a few notes on the tenants movement amid covid

As you might guess, I've been mostly plugged into the tenant stuff, and I'm still working out my sense of what we've seen over the recent period. Clearly, at the beginning, we observed a recently unprecedented growth in tenants movement activity, self-organization, and organizational growth (my group, TANC, grew by like 5x in membership). The rent strikes appear not to have gotten as big as people have expected, despite the common ~30% not paying rent monthly number people throw around (it's much smaller than that in actual fact, it's probably closer to 10%, that 30% number comes from missed payment at the beginning of the month; a large population normally pays late, so that isn't a big jump from normal times). Honestly, the average is probably misleading; my guess is that in places where no or weak eviction moratoriums have been in place, everyone has been paying. In places where there are moratoria, people probably are not paying at higher rates (but still not as high as you might expect). Both are expressions on the current and historical limits of the tenant movements in these different areas, which can't be forgotten even as previous limits appear to have been generally and widely succeeded. I think along that same division we'll see the coming eviction waves break down. Where the movement and the laws have been weaker, we're definitely looking at a massive increase in homelessness. Places where movement and laws are stronger, I am not sure what will happen, but I don't think ultimately the wave will be as big (though it will be big). It seems possible some kind of repayment for landlords will happen that will undermine it. There isn't enough geographic circulation of movement capacity to shift support toward where the evictions will hit hardest, obviously for the very reason that all of this is happening in the first place. At the same time, in some places, we are seeing levels of homeless people's militancy that haven't been seen in quite some time, and there's no reason that wouldn't escalate as the homeless population experiences sudden growth.

A lot of places are already feeling the eviction wave now and it would be worth talking about their defense efforts. Richmond is one place that comes to mind and I could brainstorm a list to look into.

The other thing that I would say is key is that the rent strike is nowhere near that ~30% number that some people quote. Probably closer to 10% actually non-payment (once you cut out late payments), and I don't know what that change is vs pre-covid.

Related to both, there is are major geographic divisions in the tenants movement and it's made more intense around this moment—places where there are and are not significant tenant protections, and places where he gentrification leads vs places where slummification leads. Key to discuss movement developments in all of those places to accurately describe the movement as a whole.

I'd also say it would be good to try to get some info form ATUN about member org growth, to just get a sense of where there are new tenant unions.

And the last thing would be to have a sense of the institutional vs autonomous sectors of the movement. At some level, the divide between advocacy/counselling & base building (that Justin has articulated elsewhere) tracks to that.

I don't really have a sense of the policy environment beyond CA with respect to alternatives to rent cancellation, but it would be good to have a grip on that too. I was listening to a Bloomberg Businessweek podcast ep and they were pretty clear confident that there will need to be a federal reckoning on repayment, which isn't of course necessarily right, but interesting that Wall Street thinks that.

This is completely incomplete and missing a lot of causal explanation. At an earlier moment in this period of tenant struggle (let's say, post dotcom bubble), gentrification & level of tenant organization definitely seemed to track (though not mechanically, it has more to do with centers of social movement activity on general, I believe, but also with the nonprofit community org sector). But then the mortgage crisis altered the trajectory some, brining more non/less gentrifying areas into the movement. Then I think since approximately 2015 (LATU founding being signal & partial cause of a pivot) we've entered a new period of tenant struggle with the growth of the autonomous tenants movement (which is both an independent trend but also dovetails with the Trump era boost to social movement across the board, which some mistakenly reduce to a DSA specific thing). My loose impression is that the ball really gets rolling around 2017-2018 & more & more autonomous TUs start forming all over, not really tracking to gentrification at all. And COVID, I would imagine, broke the connection even more, and exploded the movement across all sectors. At a certain point, the movement, which began partly as specifically reactive to gentrification gained sufficient legs that it's organizing methods began circulating more broadly, and part of the whole thing about autonomous organizing is that it's less money dependent than nonprofit style stuff, so it can happen wherever there are people with capacity & motivation. This change doesn't abolish the fundamental difference between organizing in different regional conditions, but it makes it the case that the division is increasingly less about where there is and is not organizing, and more about the conditions of tenant life within which people organize.