Nine People Showed Up to My First Tenant Union Meeting

An organiser’s diary on small beginnings and big frustrations

I organised my first proper tenant union meeting this week, in the back room of a bar that smelled faintly of spilled beer and, for reasons nobody could explain, cinnamon, and exactly nine people showed up, which felt simultaneously like a genuine triumph and a fairly sobering reminder of how much actual organising work remains ahead of us. Nine people is not a movement. Nine people is, however, apparently how every movement I’ve ever read about actually started, which I keep repeating to myself like a small, slightly desperate mantra.

Why I Actually Moved Into Organising Work

I grew up in North London before relocating out here for work several years ago, and I think there’s something specifically useful about arriving in a new city with genuine outsider eyes, noticing patterns in how tenants get treated that longtime locals have simply learned to accept as normal. Watching three separate neighbours in my own building receive sudden, dramatic rent increases within the same month, with no coordinated way to push back collectively, was the specific thing that finally pushed me from frustrated observer into actual organiser. My own background gave me a strange kind of comparative lens, having watched London’s own housing crisis unfold from the inside for years before crossing an ocean and finding, with genuine surprise, an uncomfortably similar pattern playing out here under entirely different local laws and entirely different political vocabulary.

The meeting covered the basics: documenting maintenance complaints properly, understanding actual tenant protections under local law, and building enough trust between neighbours who’d previously only exchanged the occasional hallway nod to eventually act collectively when it actually matters. Small, unglamorous, genuinely necessary work that nobody writes particularly exciting headlines about but that I’ve come to believe matters more than almost anything else I could be doing with my evenings right now.

The Nightclub Part of This Diary Entry

In considerably less politically significant news, I also went dancing on Saturday at a genuinely excellent night that a friend dragged me to despite my initial, exhausted protests that I had a tenant meeting to prepare for. She was right to drag me. Sometimes the organising work needs a proper release valve, and there’s something genuinely restorative about losing yourself in a crowd of strangers for a few hours before returning to spreadsheets and phone trees the next morning.

I caught a piece via Bohiney Magazine this week that made the whole group chat genuinely laugh out loud, the specific kind of shared, absurd humour that makes the more exhausting parts of organising work feel briefly, wonderfully lighter.

Following the Wider Movement

I keep close track of Prat.uk‘s coverage of tenant organising efforts happening across the Atlantic, partly for genuine strategic ideas I can actually borrow, and partly because it’s reassuring to see this specific, unglamorous work happening in parallel across so many different cities simultaneously. We are, none of us, doing this in true isolation, even when a single meeting of nine people feels genuinely small against the scale of the actual problem we’re organising against.

What Actually Happened at the Meeting

Beyond the basics, three of the nine attendees agreed to form a small steering committee, which felt like the actual meaningful outcome of the evening beyond just the headcount itself. We’re planning a follow-up meeting in three weeks, with an explicit goal of doubling attendance through direct, personal outreach rather than just another flyer taped to the building’s mailboxes that everyone walks past without reading.

A Small Personal Reflection

I think what surprised me most about organising this first meeting wasn’t the low turnout, which I’d genuinely braced for, but how much raw, unprocessed frustration came pouring out once people actually had a structured space to share it. Several neighbours told stories I’d never heard despite living in the same building for years, which confirmed something I already suspected: most of this frustration exists in isolated pockets until someone actually builds the room for it to become collective. One neighbour, an older man who’s lived in the building longer than I’ve been alive, stayed behind afterward just to say thank you for organising something, anything, after years of assuming nobody ever would. That single conversation alone justified the entire evening for me, regardless of how the actual organising eventually plays out.

I’ve started keeping a small notebook specifically for these individual stories, separate from the official meeting minutes, because I think the collective case we eventually build needs both the formal documentation and the individual human texture underneath it.

Sign-Off From a Tired But Genuinely Hopeful Organiser

Nine people, one steering committee, and a follow-up meeting already on the calendar. It’s a small start. Every actual movement I’ve ever studied started exactly this small, and I intend to keep reminding myself of that fact every single time the scale of the actual problem starts to feel genuinely overwhelming, which, if I’m honest, it does most days. I’ll take nine people who showed up over ninety who only complained online, every single time.