Tenant Organizers Have a New Game Plan for the Trump Era

“We are at a point where markets are tightening again, so there are fewer vacant units if you are out searching,” she said.

Raghuveer said that while the Tenant Union Federation “succeeded in a massive way” by putting tenant rights on the radar in the last years of the Biden White House, there was still so much more to be done. Although the Biden administration made big steps forward on tenant rights, the proverbial rent was still too damn high when Democrats were in charge. The Biden, and later Harris, campaign waited too long to address issues facing renters, and even when it did, it failed to talk about them in a way that showed it understood the urgency of the issue, she said.

“In some ways our project remains the same. On this question of power, the landlords currently have all the power and the tenants have none, and our intervention as ever is to organize tenants into powerful collectives, a.k.a. tenant unions, to exercise both economic and political power,” she said.