Portland Tenants United (PTU) describes itself as a ‘democratic self-organized tenants’ union’, working to ‘establish tenants’ rights, including ending no-cause evictions and establishing rent control’. It is at the grassroots end of the organisations I’ve met so far; it is entirely volunteer-run, it engages in direct action, is explicitly anti-capitalist and is dogmatically committed to the interests of its members, who also run it. The aim is to build power and solidarity among renters, to secure stability, dignity and security for tenants and, ultimately, to ‘dismantle the current landlord-tenant paradigm’. It also, incidentally, has great logos. It is part of a busy field of housing organisations including the Community Alliance of Tenants which does some great-sounding community organising, and legislation-focussed Oregon Housing Alliance. This blog focuses on PTU’s experience in and views of the field, but I recommend checking out these groups too for an idea of different activities going on.
I spoke to Anthony Bencivengo who has been involved with PTU at different levels since 2017, and currently sits on the organising committee. They tell me the organisation does a mixture of tenants’ rights education, building solidarity networks and offering mutual aid and support. Education can be through ‘Know Your Rights’ training in buildings that reach out for support, or in neighbourhoods where it’s known there are particularly bad landlords. More education work is done on the individual level; PTU can’t offer legal advice but does have volunteers, including lawyers, who are knowledgeable about landlord tenant law, and can inform and sign-post to legal resources. Finally a Facebook group, Portland Renters Unite, offers a forum for tenants to share their own experiences, with moderation from those with legal knowledge. This is characterised by Anthony as a “mixture of formal, individual and crowd-sourced education”. The idea, they say, “is to empower people to be able to person-to-person teach their neighbours”. They build networks of solidarity through connecting members to each other, holding social events and general assemblies. They provide things like eviction court support; advocates will try and connect tenants to a lawyer, and act as support alongside, providing emotional and moral support, helping to navigate the system. They’ll support groups to form tenants’ unions, and support them with union activity – whether canvassing buildings or bringing food to boost morale. Just recently Holgate Manor Tenants Union won a victory through three months of rent striking, when a landlord dropped an eviction case against one of the strikers (this is part of a wider fight to stop displacement of the community – la lucha continua).
The one kind of mutual aid they don’t offer, because their own budget is pretty tiny, is rent support. It is quite common, Anthony tells me, for renters to take to Go Fund Me when short, “and often they’re having to do it over and over because the people who struggle to pay rent one month are often the people who because of various systemic forces make it hard for them to keep a stable job or have a stable income.” Other nonprofits do offer rent assistance for the people they serve (which I think is pretty rare in England). “In an ideal world they wouldn’t have to, in an ideal world the government would be able to provide that. Someone needs to fill the gaps.” There are government programmes providing housing vouchers, and city housing authority Home Forward provides public housing in Portland. “Unfortunately it’s not nearly enough to keep up with demand”, says Anthony. There’s a several year wait for housing vouchers, “and that wait is likely going to lengthen because funding keeps getting cut at a federal level.” This might ring some bells for people in the UK who’ve worked in social housing, or tried to get social housing over the past few years. Shelter reported in 2018 that there were 1.15 million households on waiting lists last year in England with only 290,000 homes made available; 65% of families had been on the list for more than a year, and 27% for more than five years. Here the scale can be a bit different, though. Los Angeles, for instance, opened its housing voucher wait list last year for the first time in 13 years (people on it might have to wait another decade more to get the actual benefit). There’s actually a web page detailing which wait lists are open and closed in different states. “The safety net has a lot of holes,” says Anthony.
Because of its methods, principles and aims, Anthony sees PTU as somewhat unique among nonprofits, in the housing sector and more broadly. It doesn’t receive (or indeed apply for) any money from government and this they see as liberating; “there’s good nonprofits that do a lot of really important things but are still kind of limited in terms of their ability to do radical direct actions… We don’t need to worry about what happens if we burn our bridges with a particular legislator and our funding gets cut and suddenly we lose all our full-time staff. We don’t have to worry about because we alienated someone in power we all of a sudden will not be able to carry out the same programmes we were carrying out.” But it also brings PTU into conflict with other groups in this space, with different methods and different goals. The organisation recently had a high profile split with a coalition of housing organisations trying to pass a bill that would strengthen renters’ rights. In Anthony’s view, after a number of rounds, “we felt like we had to be true to our members, and we withdrew our support for the bill when it became clear that a) it was not going to get the votes to pass and b) that in order to try to pass it, it was going to keep getting watered down and watered down and watered down. We wanted to keep the conversation around tenant rights. We started pushing for like a ‘restore the bill’ to what it previously did. We broke with the rest of the coalition on that, because they were still trying to get a legislative victory on it. And it was a difficult – everyone was making very difficult decisions in that coalition but I think that was kind of a pretty classic example of some of the ways in which priorities differ in organisations of different types.”
Reflecting on my own practice, having worked on policy and legislation, and made compromises to achieve minor gains, I can see lots of different sides to this. It troubles me the extent to which such gains make a difference, versus putting effort into more radical goals. I do still believe there’s value in incremental change, being round the table, and fighting from within, providing the big picture or end goal is guiding you (feel free to disagree, I regularly do so with myself), and providing you stick to your red lines. But I also think radical action and organisations are vitally important both for challenging bad politics, and for challenging more formal organisations to think about their positionality. This can make for messy relationships, though, particularly in crowded fields.
The challenges and opportunities Anthony identifies for PTU will be familiar to those who’ve done this kind of organising before. Volunteer capacity is a key challenge; “we have lots of people who are really down to help with super cool direct actions and things like that but when it comes to things like managing our membership database, that is much harder to do regularly.” This additionally makes it hard to do long-term planning; if the one really active person who’s been driving a project leaves or scales back their involvement because they have other things in their lives, that work stops. It also brings some democratic challenges. Anthony points out that to dedicate significant time to organising, you often have to have a certain level of privilege. Those who are the most precarious in the rental market, those who most need representing, are not always going to be able to take on those roles, and there can be challenges where volunteers need support with other issues such as mental health or dealing with trauma. The bureaucracy of a structure can help organisations to be more democratically accountable (if used well), whereas PTU by its nature has to be more informal and irregular. (I do want to acknowledge at this point that after our conversation I also found this article about the racism experienced by a black activist; I won’t comment on it, but my experience of radical spaces tells me challenging and breaking down structural power dynamics is an ongoing battle that we all need to fight. PTU has made this statement in response, which Anthony shared with me.) But this informality brings opportunities too; “most of the people who are leaders in our organisation are renters just came to a meeting and were like ‘I wanna do something’ and everyone was like ‘cool! Let’s help you do that!’ And that’s a structure that you would never have in a much more established non-profit where it would be like I’m not sure we have the funding for that, our paid staff are already doing this. In PTU, if you want something to happen just show up and make it happen.”
There are lots of themes here that I’ve touched on in previous blogs, and will pick up again in the future, around independence, the relationship between radical and more formal organisations, and how they each see themselves within the field. Thanks to Anthony for their time!
Voluntary Action and Other Animals 