How a movement born in Kansas City could help St. Louis renters

Kansas City has come to national prominence for leading the national “tenant union” movement, organizing massive groups of renters to effectively stop rent increases and get landlords to provide needed repairs. The union has reportedly stopped thousands of evictions and also notched key legislative victories, while similar successes in St. Louis have proved elusive.

Renters in Independence Towers, a high rise in the Kansas City suburb of Independence, had experienced issues with their heating and cooling systems, along with a host of other problems that made living in the building difficult. The Kansas City Star reported last year that many renters there needed to keep their windows open in the summer, since the air conditioning didn’t work, leading to a three-year-old falling from a window and dying. Tenants went on an eight-month rent strike, getting their landlord to agree to a contract that removed some “junk” fees, kept rents flat, and set a deadline for repair work, In These Times reported.

That work was led by KC Tenants, a tenant union founded in 2019 that now boasts a membership of more than 10,000, much larger than the two groups that lead tenant organizing efforts in St. Louis. The organization has seen many other successes on the western side of the state, with a goal of ensuring that “everyone in KC has a safe, accessible, and truly affordable home.” KC Tenants is also credited with lobbying for a “tenants’ bill of rights” passed by Kansas City in 2019. That ordinance introduced a series of safeguards for renters, including barring landlords or management companies from discriminating against prospective tenants and mandating notice before unit entry.

Rising housing costs, and the economic precarity tied to that, is a barrier to stability for many Americans. Princeton University’s Eviction Lab says “most poor renting families spend at least half of their income on housing costs,” adding that roughly 25 percent spend the overwhelming majority of their income on rent and utility costs. Evictions, they say, exacerbate the problem, adding court records that make finding new housing harder, pulling people from their communities or schools, and sometimes separating them from their belongings.

KC Tenants has pitched itself as an advocate for the renters’ side of the equation, one they say is often stacked against them. Rosalind Guy, a St. Louis area renter and former staffer for the St. Louis Housing Authority, told a group of aldermen in November that, without the safety that comes in numbers, tenants often have little power. She said she started trying to organize residents at an apartment complex in north St. Louis—where she said residents weren’t getting amenities they were promised—prompting the ownership to “use (her) as an example.” 

“I was told they were not going to renew my lease because I reported I had mold and mildew in my apartment,” she said. “It’s like you’re punished if you speak out.”

In St. Louis, advocacy for further tenant protections coalesced in November around the city’s Right to Counsel program. The 2023 pilot program sought to give city renters a free lawyer to represent them in housing court; advocates have groused that the city underfunded it, leaving many people to face eviction without an attorney. 

But the example set by KC Tenants—who spearheaded a similar, better-funded program on the western side of the state—shows what renters might achieve through labor-union-style tactics. These include “rent strikes” (where renters withhold rent in the face of poor conditions) and collective bargaining for leases.

Renters in other cities, too, have seen the benefit of taking the tactics of organized labor to the tenant-landlord dynamic. Tara Raghuveer, the founding executive director of KC Tenants, also leads the national Tenant Union Federation, made up of similar tenant unions from Louisville, Kentucky; Bozeman, Montana; Connecticut, and elsewhere. In September, the Tenant Union Federation sought to organize 1,000 renters from five states, all of whom rented from the same management company, the private equity-funded Capital Realty Group. Bloomberg dubbed it a “first-of-its-kind” effort. That effort was ongoing as of mid-December. 

But efforts in St. Louis have seen less success. The Right to Counsel program was funded at just $685,000 for the first two years. It had only two lawyers working on behalf of tenants as of last month and only represents a fraction of the people the ordinance intended. Meanwhile, it took two years for the city to set up the Impacted Tenants Fund passed by the Board of Aldermen in 2023, even as the program has been expanded to include tornado victims, per St. Louis Public Radio. Portions of a proposed Tenants Bill of Rights for St. Louis were folded into the legislation establishing the previous two programs, but were not as comprehensive as the standalone one Kansas City passed in 2019. 

The campaign to fully fund Right to Counsel is being led by two tenant organizing groups in St. Louis: We The Tenants, a partnership between Action St. Louis and Arch City Defenders, and Tenants Transforming Greater St. Louis. Both organizations say they have a boots-on-the-ground approach to helping renters, and both blame a lack of support from city leaders as an obstacle to a stronger tenant union effort here. 

Tenants Transforming Greater St. Louis is a Black-led, independent nonprofit that started in 2018, then known as Homes for All St. Louis. It successfully led a rent strike at the Fountains at Carondelet complex in South City, which it says led to the property going into receivership, and several tenants winning eviction cases against a “slumlord” causing “abusive housing conditions.”

Kristian Blackmon, the leader of Tenants Transforming Greater St. Louis, says the full funding of existing city programs such as Right to Counsel and the Impacted Tenants Fund, along with further legislation to establish a baseline for the rules regarding the tenant-landlord relationship in the city, would be a necessary first step to a tenant organizing movement here. 

Blackmon says housing is often one of the most difficult areas to organize around, since efforts are often life-and-death.

“It’s great when it passes,” Blackmon says of programs like Right to Counsel. “But, that’s actually the easiest part out of all of this, if you’re looking at it all the way to the finish line, right? Because the implementation, the funding, is the biggest part in that. I think that getting those things where they need to be is extremely important before we [look at] next steps.”

Rachel Hurtado, an organizing lead with Arch City Defenders and a key We The Tenants leader, says that KC Tenants offers a model for a strong, diverse coalition. She says a group of tenant organizers from St. Louis met with some from Kansas City just before the May 16 tornado, in hopes of coordinating efforts statewide and learning about their successes and challenges.

“I do think that one piece of it is more robust support from elected officials for tenants’ rights and tenant resources, but I think the bigger, more impactful piece is how successful KC Tenants and the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom have been in base-building,” she says. “They have built a massive, powerful base of renters that span different racial and economic groups, mainly working class folks, people from all walks of life who believe in housing justice for Missouri, for Kansas City.”

Hurtado says that We The Tenants is looking to build its tenant base, doing direct door-knocking efforts and expanding outreach efforts. A spokesperson for ArchCity Defenders says it had “met and mobilized hundreds of tenants” since that effort launched in 2021.

When renters and activists pushed St. Louis city government in November for further funding of the Right to Counsel program, many spoke about the need for better representation for tenants, who often face a dynamic where landlords are far better-resourced, and more prepared, than the renters they’re seeking to evict.

During their rally at City Hall, some tenants spoke about situations where landlords mistreated them, or they were facing eviction—situations Right to Counsel, a tenants’ bill of rights, and tenants’ unions have been set up to help with. 

As the groups chanted in the City Hall rotunda, one protester carried a sign acknowledging the lopsided tenant organizing efforts in the region, ostensibly pinning some blame on the city: “KC did it. So can STL.”

“After the tornado, basically, ripped through my community—ripped through my home—it went from somewhat stable to unsafe overnight,” said Jamila Mitchell, a renter who told her story to an aldermanic committee shortly after the rally. “I felt like we survived the storm, but we couldn’t survive the neglect that came after it. Ceilings were damaged, leaks, unsafe conditions. … I would reach out to my landlord and let her know about the repairs, but I didn’t get anything in return but silence.” She added, “There was no compassion; there was no support. However, I still got dragged into court.”

Mitchell said lawyers with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, who are contracted through the city’s Right to Counsel program, helped her work out a deal with her landlord that she couldn’t have gotten without their help. 

While few landlords will say so on the record, it’s safe to say that neither Right to Counsel nor a tenants’ bill of rights are popular with many large-school landlords or their lawyers, who often already feel at the mercy of bad renters.

Matthew Chase, a lawyer who has boasted of filing as many as 450 eviction suits a month on behalf of his landlord clients, sees these efforts, and the popularity of KC Tenants, as short-sighted. He takes specific umbrage with the framing of housing as a human right, comparing it derisively to other things not guaranteed by the constitution, like, say, “pizza.” Efforts to enshrine housing as a human right defies the basic capitalist principle of scarcity, he says, and will lead to more unintended consequences than benefits.

“The idea that you and I get taken from us to give to those who don’t have—simply because they don’t have, whether they’re trying or not—is wrong,” he says. “It’s called redistribution. It is the fundamental basis of socialism/communism, the fundamental basis of left-leaning politics and the alleged right to housing is part of that. There is no right to housing once something is scarce.”

Chase tells SLM that “activists” want to put “roadblocks” in the way of effective property management to protect the poor, which he says over-complicates the tenant-landlord relationship. 

“All you are doing is making it more stretched out in time and a near certainty that they will be displaced,” he says. “They will never get paid up, they will end up with a judgment against their name that the landlord can never collect on because they’re poor or just not good with money.”

But Turner Seline says problem landlords only have themselves to blame if tenants are driven to organize. He used to manage property for his father for nearly 20 years, and later worked as a property manager for Avenue Real Estate Group. He says he never dealt with tenants organizing, but expressed broad sympathy for the cause. He now works outside the housing management industry, but says, “I’ve worked hard to be a good person to my tenants and (try) to work with them on issues.”

“I think the biggest issue with that that we’ve seen in St. Louis is particular developers that have properties that they just aren’t doing a good job caring for, whether it’s the tenants or the property, they’re just not doing their job,” Seline says. “When you get enough of that, people start to collect and talk about it. I think we’ve seen that happen recently with some of the developers … they’ve been so bad for so long that people are starting to group together and try and really get these people to answer for what they’ve been doing.”

In the future, Blackmon says St. Louis housing activists are considering either a city-wide tenant union or working neighborhood-by-neighborhood within that structure. The former, she says, seems like “the best route to take,” adding, “We thought about it, and I think it’s a great way to build power and to keep that power so that it’s not becoming fragmented, or it’s lost.”

Whatever the obstacles within city government, Hurtado points to a larger issue that hurts efforts to organize tenants across Missouri: state laws that override local rulings. She called the state “landlord friendly” and “tenant hostile,” giving the example of rent cap efforts.

Another example of that hostility: Missouri last year passed a law that allowed landlords to evict without giving tenants any notice. A lawsuit from a group of homeowner’s associations wanting the right to ban chicken coops struck down that law in October, but it will almost certainly return.