Tales from Tenant Organizing
Why it haunts me — and why I do it anyways
I am a tenant organizer. When people ask what that means, I always tell the big stories. I talk about the woman who lost a child, or her husband who developed cancer, from a mold-infested apartment. I talk about the single mother who lived in a burnt out apartment for a year because the landlord couldn’t be bothered to fix it. I talk about the tenants being threatened with eviction during a pandemic, who never missed a rent check until they lost their job. I tell the stories that throw injustice in your face without apology — the kind that show the worst horrors of landlordism, and make it impossible to ignore.
But, honestly, those aren’t the ones that haunt me.
I started talking to tenants three years ago. It began with Facebook posts and Reddit threads from around Boston. I am not a lawyer, but I’ve done some housing work for a firm on State St., and oftentimes nobody else would reply. All I could really do was help tenants search the internet for info on their rights, or for representation, but it was better than nothing.
About a year ago I started helping a tenants union in Somerville. They were trying to force LaCourt Realty, a mid-sized corporate landlord owned by a single capitalist and maintained by a management company, to stop raising rents and start maintaining their properties. In response, LaCourt has evicted union organizers, sued student journalists at Tufts, and filed baseless lawsuits against activists working with the union in an effort to muzzle them.
That’s when I started hearing the stories that really stuck with me — that formed my once-academic understanding of economic coercion into an innate hatred of landlords.
$30,000 is meaningless to LaCourt. They have a portfolio of dozens of buildings, each of which is worth more than $1,000,000. They own $30,000,000 complexes and extract hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent each month. LaCourt, and the man that owns it, spend orders of magnitudes more without blinking.
To one of their tenants, however, $30,000 was everything. A young woman living with a partner and some friends was worried about finding a new apartment mid-pandemic. LaCourt emailed her offering to extend the lease for a year, so she signed on. Before her previous lease was up, however, she realized her friends weren’t staying and, without them, she couldn’t afford a new year. So she packed up and left. LaCourt found another tenant, and the unit was never vacant. Unfortunately, however, she had signed a document promising a year of rent, and LaCourt was going to take it from her, one way or another.
No law was broken. She’d made a mistake and signed something she shouldn’t have. She lost her life savings. Law or no law, a horrible injustice was done.
While organizing with the LaCourt Tenants, and now with the Greater Boston Tenants Union, I’ve canvassed a few hundred units and spoken with dozens of tenants. Sometimes, more often than I’d like, I hear one of the big stories. Tenants who are being screwed and know it. Tenants whose suffering is overt even if they are shy in exposing it.
More often, I hear from tenants who have given up on being treated with dignity. When asked, they will insist that their apartment is fine — until I get specific with my questions. Turns out the heat barely works, there’s mold in the closet, the sink is leaking, the water heater is broken, and there’s water dripping from the floor above. The landlord never fixes anything, and if he does, he sends incompetent or overworked handymen whose fixes never last. Oh — and the rent keeps going up.
The most devastating stories I’ve heard while organizing do not come from individual tenants facing huge injustices. Instead, they come from every tenant in a forty unit building having the same complaints, concerns, and grim sense of humor. Each one of them spends thousands of dollars each month for an apartment, and yet somehow has such low expectations of landlords that they forget to mention pests, leaks, breaks, or complaints unless reminded that they’re supposed to be paying for a safe, working, comfortable home.
Millions and millions of Americans give up half their wages for apartments that are hardly maintained. Corporations like LaCourt Realty ruin lives as a matter of course, and nobody blinks an eye. The idea that a landlord would treat a tenant well is so foreign that tenants forget their own agency, and resign themselves to exploitation.
Being a tenant organizer can be hugely encouraging. Speaking with hundreds of working people, learning about their struggles, and building solidarity is exhausting, but rewarding. When we succeed, lives are changed for the better and communities are rebuilt.
But being a tenant organizer can also be devastating. Not only because of the big stories, but because of all the small ones — because so many people have surrendered to such an unjust and cruel economic system. Tenants deserve dignity, and one day we will win it, but before we can we have to convince ourselves that everyone is worthy of a safe, comfortable home.
