The Rent is Too Damn High, But Renters Are Even More Powerful

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Cricket Media.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

Food, shelter, clothing.

Most of us would list these among our core necessities for survival, and we're not alone.

In fact, Professor Abraham Harold Maslow is credited with actually organizing how we think about our needs into a pyramid, known as Maslow's hierarchy.

In his groundbreaking work, he posited that we all begin with our physiological needs as the basis of our behaviors, essentially what we require to survive.

Once those are satisfied, we move up the scale, allowing creative and intellectual self-actualization needs to take over.

But survival not only comes first, it's the foundation for everything that follows.

Hungry?

You can't think.

Cold?

You can't focus.

No place to live?

See items one and two.

And a dozen other consequences, including losing your job, your family, and your future.

For millions of Americans, they have a hard time conceptualizing the pinnacle of the pyramid for a simple reason.

The cost of housing is skyrocketing.

But this isn't news.

In fact, in 2010, political newcomer Jimmy McMillan emphasized this reality when he ran for governor of New York.

Rep,

it's too damn high.

Jimmy was so serious, he also made it the name of his political party.

Mr.

McMillan did not succeed in his bid for leadership, but nearly 15 years later, his colorful call to action continues to live on, and the rent is still rising.

After the pandemic, prices soared even more, and in many parts of the country, the average rent rose faster than inflation.

Around the same time, hedge funds, which pool the funds of corporations, partnerships, and and real estate investment trusts, have been buying up housing and taking a real position in the rental market.

Most of the attention has focused on the lack of available stock for purchase by potential homeowners, but this dynamic has very serious implications for rental costs.

Often, these houses are scooped up in neighborhoods with significant Black or Latino populations.

In 2023, according to CoreLogic, hedge funds held 26% of all single-family home purchases in the united states typically for rent

imagine if your landlord is a conglomeration located on wall street rather than down the street and that's only part of the problem tenants face across the country i have mold in my bathroom my air conditioning went out about four weeks ago Part of my ceiling collapsed in my front room.

I'm being evicted.

I have court on December 21st.

There's lead paint.

I just don't know what to do next.

Can I have to find somewhere else to live?

What we just heard are voicemails from residents in Missouri calling a statewide renters hotline.

They were featured in a Time magazine documentary about the Kansas City Tenants Union.

According to the local NPR station, rents are rising faster in Kansas City and Missouri than in most of the country.

But whether you live in New York, Kansas City, or Atlanta, everyone is suffering.

The typical American renter now spends more than one-third of their income on housing, meaning over half of all renters are considered rent burdened.

For a lot of people, high rents are like the tip of a really scary Titanic level iceberg.

Those who are unable to pay rent or keep up with rent hikes increasingly face eviction.

And depending on your state, the process is swift, cruel, and offers little recourse.

To truly understand the impact, we must recognize that eviction isn't just a condition of poverty, it also pushes people into it.

When someone loses their home, even temporarily, the loss impacts their physical and mental health, their access to transportation, to their schools, and to the jobs they need to survive.

In fact, kids are the most likely victims of eviction.

Every year, 2.9 million children under the age of 18 are threatened with eviction.

and 1.5 million are actually evicted.

These children represent four in every 10 people who are threatened with eviction every single year.

And once you're out, your ability to impact the system shrinks because there's clear evidence that evictions suppress voter turnout.

Think again about Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

When you can't find something as basic as shelter, you are more than likely not thinking about something like voting.

States like Georgia have actually made it more difficult as a part of a voter suppression scheme.

State laws here and around the country make it hard to register to vote if you don't have a stable address.

And if you cross county lines, good luck remembering to get everything changed in time to participate in the upcoming election.

Being evicted also increases social isolation.

You're removed from your community and from the friends and family that can encourage you to vote and possibly change the system.

But here at Assembly Required, we don't focus on the problem without talking about possible solutions.

While housing has become more and more precarious, the people fighting for better policies and more power have become bolder and louder.

My friends, neighbors, comrades, and fellow tenants, we envision a Kansas City where everyone has safe, accessible, truly, and permanently affordable homes.

At KC Tenants, we are here to get get shit done.

That's the voice of Janae Manley, an organizer with KC Tenants Union, a multiracial, multi-generational organization of poor and working class tenants in Kansas City, Missouri.

Manly works with the tenants union to protest evictions, call out abusive landlords, and organize apartments and housing complexes to fight for their rights.

A single mother of two who was impacted by the housing crisis in her city, Manly even ran for city council in 2023.

I was like watching city council meetings like in the middle of the night because I was hungry to learn what decisions were being made about my life and my neighbors' lives.

Now, Manly didn't get the seat, but she got attention for her colleagues and a voice for their issues.

Because tenant unions aren't just about housing.

They're about political power.

Starting last week, tenants in Kansas City now have access to free legal representation in housing court that follows a campaign from local activists and the overwhelming city council approval of an ordinance and funding for the program.

This is from a report on KCUR, the local NPR station, in 2022.

The KC Tenants Union not only won a right to counsel for tenants facing eviction, they also got a tenant's bill of rights passed.

They won millions of dollars in city funding for long-term affordable housing.

Here's KC Tenants Union Director Tara Ragavir.

We talk a lot about tenants as a political class, a class of people who identify with their tenancy, their poor and working class tenants.

And that's actually not something to be ashamed of.

It's something to find strength in.

In a moment when political power matters more than ever, we're gonna talk to Tara Ragavier right after the break.

Thank you so much for being here, Tara.

We know that you are actually in a tenant's apartment doing this conversation with us.

I am.

Thank you so much for having me, Stacey.

It's great to be in touch.

Well,

I am just privileged to have this conversation.

I see the law books behind you.

So yay, tenant, yay, activist.

And as a writer and an activist, I am always intrigued by where people begin their journey to up in the world.

So Tara Raghavir, tell me about your origin story.

What led you to this work and to this room?

Sure.

So I grew up kind of all over the place.

My family are immigrants, and we moved to this country in 1995.

And my parents did what a lot of immigrants have to do when they come here, which is restart their education and some of their professional work from the beginning.

And that led to us moving many times over before I was in fourth grade.

And then finally, we had a chance to settle someplace where they got work.

And we ended up in Kansas, just outside of Kansas City, Missouri, but on the Kansas side.

And I grew up there and went to high school there.

And on that side of the track, so to speak, I had access to amazing public schools and public libraries.

I spent most of my childhood at the public library.

And

then I got out of here.

And I really didn't think that Kansas City would be a home for me long term.

I had grown up in a pretty white and wealthy community.

And that wasn't the community that I saw myself in the long run.

And it certainly wasn't one that my family had fit into very well

when I was raised here.

So I left.

And then when I was a senior in college, I began my senior thesis research.

And I was curious about housing.

And I had read what was then Matthew Desmond's dissertation on evictions in Milwaukee.

And

I asked him basically, I grew up in Kansas City and it's kind of a similar town to Milwaukee.

Would it be helpful or interesting if I went and asked a similar set of questions?

And so then I did that.

I basically came back to Kansas City and I started meeting with tenants who had been evicted, observing court, and then also, and importantly for my story, following around some landlords who were on the other side of the eviction equation.

And the meetings were with tenants were really moving.

If I'm being honest, it was some of the first times in my

academic life that something felt really meaningful.

And I was meant to be a neutral observer, but those conversations ended up being more like organizing conversations than anything else.

And then the most meaningful part for me actually was spending time with landlords, some of whom I knew personally because I had grown up in the part of town I grew up in.

And seeing the way that some of them treated their tenants was extraordinarily politicizing for me.

So that was the very, very beginning of my journey.

And that led me to community organizing.

And I've always been obsessed with housing and had the privilege of moving back to Kansas City in 2019 to start the the citywide tenant union, Casey Tenants.

That's an amazing story.

And we can tell that the work you do is about the lived experiences of tenants, including your own.

But you've also undergirded it with data.

For example, for seven years and counting, Kansas City Eviction Project has been compiling eviction research from lawyers, academics, neighborhood leaders, organizers.

Can you tell us about an example of a time that being armed with the facts came in handy?

There are countless examples.

I can tell you from half an hour ago, we had our congressmen walking around a building that we're organizing called Independence Towers.

It's in Independence, Missouri, just east of Kansas City.

And we've done a lot of research to equip the tenant union here with the facts that they need to ensure that they are organizing in the most strategic ways.

We know all the ownership history.

We know all the eviction history.

Most importantly, for this building, we know the financial history.

I'm in a property right now with a $5.5 million loan from Fannie Mae.

So that's public money that's actually backing the financing of this building that's in horrible shape and is desperately unhealthy for the tenants who live and organize in this building.

So in instances like this one, where we're organizing a tenant union, it's extraordinarily meaningful for us to have the facts, to have the financials, to have the legal history, the ownership history of the building.

But what I will say is that as an organizer, what I found is that sometimes the facts are just not enough, right?

And facts are not the same as power.

And that's the reason why we organize the people who are the closest to the problem, who we believe are also the closest to the solution, and should be treated as the experts of their own experience that they really are.

So we hear this term organizing a lot.

In fact, in the 2008 election, it was used as a term of disparagement by the then candidate for vice president when describing soon-to-be President Barack Obama.

As someone who is actively engaged in this work today, give us a quick primer on what organizing actually means.

When you say you're organizing tenants in Independence, Missouri, what does that look like?

I love this question because I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what organizing is and for some good reason.

Some people think when I say I'm an organizer, that means I am very organized and my closets are very clean.

That may or may not be true.

I won't be commenting on that on this particular podcast, but we'll keep it between us.

Exactly, between us.

But organizing is this beautiful craft, and I love it.

And I feel so lucky to have been exposed to the craft of organizing.

early on in my career because I otherwise I think never would have found my way here.

And I really do see myself as an organizer for life.

So when I talk about organizing tenants in Independence Towers, the building where I'm currently sitting, what I mean is that the tenant union often gets a call from tenants who are in some form of crisis.

And while a service provider might respond directly to that call and try to connect the tenants with resources or try to get the immediate harm mitigated or solved for, the tenant organizer does that and asks the tenants who call, do you want to get together with your neighbors and do something about the bigger picture issues here?

Because there's always bigger picture issues, right?

We could put a band-aid over a bullet wound, but that does not heal the wound and it doesn't stop the wound from occurring to begin with.

So organizing is about preventing the wound.

It's about healing the wound.

And along the way, of course, there's harm reduction that we are involved in to make sure that tenants basic needs are met and that their health is taken care of while they live.

and endure these conditions.

But organizing is really about those root causes.

And the basic premise of a union, I think, is relevant to this question, where a union basically just means there's more of us than there are them, and there's power in numbers, right?

But in the context of our homes, people are, again, understandably pretty unfamiliar with what that could actually mean for them.

In fact, many of us, I think, are told, first of all, if you're behind on rent or if there's issues in your apartment, that's your fault.

And you got to address that stuff individually.

Well, that's exactly what the landlords want us to think, right?

But there are actually more of us than there are them.

And there is actually strength in numbers.

And when tenants get together at their home in the same way as when workers get together on the job, there's a lot of power that they can wield to actually get those root causes attended to and hopefully solved.

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Well, I want to talk about power in a second, but before we get to that conversation, I want to go back to your analogy about the gunshot.

We often hear the report of the gun, but very few people understand the trauma of the actual wound.

In Jackson County, where Kansas City is located, about 9,000 evictions were filed each year as of 2017.

And for many, eviction is a very remote process, kind of like you hear the gunshot, but you never actually feel the wound.

When it comes to evictions, you might see a neighbor's belongings on the curb or one of those bright red notices on a door.

But the actual act of losing your home is incredibly personal.

It is incredibly humiliating.

And it is deeply traumatic.

Can you describe what an eviction feels and sounds and looks like for a family that you've worked with?

Well, first I have to say I am lucky to have never experienced that wound firsthand.

And as an organizer, I'm unlucky, but fueled by the dozens, if not hundreds of experiences that I've now seen up close.

And you're absolutely right that the eviction is actually much bigger and more profound, much more life-changing for people than the event itself or than the court date itself or the sort of legal step itself.

An eviction often leads to long-standing health issues, mental health issues, trauma for children.

It can lead to job loss if you're displaced from a place that was maybe convenient to get to work to a place that's further out.

In places like Missouri, an eviction on your record is basically

a sentence to never rent a decent place again.

Again, the building that I'm sitting in right now is run by what we might call and what we often call a landlord of last resort.

So there's a whole class of landlords, right, that's actually keen to the fact that people with evictions on their records can't get a decent place.

So they have to turn to someone, and that someone can often exploit them on the basis of the desperation that they have when they're walking into the leasing office.

So it kind of sets up this whole class of tenants who have even less less power and even more desperation than anyone else.

And the word that I want to call back to that you said, Stacey, is the word humiliation.

That's actually probably

the

most painful thing I encounter when I speak to tenants who are at any stage in the eviction process, whether formal or informal.

People feel such deep humiliation.

And that all goes back to this idea that we are supposed to,

we are socialized to think that if if we can't pay our rent, we are failures.

If we can't keep a roof over our head or our kids' head, we have failed.

And this whole system is a failure, right?

This system was set up to fail millions and millions of people in this country.

There's no county in this country, there's no county, whether it's urban, suburban, or rural, where a person working full-time at minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.

This system is a failure.

The market is a catastrophe, but we're socialized to believe that it's our fault.

And that leads to such deep humiliation.

And some of the most painful humiliation that I've encountered is among parents who really feel so deeply that they failed their kids when they get put out.

And they feel and experience the pain that their kids feel when they have to leave schools or pack up their belongings again.

Many of them don't have belongings because they have to face this over and over again for years on end.

What you've just raised is part of an analysis that was done by the eviction lab at Princeton, which found, as you just described, children suffer the most from eviction.

They make up four in every 10 people threatened with eviction each year, and adults living with children face double the risk of eviction than those without.

You just gave a few examples of how an eviction will impact a family with children.

Talk about what the tenants union does to support families with kids in a different or more intentional way.

We have an amazing set of kids involved with KC Tenants.

We call them our baby bulls because our logo is a bull.

And the kids are incredible.

I mean, we have dreams of starting a whole youth organizing program through KC Tenants.

As of now, a lot of the youth organizing looks like...

frankly kids getting dragged to meetings with their parents but you know they're listening

they're paying attention and they do get involved they have their own community agreements They run their own meetings.

They're often prepped to speak at our events in public.

In recent years, we've developed a child care team so that there are other tenant union leaders who help support the parents so that the parents can be active participants in our union and make sure that their kids are cared for and educated and entertained

while they're involved.

I just spent some time yesterday with one of my favorite baby bulls.

She's not quite a baby, but her name's Michaela, and she's a teenager who's been involved in our organization for over five years now.

Her mom, Ashley, is an amazing mother, and Ashley has struggled really hard in this system that continuously has failed her since she was a child.

And Michaela has had to go through more in her 18 years of life than any kid should have to.

And also, she is more powerful than most 18-year-olds you would encounter.

And, you know, she shouldn't have to be.

And that's a painful painful truth of her situation.

But she's smart and she's smart about power.

She has seen up close and experienced up close the inequity that exists in the world.

She's very keen to distorted power dynamics and she won't stand for it.

She's writing articles now about ways that the school district needs to do better for kids.

She's having debates with her peers.

You know, I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture.

She's had a really hard life and she's still struggling.

But i think by having exposure to organizing people like michaela students like michaela kids like michaela see that there is a way to fight back and that way actually involves getting with other people who have been impacted by similar violence and deciding to do something about it

you use one of my favorite words which is power you know i grew up with parents who were always not only living paycheck to paycheck, but prayer to prayer.

And they would take us with them to volunteer, to protest, because they wanted us to understand that we were the targets of someone else's power.

We were not their victims.

And while they never articulated it in that way, they were very intentional about us understanding that we were not defined by what other people saw in us.

I leverage that and continue to be driven by that because I believe that power is how we change the world.

And when I hear you talk about power, when I hear you you talk about Michaela, it resonates through you.

When you decide to, when you and your colleagues made the bull your logo, I mean, that to me is emblematic of this notion of power.

So how do you define power?

And what role does it play in how you think about the work you do?

Oh, Stacey, I'm obsessed with power.

I'm so excited to get into this with you.

Bring it on.

Yeah, the obsession is like it permeates through the tenant union, as you said, right?

Everything from our bull.

We chose that very intentionally.

Our logo was not going to be some clip art, first of all, and it was not going to be a butterfly.

It was always going to be something aggressive and yes, threatening.

We wanted to create something that people wanted to be a part of and felt powerful being a part of.

So, in the tenant union and in all the tenant unions that we organize with across the country, we define power very simply.

Power is the ability to act, the ability to do something.

And in that definition, simple as it is, the thing that we train people on is the idea that power is actually neutral.

We can, we often say the word power in meetings, especially among people who have been on the wrong end of a distorted power dynamic, and they hate that term.

They don't want that term.

They don't want to identify as power hungry because power to them has represented bad, evil, violent, exploitative.

There are bad, evil, violent, exploitative ways to exercise power, but power itself is neutral.

The ability to do something when we apply our values to it can be something totally different, right?

And in the tenant union, I think people get to practice that frequently.

And people who have been cut out of any experience of power for their whole lifetimes start to feel power.

I'll never forget in a tenant meeting a couple of years ago, one of our leaders, Mary Allison, said, I've never felt power in my body body like I feel it when I'm taking action with the tenant union.

And that's such a profound thing.

And it's a profound thing that once people feel it, they can't get enough.

And they do start identifying as power hungry, as they should.

And that is what organizing is all about, is getting people to that place where

they're not only accepting that they want and need power, they're hungry for it.

And then with their neighbors, they start to collectivize that power.

It's not enough just to assemble power.

We have to be smart and strategic about how we wield power.

We have to study power, which means we also have to study our targets and think of them as, yes, powerful, but also human beings just like us.

We train on power analysis where we're always asking, okay, this landlord, this politician, what do they want and what do they fear?

Because part of what we can do in a campaign is bring what they fear closer to them.

If they're not doing what we need them to do, we can take what they want further from them.

Or the opposite.

If they start doing things in the way that we want them to do them, we can use that power analysis to actually bring that politician or, you know, bring that powerful person closer to us in some instances.

So it's that type of training that we do in the union that helps people

conceptualize how to exercise power, which is, I think, one of the most useful things to know about power.

You know, the flight attendant union president, Sarah Nelson, who's amazing and so powerful in her own right, she says using power builds power.

And that's a different analysis of what you do with power than a lot of people who might say, when you use power, you lose power.

No, we believe that is wrong and that when you use power, you build power.

And we have so many examples of that in the tenant union.

You described a very important dynamic when you talk about the targets that you have of your power and you want to figure out what they need, what they're afraid of.

There are different labels for power.

There are different ways we describe it and there are different names we give to it.

There's economic power, there's political power.

What are some of the other forms of power that you and the tenants confront?

And how do you name it?

How do you understand what you're targeting?

It's such a great question.

I mean, primarily we actually use those terms that you just use.

We talk about political power and economic power, probably more than anything.

And in the context of the tenant union, one thing we're getting sharper about is actually diagnosing or locating the tenant's core power.

The core power that we have is actually our rent check.

The global economy runs on our rent.

The American economy certainly runs on our rent in the same way that the economy runs on our labor.

So getting very precise about our power is critical.

And that's what we would refer to as economic power or the tenant's economic power.

Now, we have other forms of power that we can exercise, namely in relationship to the political sphere.

So big P political sphere, tenants are people, tenants are voters, tenants can exercise a different kind of power outside of their homes that helps shape our political conditions.

And that's why we also organize not just at the building level, but also across neighborhoods, citywide, and now recently across the country with other tenant unions, because we know that this system that we are critiquing, we actually can't contest building by building, block by block.

Capital is outpacing us by a long shot.

So we need to be organizing at all of these other levels to shape the kind of political power that shapes our material conditions in our homes.

Now, when we're talking about our targets, we think about

the term that we actually more often use than not is about

power players.

So we do a certain type of meeting with power players.

We do do meetings with landlords.

We do meetings with management companies.

We do meetings with mayor, city council, congressmen, as we've done today.

And we have a very specific approach to those types of meetings.

We, of course, have partners out there at different types of organizations, unions, and otherwise that we partner with as well.

But I think that the main thing I want to put out there is when we think about relating to those power players, a critical thing to know about us, and I don't think we're unique in this regard.

I I think other tenant unions across the country are increasingly making moves in this direction.

Our leaders refuse to be marginal.

I think

there's a big critique, that's frankly true, about a lot of what we might know as left organizing, where people are saying, well, they don't actually want to come to the table.

They don't actually want to win.

They don't actually want to solve anything.

They just want to criticize, throw stones.

That's not our leaders.

Our leaders refuse to be marginal to the decisions that impact their lives.

And that requires us to be serious about power and serious about strategy.

And yes, serious about engaging some of the people who are our targets and engaging them as human beings and understanding their motivations to get them organized in the direction that we need them.

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I would applaud, but that would seem inappropriate.

So I'm going to talk about one of the misunderstandings of power in the eviction space.

And that is that while we might assume eviction is this widespread scourge, your organization is actually highlighted based on data and stories that there are often a handful of landlords who are responsible for the most evictions.

In fact, the Kansas City Eviction Project wrote that eviction is like part of their business model.

Sometimes it's a core group of landlords or specific buildings.

Sometimes it's corporations, but they evict tenants regularly as part of how they do business.

At the top of the show, I pointed out the increasing role of hedge funds and buying up property in the rental space.

And you talked about the neighbors that you grew up with who crossed the tracks and become these

slumlords, basically.

Talk a little bit about what this concentration of eviction as a business model means.

This is such a great question, and it's so misunderstood in public, as you said.

People gasp when we say this sentence out loud, eviction is a business model.

And of course, it is not for everyone but as in any market there are actors that are doing everything they can to make the most money at the least cost to themselves and they are engaging in exploitative violent business practices to do so and it's not just small landlords it's not just big landlords it's not just private equity backed landlords there's all kinds of landlords for whom eviction is part of their business model so i actually want to call back you know, when we spoke about the building I'm sitting in today, I told you that this building was financed with a $5.5 million loan from Fannie Mae.

Well, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored enterprises, are in big business with our landlords, actually.

They do $150 billion of business with our landlords every year and basically act as

a guaranteeing bank for some of these loans that our landlords go and seek out so that their businesses work.

Now, the loan terms are often written in such a way, these are the government sponsors and enterprises, writing loan terms in such a way that the landlord actually has to rely on frequent evictions and rent increases in order to pay down the mortgage.

Like the terms of the loan simply don't work unless the landlord is guaranteeing rent increases and evictions.

And sometimes rent increases are tantamount to evictions, right?

The math does not math, so to speak, without this type of practice.

And again, this isn't every landlord and it's not every federally backed loan, but oftentimes this is the business in this system that organized real estate capital has orchestrated.

And this is a class of landlords that participate in this.

part of the market.

It's actually easier for them to keep units vacant or hike the rent or evict their tenants And

they make more money doing that and facilitating that kind of churn than they would if they just kept a long-term tenant in the property.

Now, a lot of landlords freak out when we say this because they say, that is not how I run my business.

That doesn't make any sense.

You know, for me, it only makes sense to keep long-term tenants, good tenants, as they would call them, in the unit forever.

That is one business model, but there is a common and unfortunately widespread and growing business model that includes this type of churn.

The churn is baked into the business model, or as some of our tenants say it, the landlord's business model is predicated on tenant instability.

What do we do about it?

One part of what we do about it is organize.

And we've launched, KC Tenants has joined with some tenant unions across the country to launch a new national tenant union federation.

The idea being that their strength and numbers, when we all act together, we can get bigger and more things done.

And we also have to focus on refining the kind of art and science of the tenant union.

You described this when you talked about hedge funds and the kind of big business of renting housing out to people.

Business has changed.

Organized real estate capital is operating in ways today that they weren't 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

We're talking about one of the biggest lobbies in this country that has a huge amount of control over policy and over political practice related to our lives.

So tenant unions need to organize with increased sophistication, rigor, discipline, strategy than ever before.

And that's part of what we're doing with the Tenant Union Federation.

So that's part of the solution.

But then part of the solution is, of course, policy.

We need a different system, right?

There's a lot of talk these days about housing supply.

If we just build more housing, everything will be better and different.

You know, you're giggling.

I'm giggling too every day.

I'd be laughing if it wasn't so serious, right?

It is really kind of a joke to think that simply building more housing will solve this problem, especially when the system was set up to fail so many people, right?

People say if we just add more housing stock to the market, this problem will go away.

But the market is created by the people who created this problem and who benefit from it.

So, in addition to adding new units of truly affordable housing, we actually need a regulatory agenda that takes seriously who some of these players are, what kind of power they're operating with, and how distorted that power dynamic is.

We need a system that protects tenants, that introduces universal rent caps so that people can have stability, that protects against eviction.

And then we also need a system that holds landlords accountable for bad practices and and takes them to task when they step out of line, as they often do.

And then, of course, on the question of supply, we do need more homes.

We need more affordable homes.

And I would argue we need those homes to be built and managed off of the private market so that they're not profit machines, but actually they're guaranteeing housing as a public good to poor and working class people across the country.

No, I think that's absolutely right.

And I just want to clarify the smile that you saw is absolutely that we have this oversimplification of solution.

We absolutely need more housing stock.

We absolutely need policymakers.

In fact, oh, I don't know, presidential candidates who are espousing the need to build more units.

But what I think our shared smile and shared caustic laughter was that for so many, they think that's the only solution as opposed to part of a basket of goods solution.

That we have to have more housing.

We have to have more regulatory investment.

We also have to address who's actually buying the housing.

As you pointed out, the model is changing.

When I was running for governor in 2022, I met a woman who had to drive four hours from her home in Albany, Georgia, which is at the bottom of the state, to Atlanta just to contact her landlord about the dilapidated state of her property and the landlord's failure to remedy.

Only when she got in her car, took time off of work, drove those four hours, got to the office, it was just a front.

And it was a front for private equity.

And she had to turn around and come home because there was literally no one there.

And there is nothing in Georgia law that gave her any recourse.

This is not endemic to Georgia.

This happens in Kansas City.

This happens in Charlotte.

This happens out west.

How does this remote landlord issue, which is a regulatory issue, it's a financing issue, how does that affect where and how tenant action can be taken?

And what does it mean for you leading both the local tenant union, but also this national federation?

How are you all thinking about this?

I want to go back to your point on supply just quickly, because I think you made such an important observation there that

the call towards simplicity is very compelling, especially in election years.

And on an issue like housing, there is not a simple solution.

And anyone who's saying otherwise, frankly, is a plant for the industry who benefits when we think that the only thing to be done is to build, build, build, right?

And I just want to say, like, my quick point on this is that we actually lose affordable housing supply to landlord.

rent hikes at a rate that so far outpaces our ability to build new that this really becomes a question of sequencing and priority.

We need the regulatory agenda to protect tenants and we need to focus on building truly affordable housing supply with an eye to who actually owns it and builds it.

But one of those things actually does need to come before the other if we're going to protect the affordable housing supply that exists in this country.

So back to your question about remote landlords.

This is a huge issue, right?

The story that you told is unfortunately so typical.

Tenants do not know who their landlords are.

They don't have a number to call.

At best, they might have an electronic payment system.

What the landlord always knows how to do is collect the rent.

What the landlord very frequently does not do is provide any on-site management, any mode of communication when there are issues with the building.

Tenants are forced into the most undignified situations you can imagine.

You described one, but I'm telling you, I see a dozen every day of tenants doing everything

they've been told their whole lives to do, to find recourse, to find an answer, to keep their kids safe, to keep themselves healthy.

But the remote landlord problem makes it such that there is no recourse.

And often at the local level, at the state level, and federally, there is no recourse.

Tenants are not protected like other consumers might be protected.

While our homes are essentially goods and services that we pay money for, we're not protected by the same consumer protection laws, right?

So it really falls on tenants in a really case-by-case way to either organize with their neighbors, try to advocate for themselves, but oftentimes tenants, especially in the worst conditions, will just pick up and move.

And this is why when I talk about eviction, I don't just talk about formal evictions through the courts, because I would call displacement on the basis of conditions an eviction.

I would call displacement on the basis of a rent hike eviction.

And one thing to point out too about the increasing trend about remote landlording, first of all, remote landlords also live in our communities, right?

Our local landlords now have LLCs that shield them from any accountability to their tenants.

So it's not just the big guys.

And then the second thing I will say is that these kinds of shields that they've come up with are also organizing vehicles for them.

And we're seeing this play out in the recent case having to do with RealPage.

It's this software company that a lot of property managers are using to collude and artificially increase the cost of rent.

And landlords who use this software have said on the record in public, the reason we use this software is because it removes the human from the equation.

We don't want to have to negotiate rent with the tenants.

We don't want to have to deal with tenants in the building who are organizing.

We don't want our property managers to accidentally find some empathy and do the right thing.

We would much rather use an algorithm to artificially set the price of rent so that we can extract the most profits possible.

Which is both terrifying and entirely predictable.

I mean, we know that poverty is a huge risk factor in facing housing precarity and eviction, but the rent burden and the rising rents is really, it's impacting all income levels.

I mean, there was a Harvard University report that found that middle-income renters earning between $30,000 and $75,000 a year, they saw the sharpest rise in their cost burden since 2019.

So when you think about RealPage, when you think about the

inflexibility of

the system as it stands, how would you describe the coalition that you're building with both the Casey Tenants Union and nationally when you have to accommodate diversity in economics as well as diversity in their point of entry into this space that typically is just disregarded as something that poor people deal with.

So there's an incredible organizing challenge here.

And

the potential power that we could build through the tenant union is limitless.

We're talking Zoomers, boomers, black people, white people, all kinds of people across every political spectrum are getting getting hosed.

The rent is too damn high.

The people are saying it.

When we knock on doors, I'm telling you, Stacey, that line is so compelling.

Every single person we talk to, whether or not they're a tenant, knows that the rent is too damn high and something's got to give.

There have been these incredible interviews in this election season with Trump voters who are saying, The rent is the key economic issue of our time.

My kids are living with me because they can't afford to rent anywhere.

What are we going going to do about the rent?

Across every line that anyone would use to divide us, this issue is so deeply resonant.

And I will also say this, the rent is not only a big pain point for most people across all these lines, it is also the biggest bill that most of us pay every month.

So people might be mad about some other goods and services, the costs going up because of inflation.

People are deeply enraged about the rent.

And that politicization that people are going through right now, that is not going anywhere.

I keep telling people that it is not a question whether or not tenants revolt.

The only question is whether it's from a place of desperation or from a place of power.

And that power piece is obviously the part that we are trying to steer towards with our local organizing efforts and nationally.

And in terms of the coalition that we're bringing together, it's an odd one, as I described.

It's Zoomers, it's boomers, it's black people, white people, everyone else.

And that makes our job as organizers pretty complicated, I'll be honest.

One thing that we always say is we don't make assumptions about anyone, about race, gender, sexuality, mental, physical ability, or anything else.

And I think a tenant organizer

who's worth anything needs to be someone who's very, very committed to that premise.

We don't pass judgment.

We don't make assumptions.

We meet people where they're at.

And sometimes that means organizing people with very different politics into our coalition.

And sometimes that means setting up processes midway through an organizing effort to restore trust or to rebuild relationships that are broken.

This is the messy work of organizing that we don't often get a chance to talk about.

But, you know, it's not.

kumbaya.

People are not sitting around in the laundry room of their building,

you know, hugging and kissing and, you know, having a great time.

People are often mad at their neighbors because their landlord has told them to be mad at their neighbors for the problems in the building, right?

It's the tenant union becomes a microcosm for so much of our political life in this country where we're told to fight each other instead of banding together and fighting the boss or fighting the landlord or fighting what we are up against.

So, the work of organizing a union that brings together this kind of broad coalition is difficult.

And

I would say it is so worth it and has so much much potential.

When we talk about KC tenants, we often say we are building something that none of us has ever experienced, but all of us deserve.

And I really feel that.

And I see that with my own eyes every day.

Who's missing in this work?

Who else needs to share this vision, share this mission?

Who else do you need?

There are millions and millions of tenants across the country who we haven't yet organized.

So I think the first and most important thing is to build our ranks, to build a union that includes many, many, many more tenants than we currently have organized.

And that starts with politicizing people around their own experiences and telling people that what they're experiencing is not their fault and there is something to be done about it.

So, I'd say the first group is tenants, poor and working-class tenants, every kind of tenant.

We also need to be serious about organizing

other powerful institutions.

The one that's been on my mind recently is labor, organized labor.

Tenants are workers, workers are tenants.

A lot of the victories that we can win through tenant unions benefit workers who might be part of labor unions and vice versa.

And a lot of the organizing theory is very similar.

In fact, when we're thinking about this national project, we're talking about it as though we are basically trying to do what organized labor was trying to do at the beginning part of the last century.

Before formal process, before a national labor relations board, before millions of members, people just like us got together and decided to start creating a craft, an organizing craft that we see the fruits of this craft to this day.

We've got hotel workers on strike across the country.

We've got a re-emerging, powerful United Auto workers.

We've got graduate students organizing.

There's an organizing tradition that we are building from and looking to, and we need organized labor by our side in order to make the kind of impact that we're hoping to make here.

And then, of course, we need people holding formal power to get educated about these issues and to start treating tenants like the tenants in our unions as the experts of their own experience that they are.

And on that point, I will say, you know, we don't struggle to get meetings with power players.

We don't struggle to get press attention.

What we do struggle with is the implicit bias towards our landlords, to the owning class in this country.

Those are the people who are believed.

Those are the people who are treated as experts.

And tenants, if they get to the table, are wanted at the table for their story of pain.

and not for their prescription, not for their own vision for what needs to be different or better.

And part of our work is to change that.

And people holding formal positions of power should recognize the inherent expertise of the people who have lived these problems up close and go to them for the solutions and not just to hear their extremely sad and horrible story.

Tara,

unfortunately, I have to come up with the last question.

Otherwise, I could talk to you for the rest of

eternity.

As a matter of principle, I am not optimistic.

I am not pessimistic.

I am determined.

But I also greatly admire The Hulk and The Avengers.

It's one of my favorite movies, especially when he explains that he can control himself and his power because he's always angry.

You shared at the top of our conversation how angry you felt at seeing the power dynamics at play between landlords and renters and what's happening in Independence Tower.

And we don't often talk about anger as a positive driver of action.

But I know that many of our listeners feel it.

And I know that figuring out how to channel that frustration and anger into determination and action is what not only this podcast is about, but what your union is about.

So to answer two things for me.

One,

talk about how you convert your anger into action.

And then number two, tell my audience how we can help you Hulk smash evictions and get the power for everyone.

Hulk smash.

Oh, I love it.

Listen, I am so angry.

I'm so angry.

I mean, at this moment in time, here's my morning.

I walked around a building in Independence, Missouri that has holes in the ceiling, entire units burned out.

Less than two months ago, a child fell out of a window and died.

The parents are now being charged.

We haven't heard from the landlord in months and months.

I'm so angry about what's happening to the tenants in Independence Towers.

Earlier this morning, I was on the phone with a tenant on the east side of Kansas City in a building full of black seniors, five of whom were told because of flooding that obviously is not their fault, they will be kicked out and they actually have to be out within five days, right?

These are seniors living on fixed income who have nowhere to go.

I'm so angry for the seniors living at DA homes in Kansas City.

And I'm angry about the tenants and trailer park residents across the country who have to endure this type of situation over and over and over again.

They don't actually know another way besides this.

I stay angry and I actually think that's critical for organizers to channel that anger, right?

To channel our own anger and then to help other people channel their anger.

I actually think that some of the most fundamental work of an organizer is recognizing someone's anger, recognizing someone's pain, and helping them transform what is private pain and private anger into public power.

That is the work of organizing.

I think that's the better definition than what I shared with you before.

So I see that as part of my work, and that's certainly part of the work of the tenant union.

And then when it comes to Hulk smashing, evictions,

the rent being too damn high, I think the thing that we have to ask is for people out there who are tenants to get organized, to join up with your neighbors, to sign up with the Tenant Union Federation, to get organized with other tenants across the country.

And even if listeners aren't tenants, I think it's critical that all of us think of this problem as one to solve as neighbors, whether you're bank tenants, meaning working-class homeowners who pay a mortgage to the bank.

You know, we talk about folks who are unhoused as tenants at large.

Many of us exist in this world in a way that is on the same side of a a power equation that people with money and power are exploiting.

So, whether it's at the voting booth, whether it's in the local city council meeting, whether it's on social media, I think for people to get educated about this issue, about the complexity, about tenants as experts and the solutions that we put forward is really critical.

And there are no easy solutions.

I think that's

an important thing to consider as well.

Tara Raghavir, thank you for the work you do at the Casey Tenants Unit.

Thank you for being here with me.

Now get back to work.

Thank you so much, Stacey.

Take care.

You too.

Each week, we want to leave the audience with something they can take with them, an opportunity to make a difference and a way to get involved, or just to get started on working out a solution.

In the segment we like to call our toolkit.

At Assembly Required, our mission is to be curious, do good, and solve problems.

For those who want to dive deeper into the crisis and the shame of eviction, I recommend the book, Evicted, Power and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond.

Go to kctenants.org to find ways to get involved and do good.

If you scroll down, you'll find a link to an organizing toolkit, which leads you to a Google Doc full of instructions on how to organize a campaign, a rent strike, template letters, and more.

To solve problems, look up your local mutual aid groups.

These organizations often host fun drives, food banks, and you can pitch in.

Even something like donating your plastic bags from the grocery store can help a mutual aid group package food for their food drives.

You can also donate to the KC Tenants Union on their website or to your local tenants union.

If you want to tell us how you're taking action or have a topic you'd like to hear us cover, send us an email at assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail and you and your ideas might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-298-9509.

Well, that wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

Meet you here next week.

Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Stephen Roberts and our associate producer is Paulina Velasco.

Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

Our theme song is by Vasilis Photopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroote, Kyle Seglund, Tyler Boozer, and Samantha Slossberg for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long, Madeline Haringer, and me, Stacey Abrams.

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