildings receiving these types of tax breaks in the city.
Aggregate Hotline Data for Advocacy
A less adversarial, more data-driven approach has taken shape in the Pacific Northwest. Tim Morris, a tenant advocate in Eugene, Oregon, explains that because there’s so little housing in parts of Oregon, landlords can easily evict and replace tenants. This makes rent strikes—or the threat of them—less effective than they may be in places with more available housing. “We’ve seen an entire apartment complex of 15 or 20 people do a rent strike,” says Morris, “and they were all evicted, and that apartment filled right back up.”
Morris is the executive director of the Springfield-Eugene Tenant Association (SETA). SETA provides direct services to tenants—primarily through a hotline—and uses the aggregate data it compiles from that work to advocate on housing issues in the region.
In January 2023, newly elected Oregon Governor Tina Kotek declared a state of emergency due to homelessness in areas that had experienced an increase in unsheltered homelessness of 50 percent or greater between 2017 and 2022. She has extended the emergency declaration each year since. Renters in many Oregon cities must contend with high rents, poor maintenance, and landlords who are not hesitant to evict tenants.
SETA responds to more than 200 calls each month from tenants seeking support for housing issues. It publishes monthly reports on its website, using anonymized, aggregated data from the hotline. “We collect data about an individual’s demographics, income, what they’re experiencing, what part of the state … they live in, and other … things that are important,” says Morris, “and then we present that in a neutral way to lawmakers as a real-time understanding of what tenants are experiencing each month.”
Since January 2025, habitability and termination notices have made up the most significant share—about half—of calls to the hotline every month. More than half of callers every month report that they have disabilities, often more than three-quarters.
Morris says that having this data has made it easier for tenant advocates to be taken seriously in policy spaces. Often, a policymaker will say, “‘Oh well, that’s just one person’s experience,’” says Morris, “and so what we do … is [we] really [say], ‘Look, 200 people have been saying this exact thing.’”
He sees this strategy as instrumental to some recent policy successes in Eugene, including limiting rental application fees, requiring landlords to photo-document and itemize move-in and move-out property conditions and the reasons for withholding security deposits, and making landlords pay two months’ rent worth in relocation assistance to tenants who have been subjected to no-cause evictions or who have had to move out due to rent hikes.
Morris explained that because very few tenants hold elected office, “It is a very challenging environment because that shared experience is not there.” But by using the monthly reports and data, “We’re really able to highlight a lot of needs and speak the language, so that even if they haven’t experienced [the need for tenant protections] themselves, they can see … the benefit of what we’re talking about.”
The Micro and the Macro
These approaches are not mutually exclusive. It’s possible to provide services, work for policy changes, use data, and organize building-level majority-tenant unions at the same time. In fact, organizing buildings can strengthen policy pushes. This was a positive, unexpected outcome for the Kentucky Tenant Union, which found that organizing majority-tenant unions led to more committed organizers working on their policy campaigns as well, such as campaigns to pass habitability legislation in Flemingsburg and Brandenburg, Kentucky, and to get the city of Brandenburg to hire a code inspector.
“Our thinking [was that] the building leaders would focus on their own individual campaigns and the policy campaign would be led by more [of] what we call … at-large members,” says Poe. “But that’s actually not what happened. Those building leaders became very invested in the policy campaign[s] and showed up at city council on a regular basis.” By organizing at one scale for day-to-day housing issues, the base was being built for a larger scale and a larger purpose.
“We need to build economic power and political power,” continues Poe. “You have to have both to really fundamentally change society.”
Correction: The story has been updated to reflect the correct number of OSPM buildings organized by the Kentucky Tenant Union.
Editor’s Note: This headline has been updated to better reflect the scope of the article.
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