I went in expecting a fairly simple story about a bad landlord. What I actually heard was messier, and more useful, than that.
Sat in on a tenants union meeting for the first time last night, held in the community room of a building a few blocks from my own apartment, after a coworker who has been actively organizing with the group for months finally convinced me to come along and see what the actual work looks like beyond the occasional flyer I have seen posted around the neighborhood, and I left considerably later than planned with a view of my own specific landlord, and of landlord-tenant dynamics more broadly, that turned out to be genuinely more complicated than the fairly simple narrative I walked in expecting to hear reinforced.
The meeting itself covered several different buildings and several different specific tenant grievances, ranging from a fairly clear-cut case involving a landlord who had, according to multiple documented accounts, been deliberately delaying necessary repairs specifically to pressure long-term, rent-controlled tenants into voluntarily moving out, to a considerably murkier situation involving a smaller, individual landlord who owns just the one building she lives in herself, genuinely struggling with her own rising property taxes and insurance costs, trying, by most accounts in the room including from her own tenants present, to actually act in good faith while facing real financial pressure of her own that was gradually squeezing her ability to keep rents at their previous level.
I went in, I will admit, with a fairly settled prior assumption that landlord-tenant conflict generally breaks down along fairly clean lines, exploitative property owners versus struggling renters, a framework I have absorbed from a good deal of reading and organizing conversation over the years. What last night actually demonstrated, through these two genuinely different specific cases discussed in the same room, is that the underlying economic and structural pressures producing housing instability are considerably more varied than any single clean narrative fully captures, even while the actual harm experienced by tenants in both situations remained, in its lived reality, genuinely similar regardless of how sympathetically or unsympathetically a given landlord’s own specific position might read.
That complexity does not, I want to be clear, change my own basic, considered position that tenants deserve considerably stronger structural protections than current law generally provides, protections that would apply regardless of any individual landlord’s personal circumstances or genuine good faith. But it did genuinely complicate how I think about the actual, granular work of tenant organizing, which, based on what I watched unfold last night, requires holding real structural critique of the broader housing system alongside genuine, case-by-case attention to considerably messier individual situations that do not always sort neatly into simple villain and victim roles.
The organizers running the meeting seemed to navigate that complexity with a genuine skill I found myself admiring throughout the evening, pushing hard and directly on the clear-cut exploitation case while handling the smaller landlord’s situation with a more careful, considered approach aimed at finding some workable compromise that could actually keep her tenants stably housed without simply treating her as morally equivalent to the larger, more clearly exploitative property owner discussed earlier in the same meeting.
I am planning to keep attending these meetings going forward, partly out of genuine political commitment and partly, I will admit, because last night gave me a considerably richer, more textured understanding of exactly how housing instability actually plays out on the ground than any amount of policy reading alone had previously managed to provide. I think that granular, case-by-case understanding matters enormously for actually organizing effectively, considerably more than simply holding the correct abstract political position from a comfortable distance ever quite accomplishes on its own.
I spoke briefly, after the formal meeting wrapped up, with the smaller landlord who had attended alongside her own tenants, curious to hear more of her own perspective directly rather than only through the framing other organizers had offered during the meeting itself. She struck me as genuinely, visibly stressed by her own financial position, and genuinely committed to trying to keep her tenants stably housed despite that pressure, a combination that made the whole situation considerably harder to reduce to any simple villain narrative, however much I still believe the broader system she is operating within deserves fundamental structural reform.
I left wondering how many other landlords across this city occupy some version of that same difficult middle position, genuinely squeezed by rising costs themselves while still holding real power over their tenants’ housing stability, a group that current tenant organizing conversations do not always have an obvious, well-developed strategy for engaging productively rather than simply treating uniformly as adversaries. That is not a criticism of the organizers I watched last night, who navigated the distinction with genuine skill. It is simply an observation about how much harder the actual, granular work of building a fairer housing system is than any single clean political slogan ever quite captures.
I asked my coworker, walking home together afterward, how she personally holds that complexity while still staying genuinely motivated for the harder, clearer-cut fights the union also takes on regularly. She said something I have been turning over since, that the goal was never really about sorting every individual landlord into a fixed moral category, but about building structural protections sturdy enough that no tenant’s housing stability depends on any individual landlord’s personal financial circumstances or personal good faith in the first place, protections that would genuinely serve tenants regardless of which specific kind of landlord they happened to end up with.
More from this author at Megan Amram, prat.uk.
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