Dear Readers,
We are thrilled to introduce this new issue of Tenant Talk on behalf of NLIHC’s board and staff. For decades, tenant organizers in this country have fiercely advocated to secure rights for tenants. The history of housing in the U.S. has been shaped by institutionalized racism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination. However, as strikes from the early twentieth century, through the 1970s, and into the modern era remind us, tenant organizers have always showed up and pushed progress forward. In this issue of Tenant Talk, we highlight the successes and challenges of tenant organizing and celebrate the resilience of those advocates who have struggled to ensure the right to accessible and affordable homes.
Recent history shows that tenants have the power to move the needle on housing policy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, widespread job losses left millions of renter households behind on rent and threatened to bring about a nationwide eviction crisis. In response, NLIHC and advocates across the country persuaded Congress to make available an historic $46.5 billion in emergency rental assistance and convinced the administration to implement a temporary national eviction moratorium, protecting the housing stability of extremely low-income renters everywhere. During the same period, more than 200 new state and local tenant protections were passed, strengthening housing security for those most threatened with eviction.
None of these wins would have been possible without the leadership of tenants. Day after day, tenants stepped up, attending community meetings, bringing issues to advocates and organizers, and raising their voices to expand and enforce their rights. The stories collected in this issue of Tenant Talk highlight the hard work of those tenants who have fought for their communities and contributed to strengthening the movement for housing justice.
Leaders with lived experience have been integral to these efforts, as shown by the successes of NLIHC’s “Collective,” a group of dedicated tenant and community leaders with lived experience of housing insecurity who work to advance housing and racial justice in their communities. The group’s members meet regularly to discuss their goals and visions for achieving housing justice and identify effective ways to engage their communities. They also work with NLIHC staff to brainstorm methods for making NLIHC more inclusive, including through a “Tenant Leader Session” held during NLIHC’s annual Housing Policy Forum. In addition to working as organizers in their states, they have advocated for tenant protections at the federal level. In 2022, for example, members of the Collective’s first cohort met with officials in the Biden-Harris administration to inform the development of tenant protection policies.
These are just some of the more recent examples of successful tenant-led organizing, of course. In fact, the legacy of tenant organizing in the U.S. extends back for decades, as this new issue of Tenant Talk reminds us. As always, readers will hear directly from individuals with lived experience of housing insecurity, because housing justice will never be realized without involving the voices of those most impacted. We believe that this new issue of Tenant Talk shows just how central these voices are to the struggle to build a just and equitable future for all tenants.
In Solidarity,
The Editorial Board