Activism
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December 4, 2024
The Tenant Union Federation is fostering a wave of tenant leaders who have been pushed to the margins—many of them elderly, disabled, low-income—as they aim to transform renters into a powerful political class.
Tenant organizer Donna Goldsmith (left), age 63, has become a leader with the Louisville Tenants Union.
(Courtesy of the Louisville Tenants Union)
In May of 2023, Ozaa Echo Maker heard a group of people knock at her door and didn’t answer. “I didn’t want to talk to any of them,” she said. “I was scared and socially awkward.”
The visitors were organizers from Bozeman, Montana’s citywide tenant union, conducting one of their regular canvasses of local apartment complexes. After it became clear that Echo Maker wasn’t coming to the door, the group moved across the hall and began speaking with Echo Maker’s neighbor. Echo Maker overheard them talking about organizing through their tenant union, a term she had never heard before. The closest she’d ever come to organizing was building a float for her high school’s homecoming parade.
Hearing them, she thought, “I was like, you mean me complaining about my circumstances can actually be more than just complaining?” Echo Maker told me. “I can complain with a purpose?”
Echo Maker has been a tenant all her life. For the last six years, she’s been back in the same unit she lived in with her mother after she was born, in a complex called Bridger Heights that houses low-income tenants across 50 units. But in 2019, the property was bought by a new real estate investment company, who she says have proven themselves to be absentee landlords that allow poor conditions to go unaddressed. Echo Maker contracted a severe neurological disability 10 years ago, and for years that in combination with the worsening conditions left her spending the bulk of her time on “survival mode.”
This August, however, she told a different story. On the Zoom call that officially launched the new national organization the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), she announced a new identity: a leader of Bozeman Tenants United, the very same union for whom she’d been scared to answer the door.
TUF, made up of local member unions Bozeman Tenants United, KC Tenants in Kansas City (Missouri), the Louisville Tenants Union, the Connecticut Tenants Union, and Not Me We in Chicago, is the first major tenant organizing effort with a national structure to emerge in decades. Prior to its official launch, TUF had already been an instrumental force in the campaign that pushed President Joe Biden to propose federal rent control in July. Its member unions are collectively bargaining leases, working to put tenant organizers into elected office, and fighting successfully for laws to prevent gentrification, all in the name of establishing renters as a formidable political class.
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As TUF is finding its national footing,