This is the first installment in a new series of serialized interviews that we are calling Anarchists in the Tenant Movement.
In this interview, we speak with E, an organizer with the San Francisco Bay Area’s Tenants and Neighborhood Councils (TANC) in its East of Lake local.
Like our other series Anarchists in the Labor Movement, this series presents insights and perspectives from anarchists who are active in tenant organizing. Some of those we speak to are organizing through established tenant unions, others are building new unions, while others still are launching initial campaigns without a formal union yet.
For Black Rose / Rosa Negra (BRRN), mass organizations like tenant unions play a central role in our strategy. It is through these kinds of organizations that people create and apply their collective leverage against structures that dominate and exploit us, such as landlordism and private property. By engaging consistently in everyday campaigns, members of mass organizations grow their collective confidence and power, enabling them to take on ever bigger fights and ultimately to challenge the very existence of these dominating structures.
In part, the aim of this series is simply to shine a spotlight on the presence of anarchist militants in the U.S. tenant movement. More substantively, we ask participants to critically reflect on their experiences, including both successes and failures, to draw out generalizable lessons.
Some, but not all of those interviewed in this series are members of Black Rose / Rosa Negra.
Answers have been edited for clarity and length.
E – Tenants and Neighborhood Councils (TANC)
Black Rose/Rosa Negra (BRRN): How would you summarize your political perspective in one sentence?
E: We live in the moment of the decline of empire. It’s uncomfortable and we’re alienated. While I have ideas about what could help things, I think the most important thing is to work with lots of different kinds of people, but [especially] people who are most impacted by the stress points of the decline of empire.
BRRN: How is your tenant union organized?
E: TANC is organized in a pretty standard democratic union structure. Monthly or every other month we hold Assembly for unionwide decisions, things like spending on something, starting a working group, or endorsing a coalition. There are also elected roles in the larger union called coordinators who meet and make budget decisions.
TANC contains various locals [by neighborhood geography]. Each local is organized pretty autonomously. They all have their own culture and processes. For example, East of Lake local doesn’t have roles; we tend to share a lot of duties in terms of reproducing the union, whether that’s [running] meetings or weekly office hours.
In theory, each local contains various tenant councils or organized buildings made up of base members. Base members are working-class people and buildings who are the most impacted by either exploitative conditions or displacement [which] we identify as the front line [for] the union to build the most. Within the councils, decision making is a little bit more enigmatic. It depends on the culture of the building and leadership in it, which is different for different buildings.
BRRN: What are some of the things you do as a tenant organizer?
E: Over the last four to five months in the East of Lake local, we have been going through a strategic plan and analysis that looks back at how some of the things we planned over last summer are working [and] if we wanted to refine any of those strategies. It’s been really beneficial for getting collective buy-in in our local for trying to pursue strategies that are going to grow the union and our local and engaging base members.
We also host weekly office hours where tenants can come speak to TANC members in a nearby cafe that’s central to the area that our local covers. We also canvass and organize buildings when tenants come to us.
I also facilitate Kitchen Table through the Autonomous Tenant Union Network with organizers from Crown Heights Tenants Union, Sacramento Valley Tenants Union, LA Tenants Union, and Puget Sound Tenants Union that brings together tenant unionists from all over the US and Canada. In the last year I’ve grown a lot and benefited from it very much.
BRRN: What campaign are you currently involved in?
E: The main organizing project in the local right now is a SRO (single room occupancy hotel). A lot of the people who live there are single men of various ages. There are a few women and a small family that lives there as well. It is approximately under half occupied.
It’s owned by a notorious slumlord in Oakland who has profited off the foreclosure crisis and used a lot of legal loopholes to try to get units off rent control. In addition to regular habitability issues like mold or lack of heat, the landlord is taking the unoccupied rooms and cutting them up into smaller rooms. The landlord is also getting rid of collective spaces like a large living room and communal kitchen to turn into separate units. They’re also trying to get tenants to electively move out of their rooms for remodeling.
Residents have been in touch with us about the conditions in the building since 2021. We met several residents through office hours. All [of them] said that they didn’t think it was possible to organize in their building, that they felt alienated, and that nobody else wanted to do anything because it was just them that had this problem.
In line with that strategic plan (described earlier), we canvassed this building for the first time recently. Once we got in, we found that the tenants were immediately receptive to and interested in support and organizing, and they had a lot to say about what was going on. That narrative changed quickly. They just had their first meeting about a week after a round of door knocking. That’s really fast, so it is quite validating that this is something that they really want and need.
In that first meeting we brought them a landlord dossier [that explained] this is who they’re dealing with. It included things like how many units of housing the landlord owns in the area, how he has capitalized off foreclosures, how he has used these loopholes, how much money he has made—five million dollars—from simply refinancing the property. [We were] showing tenants why it’s still more valuable for the landlord to have empty units that he can rent at a market rate at different intervals than have the entire place full, even while it’s going through a transition.
So, we’re bringing two groups of people together: tenants in the building and organizers from TANC. It’s been remarkable how quickly that tenants have come together on fighting their landlord and trying to figure out what to do.
BRRN: You mentioned we’re living in a moment of decline of empire, and that tenant unions are a way to bring people together to improve their lives. How do tenant unions fit into a broader strategy aimed at revolutionary social transformation?
E: Kawasi Balagoon talks about a vision of block-by-block organizing [by] building localized and regional capacity to take on the failures of empire and the state.
The fact that we don’t have basic needs like food, a sense of security, economic benefits, and healthcare and that they are even further under attack by the current administration, the previous administration. We’re not offsetting what the state needs to do [and] we’re not making that accommodation for them. We’re noticing that these things are being taken away from us and we’re using that politically to grow that group of people who can organize their block, that can organize their neighborhood, that can organize their building, to meet that need.
Particularly around the questions of immigration enforcement in the country right now, I think that’s really the only saving grace. You cannot really have a rapid response network that isn’t right there, where it needs to be when it needs to be there.
BRRN: What advice would you share with anarchists looking to organize or become active in a tenant union? If you were just starting today, what do you wish you would have known?
E: I wish I had known that the ultimately productive, helpful, beneficial thing was to work with people totally different than myself. Right now, in the tenant movement there’s a culture that really excludes many working-class people from participating. I think I could have spent less time training people who already see tenants as a political subject on how to organize, or politically articulating something within the tenant union without that meaningful base membership of other working-class people who are the most impacted by these conditions and housing.
BRRN: Is there anything else that you’d like to share with the world?
E: Join a tenant union. You don’t have to be an expert or know everything that you’re doing to try to do it. There’s a lot of space for different kinds of creativity and knowledge to contribute to it.
We still have a long way to go. Neighborhood organizing is integral to fighting back against ascending fascism. It’s not irrelevant. It’s not a single issue. It really is about organizing the whole person and not just parts of them that are impacted.
Are you an anarchist involved in the tenant movement? Would you like to participate in this series? Email us at eec@blackrosefed.org
Enjoyed this article and want to read more on tenant organizing? Check out our tenant organizing resource guide!