Why more tenants are forming unions

This summer, I moved into my first post-grad apartment, determined to leave the college housing lifestyle behind in the high-rise Marquette Place Luxury Apartments in Minneapolis.

My new home was luxurious indeed: a building pool, hot tub, sauna, gym, and in the common area, complementary coffee and donuts each morning. My roommate and I had two bathrooms, in-unit washer and dryer, and 1,286 square feet — all for less than $1,700 a month total.

Then came the problems: one shower stopped working, then one toilet, then the other. Management did nothing for months until we took our complaint to the corporate level.

Other tenants described more severe issues: mold, pests, flooding, break-ins, a broken elevator, and more. The problems had become so persistent — and management so inattentive — that a group of renters formed the Marquette Place Tenants Union to sue the landlord, Fine Associates.

“The union came out of the lawsuit essentially,” said Zahid Hasan, a building resident since 2023 and one of the union leaders. “The idea was [that] a lawyer is not going to want to talk to 40 people at once, and so the best way to sort of have that decision structure is to have a union."

As of this writing, the union has roughly 20 units in the 35-story mixed-use building that have put their rent in escrow, essentially paying the courts instead of the landlord until their problems are solved. In August, a little over three months after the escrow action began, the union had over $140,000 in escrow and was headed to mediation. Fine Associates did not respond to a request for comment.

A nationwide trend

My building is part of a bigger national picture, in which more tenants are unionizing. But for a long time, that picture hasn’t been a very clear one.

Years ago, Jamila Michener, professor of government and public policy at Cornell University, started researching tenant organizing. She quickly realized that there was no single place to find these groups.

So, Michener and her team created a database of housing organizations across the country that provide support and resources to tenants and homeowners. They found 879 groups overall, 250 of which were tenant organizations.

“I thought going in, to be honest, that we were going to find hardly any tenant organizations — kind of a blip — and instead we found more than I thought we would,” Michener said. “We stopped our data collection [in 2025], and I bet you that roughly ballpark number of 250 isn't even accurate anymore, because there have been new groups that have been popping up.”

These groups exist at the building, neighborhood, city, state, and national level. Michener’s data is conservative, only including organizations her team could find through IRS tax records and extensive online searches. She said they missed many active building-level groups with no online presence or tax obligations.

This blind spot exists in part because tenant unions aren’t protected like labor unions. There is no renter-equivalent of the National Labor Relations Board — so these groups are harder to track.

But they still have power. According to Greg Baltz, a law professor at Rutgers University, unions give tenants an avenue to protect themselves outside of an otherwise sluggish legal system.

“Tenant unions, in many ways, see themselves as an antidote to the problem of bureaucratic delay,” Baltz said. “If you want to sue your landlord over the heat being out, it might be the summer before your heat gets turned back [on]. If you can build relationships with your neighbors and show up on the front sidewalk outside of your landlord's house, or catch the attention of an enforcement agency that otherwise would never have gone to your building, that can work much faster.”

A brief history

Despite a lack of good historical data, researchers agree that there has been a recent surge in tenant organizing. For one, today’s economic conditions mirror the last period when tenant unions flourished, over 50 years ago, in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

“There are real parallels between the economic situation in the 1970s and now,” Baltz said. “There was this period of stagflation, where the middle class was also shut out of home ownership, and it was coming out of a moment of serious social upheaval, where people connected their politics with their home.”

The tenant movement had grown around the country following the Harlem Rent Strikes in 1964. Baltz said that New Jersey, Massachusetts, California, and New York City all supported major tenant union growth during those years. For the first time, a nationwide group — the National Tenant Organization — formed to help unite local tenant unions.

Then came the real estate backlash, Baltz said. In the 1980s, real estate interests lobbied to prevent local governments from passing tenant protections. As inflation eased and mortgage rates tumbled, middle-class families could afford homes again. Tenant unions fractured.

At the same time, the financialization of housing was underway. Two groups — the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, better known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — turned homes into assets on the secondary mortgage market.

Homeowners could get cheaper mortgages, and tenant unions struggled to organize against a more complex housing system. The market stayed that way, with homeownership skyrocketing, until the foreclosure crisis in the late 2000s.

Then everything changed again.

A recession and a pandemic

The foreclosure crisis planted seeds for the modern-day tenant movement, which bloomed in the late 2010s and during the pandemic, according to Baltz.

“The examples of the rent strikes during the pandemic were really powerful,” Baltz said. “You had tenants who could not pay their rent standing side-by-side with the tenants who could, but decided to withhold, so that everybody would have leverage.”

The federal moratorium on evictions offered temporary protections, but the percentage of tenants behind on rent increased. Likewise, home prices saw an initial dip before a precipitous rise, and the cost of rent slowed before shooting up as well.

Tara Raghuveer got involved in tenant organizing in the 2010s and is now the director for the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), a national organization that supports and advocates for tenant unions. She said that today, tenants across the U.S. face an affordability crisis.

“Tenants are paying higher rents than they've ever paid for the worst conditions they've ever endured,” Raghuveer said. “The rent is too damn high, but it's been too damn high for a really long time. There's a whole generation of tenants … I'm one of them … that really can't envision a future where they escape the tenant class.”

In 2024, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that more than half (51.7%) of rental households were “cost-burdened,” meaning that they spent more than 30% of their income on rent. That number has hovered around 50% since 2011. While TUF focuses on many issues, Raghuveer placed affordability above all else.

“If people cannot afford their rent, all of the other rights that they might have really don't matter that much, because they'll get priced out,” she said.

While individual tenant unions operate locally, Raghuveer emphasized how important it is for TUF to advocate nationally. The problem of affordability — while it disproportionately affects people of color — is widespread.

“12 million households are paying over half their income in rent today,” Raghuveer said. “That's a problem at a level of scale that we cannot solve building by building, block by block, and we have to be serious about that.”

A unified movement

The recent tenant movement also comes from a greater number of people looking for an outlet for their political energy.

“Maybe you were in the [Democratic Socialists of America] (DSA),” Michener said. “Or, I talked to a fair number of people who were like, ‘I was very pro-Bernie. That's not happening. Where do I bring this political energy that makes me want to fight for the material gain of working class people?’”

One such DSA member: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani’s administration has encouraged tenants across the city to organize and stand up to their landlords.

That’s also how Hasan (my building’s union leader) got involved. He was a legal observer during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge and a DSA member, which gave him canvassing experience and connections to organizers.

Michener noted tenant union leaders tend predominantly to be people of color, and especially women of color.

“That's not a coincidence, right?” Michener said. “These are folks who are more likely to be boxed out of traditional modes of finding power and expressing their voice and having their needs met.”

Still, Michener noted that tenant organizing is “deeply and fundamentally multiracial and cross-class,” she said. As Raghuveer put it, the real estate lobby doesn’t discriminate — it impacts all tenants. Michener agreed.

“There are people who otherwise understand themselves to be conservative or to be Republican, and people who very much don't,” she said. “Organizing is bringing people together who we have very few other ways of bringing together in this country — in this moment — and that's something that is quite extraordinary.”

Tenant unions also can’t be dependent on friendly governments to create change, per Raghuveer. She said that a practice that works with Mamdani in New York City can also work conservative politicians in rural Kentucky.

“Our organizers in Kentucky have built inroads with the Kentucky Republican Party and folks who are in governing power throughout the state and in their federal delegation as well,” Raghuveer said. “Why? Because they care about winning. Because they care about actually delivering for tenants in the state, and those are just the realities of the state in which they're organizing.”

A powerful opposition

Although 34.7% of American households — roughly 46.1 million — were renters as of 2024, Raghuveer said that the success of tenant organizing isn’t as simple as power in numbers.

“We’re organizing to establish tenants as a political and economic class that cannot be ignored,” she said.

It won’t be easy. Real estate lobbyists — who stifled the tenant movement in the ’80s — have only grown more powerful.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) has been one of the highest-spending employers of lobbyists since 2012, second only to the pro-business U.S. Chamber of Commerce, according to nonprofit research website OpenSecrets.

NAR peaked in 2024 as the highest-spending lobby in the U.S, with close to $86.4 million spent that year alone. It has opposed rent freeze, rent control, and rent stabilization initiatives across the country, funding landlord and real estate interests.

Annual real estate lobby spending has quadrupled since 1998, when OpenSecrets started tracking it. It has sat comfortably above $100 million per year since 2020.

Regardless of union membership, tenants cannot match that sort of money. But they aren’t trying to, according to Michener.

“It's becoming a real movement,” Michener said, “not because they have funding, not because it's easy, not because there's some kind of an economic or a financial incentive, … but it’s really coming from a true grassroots demand and desire.”

I saw that grassroots demand at Marquette Place. While the union developed as a defense mechanism, it created something unusual in the rental world: community. In my 35-story apartment building, I rarely saw the same person twice in one week. When I went to my first meeting, I saw people who all knew each other.

“Your average tenant living in a rental property is too embarrassed to ask their neighbor what their name is for the third time,” Baltz said. “To go from being strangers living in proximity to each other to making decisions like [going] on rent strike requires a concerted effort to build trust with people. When we talk about organizing, that's fundamentally what it is: going from a place of not knowing one another to trusting one another and having built a sense of a community to make decisions together.”