A-Infos (en) US, BRRN - How To: Organize Your Building (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

This article by Rose Lenehan and Tracy Rosenthal originally appeared in 
Jewish Currents. It serves as a basic organizing guide for those seeking 
to build and use collective power to solve issues facing themselves and 
their neighbors. ---- Both authors are veteran organizers with the Los 
Angeles Tenants Union, one of the largest and most successful tenant 
unions in the United States. Tracy Rosenthal is a co-author of the 
recent book Abolish Rent. ---- By Rose Lenehan and Tracy Rosenthal ---- 
Introduction ----Like workers struggling with their bosses, tenants 
dealing with their landlords have little power-as individuals. 
Organizing, however, turns shared vulnerability into shared power. 
Tenants can create associations and unions to defend ourselves and our 
communities against the cruelties of a market-based housing system.

The system as it currently stands prioritizes landlords' right to 
property and profit over people's right to shelter and to remain in the 
communities they've helped build. Why should a corporation's target 
profit rate determine whether you can stay in your home of 20 years? Why 
does the sheriff show up to carry out evictions so much more reliably 
than the housing inspector shows up to enforce the housing code?

Tenant organizing changes the balance of power. Organizing your building 
is the first step toward forcing a landlord to patch a roof, or 
negotiating a lower rent increase, or stopping the eviction and 
displacement of your neighborhood's residents. It also creates 
community, establishing a framework for neighbors to take care of one 
another, plan for natural disasters and other emergencies, and mediate 
conflict without police.

Brush Up On the Basics
You have the right to organize. You have the right to knock on doors, 
distribute flyers, and hold meetings. Your landlord or building manager 
may claim you are soliciting or acting in violation of your lease-but 
they cannot stop you from exercising your rights to free association and 
assembly. In most states, you can remind your landlord that it's illegal 
to retaliate against you for organizing.

Look for a local tenants union that is led and funded by tenants. There 
are a lot of nonprofit tenant service organizations out there, but they 
will generally treat you like a customer or a charity case. Tenants 
unions, on the other hand, will empower you as the expert on your own 
housing situation and can support your fight through direct action. Most 
important, tenants unions understand that whatever problem you're facing 
is a conflict between people who own property and people who don't. The 
Autonomous Tenants Union Network is a great resource for finding 
existing tenants unions and for getting help if you want to start a new one.

Find out what kind of legal protections apply to your building. Are 
there rent-stabilized apartments in your area? Is yours one of them? Are 
there pandemic-specific eviction protections in place where you live? 
Having a few laws in your pocket can help you strategize.

Invite Your Neighbors to a Meeting
Put up a sign with your contact info; slip notes under your neighbors' 
doors; draw on existing relationships; talk to people you pass in the 
halls. Your goal is to collect the contact information of as many people 
in your building as possible. Even five people is enough to start-that 
means you will have four more people collecting contact info!

Your meetings should be accessible and welcoming to the tenants most 
vulnerable to displacement. Make a note of the languages spoken in your 
building and think about how you can arrange interpretation. Are there 
bilingual people in the building who can translate flyers or offer live 
interpretation at meetings? Within your building, there may be some 
general distrust of strangers as well as distrust across lines of class, 
race, and language; the success of your tenants association (TA) will 
depend on overcoming that distrust.

Start Meeting...
Introductions: Make sure your neighbors know that what they say is 
confidential-you're not a cop, and you don't represent the landlord or 
manager. If you're meeting in person, bring snacks. Ask everyone to 
introduce themselves: What's your name? How long have you lived in the 
building? What's going on in your apartment? Mold? Roaches? How have you 
been treated by the landlord? Any rent increases? Can you pay rent? Are 
you okay on food and necessities?

Reflect: After everyone has shared their experiences, ask them to 
reflect on what they heard. This lets you collectively name the patterns 
you notice. When tenants can't afford the rent or live in unsafe, 
unsanitary conditions, they often blame themselves, or assume they have 
to live with it. As an organizer, part of your job is to turn 
individualized shame and acceptance into collective anger.

Plan: Talk about what you want to achieve. Rent rollbacks? Canceling 
rent debt? Payment contingent on meaningful repairs? This won't be set 
in stone, but it will help you move forward. Make a list of tasks to get 
done before the next meeting. Some will involve outreach: You want to 
get as many people involved as possible, so make a plan to invite more 
tenants. Others might include researching your landlord, researching 
your rights, or connecting to a local tenants union. If you've convened 
the group, make sure you're making room for other tenants to step 
forward as leaders. Share the contact list, and get everyone in a 
WhatsApp chat, phone tree, Facebook group, or email list. Choose a date 
for the second meeting.

...and Keep Meeting
As the Philadelphia Tenants Union says, organizing is 90% follow-up. 
Don't expect that everyone will remember the meeting time. Follow up 
with one-on-one calls and reminders.

As you continue to meet, make sure everyone feels like their concerns 
are being addressed. Warn your neighbors that the landlord will likely 
try to scare you off from organizing, aim to negotiate with a few 
people, pick favorites to sow distrust, and refuse to address you 
collectively at first. This is how landlords show fear! If you discuss 
these tactics early on, tenants will be less likely to fall for them.

Tip: Research Your Landlord
Who owns your building? Landlords make it intentionally tricky to answer 
this question, but there are tools available to support your research, 
like ownit.la, JustFix.NYC, and EvictorBook. Your local assessor's 
office, the registry of deeds, past eviction and court documents, and 
internet sleuthing can help you find out how is paying taxes on or holds 
the title to your property. It might also work to target your management 
company or your building's legal representation to give up your 
landlord's name.

Formalize It
Form a tenants association. This is not a formal or legally elaborate 
process. You're just saying, "My fellow tenants and I have decided that 
we now constitute a new organization," and identifying yourselves as an 
entity for collective bargaining. While there's strength in numbers, you 
don't need every apartment in your building to join-an enthusiastic 
minority will do.

Draft some bylaws: Often, TAs write and sign bylaws to make sure all 
members are on the same page. Include what the Bay Area organization 
Tenant and Neighborhood Councils calls a solidarity pledge: an agreement 
that members will defend each other, act together, and refuse to 
negotiate with the landlord on their own. You should also plan in 
advance and as a group how you will make collective decisions. It's 
often worth it to take the time to achieve consensus; you risk 
alienating members if they're outvoted and unconvinced.

Stay consistent and share power: Make a plan for meeting at regular 
times, and ask volunteers to sign up for necessary roles. Who is 
responsible for notifying everyone of meetings? Who can provide 
childcare so meetings are accessible to parents? Who will compile and 
submit maintenance requests? Who will connect your building to the 
broader union or tenant movement? Throughout the process, remember and 
remind: Leadership is service to the group. Facilitating a meeting is 
making space for everyone else to share.

Celebrate: Have a signing ceremony! Remember, organizing is about 
turning strangers into community: Shoot the shit, ask about people's 
kids, and crack jokes (particularly at your landlord's expense).

Make Demands
Congratulations, you're a collective bargaining unit! Time to get what 
you want. Send a letter to the landlord with your demands, requesting an 
immediate response. Announce in the letter that you've formed a TA, and 
instruct the landlord to begin communicating directly with the TA, 
rather than with individual tenants. Use legalese in 
communications-reference tenant organizing laws and/or Covid-19 eviction 
laws-to show that you know your rights and won't be intimidated by empty 
threats.

Escalate
Did your landlord instantly agree to your demands? No?! You might have 
to escalate.

Official complaints: You want to create a paper trail that will put your 
landlord on the defensive. Record instances of landlord harassment. Have 
every member of your association document poor conditions or violations 
of health and safety codes, then report them to your local housing 
department. Even failures to post required notices are worth recording.

Direct action: Direct actions are good ways to garner public support for 
your predicament. Marches, protests, block parties, bake sales, and 
other events in public space-as well as petitions, social media storms, 
and GoFundMes online-are ways to celebrate the community you're creating 
and get a larger community involved. Hold an action outside of your 
building or in a nearby public place to drum up allies. Protest outside 
your landlord's home or their place of work. Leave negative online 
reviews, publicize poor conditions, expose their life of luxury-in 
short, shame. Eviction is personal for us; it should be personal for 
your landlord to carry it out, too. You can also hold actions against 
failing city agencies and local politicians. Is the housing department 
failing to respond to calls? Are city council members refusing to 
support your rights? They are worthy targets!

Engage the media: Media bias runs deep; be sure your press release 
frames the story you want them to print, and train yourself before 
interviews. You are not poverty porn. You are not collateral damage. You 
are fighting back against racist, classist exploitation, eviction, and 
displacement.

Lawyer up: Having a TA makes it easier for a lawyer to represent you, 
saving time and resources. Some cities provide legal counsel for tenants 
facing eviction. Most have pro bono or low-cost options. Your citywide 
tenants union can help connect you to someone they recommend.

Scale up your association: Does your landlord own other buildings? Can 
you find them and join forces with the tenants there? The bigger the 
collective bargaining unit, the more power you wield.

You can also...

Rent Strike!
Often, we use rent strikes to intervene when a landlord is legally 
permitted to collect rent but should not be-when there's a gap between 
what's legal and what's right. Why should your rent be due as usual when 
the elevator is broken and your disability means you can't take the 
stairs? Why should your rent be due when a pandemic has severed you from 
your source of income and the government has told you to stay home? We 
also use rent strikes when landlords are in breach of existing tenants' 
rights laws-of habitability standards or rent stabilization, for 
instance-and we realize we have no one to enforce the laws but ourselves.

A rent strike gets the goods when a group of tenants is unified in 
nonpayment and committed to a drawn-out struggle. There are real risks 
involved in striking: Landlords may threaten to evict you, try to hurt 
your credit, or put you on tenant blacklists. But in an unjust system, 
rent strikes can succeed by utilizing the two weapons tenants have at 
their disposal: solidarity and their rent checks. Over the past century 
in the US, tenants have used rent strikes to resist price gouging in the 
Bronx in the 1920s, slum conditions in Harlem in the 1960s, the 
displacement of mariachi musicians from LA's Mariachi Plaza in 2017, and 
many other anti-tenant attacks.

Don't pay rent: If you're withholding rent to protest rent increases or 
to get repairs, your TA should set up an escrow account where tenants 
put rent money aside. Pooling your rent money into escrow allows you to 
demonstrate that it exists without handing it over. Suddenly, it's 
leverage, an incentive for your landlord to come to the negotiating table.

Can't pay rent?: Solidarity can still help create leverage. If there are 
other tenants in your association who can pay, but have agreed to 
withhold rent along with you, they can put this money in an escrow 
account, or even a savings account. Joining a citywide rent strike, if 
there is one, will also increase pressure on politicians to respond to 
the current emergency with mass rent cancellation.

The bottom line is, as a collective bargaining unit, you can make 
demands on your landlord with or without withheld rent. Asking a 
landlord to forgive a few months' rent during a pandemic is a reasonable 
request! If a request doesn't work, try a demand. Escalate, through 
online campaigns and public direct action.

Stay and Fight!
When faced with a strike, protest, or other forms of tenant 
organization, a landlord may try to intimidate you into paying up, 
shutting up, or moving out. They may send you a "Notice to Pay/Cure or 
Quit," indicating that they're beginning eviction proceedings. This can 
be scary, but it's not the end of organizing work. Eviction is a 
process, and there are both legal and extralegal strategies to stall and 
stop it.

Don't self-evict: Many tenants move out as soon as the landlord tells 
them to, thus doing the landlord's work for them, and saving them the 
cost of a lawyer. Stick it out. There are risks that can come with 
fighting to stay-but being pushed out of your home or neighborhood 
(especially during a pandemic!) is even riskier.

If your landlord takes you to court: Tenants who represent themselves in 
court are much less likely to successfully defend against evictions. A 
good lawyer will buy time to make discovery requests, collect 
information, demand a jury trial (as is your right in some states). As 
the Washington, DC, group Stomp Out Slumlords says, the courts can act 
as a chokepoint in the displacement machine. Clog the courts!

If your landlord tries to forcibly evict you: Landlords may come in when 
you're out and change the locks, cut your electricity or gas, or try to 
physically remove you. They often enlist the cops, who arrive all too 
eager to enforce these illegal evictions. Your TA and union connections 
are necessary here. Show up with supporters, legal observers, 
cameras-and/or bolt cutters-to defend your right to a legal eviction 
process.

Negotiate
Maybe your landlord is losing in court and the lawyer fees have gotten 
out of control. Maybe they're sick of bad publicity. At some point, your 
landlord may decide that negotiating is in their best interest, too. 
Decide as a group what your priorities are and come prepared for 
negotiations with a list of demands. These negotiations will culminate 
in a collective bargaining agreement, signed by both your association 
and your landlord, which could include a rent rollback, the right to 
keep all rent owed, guarantees of needed repairs, and-sometimes most 
importantly-the right to renegotiate later.

Block Your Eviction
If you've already gone to housing court and lost-that is, a judge has 
signed off on your eviction-it might be time to collectively occupy your 
housing. Mobilize your association, your community, and your union and 
greet the sheriffs when they arrive. Discuss multiple levels of defense 
in advance: Figure out who will support you outside on the street, and 
who will stay with you inside and risk arrest. In some cases, your goal 
will be to prevent the eviction from happening, or to move back inside; 
in others, to garner as much media attention as possible, demonstrating 
the violence of evictions and politicizing the problem.

From Community Defense to Community Power
We often say in the L.A. Tenants Union that we make our community by 
defending it. The strength of your tenants association and your tenants 
union is manifest not only in its ability to win demands, but in its 
power to create local relationships of trust, mutual aid, care, and 
support. Tenants associations redefine the home as a site of social 
struggle. In this way, they allow us to live in the world our campaigns 
demand-where buildings, neighborhoods, and cities are controlled not by 
capital, but by their residents.

Resources
 Tenant and Neighborhood Councils in the Bay Area has a great 
escalation guide. The Anti-Eviction Operations Manual from Stomp Out 
Slumlords in Washington, DC has some more information about 
landlord-tenant court and their blog explains some of the day-to-day 
process of organizing. The Autonomous Tenants Union Network's resources 
page has information from tenants unions across North America about how 
to write a press release, how to research your landlord, and more. 
Finally, the L.A. Tenants Union's Tenants Association Handbook explains 
why we need a TA in every building and includes stories of tenants 
associations we organized that successfully fought landlord harassment, 
rent increases, and evictions.
https://www.blackrosefed.org/how-to-organize-your-building/
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