Hell Woods had read the reviews of Quality Hill Towers online and they still couldn’t believe how run-down they found their new apartment. When they moved into the Kansas City apartment complex in November 2022, they were shocked by the filth. “It looked like nothing had been cleaned. Everything was broken — from the shower to the sink to the stove to the door lock to the mailbox to my windows to my ceiling fan,” Woods said. “I lived in the woods and I hadn’t seen as many bugs as I saw in this apartment.”
A week later they found bedbugs. They bagged them in a Ziploc and took it straight to the management’s office, but it took weeks for the landlord to send pest control. In the meantime, Woods was suspended from work because of the bedbug situation.
“I was just sitting in my apartment being eaten by bedbugs, waiting to be evicted,” Woods said. Then someone told them to get in touch with the local tenant union.
On October 1, 2024, Quality Hill Towers and Independence Towers, both in the Kansas City metropolitan area, announced that they were going on a coordinated rent strike. Tenants at both buildings had reported mold, asbestos, holes in the walls and ceiling, roaches, mice, broken appliances, rank smells, brown water, and leaks. In July, a three-year-old fell out of an eighth-floor window at Independence Towers and died; his parents had filed multiple unanswered requests for repairs to the window. At both buildings, tenants felt they had reached their limit with landlords who apparently had no incentive to answer their calls for repairs when they could continue to collect rent. The answer for the tenants became obvious: They must stop paying. The rent strike is to the tenant as the riot is to the people: the voice of the unheard.
The tenants at Quality Hill and Independence are backed by the Kansas City Tenants Union (KC Tenants), an organization that only five years into its existence already boasts 10,000 members and an impressive series of wins. It was a key organizer of a Tenants Bill of Rights, which codified protections for tenants such as the right to organize without retaliation from the landlord, a first for Kansas City. The union also led a movement to shut down a plan, beloved by developers, to build another sports stadium downtown. KC Tenants has been so successful that it has essentially begun to work as a proto-political party in the city. In October 2022, it established a sister organization, Kansas City Tenants Power, so that it could endorse political candidates in the city council race that year. Three out of four of these chosen candidates won their races. KC Tenants has proven that tenant power is real.
The tenant movement that KC Tenants is helping shape is about more than just ensuring high standards of living for renters who share a building and landlord. This is a movement with a completely different political vision, one of decommodified housing. A more expansive vision for housing requires a more expansive definition of “tenant.” In their recent book Abolish Rent, Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, co-founders of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, write: “A tenant is more than a renter. A tenant is anyone who doesn’t control their housing, who inhabits but doesn’t own.” This includes those currently fighting to stay in their housing and those who are unhoused. It also positions tenants as the protagonists in a fight against all the forces that collude to control our housing.
At a November event hosted by Brooklyn’s Center for Fiction, KC Tenants director Tara Raghuveer laid it out clearly: “It’s not just the landlords; it’s the state as well.”
In a packed room before an audience of organizers, minor celebrities, and Tabi wearers — I saw Leah Goodridge, a Twitter-popular tenants’ lawyer, and the actor Caleb Hearon in the audience — Raghuveer was in conversation with Rosenthal, Vilchis, and Crown Heights Tenant Union member Esteban Giron. They talked about how they established their unions, sharing anecdotes of the battles they’d fought and won and lost. Raghuveer, who grew up in Kansas City and got her start in tenant movement work researching evictions, is also director of the union’s associated national network, the Tenant Union Federation (TUF). On stage she was charismatic enough that, afterward, I had to jostle my way through a crowd of admirers to speak to her.
When KC Tenants launched their coordinated strike in October, they launched a test case for the entire tenant movement. The Quality Hill and Independence Towers tenants are demanding immediate repairs to their buildings and collectively bargained leases from their landlords. They also have some more ambitious goals, like new ownership of their buildings. Their biggest demand is a national three-percent rent cap on all buildings that receive federal financing through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-owned mortgage giants.
In Abolish Rent Rosenthal and Vilchis write that while common ownership of our housing is the end goal of the tenants movement, the way forward will be paved by chipping away at public policy: “In the context of the asset-inflating American dream, to capture the state’s powers of taxation, regulation, housing provision and eminent domain will mean to run the state against its grain. It will take mass, independent organization that understands policy outcomes as way stations of tenant power.”
Kansas City has identified a possible way station. The idea is to withhold rent to prevent their landlord from paying its mortgage to the state, and to draw the attention of federal regulators to dire conditions that violate the terms of those mortgages. Despite how closely linked the interests of the state are with real estate, they do still exist as separate entities with specific roles to play. KC Tenants’ strikers were betting on their ability to leverage the state’s interests against the landlords’. Can a tenant union use a rent strike to force the landlord and the state into a confrontation that changes the balance of power in favor of the tenants?
In Missouri, a rent strike is a historic occasion. I won’t pretend tenant organizing is easy anywhere in the United States but it’s certainly easier in cities like New York and Los Angeles than it is in Kansas City. New York, for example, has some of the strongest tenant protections in the country, which is why you can find dozens of tenant organizations across the city that frequently support rent strikes and even eviction defense. In New York a tenant has a legal right to withhold rent in part or even in full when repairs have not been made, or if conditions are unlivable. It’s even possible, if rare, to win damages for landlord harassment.
In Missouri there are no such protections. The rent is due when the rent is due, even if rats are literally falling from your ceiling. In Brooklyn if you withhold your rent due to falling rats, the landlord has to go through the courts to evict you, meaning you’ll have to go sit in a grim, linoleum-floored room downtown where an annoyed judge will likely ream your landlord out and instruct him to fix the rat hole. In Kansas City the landlord can just file an eviction and have the sheriffs come throw you out if they’d like.
“A strike is extraordinarily risky in our context,” Raghuveer told me. “Something that weighs on me a lot is that when people get displaced from a place like NYC, they end up in a place like KC. When a person gets displaced from KC, you just literally don’t have any place to go. The stakes are really high for a poor person from Missouri.”
The tenants of Quality Hill Towers and Independence Towers thought the risk of organizing the rent strike was worth it. Raghuveer said the buildings have people from many different backgrounds — old, young, Black, white — but what they mostly all have in common is that they are poor and there are few options for housing within their financial reach. Striking to improve their current housing struck many as the only sensible option.
When Hell Woods started organizing their neighbors at Quality Hill, they spent the first year just focusing on individual crises. When, on Zoom calls, TUF started talking about a national strike, Woods realized that they could use the lack of progress on repairs to encourage the tenants in their building to join it. Last summer they got serious about organizing a majority tenant union, and achieved it, with most tenants in the building having joined. Still, the landlord, Sentinel Real Estate, did not make repairs in a timely manner. Having exhausted all options, Woods knew their building would be one of the first to answer TUF’s call for a national rent strike.
They were well aware of the risks, having seen at least two or three neighbors evicted every month that they had lived there. “Sentinel is known as one of the biggest evictors in Kansas City and there are no protections. This is Missouri — it’s the sunken place,” said Raghuveer.
“It was a nuclear bomb,” said Woods. “We didn’t have any other choice but to go on strike.”
Abolish Rent describes a rent strike as an exercise in solidarity: “What makes a rent strike a strike is consciousness and coordination.” Strike action comes from the labor movement, which boasts a long history of success. When the worker does not go to their job, value cannot be produced for the capitalist, and therefore, we win. But as we move into new micro-eras of late-stage capitalism, the strike action as a form shows some wear and tear.
Capitalists no longer own one or a handful of factories — they are conglomerates whose bottom lines are padded by workers and factories laid out in complicated webs whose nodes do not speak to each other. Last winter’s strikes against Amazon and Starbucks were both exciting to witness and, despite hundreds of people participating, almost inconsequential to corporate profits. Neither company came to the bargaining table as a result of the strikes.
What Amazon and Starbucks workers did achieve, however, was big press, which raised the general public’s awareness of their unions’ existences. In a world where workers under the same employer are so diffuse, visibility of a political action is a key element to raising consciousness, enabling coordination, and creating political pressure. You can’t just be on strike — the people have to know you’re on strike.
KC Tenants, as led by Raghuveer, is taking notes from labor just as much as other tenant organizations. She’s attracted to the shop steward model, finding it a refreshing change from her background in community organizing. “We shouldn’t be overly rigid in how we interpret or adapt from structure-based methodology. On the other hand, we can’t be loosey-fucking-goosey about how we organize.”
In borrowing a tactic from labor, tenants will face the same limits that movement has. The share of housing owned by large corporate landlords has risen, so has the landlords’ ability to withstand strike action. The bottom line is supported by many different buildings and a bevy of friendly policies. And unlike a labor action, a rent strike is often not visible to outsiders. If a rent strike can be a way to engage other people — other tenants — and create political pressure, it has to translate the militant tactics of the labor strike that bring visibility, like picketing, into corresponding ones for the tenant movement.
When the KC Tenants strike moved into its second month in November, the tenants picketed outside their own buildings to shame the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) for its lack of action and refusal to meet with them. Considering that FHFA decision makers are hundreds of miles away in Washington, this was primarily a stunt to attract media attention rather than a real picket line. The FHFA oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that essentially act as banks. Real estate corporations rely on mortgages just like us little people do to buy their properties. These loans are securitized — that is, bundled and sold to private investors — by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Creating a secondary market for mortgages is a great idea for capital to drum up more money for itself, but there are risks. Roll the 2008 tape: banker bros jumping off ledges, people losing their homes, general panic. All because lenders were overleveraging themselves, making bad loans, and creating defaults all down the line to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Allowing both entities to go bust would have created an even bigger financial crisis, and so, enter: a bailout and new oversight by the FHFA. The whole purpose of the agency’s takeover of the GSEs was to make sure loans were regulated to prevent another 2008.
The rent strike is to the tenant as the riot is to the people: the voice of the unheard.
In photos of the action at Quality Hill Towers, tenants held signs with FHFA director Sandra Thompson’s face on them and a banner labeling her a “NEGLIGENT REGULATOR.” FHFA is supposed to ensure that landlords who receive loans from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac are held to the standards that the agency sets. However, when KC Tenants and TUF organizers looked into the loan terms that landlords had received, they found that many of them were loaned millions of dollars without needing to meet many standards at all.
Quality Hill Towers, owned by Sentinel Corporation, was financed with a $9 million loan from Fannie Mae. Sentinel is a New York-based company that owns over 28,000 units in the United States alone (they also have holdings in Europe and Australia). Corporate landlords like Sentinel are in an arms race right now to buy up as much property as they can, and they need loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make that happen. Theoretically, this makes the FHFA a powerful regulatory force that can step in and discipline these entities into ensuring their buildings are actually liveable. The agency could push Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to pursue default or foreclosure against landlords, or put their money in receivership along with guidance on how to spend it. KC Tenants hoped this relationship between the GSEs, the regulator, and the landlord would be the chink in the armor.
“We’d basically sent a bat signal out to the federal regulator saying, what action can you take if tenants choose to go on strike? How are you going to protect them if the reason tenants are going on strike is the landlord isn’t holding up their end of the bargain?” Raghuveer told me. The KC Tenants strikes are a way of attacking the whole system by turning its parts on each other.
Though FHFA did not respond directly, Raghuveer said there was back-channel chatter that indicated the agency was moved into a slight panic by the potential of a strike, which made the union feel more confident in their assessment of how effective the action would be. It was still a big swing for a union that had never gone on strike before because it hadn’t needed to do so to win its fights. Now, they saw that a strike could provide the right leverage to get the FHFA to go directly after the landlord.
“Our theory was the strike would push them into a state of financial crisis and default on their loans,” Raghuveer said, thereby forcing the FHFA to step in and possibly provoking a building sale to a new owner, in the case of Quality Hill Towers. KC Tenants assessed its ability to force a financial crisis on the landlord based on the calculation that Sentinel had been losing $3,000 per month on the building. Since the building already wasn’t profitable, the union was sure that something was going on that it could exploit. Independence Towers, the other building on strike, was also financed by a Fannie Mae loan and was already in a state of crisis that led to a receivership under a court-appointed attorney. This is one of the “new mechanisms to evict our landlords,” as Abolish Rent calls it — a way to wrestle ownership of buildings away from corporate landlords and into the hands of tenants.
Both properties were ripe for the sort of pressure that KC Tenants wanted to experiment with. While the goal was to get tenants better living conditions, it was also a chance to see if that pressure could force the state to come to the table and talk directly to tenants. If KC Tenants could get the FHFA and Thompson to talk to them, that would restructure some of the power dynamics in the triangle between real estate corporations, the state, and the people.
Up to this point, KC Tenants has enjoyed a good run of unambiguous wins — the bill of rights, the city council seats, shutting out the stadium, building a 10,000-strong base — but the strike showed the union where it needed to grow.
“There’s some muscle we haven’t developed around what it means to do things outside of slam dunk wins. This is that — it’s not a loss but it’s also not a slam dunk win,” Raghuveer said.
As the tenants faced the possibility of a third month of striking, the fight at each building took its own turn, and not necessarily toward victory. At Independence Towers, the smaller of the two buildings, the tenants have celebrated pressuring Fannie Mae into paying out $1.35 million for repairs in the building. The fight there isn’t over though — the money hasn’t yet been used to make all the repairs needed, and tenants are still demanding collectively bargained leases and want Fannie Mae to make this a condition for whoever becomes the next owner of the building. The tenants voted to stay on rent strike through December, even in the face of potential evictions.
At Quality Hill Towers, tenants took a hard look at what they had to lose and what they felt they could win, and voted to pause their rent strike.The choice didn’t come lightly, but Raghuveer said the pressure from the landlord on the building leaders became too much. Recently, Sentinel hired a high-profile PR firm and a new law firm to help deal with the strike. They sent non-renewal notices to 11 tenants. Woods is one such tenant; when we spoke at the end of December, they were in the process of packing. In January 2025, they will no longer be a Quality Hill Towers resident, but they said they will still be a KC Tenants member and won’t stop fighting for their neighbors.
Woods said that things took a turn for the worse when President Donald Trump won in November. The relative salad days of Joe Biden’s administration are over. In September 2024, Biden put out a proposal for national rent stabilization that would cap rent increases by corporate landlords (defined as those with 50 units or more) at five percent. Even if the plan was unlikely to pass in Congress, it signaled an administration that recognized rents as out-of-control and in need of regulation. But all that’s out the door now that the nation refused to be coconut-pilled by Kamala Harris. While the FHFA under Biden may have been concerned about rent strikes, and conversations were had between Fannie Mae and the landlord, the election has had a noticeable chilling effect. “Pretty concretely, this company seems to be emboldened. The intimidation has really picked up in the second half of November,” Raghuveer agreed.
It wasn’t only the election, however. One of the hardest lessons KC Tenants learned is that corporate real estate’s sheer size does indeed insulate it from failure. Despite the fact that Sentinel was already losing money on the building prior to the strike, the additional loss of rent during the action seemed to make no difference to the company. It most likely didn’t threaten their financial relationship to the GSEs.
You can’t just be on strike — the people have to know you’re on strike.
The KC Tenants strike strategy was an attempt to force landlords into an antagonistic relationship with the state, but it would appear that antagonism is only possible if the losses for the landlord are at a much larger scale than the building. While organizers like Woods described their rent strike to me as part of a national strike strategy by TUF, two buildings do not a national strike make. It’s still an open question of what a real national strike, with a significant sector of even a single landlord’s portfolio declining to participate in rent, could do. But so far, the checks aren’t bouncing, and the state doesn’t seem to care.
Much like the Amazon and Starbucks strikes, the KC Tenants strike built consciousness and skills for organizers inside the union, and it was good PR for the tenant movement. This might not seem like much, but for the organizers, the experiment was not a loss. In Quality Hills, tenants like Woods may have been pushed out, but many repairs were in fact made in the building. At Independence Towers, no one has been evicted since they went on strike. KC Tenants and TUF organizers spent a few days in December on calls with other tenant movement leaders across the nation, figuring out what comes next.
“The thing we’re trying to do with with TUF is really figure out what the fuck tenant organizing is,” Raguveer told me the day after Quality Hill Towers paused their strike. “We’re exiting this first phase hearing we’re really onto something.”
Cheryl Rivera is an editor at Lux.
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