Kansas City has come to national prominence for leading the national “tenant union” movement, organizing massive groups of renters to effectively stop rent increases and get landlords to provide needed repairs. The union has reportedly stopped thousands of evictions and also notched some legislative victories, while similar successes in St. Louis have proved elusive.
Renters in Independence Towers, a high rise in the Kansas City suburb of Independence, had experienced issues with their heating and cooling systems, along with a host of other problems that made living in the building difficult. The Kansas City Star reported last year that many renters there needed to keep their windows open in the summer, since the air conditioning didn’t work, leading to a three-year-old falling from a window and dying. Tenants went on an eight-month rent strike, getting their landlord to agree to a contract that removed some “junk” fees, kept rents flat, and set a deadline for repair work, In These Times reported.
That work was led by KC Tenants, a tenant union founded in 2019 that now boasts a membership of more than 10,000, much larger than the two groups that lead tenant organizing efforts in St. Louis. The organization has seen many other successes on the western side of the state, with a goal of ensuring that “everyone in KC has a safe, accessible, and truly affordable home.” KC Tenants is also credited with lobbying for a “tenants’ bill of rights” passed by Kansas City in 2019. That ordinance introduced a series of safeguards for renters, including barring landlords or management companies from discriminating against prospective tenants and mandating notice before unit entry.
Rising housing costs, and the economic precarity tied to that, is a barrier to stability for many Americans. Princeton University’s Eviction Lab says “most poor renting families spend at least half of their income on housing costs,” adding that roughly 25 percent spend the overwhelming majority of their income on rent and utility costs. Evictions, they say, exacerbate the problem, adding court records that make finding new housing harder, pulling people from their communities or schools, and sometimes separating them from their belongings.
KC Tenants has pitched itself as an advocate for the renters’ side of the equation, one they say is often stacked against them. Rosalind Guy, a St. Louis area renter and former staffer for the St. Louis Housing Authority, told a group of aldermen in November that, without the safety that comes in numbers, tenants often have little power. She said she started trying to organize residents at an apartment complex in north St. Louis—where she said residents weren’t getting amenities they were promised—prompting the ownership to “use (her) as an example.”
“I was told they were not going to renew my lease because I reported I had mold and mildew in my apartment,” she said. “It’s like you’re punished if you speak out.”
In St. Louis, advocacy for further tenant protections coalesced in November around the city’s Right to Counsel program. The 2023 pilot program sought to give city renters a free lawyer to represent them in housing court; advocates have groused that the city underfunded it, leaving many people to face eviction without an attorney.
But the example set by KC Tenants—who spearheaded a similar, better-funded program on the western side of the state—shows what renters might achieve through labor-union-style tactics. These include "rent strikes" (where renters withhold rent in the face of poor conditions) and collective bargaining for leases.
Renters in other cities, too, have seen the benefit of taking the tactics of organized labor to the tenant-landlord dynamic. Tara Raghuveer, the founding executive director of KC Tenants, also leads the national Tenant Union Federation, made up of similar tenant unions from Louisville, Kentucky; Bozeman, Montana; Connecticut, and elsewhere. In September, the Tenant Union Federation sought to organize 1,000 renters from five states, all of whom rented from the same management company, the private equity-funded Capital Realty Group. Bloomberg dubbed it a “first-of-its-kind” effort. That effort was ongoing as of mid-December.
But efforts in St. Louis have seen less success. The Right to Counsel program was funded at just $685,000 for the first two years. It had only two lawyers working on behalf of tenants as of last month and only represents a fraction of the people the ordinance intended. Meanwhile, it took two years for the city to set up the Impacted Tenants Fund passed by the Board of Aldermen in 2023, even as the program has been expanded to include tornado victims, per St. Louis Public Radio. Portions of a proposed Tenants Bill of Rights for St. Louis were folded into the legislation establishing the previous two programs, but were not as comprehensive as the standalone one Kansas City passed in 2019, which was cited as an early win for KC Tenants by Next City and included a host of tenant protections.
The campaign to fully fund Right to Counsel is being led by two tenant organizing groups in St. Louis: We The Tenants, a partnership between Action St. Louis and Arch City Defenders, and Tenants Transforming Greater St. Louis. Both organizations say they have a boots-on-the-ground approach to helping renters, and both blame a lack of support from city leaders as an obstacle to a stronger tenant union effort here.
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