Could tenants unions become a powerful political force in the way that labor unions already are?

The Louisville Tenants Union, which was formed last year, is bringing negative attention to property management companies who treat their residents poorly, pushing the city to end its contracts with such companies and more broadly trying to get the city council and the mayor to adopt policies that will reduce rents and limit evictions. It’s also part of a national effort to advance more renter-friendly policies. 

In my recent interview with Josh Poe, one of the founders and organizers of LTU, he discussed the importance of tenants unions, why groups pushing for change really need a “base” and his vision for widespread social and public housing in Kentucky and around the country. (This interview has been condensed and lightly edited.) 

Perry: To ask a simple question, a tenant is just anyone who doesn’t own their home, right? 

Josh: We define a tenant as someone who doesn't control their housing. We would call certain homeowners bank tenants. A lot of first-time home buyers still live in a high level of precarity. Their debt is so high. So if people are living in that level of precarity, then we invite them into the tenant union. We have a lot of black homeowners in the tenants 

union. 

How did the Louisville Tenants Union come about?

I've been organizing tenants in Louisville since around 2010, but not formally and not with any structure. That was happening a lot all over the country.  There was always tenant organizing in New York, you had the LA Tenants Union. But in the Midwest and South, you didn't really see a lot of tenant organizing happening. And I think that started to change in 2018 and 2019. 

I didn't start doing tenant organizing full-time until 2021. Something happened in 2020 that really changed the way I think about organizing and about power.

During the height of the pandemic, there was a lady who was being evicted from her property. This is the same weekend that David McAtee was killed. was killed. There's a moratorium on evictions. You're not supposed to be able to evict people. Her landlord targeted her for an eviction. And we tried to stop it. And the judge ended up throwing everyone out of the Zoom court, holding a closed Zoom hearing, and she got evicted. This really affected me and it affected everyone that we were working with because we weren't able to stop one eviction during the height of the moratorium. 

It showed us how much power we lacked, not just in the city, but in the state. And through that, Jessica Bellamy and myself started strategizing about what a tenant movement should look like in the South and in Kentucky. 

Interesting. 

We realized that we don't have a base in Kentucky. There's not really one organization outside of a labor union that actually represents a base of people. And that is a serious power vacuum. You have just a massive group of unorganized people who are seriously impacted by racial capitalism, but who aren't politically involved in any way. 

And until we have that, it doesn't really make sense to write and talk about policy. It doesn't really make sense to do op-eds. It doesn't make sense to create content.  Jessica and I both realized this as content creators. We both found ourselves in a lot of situations where we're in front of power-holders with great content, great graphics, but content in and of itself is not actually powerful. 

So in 2021, we worked on stopping a mass eviction at a trailer park in Morehead and did some statewide base building around that. The group KY Tenants formed in 2021. In 2022, we felt like we had enough tenants

organized here in Louisville to start a tenant union. But we didn't want to start an organization that only existed online with a logo. 

There actually needed to be people in a room making demands, planning a campaign. And we figured that needed to be like 40 or 50 people. And that's what we did. We had a meeting and brought people together. 

It is very important that the tenants union be engaged in struggle. That's one of the things that really separates us from other political nonprofits. We're constantly engaged in political struggle, whether against landlords directly or against real estate capital through policy. 

Why organize people as tenants? 

For me, it's deeply strategic. The point of the tenants union is to politicize a base of people who aren't politicized. Labor unions are not the same vehicle that they were 50 years ago, or even 20 years ago. 

We've lost the manufacturing base. We've moved to a more service-oriented workforce, so fewer people are unionized. Labor unions have become very much tied to the Democratic Party and very politically ineffective. Really concerned with their own self-interest, but largely not politically-engaged beyond that.  

So tenants unions can be the thing that really changes that dynamic, especially in places like Kentucky. We can build a massive base of people who aren't currently politicized through tenant organizing. 

I was at a meeting last night in a trailer park way out in the South End. There were about 150 tenants there. Everybody's from Mexico except three or four people, and they have Trump shirts on. I talked to them and I was able to get them very clear that they have a corporate landlord who received a federal subsidy. And the way that we attack that is through solidarity, attacking that landlord, making demands, running a policy campaign on the federal government. And they were very into that and made a real public statement of solidarity with their neighbors. 

There's no other vehicle that I can use to do that. There's no other issue. Let's run a campaign on climate justice or a campaign on defunding the police and see if we get that group of people in the room. 

When we have tenants union meetings, the age range is 18 to 94. Every religion represented, every demographic. Tenant organizing is the only thing that can do that. And so the point of the tenant movement is to build a large enough national base that we can hold a rent strike and create a crisis in capitalism, bring this entire system down, and then dictate the demands that we really want.

So being a tenant is a kind of collective identity. 

Everybody hates their boss. But your landlord, it's much deeper. It's much easier to leave a job. 

I can connect with people's rage and connect with hating that landlord. That starts a conversation. Through that conversation, you invite people in. You ask people to get clear about their self-interest, and then you invite them into building power with their neighbors. 

We're not asking people to get rid of their deplorable politics. We're not asking trailer park residents to suddenly have a Marxist analysis.

…..We have an entire system set up to isolate working-class people as individuals. And then you also have the Christian Church, which really works against you. So you have to work around those two things. And so you really have to connect with people's rage and connect with people emotionally and build really strong relationships. 

…In 1920, it made sense to do labor organizing because the real power in the country was in manufacturing capital. At this stage in our country's development, the power is in real estate capital. Real estate capital shapes every part of our lives. And so in order to change the power dynamics in this country, you have to organize directly against it. 

Explain the Christian Church part.

Sometimes the Christian Church can really reinforce narratives of individualism and meritocracy. That’s the antithesis to the narratives of organizing.

The Christian Church teaches people to be selfless. A lot of time in the Christian Church, what you see is the women set everything up and do all the work, and then the men come in and shine. So it reinforces all these dynamics that really make it hard to organize. And so what you have, especially in the South, are a lot of women who've just shown up helplessly for years. I think this is true in black communities. I think it's true in Appalachia, where I'm from, where women are just taught to just show up so selflessly. And we're taught in general just to be selfless. You just end up giving up your power and you get organized in somebody else's interests. 

….In the type of non-profit organizing that we have, we're trained to lean into respectability. People don't realize that respectability comes from power. Power doesn't come from respectability. People only respect you based on how much power that you have, not on being likable. 

So we train an entire culture of activists and organizers to have good relationships with power-holders.  Their power is contingent upon that relationship with the power-holders, instead of their relationship with the base. 

So when I meet with a power-holder one-on-one, I say, “I'm not here as myself. I'm here representing a base of people.” 

That lets them know right off the bat, I do not need to be liked in this situation. That's the key there. In a lot of our non-profit spaces, we’ve trained people on how to be liked.

When you say racial capitalism, what do you mean? 

Racial capitalism just means that in our economic system, economic values are defined by, determined by race. That means that say, a house costs $120,000 when a black person owns it. It costs $300,000 when a white person owns it. 

Racial capitalism is why black people often remove cultural identifiers in their home when they put it on the market. Making the home white increases its value. And our entire economic system is really predicated on this.

Content is not powerful. What did you mean by that? 

The idea that we can create content and somehow change public policy is a naive liberal idea that rests on the idea that people aren't actually self-interested, that they're ignorant, and that we can convince them through knowledge or better data to work against their self-interest. “If we can produce this great content, then somehow that's enough to actually get our policy passed.” 

But it’s about power, not content. When you organize, you still need to create great content. We have a policy team that does that. But you have to have a base of people that can use that content. 

Otherwise, what happens is the content you create can get co-opted and used in somebody else's interest. And I think that happened with the redlining work that I did. That's a good example of creating content without actually organizing a base of people behind it. 

Yes. I was going to ask about your redlining work. You were one of the people who first went in-depth on the redlining maps that were used in Louisville, right? 

They hadn't been widely publicized. A lot of people had found them, but they hadn't been published at a large scale. And so I published the ones for Louisville and created a really cool digital platform that's used widely. 

I think it was a good project, don't get me wrong. But it fell short of building any kind of power. I don't think there's been one policy passed in response to it that actually benefited black people or working class people in any way. 

I actually thought that when this gets published, there'll be reparations. There'll be a massive lawsuit. That’s how naive I was in publishing that.

My mistakes here can help a lot of other people in that situation. If you don't build power behind your project, your project will be used in a way that's entirely contrary to the way you intended.

The way they [Louisville political establishment] twisted the narrative was a very pro-market, pro-gentrification narrative. The narrative became, “These neighborhoods were denied investment, we need investment.” So it became a very pro-developer narrative. 

Did the same thing happen with the Breonna Taylor protests? There was activism and data about police brutality, but not necessarily a base of people pushing for specific policies? 

I think that example is a little more complex. Breonna Taylor was killed in March. Her family went around ….and [for a while] nobody would report on that story. It started to feel like in places like Louisville, Kentucky, the police can kill a black woman and it won't even be on the nightly news. 

The initial uprising was a spontaneous youth uprising in response to that happening. It’s important to separate that from the protests that came afterward because the protest wasn't just one thing. The youth uprising that happened, that was a very powerful action, a very powerful statement. The story wouldn't have been as powerful as it was, and we wouldn't have had the DOJ investigation. So I think a lot of good came out of that. 

The protests [in the summer and fall of 2020] became a very un-strategic action. And I think they also became a vehicle for a lot of people in the city to basically stage their own photo-ops.

What is your broader goal in tenant organizing? 

My personal vision is to help build tenant unions all over the South: Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee.

We are seeing labor strikes all over the country. How is that connected to your work? 

The labor union organizing that's happening is incredible. It actually strengthens the tenant organizing. It has to be both. We only have two ways to organize in this country. That's it. We can withhold our rent or we can withhold our labor. So if anyone comes to me about a campaign that doesn't involve withholding those things, or doesn't have withholding those things as part of it, at this point, it's hard to take it seriously. 

Our North Star is guaranteed housing. We believe that in the richest country in the history of the world, we should have a homes guarantee. 

What does a homes guarantee mean?

That everybody's entitled to a place to live, as a result of being a citizen of this country. We need a massive investment at the federal level in public housing. Let’s make a massive investment in building public housing and social housing and de-commodified housing. 

Public housing would be specifically run by the government. Social housing could be independent of that. It could be cooperatively-owned. We need both of those things. 

The single-family home ownership model ….it's obsolete at this point. The housing market right now is a total catastrophe because it's predicated on you being either a single-family homeowner or a renter. That model doesn't work anymore. It doesn't fit the needs of the populace. For example, we've got a building of seniors organized in Portland. [An area in Louisville.] They could own that building collectively. Instead of subsidizing private real estate, we could subsidize those residents to purchase their building and then subsidize them to maintain it. 

The way we think about home ownership really has to change. We need different models of home ownership, cooperative ownership, collective ownership, de-commodified land for black communities. There has to be a racial justice component to the housing plan. It’s not one thing. It needs to be an entire menu of these things.

We can create housing for everyone in the country.

When you say things like that, I tend to think, “This will never happen.” Is the goal to just make progress, or do you imagine some of these ideas might really come into fruition in your lifetime?

I spent the last ten years in front of people like you who told me the same thing about rent control nationally. And now we've got a letter from Chuck Schumer saying he supports it. 

So it can happen.

I think it will. 

A few years ago, you told me there'd be reparations in our lifetime and I laughed. California is discussing reparations right now. 

Reparations seems a lot different today …Rent control is going to be the same. 

I'm in my forties, so I've got a lot of energy to devote to this. In 10-15 years, things are going to look a lot different.