Philadelphia Tenants Union’s

Organizing Guide

Philadelphia tenants are in crisis from the long-term economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and our lack of political power to change laws that favor landlords. Many of us can’t pay our rent, and our politicians are not taking this crisis seriously enough. Our representatives are unwilling to take the steps needed to create structures and fund resources that are necessary to keep people in their homes. The landlords, developers, and politicians all profit from our exploitation and will not give up their power voluntarily.

But you are not alone. You can build organizational structures that will give you the ability to collaborate with your neighbors and fellow tenants to leverage our power in numbers against landlords. This is a guide created by tenant organizers in Philadelphia to help you get started.

The best way to get further resources and support from us is to join the Philly Tenants Union!

Table of Contents

Who Are Your People?

One-on-one Conversations

Tenant Mapping

Leadership Identification

Connecting Tenants and Hosting a Meeting

Organizing Tenants Democratically

Relationships are Key to Organizing

Achieving Demands

Escalating Actions

Rent Strikes

Looking Ahead

Documents

1. Sample demand letter to your landlord
2. Sample leaflet to fellow tenants
3. Sample rent negotiation letter with your landlord (individual)

Who Are Your People?

• Find your fellow tenants.  Who are the other tenants who need to be on your side against your landlord? In some cases this might be easy because they’re your neighbors, so if you are in a building you know where to look. For tenants whose landlords have properties spread in single family homes across the city, this might take more work.

• Search databases. You can use https://property.phila.gov or Who Owns Philly? to:

• Search for your landlord’s name and determine what other properties they own
• Your landlord’s name might be recorded differently than you’d expect on the website. In that case, you can first search your address, which shows the owner’s name. Then you can use that name to find your landlord’s other properties.
• You can also use Eclipse - Philadelphia by searching your address to find your landlord’s rental license (if they even do have one), then search their name or LLC associated with your address to find other properties they have rental licenses for.

• Be wary of the social media shortcut. While social media is one tool to look for fellow tenants of your landlord, keep in mind that the people who respond to a post in a community facebook group will be a small fraction of the fellow tenants you will need on board for successful collective action. Social media is also public, so you may be inadvertently giving your landlord a heads up that you’re organizing.
• Talk to your neighbors and fellow tenants. Doorknocking and face to face conversations are the most effective way to connect with your neighbors and find out their motivation and what changes they are invested in fighting for. They also probably have information you don’t. Talking to people one-on-one and building trust is a helpful way of learning. This helps discover forms of organic organization that you may not be aware of. Maybe there’s already organizing that’s started or they’re in a groupchat with fellow tenants for other reasons. More on this later.
• Plan a one-on-one. When you make contact, you can move into a one-on-one conversation. These meetings are best in person, but given social distancing, can also be done over the phone, Zoom or Google Hangouts.

One-on-one Conversations

• One-on-ones are the heart of an organizing campaign. They are an organizer’s main tool for understanding someone’s motivations to  bring them into the campaign. People do not join organizations they do not identify with or see how they can benefit from. In one-on-ones, you can have vulnerable conversations where you discover their issues, help them face the reality of it, that they’re not alone, and understand that the solution is to organize to tackle the issue together.  Most tenant issues are the result of a system (i.e. a landlord) and collective action has the power to change things.
• Tenant law is neither a good sword nor shield. Landlords do illegal things and retaliate all the time. It’s important to be honest about the risks and understand where concerns and fears lie so you can push them to realize that those risks are there, even if they weren’t challenging the system. A one-on-one also a safe space to talk about the risks of organizing and how acting together as a union makes fighting for change safer. 

One-on-one conversations are necessary for assessing engagement and whether or not someone is committed to organizing work, and also provides a space to address concerns in a meaningful and productive way.

• Expect a bit of discomfort. One-on-one conversations are outside of the norm and how we are conditioned to engage with each other under capitalism. You will probably ask someone to do something outside their comfort zone even if it’s something small like knocking on a neighbor’s door.
• Don’t ask leading questions and assume that they must already have a certain problem that you obviously have the answer to already.
• You must LISTEN and DISCOVER their issues first, or else you are effectively putting words in their mouth and failing to discover the issues they actually care about. People (probably including you) hate doing what they’re told or how to think.
• There is a process to one-on-ones: see here, here, and here for what it looks like!
• Practice helps. If you haven’t done one before, try practicing with a friend or fellow organizer! No one starts out being good at one-on-ones. It is a skill to learn and it takes practice.

Tenant Mapping

• Drawing physical maps of your neighbors or fellow tenants and where they live is an extremely helpful exercise. Seriously. Use the map to visualize where you have support and where you still need to organize, the connections/relationships that already exist, and the organic leaders that result from that (more on that in the next section).
• People are already organized. Expand the map to include each tenant’s own social networks, churches, workplaces, universities, political organizations, and other communities.
• Think about ways people connect through their intersectional identities: familial structure, race, gender, age, etc. You want to find and build on the organization that is already there. For example, a tenant may be deeply connected to their church, and it could be wise to bring in the pastor’s help as another leader in the campaign.

Leadership Identification

• A strong organizing campaign is full of leaders, and not driven by a small heroic group of individuals. It is essential to identify leaders and bring them onboard the campaign. Often, they may not have had any prior organizing experience before.
• A leader is someone who has followers. They most easily convince others to take action when this person asks -- sign a demand letter, join a rent strike. Leaders are not necessarily whoever is the most talkative / loud / political, rather they are the people others turn to for advice. They are the people who get things done. You don’t always need to be the leader, but you’ll want to have the leaders on board when you make a suggestion.
• Across a landlord’s properties, or even between floors of a building, tenants already have the people they trust, and it is often not you. Communities have their own natural leaders.
• If a campaign starts and for some reason a natural leader has a negative perception of it, that can damage your ability to organize. If you meet with them and bring them into the campaign early, that reduces your risk.
• Leaders can be found by asking questions like “Who around here is someone you go to for advice or help? Who around here is reliable?” Crucially, a leader must be able to follow up on a task. For example, at the end of a one-on-one, if you ask someone “can you get petition signatures from each of the tenants on this floor?” and they come back a couple days later with barely any, you don’t have a leader.
• Help leaders learn. Leaders are people who can get things done, but that doesn’t mean they already have all the organizing skills. If someone seems interested, work on tasks alongside them until they can do it by themselves. Delegate tasks and follow up with them.
• If you try to do everything yourself, people will not be invested in the campaign. Delegating tasks and letting people take ownership of tasks is key to organizing, even if you think you would do it better or you like your idea more.

Connecting Tenants and Hosting a Meeting

• Communication channels should be whatever most people can communicate on. While it can be tempting to recruit people to your favorite encrypted app, the most powerful group is one where the most number of people can communicate.
• Host a meeting. Usually the best method to determine problems and demands is a group meeting, as people can get overwhelmed by text threads. Since that might not always be possible, consider having a virtual meeting on Zoom, Google hangouts, a conference call, or any other virtual method. People trust each other more when they have seen each other’s faces and heard their voices -- it’s hard to go into a scary fight with strangers.
• Meetings are about decision-making. Not about talking about your feelings. Your feelings matter, but that’s what one-on-ones are for. You also cannot make a democratic decision without having one-on-ones to get feedback and build support before bringing it forward to a meeting.  
• Reach out to literally everyone multiple times to remind them about the meeting! Organizing requires follow-up. It can be tempting to take shortcuts through mass texts or emails, but many people will not attend if not individually invited and reminded to. Think about a time you were invited to an event and decided to go because someone personally reached out to you. This is why we follow up one-on-one. Organizing happens at the speed of trust, and you are building a relationship between you and your neighbor.
• Plan a simple agenda. Ask people to share a little about themselves: who they are, how they’re doing, how long they’ve lived in the building, maybe how they are coping with the pandemic. Look for opportunities for mutual aid to build trust. Encourage people to share as well how the pandemic is impacting their housing -- are they struggling to make rent? Is it forcing them to confront the shitty conditions in their house they were otherwise avoiding? While you want to be wary of time, it’s important to make space for people to vent and agitate themselves over this situation. Then plan to discuss what people’s biggest collective issues are, and what demands they want to make.
• Sample agenda:

1. Introductions and check-ins
2. Set the scene/explain the purpose of the meeting
3. Report on grievances or problems people are facing
4. Brainstorm possible solutions
5. Assign roles for tasks
6. Plan follow up and schedule next meeting

Organizing Tenants Democratically

• You may be ready to take drastic actions, but without your neighbors on board and support in numbers, you are unlikely to win your demands and more likely to face negative consequences. Democratic organizing is about building relationships and structures to make demands collectively. A demand is only democratic if everyone who has a stake in it has a voice in deciding how to address the problem.  Voting can sometimes hide people’s real concerns because of peer pressure or shyness, which is why we rely on one-on-one conversations to get to the root of people’s needs. Meetings bring what is uncovered in one-on-ones to the larger group in order to discuss and decide collective solutions
• People whose input was included during the planning stages of an action are more likely to participate in or even take leadership in the action. Don’t expect to plan an action and then have everyone “just show up.” 
• It’s important to plan follow-up when planning actions. If your first step is a strike and your landlord still doesn’t meet your needs, but instead evicts everyone, there will be no change and not many ways to increase pressure on the demand. Starting small and escalating after each action is necessary. Many tenants who are hesitant about an action that is “too radical” may be ready to act when the group decides to settle on a less scary step first and find it doesn’t meet their needs. A tenant who thinks their landlord is “just doing their job” may change their mind if the landlord yells and ignores them when confronted with a phone call. Sometimes it can be frustrating settling for a step you don’t feel like will do anything, but it serves important needs. It helps train the group in doing collective action together, empowers them, and agitates them against their landlord when the landlord responds poorly. They may then be ready for more dramatic steps. Tenants who don’t yet feel ready to withhold rent can be encouraged through “baby step” collective action to get there -- such as everyone showing up to a meeting so they can tangibly see the support behind a future collective action.  
• Smaller actions than a rent strike, like organizing an email blast or simultaneously paying rent late on the same day, will show the power of the union and tell the landlord we are organized to escalate, like strike, at any time. Remember, going into an action with the most amount of people on board is the best way to success.

Relationships are Key to Organizing

• Trust is key. People will only take collective action and put themselves at risk with people they trust. It is necessary to build strong personal relationships with the people you are organizing alongside.
• Start small. Organizing smaller, less risky actions to show that collective action works.
• Meet people where they are at. Not everyone will come to the table from the beginning with radical politics or be prepared to strike on command. Listen to and respect their opinions and concerns. Through agitation, education, organization, working together and relationship building, people come to share some of the same values.
• Landlords and their agents will try to retaliate. Unstable relationships will lead to people backing down fast and being willing to take individual meetings with landlords to negotiate instead of collective bargaining. The more undeveloped relationships there are among tenants when the landlord begins retaliating (which can be sooner than you expect), the worse off your campaign. Everyone is weaker as an individual and stronger as a collective.

Achieving Demands

• What exactly do you want? A winnable demand might be a repayment plan with no evictions or reduced rent. Maybe the biggest complaint is something other than rent altogether -- maybe people are upset that essential maintenance is frozen.

• Good demands are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable. What your landlord gives up is roughly equivalent to the damage your collective action is doing. Landlords operate logically (...more or less). If your collective actions are doing equivalent or more damage to the landlord because a demand isn't being met, then it is in the landlord's interest to agree to the demand. If your collective action does not meet this threshold, then it is extremely unlikely the demand will be won.
• Relevant: Widely shared among the group
• Timely: with a timeline that fits ability and need

• A demand does not need to “go for the gold” right off the bat. In fact, demands often fail if they do because there is usually not enough collective power built in the beginning to achieve the highest demand. Smaller demands that can initially be won more easily, such as simply getting a video chat with your landlord when they wouldn't previously, can build up the collective confidence in order to eventually lead to calling for the highest demand.

• Who has the power to fix the problem? For smaller companies, this might be easy: the landlord whose name is on all your rent checks. For larger developers, it may be less clear. Identify a person in management who has the ability to either fix the problem or make the call, and whose pockets would be hurt by collective action.
• Which tactics can work? Tactics can leverage social, political, and/or financial pressure on a landlord. Social pressure means impacting a landlord’s personal relationships in their community, or impacting their sense of power over tenants. Political pressure means leveraging media, city officials, and legislative means to influence a landlord. Financial pressure means hurting a landlord’s profits. Typically, financial pressure with some political pressure is the most effective in achieving a demand.
• It deserves special mention that a demand on your landlord for rent suspension with no back pay owed would be extraordinarily difficult to achieve. The actions tenants can possibly take against a landlord can't match up to the financial losses the landlord would take by agreeing to this demand. Strongly consider a different demand -- winning something is better than winning nothing. Demanding this of the state is another matter though, and one we can fight for (see section on Looking Ahead).
• Sometimes individual demands may be achieved, such as maintenance requests in individual units, for leaders identified by landlords and their agents in an attempt to “buy them off”; it’s important to both acknowledge this as a win of collective action (power has been identified in your organizing) and to inoculate against leaders feeling like they no longer have something to fight for. Emphasizing that working as a collective is essential, and sustained, long term power means a fundamental disruption in the power between the landlord and tenants.

Escalating Actions

Here is a toolkit of ideas for escalating against your landlord under COVID-19. Your path might look different depending on your members, your landlord and your demands.

When choosing a tactic, ask:

• Will this increase the pressure and push the landlord to cave in to demands?
• Is it visible -- to your landlord, or to people who your landlord cares about?
• Are enough people ready to do it?
• How will others react? Will it unify people?
• How will management react? How can we prepare people for retaliation?
• Does it look like a bunch of fun?

Rent Strikes

Before you call for a rent strike, has your group…

• Attempted collective negotiation with your landlord?
• Attempted a one-on-one with every tenant under the landlord?

• If you live in a large building, then just the tenants in building are enough
• If you live in a small property, then you will need to reach out to the landlord’s other properties
• If you live in a landlord’s only property, then unfortunately it is extremely unlikely a rent strike will work and negotiation is the best bet

• Clearly formulated collective demands to your landlord that haven’t been met yet?
• Gotten commitments from a supermajority (i.e. >75%) of tenants under the landlord?
• Organized a collective backup plan if the rent strike fails?

It is essential to build trust among all tenants of your group before attempting. Collective actions prior to a rent strike build the confidence of the group you are working with to ensure that they see others are also on their side. If a tenant doesn’t trust the members of the group and isn’t convinced collective action will work, it isn’t guaranteed they will participate and they might quietly pay their rent.

If you have no income to pay rent, then a “rent strike” is an immediately attractive action. But that is not so much a rent strike as it is non-payment of rent. A rent strike means building deep organizing roots among all tenants and collectively withholding rent even when people have the means to in order to meet a demand.  Non-payment of rent means...you have no income, and thus cannot pay rent. A rent strike is a demonstration of collective power, while mass non-payment of rent is collective desperation. It goes without saying that many landlords do not care if you are desperate, and neither does eviction court. If your goal is a “rent strike” but you have no income to begin with, then you have no financial pressure to leverage.

A rent strike is a tool, not a demand. A rent strike is a tool that may be used to achieve a demand that you believe can be met by withholding rent payments to your landlord and forcing them to address the issue because it affects their bottom line. Like with labor strikes, it is the tool of last resort, delivering the most damaging impact to your landlord but also carrying the biggest risks (i.e. eviction). In a situation where the demand is “stop collecting rent from me”, it’s questionable how effective a rent strike would be. To put it another way, how does withholding rent pressure a landlord to suspend rent? Whether they suspend rent or not, the situation is the same for the landlord (no profits). If they don’t agree to suspend, they reserve the right to evict the tenant when the court reopens, while if they do agree to suspend, they get nothing. In this case, it would be wiser to instead leverage social or political pressure on a landlord -- for example, pushing the landlord and the city to support a rent and mortgage moratorium.

Rent strikes can be powerful. Hitting a landlord’s pockets obviously hurts them the most, and a rent strike successfully carried out can force them to cave to pressure on demands. For a situation such as lack of repairs being done or other collective complaints, a rent strike is a strong tool when all else fails. But the rent strike is the means to the end, not the end itself. Think about what your demands are, and what tactics can best get you there.

Looking Ahead

The city and its people are in crisis as our entire economy is spiraling towards a deep recession. By many estimates, the COVID-19 crisis is going to last for months. That means, of course, we need to organize. Given the urgency of the situation, it’s tempting to take shortcuts -- only reaching out to your immediate circle, or individually trying to communicate with your landlord, or trying to gather as many petition signatures as possible without thorough conversations, or trying to organize everything on your own, or pushing ahead with drastic actions and demands without commitment from others.

But as the Tenants Union has learned from (many, painful) past failures, there are no shortcuts. Building strong, durable organization among tenants where there is an abundance of leaders and widespread trust yields the most successful and lasting results. It takes time using the strategies we describe here. Looking ahead we face mass evictions and continued unemployment when the immediate danger of COVID-19 passes. The state will intervene, as it already has, but it will most likely intervene in favor of bailing out landlords and the housing market rather than tenants. To have a fighting chance with the state, tenants will need to be organized on a mass scale that is not there currently. Taking shortcuts now means losing crucial time we have to build the organization we’ll need in the near future to confront all that lies ahead.