Rev Left Radio - Organizing Tenants & Fighting Landlords: Omaha Tenants United

Episode Date: June 30, 2019

Members of the OTU (Omaha Tenants United) join Breht in-studio to discuss their organizing, give advice to others, warn about common errors to avoid, and much more! This is the perfect episode for people interested in how they can get involved in organizing in a way that 1) genuinely addresses the immediate material needs of our class, 2) does not require a huge amount of people, and 3) has little to no overhead costs. Learn more about OTU here: https://www.facebook.com/OmahaTenantsUnited/ and Here: https://medium.com/@omahatenantsunited Outro Music: "Neighbors" by J. Cole Support his music here: http://www.dreamville.com ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/ SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical.  Intro music by Captain Planet. Find and support his music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today we have three representatives from Omaha Tenants United, Seth, Nolan, and Talia to talk about some of the tenant organizing struggles, going on in Omaha right now. The point of this discussion is to talk about an organization doing great work in Omaha, probably the best organizing work in Omaha at the moment. And then also to lay down some tips and advice and some structure for how people in other cities might replicate some of the strategies and successes that the OTU has had, which have been really impressive, especially as of late. So we have Seth, Nolan, and Talia in studio. Maybe everybody can start off just

by saying hi, maybe saying what your political orientation is as a nice introduction. Seth, you want to start? I'm Seth and I'm a Maoist. I'm Nolan, just generally a Marxist. Talia and I'm an anarchist. Nice, a nice little mix of people today. Nolan was actually on our first episode ever and Seth's been here numerous times as well. This is the first for Talia. Nice to have you here. But let's go ahead and just jump into the questions here. First question. First question, Can you just talk about Omaha Tenants United, why it was founded, what the vision was, et cetera? Yeah. So it was, so we do our, like, food distribution thing, feed the people through Omaha.

And, like, part of what we would do was, like, you know, ask people questions about, like, what was going on in their lives, what other issues they're struggling with. Because, you know, it's not meant to just be a charity. It's meant to be a way to, like, tap into other struggles. And we had a few people that are coming up. talking about how they have issues with their landlords. And so, I mean, pretty much a few people that were interested in, we thought it would be a good opportunity to get something off the ground in that regard, and just got a few people together that were interested in that type of work,

both from inside and outside of FTP, and we just basically got it going. Yeah, so our first couple victories were both people who had been attending and receiving food at FTP regularly. And FTP is feed the people. Yep. So we were able to, our first one, we were able to get this landlord to fix this guy's hot water, which he was refusing to do in, for, like, literally six months.

We managed to get it back on in less than 24 hours after we, like, gave him a demand letter. And then the second one was a really big, was, like, a really big deal. I guess we can talk about it more when we get to the day, Palladino stuff, but we were able to get this man back $1,500 and bullshit move-out fees that his landlord was trying to charge, and he walked out with a $500 deposit, or $500 check

for his deposit. So that's sweet, yeah. And this is in a part of Omaha that's being highly gentrified, that a lot of developments going on, and these are low-income, working-class people, obviously. Nolan, how did you get involved with the OTU? Um, so I got involved with the OTU, um, kind of fully, not too long ago. Um, I've always kind of been involved in the background just a little bit, just being aware of what's going on, helping out when I can, kind of as a volunteer. Uh, the structure of OTO is we have, like, our organizers, who are our main organizers, but we also have people who are, like, the rallies that we have and things like that are willing to help people move. Um, so I kind of got involved then, uh, just through Seth. Um, tenant organizing is something that Seth and I both tried to do. Uh, several years ago. There's been a few attempts, even outside of you guys.

The IWW has tried before, too. Yeah, and we worked with a member from the IWW when we made our first attempt, and unfortunately we just didn't really get a good formal structure, and it didn't really stick around. Back in the Red Plains Revolutionary group, those first. Those heavy days.

Those were some good old days. We made a lot of mistakes. We had a lot of things that we did, right, and there's a lot to learn from that. But, yeah, so I've been formally involved with OTA as an organizer, somewhat more recently, and it's just something that I've always wanted to do, and after things started popping off, I wanted to be able to help it any way that I could, and that's what brought me back to it.

Holly, what about you? How did you get involved with the OTAU? So I'd been kind of out of activism and organizing for a while, kind of took a break to go to school and work, but I actually worked for the city, and so it was really when OTAU started coming to the city, bringing their campaigns to the city council against Dave Paladino. I knew that tenant organizing was something that needed to be happening and I had had issues in the past with my own landlords. So really just seeing that, seeing that people were doing something, I kind of you know made some contacts and met some people and was able to join and I've been doing work with them for a few months now. Yeah, that's amazing. So literally at a city council meeting,

OTU came in, right? And they were talking their shit. And you just realized that this is something that needed to happen and jumped on board, got your way into the organization. And now you're organizer with them. Exactly. That's awesome. And one of the things about OTEU that's so great, and that's an example of it, sort of a weird one, because you wouldn't necessarily expect that to happen. But one thing that OTO does really well is helps people and then, you know, some percentage of those people get integrated into the organizing efforts themselves. And that is the way that you build, you know, a mass movement. That's the way that you base build. That's the way that you bring working class people into organizing efforts by showing them the solidarity,

getting something materially beneficial for them. And then some percentage of them will be so compelled by that victory to join and help other people. And that's the mark also, I think, of a successful organization that can do that on the regular. So it's really impressive in that way. Just talking about the local area right now, what are the unique or not so unique conditions or elements here in Omaha that Omaha Tenets United are operating in? And maybe Talia, you can start with that. Sure.

So maybe the biggest not-so-unique one is just the rampant gentrification that's happening in Omaha right now. We have a city government that just pushes development for development's stake right now and developers that are fully taking advantage of any incentive that they can get from the city to do that. And so it's really come down to renters only having a choice between renting cheap apartments from slumlords that are in horrible conditions. They're unlivable in many cases, but they can't get anything done about that. And they also can't afford to move overrent anywhere that would not be in those conditions because there's just literally no quality affordable housing in Omaha right now. So you just kind of have a choice between that or all these

luxury developments that are popping up all over the place, pushing tenants out and displacing them and just kind of keeping tenants in a cycle where they're unable to stay anywhere stable and safe and comfortable and also affordable. And it's something that is only getting worse without, you know, the actions of organizations like Omaha Tenants United because nobody else is doing anything. The city is fully moving that forward. Developers are fully moving that forward. It's all about profit and tax bases for those entities

and not at all about the people who actually live in these spaces. Yeah, and, you know, I said this before we started recording, but in lieu of any popular pressure from below, you know, those people get steamrolled and the politicians and the powers that be and the city have no incentive whatsoever to do anything negative against the developers, you know? So, you know, when there is no popular resistance, there's no incentive at all for them to not, to not give those handouts to developers.

And so OTU represents, you know, really bottom up pressure on that system, and we'll talk about some of the victories that that's gotten here in a little bit. But, you know, I just want to chime in on that really quick. I think, like, one way in that Omaha is, like, a bit unique. it's certainly not exclusive to Omaha, but I think it's very prominent here is just like with the history of the city being so segregated, you know, like basically literally redlined into where like black and white people are able to live back in the day, you know, you still see the same demographic patterns today. However, like the thing that's changing with the

gentrification process here is now like, you know, back in the day when they were redlining and all, you know, the white people go live out west and then central Omaha and, you know, move farther and farther west now. Now, you know, about like a half a century later, we're seeing kind of a reversal of the process. So it's like the generation or two after that is now moving back down into the city, which really like is really the catalyst for the gentrification process because now it's these people who, the relatives of people who previously did not want to live in these areas. And now they're coming back to raise our rents and, you know, put up a bunch of, like, boutiques and, like, craft cocktail bars for hipsters and you have to use. Yeah. So it's kind of

like, I think that is, like, one interesting aspect. How, like, segregation is still, like, very real and it still is, like, predominantly, like, you know, West Omaha, white people, North Omaha, black people, south for Latinos. But, like, it, the gentrification is, like, spurring the sort of, like kind of not a reversal of that process, but just kind of like a dialectical continuation of it, I think is really interesting. Yeah, we, we, you know, left the urban areas because of the black people and the poverty and the working class people. And then now we want to come back and have the benefits of living in the city. So our grandkills are going to come back and we're going to push those people out through these various mechanisms. And just the precarity of daily life

under capitalism is one thing. We all deal with it. But add on to all that precarity that we all face just the constant precarity with regards to losing your house or your rent skyrocketing over a short period of time, that's horrifying. And if you have children and that lack of stability, I mean, that builds up as like cortisol in your blood. I mean, there's physical stress symptoms that come out of that and can really damage people's health, especially if these things go for long periods of time. So that's something I always think about with regards to this issue as well. But let's go ahead and talk about one of the villains in this novel, if you will. And that is Dave Palladino. So who is Dave Palladino and what is the history between

him and the O'TU? And maybe, Seth, since you're one of the founding members, maybe you can start off with this one. Okay. So Dave Palladino is one of the most notorious Lomlords in Omaha. He literally owns hundreds of properties. But not only does he own properties, he owns a bunch of storage units. And the fun part about the storage units is that he likes to put quotes on them. They're usually like bible verses or like that's who that is yeah okay no storage yeah yeah that's that so like it's always like for me finally i don't know i think i knew that somewhere in the back of my head but yeah wow yeah so like he likes to put like these really like christiany messages i like can anybody remember any of them off top like they're hilarious oh there was the truth will come

back to you someday something like that um he who prophets will you know go to hell things like that. Things that are just, like, completely, like, absurdly ironic. He doesn't realize it, because he's, you know, he thinks he's, like, this big man of God, and that's, like, how he, like, promotes this whole. That's his whole image, basically. But, uh, no, so, yeah, he's also just a horrible slam lord. Um, he likes to, like, make up move-out fees. Um, recently, somebody that we're helping, um, Annie, she had said that, like, she had actually become, like, pretty decent friends with one. one of his workers and he this worker told her that Dave had said like the month after she

moved in that like oh yeah we're just going to like you know charge her for just we'll just make some charges up when she moves out like literally like said that and I mean that's the pattern you see so like that kind of brings us to like our first like really big victory like after the initial one that we kind of got started this man Rashad who had been coming to be the people for a long time you know we developed a really good relationship with him he's living a paladino apartment um he'd been having all types of issues for a long time um he's like you know just want to get out of there they're like making things up that he was being loud and stuff which like wasn't true and that like if you've met him you know it's not true yeah and like uh that he was

laid on rent which was also like not true so they tried to give him a eviction notice and um we had a couple OTU members go down and well let me rewind a little bit so the hand him of eviction notice is so he's like freaking out um and then dave paladino this is another classic thing that they do to their own detriment sends one of his workers there and doesn't even like knock but attempts to enter the apartment uh while rashad is home um so rashad's obviously like scared because he's like who the hell is this it turns out it's vincent this guy that works for day paladino And that's illegal, right, technically? 100% illegal, because he didn't provide a 24 hours notice.

And in Nebraska, that does mean that you can receive up to, I believe, three months back rent. I mean, you'll never get the whole three months. But I would say, like, a month is more. Yeah, you get a month. If they violate that and you pursue it legally. Yeah. So we went and sat, we had a couple of two people go down and sit with Vincent at Paladino's office and basically told him, like, you're getting rid of this eviction.

You know, like, try to lie a bunch, and, you know, and they just whipped out. the, like, well, you tried to enter his apartment illegally, and do you want, so do you want to, like, get rid of this eviction or give us a month's worth of rent, basically? And so they step down, like, really quickly after that. Um, so then, fast forward, like, maybe another month or so, Rashad's moved out. He's got a new apartment. Everything's good. He receives a letter from Dave Paladino saying he has, uh, $1,500 worth of move-out charges. Um, he be on the hook for a grand of it because this deposit was 500 and it was just like the most ridiculous stuff like 250 dollars to clean the stove 250 dollars to clean the fridge like just insane

you know stuff that takes 10 minutes to do but not only that but like we helped him move out that's another thing that like we try to do when people want to is like help people move out and make little fixes as they're moving kind of like go down the checklist of what landlords are going to be looking for so that if they do try to pull this BS we can can you know we have pictures we have it all documented like no this is not true so we had helped him move out and we knew that was all complete bullshit so we were like okay we got to like escalate this fast because at this point Rashad's moved out so he's just like I just want to like go for it so we showed up with probably like 20 or 30 people at his office and um

you're just like yeah you're you're gonna get rid of these charges basically what was his face like when he rolled up he actually wasn't there he likes to like pawn all this dirty work off on those like workers and stuff but uh you know uh so we sat down with them for a while um we went through the pictures we were like yeah this is i mean this is completely absurd and got him to say in writing that all uh $1,500 of fees would be waived and he walked out with a $500 check for his deposit back so they were never expecting you guys have documentation we got the receipts baby yeah yeah that's amazing um what are some other Nolan and Pahlia, other things that may be anecdotes, not even just about Dave Palladino, but about the OTAU or maybe some people you've helped in the situations they've dealt with that you can think of to try to drive this point home and just the conditions that some people are living under in this area.

Yeah, I mean, so one of the main things that we see are just lack of maintenance, property managers, not actually putting in maintenance requests that people are asking for, and then just not actually getting the work done. That's kind of one of the biggest things we see. We also see a lot of issues with people with, like, bogus move-out charges and things like that. Just to play off the Dino thing a little bit. Another thing that he specifically likes to do is when he evicts people, if they don't have time to get their stuff out of his house, he will take their stuff and he owns these storage units. He'll put it in his storage unit and start billing them for the storage unit afterwards. Yeah, so that's, yeah, that's...

We actually did interview with a tenant who told us about, a time that she had that happened to her. She, like, was moving out. She's a single mom. She's, like, moving out of her apartment with Dave Palladino. Well, it was, like, a house that she was renting from. She's getting her own house because she was, like, recently divorced with her kids. And he knows, they decided, okay, we're going to go months to month.

And, like, at the end of this month, I'm going to be in my new house. So, um, she shows up, like, two weeks before the end of the month. She had just gotten her utilities turned on at her new place. and she finds that her house is locked and the locks are changed so she can't get in she remembers that like there's this window open so she like crawls through that and she sees like everything is gone and so she like goes to Dave Palladino obviously like what the hell and yeah it turns out so like evidently since she turned utilities on at her new home despite her him knowing that she needed the next two weeks to move out and they like

verbally agreed to this. He said that that was a violation of her lease. So she locked, he locked her out, took all of her things, put them in his own storage units, and then attempted to charge her for them. And she ended up, she ended up getting her stuff back. The other thing, though, that's important, is that she attempted to reach out to, like, lawyers and stuff. And she could not find a single lawyer in the city that would, like, represent her because they either represent landlords or personal friends of Dave Falcon so they like straight up refused to represent tenants she ended up like throwing a big fuss got her things back but a lot of them were missing she said it seemed like people

had like basically just taken whatever they like his workers and Dave himself had just like taken kind of whatever they wanted and left the rest for her to come pay yeah so just a whole ordeal and he also owns a tow truck company so in his own tenants like violate parking, he sends his own tow trucking company to impound their cars. This is a parasite of the worst order. Yeah, and then his tenants have to pay him to get their car. It's insane. I mean, it's like a brilliant racket.

Yeah, I own all the things that I can surround the landlords. Like, I can take your shit and put him in the storage and charge you, or I can have the tow truck coming. I'll profit off that. Wow. He does all of this while he has signs and say things like Hugh profits illicitly, ruins his own house. It's better to be well respected than to have lots of wealth.

Which is a classic longstanding, like, things that, like, parasitic people do is, like, they give themselves a public sheen of, like, respectability. Like, I'm a religious man. Meanwhile, he's, you know, doing the most depraved shit behind the scenes. Anything stick out in your mind, Tali, as far as anecdotes of that sort? Yeah, well, one thing I think is really important to highlight is that all of these stories and all of these things that landlords are doing, the exorbitant move-out fees and the evictions,

they're all absolutely patterns. They're not in a vacuum. They're on-purpose, explicit exploitation. The fact that lawyers won't take cases for these tenants, the fact that there's no laws, there are laws that are supposed to be in tenants' favors, but, you know, it doesn't work out that way in the courts. Landlords know that, and they expect that,

and that's why they get to continuously do it. you know, Dave Palladino, we'll talk about when we bring him to city council, but he made a promise at one point that he would stop charging these move-out fees. As soon as people stopped paying attention to him, he started charging them again. And it's just a blanket move-out fees. He does not actually look at these apartments. He doesn't see what was or what wasn't cleaned. It's just a charge that's on there no matter what when tenants move out.

And he is able to get away with that, and he's successful in making his money doing that because he knows that there's no existing systems for tenants to have any record. against that. Damn. Well, that leads well into this sort of next question, which is, you know, a recent victory that the O'TU won in the face of Dave Palladino and the sort of Omaha machinery that backs him up. So, Tali, would you want to talk a little bit about the recent victory and how that played out?

Sure. So Dave Palladino, I think it was in January of this year. He came to the city wanting to get a tax incentive called TIF so that he could renovate another building. TIF is tax incremental financing. It's basically a tax break, corporate handout to developers. Yeah, it's an incentive that is supposed to be one that's for building the community, but really just goes to developers so that they can build, you know, new luxury apartments. This is something that is normally always rubber stamped by the time that it makes it to city council, it's going through. But what Omaha Tenants United did was they brought

tenants to actually speak about the conditions that Dave Palladino had been subjecting them to. Rashad's story was really big in that. And the city at first, they were like, well, you know, there's no reason. We can't legally deny this because they have, you know, reasons laid out for why they can or can't grant TIF. By the time it goes through the committees and gets through city council, you know, it's good to go. But because Omaha tenants united and tenants came there organized. and came and shared their story, the city ended up pushing it back one week

so that they could look into it see if there was any reason they could deny it. The lawyers for the city actually came back and said, actually, yeah, you can look at an applicant's past behaviors and past buildings that they've had, and you can deny it based on that. What ended up happening was that the city just kept then pushing it back, pushing it back,

giving Palladino more and more chances. But in the end, they ended up placing it on file, which means that they could bring it back in the future if they feel that Palladino has improved enough, but what it ultimately was was the first time that we can tell in the city's history that they have not passed TIF when it's gotten to their desk. And I would say that's 100% due to the collective organizing that took place. So for the first time, it's usually a rubber stamp process for the first time due to the popular pressure led by the OTEU. They filed it, which is basically sidelining it for the first time

ever. Yep. Amazing. And I think the other important thing to point out is like, I mean, um most of that credit has to go to the actual like tenants themselves because i mean we're you know we just put people in the right places to you know activate the potential that they already have you had not only former but current tenants of day paladino who like you know are putting themselves at risk for retaliation publicly speaking against him while he's in the room and that's i mean and without that you know it never would have been possible. It literally can't be just a group of quote activists doing this. If there is no mass

support, if you don't have credibility in the community, you don't have those community members come out, like protesting in front of city hall before that, you know, for that decision, for example, or going and speaking in front of Dave Paladin on the city council, then that shit doesn't happen. Yeah. So that's, again, a testament to the sort of veracity of your organizing efforts and how effective they are. Yeah. And I would like to add that there are also a couple downfalls of what went on with Dave.

as they extended the vote they started to look into code inspections and things that he was doing wrong in his buildings to try and get him to improve them. I think technically the idea was if you improve this, then we're consider to for you. But there are like a lot of buildings where

he had a lot of code violations that he totally revamped and it even displaced people a little bit because it would raise people's rents after he did that because he would put money into fixing all these issues. There's a couple of buildings in particular and then people would be hit with the rent going up after that,

which is another kind of downfall of the way that city and especially city inspectors working in what they think is for the best for the tenants can also backfire and not really help out working class people. So his job as a landlord is to take care of these problems when they arise. But then when he's forced to finally take care of the issues, he uses that as a justification for hiking your rent because I spend all this money doing the things I'm supposed to do anyway.

yeah yeah yeah a real piece of shit all the right and i like just want to comment briefly like on a couple like lessons learned for that experience and like tactical things like first and four of us you know like we have no faith in the city like i mean we're revolutionaries like we didn't pick up this battle because we thought like this is going to fix any landlord issues however it was like a very public moment of a slum lord getting um you know basically a corporate handout um so it's like so while we can't like rely on this day we do have to take advantage of those moments of like legal activity where we're able to highlight a super huge contradiction in capitalism just to show how like a how screwed up this whole system is and then

like also you know it's just a great way to get people mobilized and get people out and allowed us to bring new people in so it's definitely like a tactical decision so like our strategy is never, like, to, like, try to get the city to change laws and everything's going to be better. You know, at the end of the day, the landlord is a landlord, and that's not changing until capitalism goes away. So, if you want to point that out. And then secondly, like, the other, like, thing that we, like, as far as propaganda goes, that we like to highlight about this whole situation is, you know, we were organizing in a Dave Paladino building at the time because we were hitting streets really hard, serving every one of his tenants that we possibly could,

just talking to as many people as possible and we had one building pretty much on lock where 50% of the building was down and ready to go to sign a collective demand letter and was going to be sent through. Unfortunately, his security guard, who was also a cop, got whiff of it and began harassing our organizers

following us when we would appear in the neighborhood and noting where we would park and then, like, I think once he realized that like, oh, we actually have like inroads with these tenants he first tried to start with you can't let these people in you can't get it's illegal for you to be doing this because it's soliciting which is not true and uh just telling tenants you can't let these people in the keyword they were letting us in so it's like to you can't have over um but then ultimately unfortunately what we what happened was he him and d'a paladino

ended up telling all these tenants that if they so much just talked to us again they would all be evicted, which is complete bullshit. I mean, that's incredibly illegal. It's right there in Nebraska Landlord Tennis Act. Obviously, we know capitalists don't even follow their own laws, so it's kind of like a, the Landlord Tinent Act ultimately is meaningless. But nonetheless, by Bouguil standards, it would be very illegal. He would have like a media shit show on his hands if he did do that. And it's like, you know, he'd have no means to actually. So it's just like lying, deceiving, and intimidating tenants in order to put a stop to our organizing efforts, which, you know, we failed in that particular instance, but ultimately emboldened and

encouraged because, like, if they weren't, if we weren't having cops and landlords doing their most to try to stop us, then what, then they're shook. Yeah, that means what we're doing works. Yeah. And it's, I mean, one, one, it's like very much like the owner-employee situation when it comes to somebody trying to unionize and then the employer fires them. It's kind of similar to that. Those dynamics exist. But then just the idea that you have a cop who on his off-time is the private security, a privately hired goon for a big developer like Dave Palladena who then goes and harasses activist and tries to scare tenants into not organizing in their own interest. So it's really grotesque all around and

just shows like an explicit form how capitalism and the state are always on the same side against the working class exactly that's how you have to like draw like those particular instances to make like broader like you know theoretical statements about you know the relationship between the state and private capital and stuff so like all those instances be it with the city council be it with that cop whatever even like win or fail provide us with a propaganda opportunity to demonstrate to people you know how capitalism is exploitative so we're not just like crazy like fuck all cops because we don't like them it's like no they're like objectively and materially work in the interests of these capitalists and the situations like that give us an opportunity

to demonstrate that and has that been effective with regards to raising the class consciousness and broader social consciousness of the people that you're organizing at least in some instances I know not in everyone probably but I absolutely I absolutely think so um you know we will call ourselves socialist or communists or whatever the first time we meet people and 99% of the time they're not batting an eye you know in fact they think it's interesting want to learn more and I think like who are these people helping me why

yeah you know they they'll ask like what like the other day we had somebody ask like he's like how do you guys get paid for this yeah how do you benefit from it I guess no one was there if you wanted like explain that response his exact words at first he's like so how do you guys get paid for this and we're like we don't

he's like how do you benefit from it and so we kind of described to him it's like well we're it's part of a broader political project of building community in empowering working class people to take things into their own hands to fight back against all of these different structures that oppress them. And we kind of tried to tie it into not just talking about tenant work, but also like, you know, it's similar to like unionizing a workplace and things like that.

It's our political belief that all these necessities need to be made and we need to make this change from the ground up. So it's all about empowering you and getting building community together. That one is especially interesting because it's at a building. with a lot of different tenants that we're working with and before we went over there and not all of them knew each other but now we're slowly starting to introduce everybody in this complex and really kind of build some solidarity there as they're all everybody's having almost the exact same issues and getting ignored by this particular property management company yeah yeah and

that's like just really quickly like and maybe you talk about this more later but like that is like the big like thing that working with ot you has reinforced for me is like the importance of being like up front about our politics you know you go to our points of union it's all there like it doesn't take a genius to figure out we're like a bunch of commie bastards like uh but it's like when we actually talk to people like on the ground that we're trying to organize about this stuff it resonates with them like in the you almost I don't think there's been an instance where we've like you know explained our politics to a tenant and they've been like whoa that's scary like yeah they're like really taken back because it's like and I think

that's the mistake a lot of like radicals make is being too afraid to be up front with workers and tenants about our politics and trying to like sort of tiptoe around the question was like if we like truly believe that our politics are the politics of the proletariat then when you explain them it should resonate with them you shouldn't be afraid to explain those politics and put a label on them because if you're doing our job right then like that's that's exactly the people it's supposed to connect with and so I think like being up front and being honest about your politics when doing this type of work is like the most crucial thing because it prevents you from just becoming like a red charity like how are you different than an NGO if you're not like talking about these broader systemic issues and talking about capitalism and stuff like that it comes off almost a little manipulatey or or cynical if you're organizing people and you're trying to hide or obscure who you are and what you stand for you know you can't have a solid basis of any sort of relationship that's rooted in a sort of,

I'm going to hide some crucial information from you. Why would you, you know? You're not dealing with like suburbanites who will shut the door at the word communists. You're dealing with working class people fighting for their lives. And so these ideas are just, you know, a lot of times, like instincts for working class people. Like when I get into conversations with ostensibly apolitical working class people,

like my mom, for instance, who doesn't even know the difference to a Democrat and a Republican, she'll say some really profound shit, like, you know, why is their wealth inequality at all? Like, why do we have homeless people and billionaires? and coming out of somebody's mouth who doesn't have any theoretical understanding at all of politics, that really is a testament

to working class people's understanding of these ideas. Maybe not the jargon, but the idea is underlying them. Yeah, I have a small anecdote about that. One person that we've organized with before, when we first met with her, she had already essentially done most of our work for us.

She had canvassed her own building. She had notes for each unit, what issues people were having. And she had this idea of once getting these things taken care of, of having like every three months all the tenants sit down and talk about the issues that they're having and collectively bargaining and we're like, whoa, you're literally talking about a tenant union. You just don't have those words to put it in.

And it's just like, yeah, it solidify that idea in our mind that these people already have these ideas in place in their head. They just, it's not something that they've ever been approached with under those terms, but it just, it's kind of common sense for working class people. It's just a matter of articulation. Yeah. All right. So now we're going to go like two more questions, a little bit more abstract, just for people

might interest in these bigger questions. Why is tenant organizing an essential component of the communist or radical or anarchist movement here in the U.S.? The broad radical left movement? How is tenant organizing like an essential part of that? Maybe you can start on it. So I think building off of what we've just been talking about is it's kind of meeting people where they're at right now. You know, we can be upfront with the fact that we're communist and people will want to hear what we're saying. And then at the end of the day, the people that we're organizing don't have to decide to be communists or decide that they're going to throw themselves in the revolution. But what we're doing is meeting people where they're at, which is housing, which is something that's a necessity

and something that they're not having access to in an affordable and quality way now. And so what it really does is it kind of brings people into the movement in a way that helps them learn the skills through transformative practices to actually build the skills to build their community on their own, whether they call themselves communists or not. They're learning the skills like how to organize, which is already intuitive for many renters like Nolan just brought up. They're learning the skills on how to fight exploitation with your neighbors as opposed to calling the city or calling the cops. They're learning how to build their own safe, nurturing communities, and that really at the end of the day is what it's about. And that in and of itself, that praxis is bringing them into the movement, regardless of what they end up labeling as politically.

It's, I think, is raising the class consciousness and really allowing people to take their own power. and use it. Hell yeah. And when we all went, some of us went to the Marxist Center, and there was the Philly tenants, they gave a speech, though, about the tenant organizing in Philly. And one of the things that stood out to me, which you just gestured towards, is they had somebody up there that, you know, he said he's just like a working class person who they helped, you know, and now he's a part of the organizing efforts.

And he's like, man, I don't really know a lot about this communist, socialist stuff. Like, I couldn't tell you about the theory, and I wouldn't call myself either of those things. But I'm here because these people helped me, and I turned around and started helping my community and he's sitting there in a Philly socialist shirt you know and so that really speaks to to that whole idea you know and that's what matters more than anything i don't care what you call yourself if you're just sitting in your home alone what are you actually doing that matters more than than words you know yep yeah i i 100% agree with like what talia just said like yeah um but to like extend on that um i think also the reason that tin organizing is important on in addition to all the

reasons. Talley just talked about is because workplace organizing and like in a post-industrial society is it's not, I mean, you can debate how feasible it is still and I mean, I think there's some potential still there, but the fact of the matter is it's kind of out the window as far as being the primary

focus of radical organizing. It's just, you know, people like IWW would disagree with me on that, but it's like that's where we're at. If it's not, it's much more difficult than it was if nothing else. So I think, like, these sort of tenant struggles are, like, the new terrain where we have to be operating on people's lives outside of the workplace.

Obviously, we hope, you know, if we can organize people in their workplace through that, but, you know, that's just not as feasible anymore. And so I think, but I think in addition to that, going back to, like, kind of highlighting these, like, broader, like, critiques of capitalist society, I think, like, the landlord-tenant relationship is kind of just, like, the most, like, Bare-faced, ridiculous manifestation of capitalism that you can possibly dream up. Like, we're literally, you're paying these people to do literally nothing. There's ostensibly supposed to be doing maintenance and kept keeping the building, but as, like, we see, they don't even do that. So it's like, we're signing as much of half of our paychecks away to this person, just to simply exist in a space that they would not utilize otherwise.

Just because they have enough money to buy the property. And I know that sounds like incredibly, like, 101 to everybody. sitting here but it's like when you talk about that stuff with somebody who's never thought about it in that way and like one of the slogans that will use sometimes with people to sort of try to invert it on its head is like your landlord works for you you know you're paying him make him do his job if you weren't doing your job at work the way that if you're acting like he does to you at your job you'd be fired why is it not the same and so it's like um yeah i think it's just a really great like it's just a particularly grotesque aspect of capitalism that you can break down really

easily like you can explain exploitation and surplus value like really fucking simply just by talking about landlords and people like get that and connect with that and yeah as we were talking about earlier you know working class people like intuitively it resonates with them so I think that's also like the key ideological thing and it also open up avenues to start talking about like private property you know fundamentally like why like so yeah I think it's just a great locus for beginning a lot deeper conversations regarding how capitalism operates and what the alternatives are. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I'll give a quick anecdote about my family in a landlord situation because I think it sort of highlights a lot of the

stuff that we're talking about. My parents' working class as fuck always have been. They're still renters, even though they're in their 50s, you know, they've never been able to buy a home and afford one. But one thing that's happened is they live in the same house for years and years since I was a kid. I grew up in this house, but they've been renting it the whole time. And it's turned out now that they've been renting for so long that they've paid off the cost of the house plus a lot a lot more what their landlord will do and uh is is when anything breaks down he'll he'll suggest they um front the cost and then he'll take it off the back end of their of their rent and then what he'll do is he'll tuck all this into like basically the good cop

routine where he constantly flatters them about how they're you know his favorite tenants and stuff um and you know like i'll do anything you know you guys are great uh yeah just go ahead and and, you know, take care of that, and then I'll take it off your rent next month or something like that. I'm telling my parents, like, you don't have to front the fucking cost. Like, you've paid for the, that should be your home, first of all. You've already paid it off, you know? And then this guy's telling you to front the cost,

and then he'll come and give you on the back end. Like, that's illegal. And it just drives me fucking insane. But last night, this is sort of personal, but it kind of ties in. My stepfather, who I'm talking about here, had a stroke. And he was sitting up with my sister and my brother-in-law and my mom, and his face got droopy, and he started slurring his words,

radically and so they were like you know scared crying and stuff and what he was slurring through the stroke last night he was saying take me to the hospital uh yourselves don't call an ambulance because i can't afford it you know and um just in the broader context of all that with the landlord and how much they pay in their house and then just like having a stroke and in the middle of your stroke you know worried about the ambulance you know fee um just a really depraved system that we're living in and highlighting it and showing people that that, it really resonates with a lot of people who are struggling in that, you know, in that way as well. We live in a hell world.

Genuinely, a dystopian. It's getting more dystopic every goddamn day. So last question. The point of this is to highlight all the wonderful stuff that you have all done and your organization has done, but also to encourage other people to replicate that and people to take up this sort of organizing. Because I do agree with you, Seth, that tenant organizing is probably the primary sort of site of struggle for communist. really get involved in. So with that in mind, what advice would you offer to listeners who may want to start tenant organizing? And what are some pitfalls they should watch out for on their journey? So I would say some advice, first of all, to be out there in working class areas,

actually talking to people. As Seth talked about earlier, that's how we got started. It was through a program, our Feed the People program. So if you have anything like that going on in your city, anything where, you know, working class people are going to be at that you can engage them in conversation and find out what kind of issues they're having. That's a great way to get started and to kind of find out, you know, areas of struggle. But also from there, once you've found an issue, if you do get off the ground in our organizing with a particular landlord or management company, find out every property that they have. As we've worked, we've found out that the issues that one person has with a certain landlord or property management company are going to

be there and most of their other properties too. And by doing so, you also, again, encourage this sort of community as you're helping multiple people fight back collectively against the same group. Those are kind of the two main points from there. Omaha Tenants United, we had a kind of a lucky thing with how popularized the Dave Palladino thing was, and that really got us, I mean, we were on the news, it got a a lot of clout I guess which has led people to just coming and finding us now but canvassing is also a great way you know go to go to these uh these working class neighborhoods just knock on

doors let people know hey I'm here with whatever what kind of issues are you having with your landlord are you having any issues with your landlord ask them questions about their life and you know try to connect with them that way and develop ties there and once you get it going as long as you're able to get some successes, people are just going to keep reaching out to you as they hear word of mouth from other people that have won through the struggles that you've had. And so just going off that really quick,

like, I think the important thing in our first game started is just get victories. Like, I think I've seen, like, a lot of attempts at, like, tenant organizing starting, like, by calling yourself a tenants union and then, like, going around, like, asking Tins, do you want to join our tenants union? I was like, well, what is that?

You know, how does that do anything for me? Like, if you haven't laid down a foundation, you don't have a union yet. Yeah, it's inverting the process. And, like, how it needs to start is just getting a victory, and even just a small one, like, for an individual person. And that's the other thing, too, is like, don't be afraid to just get, like, a single victory for one lone person. Even if you can't get anybody else, if everybody else in the building is, like, you know, completely uninterested, doesn't matter. Just, like, go for that one. because like in yeah i think a lot of times people are afraid like take on a battle if you know like

x percentage of a building isn't on board or wherever it's like you can get that one victory for one person which is how we started and then like now when you go and talk to tenants you can point to like we did this for this guy so like we can do this for you and so then like you know you're building a repertoire you're coming in with something and like some experience that shows tenants that like you're serious and you do get results and that looks better and from there, then that's how you start getting more than one person in a building on board and starting to take collective actions, and then laying the groundwork to, like, establish a tenants union. So, like, that's one thing that I see a lot just based on what I've seen online.

I think people, like, try to invert that process when the key thing is just, like, get a couple Ws, no matter how small, if it's as simple as it's just, like, getting somebody's AC fixed, one little thing. So then you can point to that and be like, this works. And I would even argue that one of the big pitfalls of reversing that process, like you guys call yourselves the Omaha Tenants United. You're not a union yet. You're building up to that.

Reversing that process can sometimes lead to biting off more than a startup organization can possibly chew. And then what that leads to is a lack of commitment or maybe you leave somebody like high and dry that you started organizing with. And that's like the worst case scenario. Like imagine if right in the middle of that fight with Rashad, you guys just walked out and said fell apart as an organization because you couldn't keep up with the demands. So starting humbly and starting. starting by serving individual people and then building up is absolutely the best way. What are your thoughts telling you?

Yeah, I'd agree with that. And just to kind of build off of that and what Seth was saying is one thing that's really cool about housing organizing is that the possibilities right now are kind of endless, you know, in terms of the way that you end up wanting to structure housing or do you want to build collective housing or do you want to push for affordable housing. But what's also great is that we don't have to entirely reinvent the wheel here. We can look to organizing tactics that people have already done. look to the labor movement and we can look at what works and I'd say that's kind of my biggest

advice is first of all just do it like a lot of people at first are like well we just don't know what to do and it's like well just start doing it first but then as you're doing it look at what other people have done look at the strategies and housing organizing and labor organizing and any organizing learn how to have an organizing conversation we're not starting over even though I definitely agree that this is where the movement is at right now we still need to look at everything come before us and all of the work that people have done to move forward and make sure that we're doing it effectively. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you all so much for coming in. This is awesome. I really hope people take this as inspiration to start their own sort of efforts in this

direction. Where can people find you online and where can people maybe support you if they like what you're doing and want to support the cause? We have our Facebook page on Manhattan's United. You can also search that. We'll pull up our medium page, which just has our points of unity and like a long form summary of the big battle that we did for Rashad, which I think also has a lot of like sort of like key theoretical and like tactical understanding. So get a idea of where we're at and how we're operating. So I like highly recommend reading that. And then yeah, that's about it really. There's a pretty low overhead cost, right? With this sort of organizing? I think we've paid like in the entire year existence, I think we've paid like maybe $50. And that's like

for printing shit off. You know what I mean? And that's huge for organizations that don't have any funds. This is something you can still do. Like feed the people might, it involves an initial investment to buy food or to build gardens and stuff, but this is something you can start with very little money and be effective and very little people. Like you and a couple of comrades can go and, you know, meet one tenant's needs. And that's a great place to start. And we're going to have a local fundraiser by the end of the summer and we'll have like a Patreon or something tossed up for people elsewhere to support. But I mean, if you do want to support in the meantime, you know, just message us and we can work something out. We have a PayPal, so one other pitfall that I feel like

any organizers need to be aware of and should be blatantly obvious to any revolutionary is trying to work with the state is not going to work. And one big example from here in Omaha was the Yale Park Apartments. We were in the building about a week before someone else was in the building and ended up getting city inspectors in there. City inspectors essentially displaced all of the people because of all these code violations. Refugees. Yeah, these are all refugees. I believe they're Corinne refugees.

So they were all displaced. It was kind of a big deal in Omaha. And it's all because they went straight to the city. And the city went sent inspectors down there. The mayor made a big deal about it like she's being this awesome person. But if they had sticked with our tactics and just, you know, taking the struggle on themselves and working with the fighting against the landlord or property manager to get things changed. It would have, I think, made a lot of people's lives easier.

That guy also now is countersuing his tenants for like a million dollars in damages, just again to underline the parasitic and awful behaviors of these landlords. Going with city inspectors and things like that is not going to be beneficial, but it's also, it is beneficial to understand the laws in your state and your city as far as housing goes. That is beneficial just to be able to cite those things, especially when you're talking to a landlord about the issues.

It scares the hell out of them. If you know the legal jargon and you can cite the law, they're done. Yeah. And that's definitely something to look into, but actually working with the city or the state just doesn't get stuff done. And that's how we kind of came into how we ended up at odds

with like a liberal group in town that was attempting to, like do housing work when you thought you know for a brief period we could work in coalition on like the state paladena issue they're really pushing for the they wanted mandatory inspections so that like eventually every apartment in Omaha would be visited by an inspector and the problem the first problem with that is that inspectors don't give a shit we've had multiple times talked to tenants who have called inspectors they come they don't do anything or they say there's nothing they can't do so it's not even like a worthwhile thing but worst case scenario especially

we're doing mandatory inspections on a citywide level, I would say, like, a solid 75% of the buildings that we go to probably be legally condemned if an inspector went there. And as they should, like, they are like bad housing. However, it is housing and it's cheap housing for people. So, like, we don't want to get people evicted. So the many you start having an inspector come over, those things are shut down the next day. You have a big displacement problem. Now people have to either find a place to live that's way farther from their job than previously before. or you know now they're going to have to pay a whole bunch more in rent and that speeds up the gentrification process because if a building gets condemned now a developer is going to come in buy it up raise the rents and it just speeds that process up so it's like these are bad intentions but it fucks up yeah so these are like bad properties like an ideal world like nobody should be living in them but it's a place to live and it's a relatively cheap places to live and so it's like you know it's it's a weird contradiction. Yeah, but it's that

liberal urge to, like, solve all problems by resorting to the police or resulting to the electoral system. Yeah, it's right another law. And then all those, they all have negative consequences on the other side. Um, so yeah, um, you know, Reve Left Radio, we stand O to you. We love you guys. You guys are doing amazing work. Uh, try to help you out as much

as I can, show up when I can, um, because I really believe that you guys are on the cutting edge of organizing, uh, here in the state. And so, thank you all so much for coming on and keep up the amazing fucking work. I don't want no picture with the president. I just want to talk to the man.

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