An organizer speaks about collective power in the world of real estate capital.

An organizer speaks about collective power in the world of real estate capital.

  • bdjukeemgood@lemm.ee
    882·
    3 days ago

    What does a strike look like? Everyone moves out? It’s not so easy to just stop renting.

    • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      17·
      2 days ago

      I think an all out strike as in, not paying rent, is a very serious and aggressive option that you’d only exercise in extreme circumstances.

      Unionising provides a lot of power to tenants long before going that far.

      For example, as a group you can afford legal representation.

    • TheThrillOfTime@lemmy.ml
      25·
      2 days ago

      If enough people stop paying rent, then they have to negotiate with them as a group. They can’t evict everyone.

      • Wilco@lemm.eeEnglish
        917·
        2 days ago

        Uhmm … yea, you CAN evict everyone. It’s called an eviction. Don’t pay rent, get evicted. Don’t move out when evicted, get trespassed and thrown out by the Sheriff. A renters union won’t do shit. Laws need to be changed to scale property tax so the more properties you own the more taxes you pay.

        • theparadox@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          2 days ago

          It can cost landlords a lot of money. You can evict everyone but then you need to actually go through the process with them, one by one. The union can also collectively call attention from the municipality, file official complaints, etc.

          If you rent strike and the landlord evicts eveyone, then they need to ready all the units all at once with none of the units generating any income. Assuming they have maintenance staff, they don’t have enough to handle that kind of volume. They’ll need to contract it out or deal with no income as units get ready one by one. The only downside (upside for them) is that they might be able to raise the rents on new tenants if demand is high enough.

          • Wilco@lemm.eeEnglish
            14·
            1 day ago

            An eviction just costs court fees in my state, and the landlord will automatically get the fee and any legal fee back.

            People put deposits down exactly for this reason. The properties are insured. There is no way a renters union would work.

            • theparadox@lemmy.worldEnglish
              5·
              1 day ago

              Sorry everyone, forget everything I said. This one person says that the first reason in my list of reasons of why it can be effective to form a tenants union isn’t a big deal in their state. I guess that miraculously invalidates all of my other points that aren’t related the legal fees of the eviction process. Obviously, it also applies to every other state, even if the fees thing is different there for some reason.

            • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world
              111·
              2 days ago

              Okay, but are the cops going to rehab the units after they haul the evicted tenants out? Are they going to seize all the tenants property and have it all catalogued and picked up? Plus if every unit is now a crime scene, that’s longer those units will sit empty, generating no income while all the evidence is gathered and then the crime scene cleanup guys show up.

              • Wilco@lemm.eeEnglish
                1·
                1 day ago

                Yes, but no. The Sherriff’s office sits everything out on the corner (not just the front of the house) when they evict in my state. They tell people not to touch stuff while they are there, but its a free for all the minute they pull off.

                • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world
                  2·
                  2 days ago

                  Okay, property is seized and tenants are deported, but that all takes time. I mean, I guess the “free market will fix it” by some enterprising and shitty American starting a company that assists landlords in cleaning up after a rent strike.

        • TheThrillOfTime@lemmy.ml
          3·
          2 days ago

          It’s kinda the same way that the Trump administration is handling it’s business. If you ignore the law and you have enough firepower to enforce your viewpoint, then the laws are up to negotiation. If thousands of people go on rent strike, they can’t evict all those people. There aren’t enough cops to throw all these people out in the street.

    • HejMedDig@feddit.dk
      177·
      3 days ago

      If you stop paying, it’s your problem, if everyone stops paying, it’s the landlords problem

    • bishbosh@lemm.eeEnglish
      38·
      3 days ago

      Rent strikes exist and have worked. The realities of evicting everyone is slow and costly legal process that can be disrupted in various ways. The point is to make it so costly that ceding to the tenant union’s demands become the better choice. There is a book Abolish Rent that goes into some tenet union victories and lessons can be learned from them.

    • Novocirab@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      15·
      3 days ago

      Besides what other people already answered here: Solidarity will also go a long way. Workers in the old days faced the same dilemma: When they go on strike, will they lose their job? A lot of them did. Solidarity saved them and made the movement work.

      In the context of housing, solidarity can take the form of organized people in a town agreeing upfront: “If folks from one house get evicted, they can move in with us.” Of course this requires a lot of trust—just like the person in the article says. And whenever it should come to this, it will be costly and inconvenient, even burdensome, for everyone involved. Just like filling a strike fund from already low wages was. In the end it worked.

      Without solidarity, we are defenseless.

    • cravl@slrpnk.net
      15·
      3 days ago

      Stop paying, same as any other boycott? I’ve done this thought experiment before, and while I think tenant unions are possible (and very much needed), they definitely aren’t as simple to implement as labor unions.

      To start, people would need to live more minimalistically so that “just moving out” can at least be a (last resort) tool in the union’s toolbox. This makes tenant unions antithetical to consumerism, a quality not shared by labor unions.

      To really thrive, tenant unions would also require people to actively know and interact a lot more with their neighbors, again fighting the trend of increasing social isolation and complacency caused largely by corporate (read: for-profit) social media.

      Personally, I want to see a sharp increase in co-living (a.k.a communal living). That would greatly lower the buy-in threshold for tenant unions to really take off, not to mention all the other mental, social, financial, and environmental benefits.

      • GrumpyDuckling@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        6·
        3 days ago

        100 people can pool their money together and hire a really good lawyer. 1,000 people could destroy a property management company. $20/month per household would add up fast.

    • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      Why is it called a strike? Why do we call it that and band together? If you know, you’ll know what all unions should be doing in this Age of Terror

  • cheers_queers@lemm.eeEnglish
    36·
    3 days ago

    My last landlord didnt fix a water leak for 9 months. The only reason they came to fix it is because i withheld rent and threatened to call the city after our bathroom closet was infested with black mold and my roommates wall on the other side slid off onto the floor.

    Oh and btw they still had the balls to send someone to serve me with a warning to evict if i didnt pay in full within 3 days lmfao

    • AlecSadler@sh.itjust.works
      11·
      3 days ago

      Where I live it takes like…30-60 days to actually evict someone by following proper protocol. And that’s if they don’t fight it in court and whatnot.

      What’d you do with the served papers? I hope wiped with them.

      • cheers_queers@lemm.eeEnglish
        11·
        3 days ago

        I paid them, didnt have the time or money to fight them. I just moved out asap. There was a lot of other stuff going on at the time and i’m sure they knew i didnt have the resources to dispute it

  • markovs_gun@lemmy.world
    30·
    3 days ago

    I fantasized about forming a tenant’s union when I was still renting but the people I talked to about it were completely unfamiliar with the concept and thought it was stupid so I gave up. Now the company I used to rent from has bought up pretty much all the apartment complexes in the area and people who rent from them are complaining about immoral and illegal stuff they’re doing but won’t consider actually doing anything about it. Anti union sentiment is deep in America and I don’t have any hope for the American public to do anything to help themselves.

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    171·
    3 days ago

    Very bold of them to assume that corporations won’t immediately use force to bust these unions and make any participants homeless and unrentable as an example.