Montreal          The global affordable housing crisis largely continues unchecked, with more people looking and fewer finding, as prices rise and access decreases.  Developers rush to build high-end luxury properties and demand extensive incentives and subsidies for affordable complexes. dampening supply.  With real estate interests often virtually owning politicians, tenants struggle to get protections.  Organizing in Canada and the United Kingdom in recent years, every new ACORN group seems to be voting to deal with housing as their top issue, so we have built tenant unions around the world.  Now, as we increasingly work in the United States on similar issues, ACORN is trying to distill these experiences over the last decade or more into an organizing model, and it’s an interesting process.

The issues are common and universal, it seems.  Bugs, mold, and repairs are ubiquitous.  The need for retrofits to meet the climate changes on one hand, or simply dealing with poor, cheap construction that might provide a roof over a family’s heads, but not keep out the cold, beat the heat, or prevent soaring utility bills, leaves few alternatives.  Consolidation in the industry offers new targets with REITs and huge corporate and private equity landlords that are not simply absent, but often foreign.  Either tenants seem to have no protections in law and regulations or, too often, even when they exist, enforcement is lax to nonexistent and the guidelines themselves are Swiss cheese.  In short, issues and campaigns are abundant.

The actual organizing drives are very similar to all of the drives that we run in communities.  Difference is perhaps that there are more drives that are prompted by what labor organizers call “hot shops,” which is to say buildings with tenants facing a crisis of some kind that forces action to trump fears of eviction or the search for a new spot.  All of that gets you going, but sustaining a tenants’ union isn’t easy.  One Toronto organizer offhandedly mentioned that fights over AGI, or “above guideline increases” requested by landlords to raise rents above the caps for various reasons, are great because the dispute usually lasted two years and helped in maintaining the group, because the issue held their attention, even when there were no immediate actions.  That was interesting to me.  In the first thirty or so years of organizing in the US, I used to argue against prioritizing tenants’ unions, other than as parts of broader community organizations, because our constituency was so transient, it was impossible to stabilize and sustain the group.  The tenant profile in Canada and the UK, and increasingly even in the US, is more permanent, so times have changed, but the problem of keeping the groups alive after the heat leaves the building hasn’t changed.

I had wondered if it were any easier to have citywide or borough wide tenants’ unions like we have in the UK?  Judy Duncan, ACORN Canada’s head organizer, argued that in fact the best working model was still to sustain the tenants’ unions within larger ACORN community organizations.  This is premised on being able to also unite the buildings in larger issues that are citywide like landlord licensing, rent controls, and other reforms.

All of that makes sense to me.  I’m on the hunt though to see if we can pull all of these experiences together in something closer to a model.  All help and advice are appreciated.