Rev Left Radio - Tenant Organizing with Omaha Tenants Union

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Seth and Jade from OTU join Breht to discuss their tenant organizing, their recent victories, implementing the Mass Line, the importance of political education, how to take the fight to landlords, concrete advice for those who might want to start their own tenant organization, and much more! Learn more about OTU HERE Get 15% off any book at Left Wing Books HERE --------------------------------------------------------- Rev Left is and always will be 100% listener funded. You can support the show and get access to hundreds of bonus episodes HERE Follow Rev Left on Insta

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have Seth and Jade from the Omaha Tenants United to talk about their struggles building tenant unions, their struggles against landlords, the role that tenant organizing plays in the revolutionary movement more broadly, its connections to anti-imperialist movements, local organizations like the Jewish Voice for Peace and Nebraska's for Palestine working with O.T.U. The trials and tribulations, challenges and obstacles that these comrades have faced in their tenant organizing over the years, their biggest accomplishments, advice for people who want to begin their own tenant organizing

campaigns and their own communities, and much, much more. It's a really great conversation. Long-time listeners of Rev-Left will have heard episodes we've done with OTAU over the years. but there's a lot of new developments that have happened since then in the broader environment like housing costs as well as the organization itself which has been diligently continuing its amazing work in growing and learning this entire time so it's a really great experience a really great conversation with really principled and hardworking comrades and as always if you like what we do here at rev left radio you can join us on our patreon at patreon.com forward slash rev left radio where you get access to bonus monthly episode mostly me, you know, ranting and doing my own analysis, reading articles, replying to YouTube videos, constructing arguments and having fun. It's just, it's a cool outlet for me to be able to do things I'm not able to do on the public feed. And at this point, over seven years in, we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of

Patreon exclusive episodes in our back catalog that you could probably spend days going through if you are so inclined. And I also want to give a huge shout out to our friends over at leftwingbooks.net. They have a cool agreement with us at RevLeft, where they offer RevLeft listeners 15% off any book in their library. And they have an ever-growing library with great works, theory, history, history, memoirs, everything in between. That is just a cool opportunity for me to bring the cost down for my listeners and support

some comrades that are doing work in the very same spirit that we do here at RevLeft Radio. So I'll leave the link in the show notes. And if you click that link, it'll automatically apply the code RevLeft at checkout, giving you 15% off any book in their library. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with Seth and Jade from Omaha Tenants United on tenant organizing and so much more. Enjoy. I'm Seth with, and I'm an organizer with Omaha Tennessee United. Okay, I was going to have a longer one.

No, no, that's fine. No, no, that's, no, man, it can be long. It's totally fine. Oh, yeah, hey, man, is Jade. I'm an organizer with Omaha, Tennessee United. I'm a small-sie communist, educator, gardener. um sports fan today go go big ride nice absolutely the huskers play today it's all we have out here in the lonely midwest the great planes well welcome jaden set it's really cool to have you guys here

and unlike 99.9% of revileft episodes which are done remotely over zoom we have you in shed we literally for those i don't know record in a shed in my producer's backyard and that's where we are today um but we're going to talk about omaha tenants united It's something that I'm sure long-time listeners of the show have heard Crop Up time and time again. I'm sure I've had you on in the past where we've mentioned it and talked about it to some extent. We've actually done two O2U episodes in the past. Way back in the day, I think. I was like 2019.

Damn. Yeah. Time flies. I feel like probably half the people that like reach out to us online and are like, oh, we heard about you in a Rev. F interview. I was like five years ago. Yeah.

We'll dig through the Ardian. Crazy. Okay. Well, that's great. Yeah. I mean, we're coming up on eight years in this spring. old heads will know, but for new listeners, Omaha Tenants United is obviously a longstanding organization here in the Omaha local area fighting for tenants rights, but I don't need to

introduce the organization. You guys can do that yourself. So first and foremost, can you guys tell us a little bit about OTO, how and why it was founded and what its overall aim was and is? Yeah, so we started sometime in 2018. Basically, at the time, a few of us were doing like a free food program sort of thing. And, you know, we wanted that the goal of that was not to just simply be like a red charity, but attempt to investigate, you know, people's actual conditions and try to identify ways in which we could potentially involve ourselves in other areas of class struggle and get people organized in. Well, we didn't always do the best job of that. One of the good things that did come out of, you know, is when we were asking people questions was kind of repeatedly

landlord issues landlord issues um and so a few of us just sort of decided decided to get a group off the ground specifically dedicated to that um and so that's kind of the birth of omaha tenants united our first couple wins were actually people who were coming to those free food giveaways um our first one for example we had no clue what we were doing to be clear um but uh it was this guy who would come pretty much every month when we would do those distributions and he'd not had hot water in six months basically I think it was June or July when that was going so he hadn't had since like December and the landlord was just like telling him all this bullshit about how it wouldn't be worth it because I'd have to take out a whole wall to fix it yada yeah yeah which is just nonsense

and you know regardless of how difficult it might be you have to provide hot water that's your fucking job yeah that's your job um quote unquote job um but uh so we just uh we wrote a we wrote a demand letter um which again was pretty we kind of just figuring it out and luckily the landlord lived and had his office just a few blocks away from where i was living at the time so um we just literally showed up with the tenant and like five or six um soon to be ot you organizers I guess we didn't really have a name quite yet then. And we tried to deliver it. He unfortunately was not home, so nothing really happened.

Except for the fact that his neighbor took a bunch of pictures of us and sent them to the landlord. And the landlord began texting the tenant, cussing him out, like, what the fuck are you doing, bring all these random people that are replaced, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the tenant sent him a picture of the demand letter. And then all of a sudden the hot water was turned back on the next morning. out it was just a gasket that needed to be replaced the entire time. So that took a whole

five minutes to do. It was not taking out a wall. So that was kind of our first victory. And I think we kind of just used that as a launching off point, you know, even though we didn't like directly engage with this landlord. You know, it showed us that confronting our class enemies works and can get results. And so we kind of just publicized that story. to show that direct organizing is more effective than just repeatedly complaining to your landlord for months on end. And yeah, they kind of just sort of started taking off from there. I guess the only other thing I'd add is after that, you know, since we obviously had no real social media platform to speak of, we just spent a lot of time basically doing cold calls.

Like we would pick landlords that we knew were just, you know, notorious for being slum lords. and we would just try to find as many of their buildings as we could and just knock on their doors. And almost inevitably, you'd find somebody with a problem that wanted to do something. We kind of just started picking off those little victories like that, I guess, and would publicize those stories to show that this does work. And slowly and surely, we had people reaching out to us

to try to help them with their landlord issues and stuff. Nice. Jade? Yeah. So I joined, I think a kind of a few months after the story, said mentioned, I was in DSA at the time, still I'm in DSA, but we don't have a kind of local chapter here. So I was looking for something to do on the left when I moved to Omaha. I'd been organizing in Lincoln for a few years, trying out some different sort of tenant things, but nothing

really sticking as far as organizational wise. But yeah, I mean, I think throughout sort of like end of 2018, early 2019, we were figuring out like what it meant to be an organization, like what that sort of would look like, and doing a lot of that sort of like case work, solidarity work with individual tenants and experimenting with like what it would look like to do larger sort of collective actions. So we expanded some of those like initial, you know, one tenant having a grievance to like, could we get a few people to sign under this? And those were sort of the beginnings of our like move into a more like collective approach to tenants fighting back, inspired, I think, along the time by a lot of other tenant organizers across the country trying to

use those same tactics. And that I think brought us to like 2020, this moment where I feel like everybody briefly got into tenor organizing or the idea of it, right? We had this sort of like rent strike idea that I think very much swept into the national consciousness. And well, like obviously a national rent strike didn't happen. I think the vestiges of most of the tenant organizations that we see today came out of that moment. So I just wanted to kind of connect those things.

Briefly, what was it about 2020 that gave rise to? Was it just the COVID situation, the political environment more broadly, people being in homes the housing crisis in the sense of like home prices hasn't quite happened yet that we're living in today i don't know yeah that's a really good question i feel like we have not really sat down to think through the actual sort of like because i would love to sequence it out and see like if we could detect a sort of trend of things there very much was like a you know like kind of i remember we like did some media first of april we actually had an event like a car parade uh first of april or was the i think first of may first of may first of man yeah sort of drawing attention

mentioned the fact that people couldn't pay their rent if they'd been unemployed and had started already burned through their savings. So I think that was a lot of it. There was, the other piece of it was that, like, for a very brief period of time, tenants had legitimate protections against landlords in a way that they have now lost again. And with sort of local, yeah, moratoriums on evictions were the biggest one. Right, right. And that gave people a ton of room to organize that they do not have now in most places. Yeah, it's always kind of fascinating to look back over the political terrain, even of the last. five to ten years and things do get memory hold so quick there's like these these immense moments

of blossoming that then close again and we just kind of move on um you know climate change is a different as another example because i remember i think it was that summer maybe there was the next one where there was those pictures of the red sky with the ups truck and you know the fires everywhere and there's a lot of momentum building up about climate i think at some point climate was even like in the top one to two issues of the american people for a brief moment because of the of those stark images and then you know the climate sort of changes you go into winter and things kind of died down and we do kind of forget these little so many of them happen these little sparks and I think those sparks are inevitably leading somewhere and we're not quite there yet and we'll see

but I forgot of yeah I sort of memory hold the entire eviction moratorium situation but even just giving tenants a little bit of leverage like that you know can can spark further action in a way that just the total deprivation of 2024 seems to, you know, hinder in certain ways. One thing I would just like say on that quickly, though, is even though that, you know, was a concession from the state, I guess two things. First of all, that was a very paper thin one. Always. It was not particularly well enforced or made known to people in any sort of systematic fashion. Because, I mean, a lot of our organizers spent a great deal of time down at the courthouse,

simply passing out the moratorium to people because if you didn't have it on you can probably explain that better than I can but my understanding is like if you don't if you didn't have that going into it and declared it they could just go ahead and evict you anyway I mean this is generally how the courts work here in Nebraska is that like judges are not in any way on tenants side and so far as like they don't even make tenants aware of any defense that they could possibly use in court and like tenants are not really able to represent themselves And there's very few lawyers that are representing tenants. There is some decent work done by like volunteers in at least Douglas County and in Lancaster County and Lincoln through this tenant assistant project where there's people kind of giving their time, sort of pro bono volunteering.

But that's largely been for like there's income requirements where most of the stuff they're doing. And generally they're just trying to buy people time to make a deal with the landlord either to like catch up on their rent or to move out a few months later. the fact, you know, sort of the same result at the end of the day. Yeah, absolutely. And I think I do remember after the eviction moratorium officially ended or whatever, there was this whole wave of backlash from the landlords charging back rent when it ended. Like, you know, now you owe me for those months now and the moratorium is over. And I remember even during the time, I had a close friend that got COVID, got fired,

couldn't make rent, got evicted. And I remember, you know, fully masking up, going over, helping him move his stuff out of this house during eviction and i even asked rev left listeners at the time to help him find a place he's going to be homeless and so i totally you know understand the the huge holes even in ostensibly um you know nice program like that for as long as it lasted but yeah and i mean this is oversimplifying the sort of result of it but um the main way that like landlords were made whole was through these like um stimuli i don't know what the proper like people were given money to pay their back rent to sort of rental assistance was given to the states and the states then sort of

dispersed them in these very messy fashions but effectively that was just paying off landlords like it was a huge transfer of money back to the landlords it was never anything to like help tenants in the long run well and not only that a bunch of landlords straight up won't accept it which like makes like no financial sense obviously but there's there's some sort of psychology there obviously like I mean they're so obsessed with just like enforcing um just their dominance over people that they won't even accept money from elsewhere on like your behalf and that I mean that's exceedingly common I mean we've had a ton of tenants reach out about that unfortunately there's you know just the way that we operate we don't have a ton of great ways to address those but it's a super common problem yeah all right well that leads actually into this next question which is about you know how things have changed since then and one of the big ways that have change and this is happening in some ways across the quote unquote west or the imperial core but definitely in the united states and north america more broadly is this untenable

you know crisis in the cost of housing and it puts anybody in a bad position it obliterates the ability for people to buy a home which for many americans is the only way that they could reliably build wealth over the span of their lifetime um and obviously it also dictates rent costs And I've seen my rent go up. I've seen everybody that I've known rent go up. In some places, rent has doubled, tripled. How has that hit this local area? And what is that done to, I mean, for your organization, but more broadly for tenants in general.

How has it impacted them? Yeah. I mean, so the biggest sort of anecdotal thing we've seen is it's very much changed how tenants in Omaha respond to poor conditions. I think like the sort of early days of 2018, 2018. tenants who, like, had a stable job and a little bit of money saved up, if they were having issues in their apartment, they would move because you could find a place that was similar, you know, part of town or maybe a nicer part of town, rent would be about the same, maybe a little bit more, maybe it'd be a nicer place. That no longer really seems to be a viable option for

most tenants. So it's been, I think, in some ways, sort of nice for organizing because we've seen a lot more tenants wanting to stay and fight here in Omaha and fight to sort of, you know, make their conditions better. And we've also, I think, seen, again, I don't know, but like, I think the sort of consolidation of housing by, like, private capital has led to a lot more, like, neglect in, like, quote, nicer tenants, uh, tendency. Um, like, so we're getting a lot more tenants, I think, reaching out, not just from, like, the sort of cheapest slumlords in the city, but also from these sort of, like, corporate landlords who, uh, have just been completely neglectful of, like, the actual job of being a landlord, you know, quote, or job again, but, like, uh, not making repairs at all. all, like, you know, having maintenance guy, maybe they're once a week or if ever, you know, cutting costs wherever they can, basically. Yeah, and I think that, too, goes a long ways towards, like, reminding some, like, you know,

relatively better off workers, you know, who may sort of be in that, like, middle range, but, you know, they're not, like, destitute or reminding where their place in society is. because your landlord doesn't give a shit. Like if, you know, you went to college and, you know, you might have a cubicle job or something. Like, they're increasingly, you know, not even keeping up appearances there. And I think that also drives kind of, you know, like Jade said, we're not just operating within, like, you drive past a building and it's clearly a slum type of thing. I think whereas, like, our very early organizing, that's quite literally how we did it because that's how we found. cases. You know, it is coming from places where you wouldn't necessarily expect, you know,

that like, for lack of a better term, I guess, in like the popular imagination, kind of like middle class, lower middle class. And so I think, you know, I'm hopeful that would kind of get some of those people to see what side they should really be on. Because there's obviously a lot of, a lot of those types can be very aspirational bourgeoisie people that, you know, don't see themselves like the others because they have some degree of extra privilege compared to what you would like, you know, typically think of as being like a very like poor working class person. But in addition to that, I think the other way in which the landscape has changed a bit too is just I mean last time we were on like gentrification Omaha was already a huge problem but that's all that's just accelerated and the developers have really like consolidated their gains there and kind of what you're seeing is more and more so many of the awful like housing um that we see is being pushed farther and farther west in the city or is like I guess for listeners like um you know west Omaha is generally considered

you know, the sort of the suburbs, not quite, but you know, a little bit more affluent than, like, the eastern part of the city. And that's certainly been the case historically. Definitely. But now, you know, because of gentrification, we're seeing, you know, these neighborhood revitalization projects and stuff that these developers come in and produce this, you know, like nice housing that's insanely unaffordable and not that nice. but what that results in is more lower income workers being pushed farther west like the number of just like awful places like west of a hundredth street is pretty crazy and I feel like that's grown significantly because I don't know that like for the first couple years there I mean I'm sure it was a thing to some degree then but I can't think of a time where we were really like organizing anywhere west of like I don't know if it's 72nd Street, basically. And it seems like it's become more systematically pushed west as they bring higher income people more into the city center, displacing lower income people.

Now there's like kind of a reversal of that like suburbanization process. That's pretty interesting. I was going to say really quick, that does speak to my understanding, born and raised here, you know, 35 years in Omaha. was always growing up west Omaha yeah even like my stepdad would talk about west of 72nd and east of 72nd as two distinct sort of

types of Omaha's and you know on the on the east of 70 second you have north Omaha traditionally the black community this is a very still sort of de facto segregated society city and then east Omaha is like you know the downtown area and that's obviously sort of urban and it has all those sort of you know

features and in south Omaha's traditionally like sort of poor European immigrants a lot of like you know Polish, you know, Eastern European type, a culture. And then now it's obviously like, you know, Mexican and Latino and South American immigration for over my lifetime. You know, that's where I grew up in South Omaha. But I have seen the deterioration creeping westward where, yeah, like even neighborhoods in Millard, for example, Miller used to be sort of a solidly middle class place. And you can see neighborhood after neighborhood being run down as the overall downward pressure

on everyone has continued. everybody is being pushed down and down and down and so it is very interesting to see to see that impact that sort of idea of west omaha which has really changed in our lifetime and really over the last 10 15 years especially and then to jade's point about private equity you know their whole job is to come in and cut cost to increase profits and so they buy up all these single family homes as part of these investment packages and portfolios they they are not they're not wanting to do be the job of a corporate landlord they do that but in everything that they do everything that they buy their whole modus operandi is to cut cost by any means to to to bolster profits by any means and so

that's going to come at the cost of tenants and you know there's very little you can do or you feel like you can do in the face of that and they've even had internal memos released where these private equity companies talk very openly and explicitly about america becoming a country of renters there's no longer a tradition of owning your home and so we got to corner this market we have to dominate this and there's even already been big big landlord price fixing schemes that have been uncovered where these huge corporate landlords come together to fix to fix rents and keep them artificially high again to generate profit and brutally exploit renters so that's it that's a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to the skyrocketing home cost and if there is anything like a solution

it's going to come at the total dismantling of private equities hand in the housing market. Yeah, and that's, I think, an important point to point out to, like, tenants and tenant organizers is that, like, your landlords are highly organized. Like, I mean, the rent cartel thing that you mentioned, they're in lockstep with one another. Obviously, there's competing interests to a degree, as there always is in capitalism. But they have, you know, their areas of intense organization, even here in Ombuds. Omaha, you know, we have the Mopoa, it's metropolitan Omaha property owners associations. They're a little, like, landowners club.

Yeah, we've been in there a couple times where I try to, like, red bait us and stuff, but, like, they can't red date you if you're, like, already deep hate yourself. Yeah, but, uh, yeah, so I mean, I, I mean, that's a, and I think that's a good point to always try to drive home to people to, um, when we're attempting to organize them. because I think a lot of people still have in their heads that, you know, even when they are renting from a corporate landlord, that this is, whether that's just expressed in like the office manager, they see it as like a singular, like, sort of issue that's between them and like this one person who either, you know, is stumbling their way along or does really suck. But, you know, these can be resolved through just like individual, I guess, struggle. and, you know, if it's not, I'll just leave and go shop around elsewhere, which, like Jade Point, I was becoming increasingly difficult to do. But I think it's just really important to point out how class-conscious landlords are and how organized they are, and that the only way to really combat that and have any effective means of changing things and tipping the balance of power is for tenants to also be highly organized

because they're operating on a level that's several steps ahead of where the people they're renting to are. Yeah, and I want to talk a second about what that organization looks like. So we recently got like a season assist from a landlord lawyer about a meeting that we were having at a site. And so we sort of just were looking into this guy. And he spoke at the most recent Mopoa meeting right before he had sent us this letter. And then we're like looking through their upcoming events. And they've got a fundraiser going on last month at the Tackle 88, like the Nazi gun. range here. I don't know.

That's a whole thing. Yeah. The owners are also like really plugged into the Bolsonaro regime, ironically, which is another great evidence. These people are like the capitalist classes organized across international borders. You know, like, we laugh at that. But I mean, that's only a small and relatively, I mean, benign, like in the grand scheme of things, example of just how these people are organized every which way possible.

So this is global fashion thing. So the fundraiser, though, was just really quickly, was for the police union, I believe. So they're, you know, hand-in-hand knowing who their friends are. Absolutely. Yeah, and that's called Tactical 88. If you Google it, I'm sure things will come up. Their history of reactionary politics and their weird anti-Islam speakers come in, they train the local police. There's even that kerfuffle, if you will, about the 88 on the name.

Like, what does that represent? and, like, just the iconography of the place, I don't know, definitely worth looking in... A lot of eagles. Yeah, exactly. My most reactionary family member is a member of Tactical 88, so... There you go. A distant uncle. So, look it up.

But, yeah, another thing just really quickly that we were talking about a little bit is back in the day when you used to be able to move, you had some leverage and, like, if this was so shitty, I could just go somewhere else. And with the rise of housing costs, sometimes, as is the case with me and my family, we're grand. grandfathered in to a better rent rate, but it's also a locking you in because, you know, I'm in a situation where my landlord is just like one, it's an old man and his wife, and they're decent people and they just have a couple properties, whatever. It's like, you know, out of all the possible scenarios, it's not a terrible one. But, you know, if he turned one way or the other or just stopped doing it or whatever got older and less capable of coming over and fixing things, we would be really fucking screwed

because the attempt to move anywhere would almost immediately mean a three, $300, $500, $800 increase in our rent. And so you totally lack that leverage. And when you lack that leverage, you're much more exploitable. And don't fool yourself to think that the landlords don't consciously know that. But the next question I have is sort of zooming out. What role does tenant organizing play in the broader revolutionary movement in the U.S. today? Obviously, you're both communists.

And so this is not merely something you do locally, but you have vision of a whole different. you know society we all do um so if you could talk about that and why it's an important and relevant sphere of struggle because some of the most in my opinion some of them the more advanced organizational formations in the united states right now are you know disproportionately focusing on on an issue like this on tenant organizing so yeah do you have any thoughts about the role that it plays within the broader movement um could i just provide a couple practical examples and then Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, I guess, first of all, I mean, you know, organizing against landlords has always been very appealing to me because I'm a malice. So there's grandfathered in as far as hating landlords. But no, I joke. But no, I, you know, I see it as a, like, a site of struggle that hasn't been co-opted by, like, institutionalized or, like, yellow unions for the most part. so it is a space in which

we have a lot of room to operate because people simply here in Omaha aren't doing it and you know and that goes I guess for America more broadly for the most part there's not like you know you don't have like teamsters of tenants basically so I think it provides revolutionary organizers

a way to engage in class struggle pretty unencumbered compared to like trying to go into a workplace or in, you know, maybe trying to reform a union or whatever. There's a lot more, and, you know, we can speak to, like, the practicality or worthwhile that later maybe. But regardless, that does mean that is more of an uphill battle, no matter, like, what side of the debate on that you take. So I think, like, the tenant landlord's struggle provides us with a really unique circumstance in which there's nothing

really going on there. And by just showing people that if they fight, they can win is really powerful. And it gives us a lot of great opportunities to do that and show people that class struggle works. And really, like, draw a dividing line of, like, who are your friends and who are your enemies. Because, you know, like I mentioned earlier, like, I think a lot of tenants at first do kind of just view landlords as sort of this, like, benign person that they just, kind of give money to and they're expected to hold up their end of the bargain and then of course

that doesn't that that doesn't always happen and increasingly doesn't happen um and so i think it provides a lot of great opportunities to show people um just how exploitative this relationship is um and you see that in landlord's reaction and once tenants start getting organized too like it becomes very clear that they are not like your buddy or like this nice guy that um you know just makes repairs for you every once in a while. Like when push comes to shove, they will shove. And so I think, you know, that broadly speaking to, I think it's easy to sort of expand on that because I think I'm probably just recycling what I said on a previous episode.

But like, you know, the tenant landlord relationship is just like a very like barefaced capitalist one. Like you're giving somebody money to just do nothing like for you. to exist in a space. And I think when you kind of put it in those like bare bones terms, that's, that becomes very obvious to people. And I think it provides opportunities to hopefully expand on that to, you know, other areas of our lives, such as our workplace.

But I think even just simply the process of engaging in class struggle, you know, daring to struggle and daring to win is something that can be transformative for people, both for organizers and for the tenants involved. and that, you know, preps them to be more willing to fight in other areas as well. So I think in that sense, it has a lot of utility there. But I think, like, also, you know, just a couple practical ways, you know, here in Omaha.

Like, for example, a few of us do, like, a little Marxist study group each Saturday. And one of the lead tenants who originally reached out to us, and we'll get a bit more into this later, I'm sure, about Fontenelle Hills building, which we eventually establish as Nebraska's first tenants union. You know, they're now coming to Marx's study group. Another building that we unionized recently, one of the tenant captains. There's just came to her first one this morning as well.

Amazing. And granted, you know, those people already had, like, communist sympathies. But just with the way that, like, society is set up, It's so easy to just be completely atomized and not even be aware that you're not the only person like you in a given area. Or if you are, the only way that you sort of metabolize that is through the alienation of being on the computer. Yeah. And so you can have the outlet, the cathartic release of going into forums and seeing other people bitching, but there's no, nothing can actually happen. And I think that's ideologically, it serves obviously the interest of the status quo because it sort of gives you that cathartic release as if you're in it with other people.

but fundamentally keeps you just at your computer not doing anything locally. And so, you know, you get the cathartic release without any of the actual threat to power. Yeah, exactly. And so I think it, you know, it can serve as an opportunity to, you know, consolidate forces and bring people and who maybe have similar political sympathies, but don't know what to do with it. So I think it's great in that way. And then also, you know, like I mentioned earlier,

I just think there's a ton of different ways that you can. can connect the tenant's struggle to various other issues. And one thing we're working on now is, like, we're collaborating with Nebraskaans for Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace to do a study group of, um, of, uh, a strategy for the liberation of Palestine by the PFLP. Um, and, you know, it seems like, you know, on the surface, none of these orgs, you know, they're pretty specific orgs, right?

But, um, those, those type of relationships, whether that, whether that be like a colonial one or a landlord one or, you know, any, any sort of exploitative class relationship, they share that fundamental thing in common. And I think there's a lot of interesting ways you can relate the tenant's struggle back to a lot of these issues. And so that's one of like practical example where we're really trying to like bring other orgs together and try to identify areas of solidarity to hopefully grow a more powerful anti-imperialist movement more broadly that goes beyond just like the direct tenant organizing stuff and that's not unique to tenant organizing to be clear you know obviously

any types of orgs can do that but I think that's just like one of the opportunities that it's afforded us and I really look forward to seeing where those things go absolutely great yeah no I agree with all of that I have to add in the like proletarian disorganization piece people should read our moment, proletarian disorganation as the problem of our time if they want to know more about what I mean by that term,

but very simply like the vast majority of people in the United States are not organized in any sort of meaningful way, not organized even into like churches or Boy Scout troops.

Like the level organization in civil society has even decreased within my lifetime. And if we would like to have revolution someday, we need to give people a place to become revolutionaries

and to live out a politics that directly challenges capital. And there is no way that at least I've in the tenant areas I've been doing to like bring people together in a way that does not bring them in conflict with their class enemies. Like there's no third way of, you know, we're going to get our city council to give us rights. That's not, you know, our city council is made up of entirely

landlords. Yeah. They, you know, we'll go on the news every year and say, oh, we got to really do something about these horrible conditions. And nothing has happened. And probably nothing will happen until we have a organized tenant movement that is demanding and has the power to make those demands and not be able to refuse them. And, like, even while we're connecting with tenants, like, in the organizing we're doing, we find that there are, like, pockets of organization and, like, community, right? Like, the working class builds for self-defense. But those pockets are disconnected until we, like, create the structure to connect them through the tenant union.

And, like, generally, we find that, like, most people, what I said a second ago, like, most people not being organized matches up very closely with what we've seen. So, like, there might be a random union member in a, you know, like, building that we're organizing, but they don't think of themselves as, like, being able to use their union to improve their conditions at home. And I think vice versa, we hope that the opposite happens too, right? Like, people start to organize with their neighbors, and they realize that they've now been given a method to fight back against exploitation. They can bring that method into the workplace or whatever other place they're facing oppression. Yeah, absolutely.

I think just really quickly going off what you said up, I just think just a couple, like, brief examples of seeing, like, those small, like, progress and consciousness happen is, like, me and Jade, both at a tenant mass meeting a couple of nights ago. And there's one guy that brought up, well, can we bring, can we get our city council person involved? Like, could we bring them to one of these meetings and use their clout for us? Yeah. And he's an old Navy guy. He's cool.

You know, he obviously has like some very clear like class hangups and both like how politics is like to be conducted. Naive but understandable. Right. And, you know, we kind of. like pushed back on that but then you know another tenant uh you know immediately started like going and they're all bought and paid for like uh you know and she was really killing it and you know we kind of patiently explained to him like hey you know that might be like a interesting pressure point

just to like make other people's lives harder to make this work but you know bringing them in here would be a potential liability because of how like closely related they are to the landlords and provide a couple examples of that. And, you know, it's not like he walked out of there with a Red Guard's uniform on, but, like, you know, you could see, like, like, he's like, okay. You could just, like, see, like, there's, like, a greater level of understanding.

He didn't, like, push back. And, like, it was clear that he could understand why inviting a city council member to a union meeting might not be, like, the best idea. Right. So I think that's cool. And, like, to Jade's point, too, about, like, you know, just people becoming more organized

and stuff, and also just, like, you know, creating community, because half the battle is honestly doing that because most people don't talk to their neighbors at all, which is crazy. But there is, like, one lady there that volunteered to be a tenant captain for the union, but she mentioned, like, I'm worried about knocking on my neighbor's doors because they're all kind of just not nice people and blah, blah, blah. And then another lady raised her hand. It turns out she was in the exact same building.

It was her neighbor. but she also volunteered to be a tenant captain and so like they immediately like you know got to talk to each other a little bit and it was like oh you know like break down some of those walls yeah and you know even just in like those small little ways like I'm not gonna like suggest

that we transformed people too much right then and there but like you know like I think even just like breaking down one's preconceived notions about who they're living next to and now they're going to be working very closely together organizing their union with one another um i think that goes a long ways to towards combating like the disorganization problem and stuff yeah then the neighbor thing is is sad like i have i have neighbors that you know and like the ones right next to me i've done things for them

that you know has built a sort of relationship over the years um you know watching their house when they go out of town or vice versa or clearing you know trees fall down or one of my neighbors are they're sort of like disabled and their dog got out so you know i help them go You know, spent like an hour running around the neighborhood, getting their dog for them. And those sort of build nice relationships. But there's others that you can just feel that like total alienation that I've lived next to you, you know, for years. And I don't, I never barely even see your face. There's new couple.

They're about our same age. You know, me and my wife's same age. They have kids about our same age. It's like a perfect opportunity to at least try to make some connection. And no matter if I'm driving by or he's driving by and I'm in my driveway or I'm walking past his house, like on one of my little walks or something. I'm always trying to catch his eye to wave and just, you know, and he just will go out of his way to look away, to make sure that he is,

pretends like he doesn't see me, you know, to keep, and I was like, I don't know if maybe it's like a personality thing where he's just more introverted and shy. Am I an intimidating guy? I don't think so. And so, but it just kind of breaks my heart. It's like, we have every reason to at least have a human connection. And I don't understand that lack of human connection. And historically, it would be anathema to live in the same community

the same neighborhood, two houses away from another human being and another family for years on end and not even know their names. And I think that's just like a speaks to the broader or alienation of modern society. But I did want to make a couple points. Jade made a great point about civic associations and how those have deteriorated over time, how they're essential. I mean, in all communist societies that have been successful, there has been this expansion into the civil realm where there are these free-floating organizations. And even in the U.S. post-World War II, you had things. things like, I remember my grandma was in the Lions Club. That's a callback.

My dad was in that. It's weird and it's not political by any means. But it's just like regular people coming together to do something routinely. Union culture played that role for a lot of people and still I think does. You know, there's that big union station, fire union station off 72nd Street here in Omaha. And I've had family and friends that have been in unions and they hold these community events there all the time. And it's like a wonderful little thing that you could. that you could have community and you foster that solidarity.

And so wherever those exists, you got to keep, you know, perpetuating them. And I think a tenant union is obviously getting neighbors together, struggling for a common goal is one way that you can kind of, you know, revive that element of society, which is essential for functioning democracy, which, of course, we also don't have. Another stat that came up recently that I saw is the average U.S. renter pays $330,000 in rent before purchasing their first home on average and now you know many people never end up purchasing their first home so that number goes up your whole life you spend a million dollars on housing that you have no equity in and it's just like the raw injustice of that is just so clearly obvious you've

literally paid for it with your labor your time and your money over decades and decades and you don't own a fucking square inch of that place and you know it's just absolutely um grotesque but Yeah, I mean, homeowners also benefit from one of the rights that very few tenants have, which is they effectively have rank control for 30 years, right? Like a mortgage is just rent control. You build some equity as well, but you are guaranteed that this is what you're going to pay. Maybe your taxes go up a little bit, right? But, like, you are safe from the sort of pressures of the market for the most part.

It's a good point. Yeah, like locked in mortgage rates. Yeah. And then, yeah, so that's, even that's like, even that's becoming increasingly predatory, too. is like the capitalist class needs to rope people into being able to buy homes with, you know, with the interest rate situation that we're in. Like, because I saw like rocket mortgage as it was going to, they had a program where you can put as little as 1% down, which is just so insane and like very predatory.

Like, and you're just setting yourself up for a horrible crisis. They're not being charitable by offering you 1%. No, no, that is not, yeah. That's the doorway to get fucked. Yeah. All right, well, you mentioned the Fontenelle Hills thing, and that's a relatively recent development. So that would never have been brought up on previous O.T.U. episodes, and that's also expanding your reach into Bellevue, which is, you know, one of these orbiting minor cities, but it's all part of the bigger metro, of course. So with that in mind, can you talk about that? And also, what have been some of the biggest accomplishments or successes of O.T.U. thus far.

Yeah. I guess we can just kind of start in with the timeline of that. where we are. Yeah, so a tenant at Fontenelle Hills reached out to us about a ton of problems that they're having with the landlord, just, you know, the place is just in disarray, just not being maintained. And these are cool places that they would be if, you know, the landlord put in least bit of effort. The company is called Elevate.

They're actually based in Minnesota, but they own a bunch of properties here and elsewhere throughout the Midwest. Just to be clear, Fontenelle Hills is just a big apartment. complex. Yeah, about 300 units. Okay, it's 31 buildings. And that elevate is the corporate landlord? Yes, yeah.

So they reached out and we kind of just started by canvassing a few of the buildings. I think we started with like four or five. But very quickly from that, we were able to get a sense of the main issues going on. I mean, just kind of everything under us on, you know, the landlord not. not really having a repair system in place at all, you know, they're now, the tennis were told they had to, like, call this hotline to submit repairs now,

but then it's kind of just, like, this endless, like, call forwarding thing until you can finally leave a message that never goes answered. So there's, like, no longer, like, a formal, like, ticket submission thing, or there is, but they kind of just get completed, and then you get told you got to, completed without anything actually being done,

and then you get told you got to, like, call this number that goes to nowhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. there's also the issue of elevate would when it's time to renew your lease like you know they'd send you your lease documents and whatnot you sign it send it back they don't sign and send it back and so you automatically get transferred to a month to month lease which is obviously more money is I don't know how much more I want to say like $100 a month more probably yeah and so tennis are obviously not paying that because they're under the assumption that oh they're going to get back to me and And it's like, it's whatever. They keep paying their regular rate. But then they start getting charged late fees for not paying the increased rent, all because Elevate didn't countersign the fucking lease.

Straight up crimes. And the issue eviction notices based on that, too. Oh, my God. So there's all that type of really egregious stuff. And then, I mean, just general, like, community well-being stuff. You know, the parking law is very poorly maintained. It's just, like, incredibly pothole-ridden and not good on your car to be driving through. things like advertised amenities like the pool is never functioning even though that's like

one of their big like selling points um yeah pretty much that's just a small spattering of it i think like by the time we put the demand letter together there's like 16 different demands on there um but in any case um we uh once we kind of like had identified those main problems we put together a draft letter and I got to say also too like the the two lead tenants on that that originally reached out to us like just did an incredible job of hitting the ground running and we're like really natural as it being willing to like put their necks out there and talk to their neighbors it was really impressive to see you know just how much energy um they put into that so anyway we kind of just brought around that demand letter um and started collecting signatures

for it for like the next month we were able to hit I think almost every one of the those 31 buildings. It took a lot of time and a lot of people power. But we were eventually able to gather about 150 signatures. So over 50%, because I'd say there's probably like, I know Jade said there's like a 300, 300 units there. Probably only 70 to 80% of those are occupied. So, um, we always try to hit about half, about majorities before moving forward with like a collective action like that. Yeah. So we, uh, we just called a tenant meeting. Um, and we honestly weren't, at least, least I wasn't planning on like putting to a vote to like unionize right then there I think that the

way that I had it and at least my head and I think this probably goes for everybody is we're just going to come up with a plan to deliver the demand letter and then you know hope that that like struggle for those demands would come out with a union on the other end um until like elevate decided to actually do something for once that a cease and desist letter jade mentioned earlier They, their lawyer sent us, this was effectively a cease and desist, saying we couldn't hold meetings there. You're not allowed to come on their property. Didn't flyer. No flyers.

Yeah. So it's like, what, like, so do you think, like, tenants don't have a right to, like, assembly and free speech? Or, like, are they not allowed to invite people over? Because it's not, yeah. It's not like, it's, like, 50 OTAU people coming over to, like, hang out with 10 tenants, you know? Like, there's probably five, five or six of us there to about three dozen. tenants once we did have the meeting, but anyway, so since they were kind of going on the offensive there, we talked to the, like, lead tenants, and we decided we got to do the same and

just, like, put the union question point blank. And so we showed up to the tenants meeting. We're expecting the landlords or some of their representatives to try to stop us on some fashion, even, like, mildly, but they just didn't show up at all. So we went over, everything and let me just kind of put the question to him like do you guys want to form a union and overwhelmingly voted in favor and so that then represents Nebraska's first ever tenants union as far as we as far as we know anyway I'm sure there's been attempts and yeah wherever there have been tenants there have been tenants fighting back but and sort of historical record from you know the finds that's the case so it's not only a big win for your organization historically and for the metro city of

Omaha. It's a historic accomplishment. And it was really propelled forward quickly by the tenants themselves, not forced by OTU, right? You were going in there with smaller ideas and the tenants are like, let's go harder in the sense of let's form a union right away. I mean, I think that was definitely our idea at some point. I mean, we certainly saw as an opportunity to form a tenants even, but I don't think we saw it coming that quickly. Yeah, I think we were going to float the idea, just sort of bring it up into the, I don't know, consciousness. And I think we were going to ask people to sign them to be part of like an organizing committee, which is most of the, what we know they're doing anyways. And that sort of happens through, we mentioned a few

times, but like tenant captains. So people within a building that are taking a little bit more responsibility to regularly come out to sort of like monthly or sort of whatever it looks like tenant meetings and then be in touch with their neighbors about what we sort of decided on, like let them know if there's going to be a mobilization, things like that. So building out some more of the structure of the union through those tenant captains. That's awesome. So there's this process where you understand there's issues somebody reaches out to you maybe even one person at first you canvass you go

around you take notes of major issues that are recurring issues that multiple tenants have just make a big ass list of it you get a eventually you want to get a you don't need to but it's best to try to get a majority of the tenants on board with something moving forward with something

so that you have that numerical leverage against the property owners you have a tenant meeting eventually you create a demand list sort of synthesizing all these various concerns that tenants have or these needs that are not being met and then eventually that even led to the formation of a union itself and this whole time this this corporate landlord is trying to scare you with their big money and their lawyers and a cease and desist they don't they don't know enough about you to know that you can navigate those things

that you're not going to be spooked away from doing this they're sort of naive about how advanced an organization like OTU is with their understanding of how these things work, but just the idea of this absentee corporate landlord that doesn't solve any problems, doesn't even return letters or calls or take up tickets, but automatically wants to dictate. Tenants aren't allowed to invite you onto the property. They're not allowed to freely associate anymore. They're to come home from work and go immediately into their house.

It's like it's so fucking absurd. Probably the first time they had like communicated with tenants. and it's in a timely manner in... Yeah, like that fire under their ass. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that it was like us having an advanced analysis or however you sort of phrase it. But I think, like, anybody who's trying to do this thing, if you receive that sort of

like pushback from the landlord, even it's kind of minor, like, keep it in mind and like, inoculate tends against it, but like you can't give up on the first sort of like sign of retaliation from the landlord because that, one, it shows landlords that, like, that is a tactic that works, that they can send a scary letter and that the problems that they're having will go away. And, like, two, it, like, shows to tenants that you're not very serious about the commitment you have to them. And, like, when we're going around, part of the reason that we go for majorities is that's what we tell tenants. We say that we're going to have a majority of tenants before we send this in to reduce the chances that you're retaliated against.

We're not putting people out there on Ireland ever. That's great. That's so important. And that's the most common question, obviously, is, like, will we be retaliated against? And I think, you know, anecdotally, at least, kind of what I always tell tenants, like, In my time with O'TU, tenants are almost always being retaliated against, like, far more prior to reaching out to O'TU precisely because the landlord thinks this is one person that, you know,

if I can't just simply ignore them, then I can bully and intimidate them into shutting up. And then, like, their tune will change pretty rapidly once they see, like, O2 is involved, at least on, like, you know, that individual level. But, you know, that's only compounded by when you're coming together with, your fellow tenants to form a union because at the end of the day they still have to make money and not to say that like landlords are necessarily afraid of doing mass evictions because they will do that from time to time but um i mean in elevate circumstances it's clear they have financial problems and i don't think they could afford to just boot all 150 people that signed that petition um and so you know you automatically create a much greater degree of protection for yourself and neighbors through that alone, I think. And yeah, and it also, I mean, I think it also keeps people more safe to, because the landlord can't, it's hard for them to, like, rapidly identify who are the, like, quote-unquote instigators amongst the tenants, like, who's, like, because they have no way to know who the tenant captains are. They have no connections to these people.

Really, yeah. So they kind of just gets lost of a sea of names. And so it's like, who do you retaliate against that? And it's like if you're going to, then you're just creating a really bad narrative for yourself, which I'll tell you right now, OTU will exploit. Absolutely. And yeah, so there's the power in numbers thing rings pretty true, I think, in that situation. I love the strategy, you know, the strategic thinking on your part. You're like, you know, if you just open up a weakness, we'll exploit it. But also like understanding, elevate to the extent that you could say they have certain fiscal issues.

That's a weak point. They can't necessarily, you know, afford to lose half their tenants in this property without big problems coming their way. And so we're going to exploit that. And it's clear that they don't understand you. Oh, we'll spook these guys with just a little cease and desist letter from an official lawyer. There's no comprehension of where you're coming from, of the ideology, of your history. But I'm sure part of the information gathering process is understanding who this landlord is,

what their history is, you know, what their weak points are, how many other properties they own. And so just having that knowledge advantage, I think, is really interesting. And sending a really quick, like, sending a letter like that, I mean, is already just a show of weakness because, I mean, it shows just how, like, deeply cynical these people are. Like, you have such a low level of regard, like, not only for OTA you, like, just like, whatever. They can think whatever they want about us. But, like, you really think, like, all of your tenants think they're not allowed to, like, get together on a basketball court. Like, that they don't have rights to invite people over.

to, like, simply, like, gathering groups of more than two people and talk to one another. Like, that's, like, that's, like, the level of respect that your average landlord has for a tenant's mind. And it's, I laugh, but, I mean, it's so, it's so fucking disrespectful. Um, it's pretty insane, but I mean, it shows how scared they are, too, by these things. I mean, I don't think you're doing a good organizing, I would go so far to say, like, if you're not receiving some level of retaliation, then, And you're not really hitting the right pressure points. Like I mean, I think like any sort of effective organizing is going to necessarily have a reaction to some degree. And that's just a show of their own weakness and a sign that like what we're doing works and is a real threat to the way that they go about their business.

They're totally unprepared for it. You know, when you were talking earlier about this horrible loop of like trying to send to. through an issue and then nobody ever receiving it and getting the call run around and then leaving a message that never gets responded to it's like the the worst horrors of basic you know customer service loops that you get stuck in when you need to follow up on a bill or you know reach somebody to for about a problem and these companies purposefully and consciously put you into a never-ending loop with hopes that you'll eventually just give the fuck up that applied to landlordism you know that applied to like your housing situation is just so fucking dystopian

and it is criminal and it's disgusting that that shit is even allowed at all and you know in a functioning society God forbid a socialist society the state would impose these things and it would never really get to this problem

but in a situation where you have just the state on the side of landlords and bosses and property owners in their interest fundamentally yeah let these guys run wild and do whatever the fuck they want and then the regular people have to come together and fight back

from the bottom up you know with little to know structural top-down help yeah and I think that's particularly true in Omaha and Jade can probably expand on this more because I'm cribbing a lot from him actually but like I think like

you know Omaha really lets landlords just do whatever the hell they want I mean the city's completely bought and sold it to developers because there's Omaha really doesn't have like at least in the eyes of the people that run it doesn't have an identity

and that's largely due to you know, a lot of our manufacturing has gone. We're highly, like, service and, like, financial-based town. But I think, I think, you know, in, like, city council's mind, if we just, like, give things up to developers, let them, like, throw up those, like, shitty, like, art deco or whatever the hell, like, postmodern-looking gentrifier buildings. Not even our deco, that'll be nice.

Yeah, that'll get us to, that'll, like, turn us into a modern city because we don't feel like a big city, but we want to be like them. And if we just let them do that, you know, no real, like, actual crafting this town into a place that has its own identity or like, you know, meaningful expression of who we are. But like, by just tearing things down and then building up the most like plastic, boring looking, gentrifying households that you can and just letting landlords do whatever, like that will form, that'll like give us meaning and, uh, I don't know, some, it will be more like the big guys. It's this soulless corporate non-vision.

Yeah. You know, non-community, non-vision, non-sense of place or spirit or anything, just a full capitulation to capital as such as the only meaningful thing that you can turn to if you want to build anything and just letting them run rampant with it. And it fucking sucks, you know? Yeah, and I generally, I think they're very afraid to limit the power of landlords in any fashion. They're, so a few years back, we got involved in a struggle around tax increment financing for a particular landlord, De Palino, rest in peace. He died on a plane crash. Horrible slumlord. He would actually have a show where he bragged about how much of a slum word he was. I think there's some episodes still on YouTube of the Super. Yeah. And so we sort of use the leverage there of him having to beg the city for money to, you know, build some new property.

And just sort of made the point, like, this guy is not doing his very basic job of being a landlord, even in the eyes of, like, I don't know, the sort of like liberal-pricing folks. and use that vote to kind of hold his development plans hostage and the city council actually ended up voting it down and as part of this started to look into more like how can we hold landlords more accountable and the route they took was through creating a landlord registry in this sort of model they'd said like oh this is what kansas city is doing in minneapolis a few years back right we're sort of just copying from the other big midwestern cities but they've never enforced the

registry. There's like a small fee you have to pay if you don't want to register and most landlords just choose to do that instead. Well, and like let's be clear too. Like even if like the registry is fully up and functioning, it's a complete non-solution. And I've gotten into these arguments and the O2 Facebook comments with liberals constantly. Because like, you know, the argument is that well, if people can see that a landlord is really bad, they won't rent from them. Right. Like for landlords? Yeah. Then they'll, then they'll rent somewhere else. and the landlord will be forced to improve their housing, otherwise they'll go out of business.

Which is like, you know, this insane, like, yeah, exactly. Like, free market fetishism, bullshit. And it's, like, also completely ignoring all the, like, structural issues as to why people have to rent from substandard places to begin with. It's not for, like, lack of information. Exactly. But that's what they really think that that is, like, some grand step forward and holding landlords accountable.

And of course, you know, that's only on the basis of individual choice, individual consumption habits. And that's, I mean, that speaks more broadly just like how our country views change in general. But it's just a, it's completely absurd to me that people think that that's, uh, at all progress. Um, and again, just you have to be so out of touch and just, I don't even know the words. for it. Like, you really just have to have zero grasp on, like, working class reality whatsoever to think that, like, it's this informed consumer choice. And if only we had more information, you know, it's very, like, techno. It's like, so I almost say it's a laissez-faire and, like,

technocratic. Absolutely. Like, uh, that that will be, like, the, the method of social change somehow. And that's the farthest they're willing to go. Yeah. And I guess the other method that, like, is sort of, in theory, the city uses to hold language account of his code enforcement. and I don't know how much we're doing it. But like, just really briefly, like, there are certain habitability requirements that cities uphold and there are code inspectors. But you can just read through, landlords are allowed to appeal a lot of those. And so you can read the minutes of, like, where they make those appeals and just see how freely, like, the board in charge of enforcement, I was like, oh, we'll give you another six months to fix this, you know, horrible conditions that your tenant is dealing with and is brought to our attention. Yeah.

Yeah, it just shows the exploitative nature of the relationship, the embeddedness of power and well, into structures of ostensible democracy, which clearly doesn't exist, and then how devoid liberalism is of any solutions to anything. Yeah. You know, like the idea that you're going to use the free market to fix the problems of the free market. What is this Reagan era 80s or Clintonian 90s nonsense? It's insane. And I think one last thing really quickly, Jade mentioned the, like,

tax increment financing thing. I think, like, just, like, one more illustration of just how little the city gives a shit about anything. To be clear, like, that is the first time a tax increment financing application. has been denied since the program was instituted in, I believe, the late 80s. Yeah, it's kind of being popular across the country around that time. The idea of it just really quickly is that there are parts of downtowns in particular, like cities in particular that can be deemed blighted.

And I couldn't tell exactly the sort of definition of it, but it's expanded really broadly. So I believe almost all of like downtown Omaha has blighted, like little stretches of into north and south Omaha and then sort of west from there are blighted. and they encourage development in there by essentially letting you pay your taxes later and like paying and then also helping pay for like a sewer and street and other sort of city improvements to encourage this kind of element in these areas that are blighted so so you take the the taxes that the developer would need to pay and you reduce them or stretch them out over a longer period to finance your taxes kind of and then you also subsidize certain aspects of it as well from yeah those are separate things but they work in concert almost always yeah so typically it's for like just outright gentrifiers um in this circumstance like in the reason we latched on to it because normally we don't involve ourselves for all the reasons outlined above and others um in you know city politics as such at all um but dave pallidino applying there like this is just a notorious slum lord who everybody in the city

hates and you know for for him to be trying to get uh tax increment financing dollars is wild because all of his apartments would, I think you could probably fit those under the definition of blighted pretty damn easily. So, like, it's just, like, a, it's just laughable that somebody who's, like, so cartoonishly evil of a slum lord would be going after such a thing. So, like, that's why he thought is important to step up

and, like, build a campaign around that. And we were able to get it successfully shut down. And that's largely all due to, I mean, his tenants, both current and former, that were brave enough to stand up and speak out. You know, some of which, like I said, we're current tenants who absolutely were facing serious chances of being retaliated against and possibly evicted for speaking out.

And it was only through, like, being able to mobilize his tenants in that way that we were able to get that stopped. Had that, you know, had we not done that, it would have kind of just been another, like, flip in Omaha's history. but instead we were able to pump the brakes on something that's never, never been stopped before. Yeah, and I think tactically we don't really ever think of the organizing we're doing as something that's trying to change the way that, like, politics, capital P politics operates. But I think there are times where there are like contradictions within, again, like capital P politics that tenant unions should be open to being involved in.

Not as a like, this is our strategy, we're going to get better conditions, but as a like, this is a place where we can fight. So this next question is twofold. You can answer either or. What have been some of the biggest obstacles or challenges you've faced in years of tenant organizing? And what are some of the worst stories or situations that you've come across in all your organizing? I guess just like speaking to like the immediate situation, you know, I think it's one of the biggest challenges is just keeping people engaged even after you. have that tenants union because I think you know you know we got the union and and actually we failed to mention we can probably talk a little bit more about we've been able to establish two more in elevate since Fontaine Hill's but um I'll circle back to that in a second but um you know I think

um there's a large problem of like people are so non-profit pill that they think things just kind of like an organization like ours is the same that they've always encountered and that it will kind of just happen and when it doesn't like happen right away then kind of just like fall off in engagement a little bit when you know the key is to have like tenants and in particular like the tenant captains who are like you know the bread and butter of the union to be highly engaged in doing the day to day stuff and so I think that can be a big challenge you know people kind of get wrapped up in a storm of excitement in the moment and you know have like high hopes and then they kind of like fall off when what because they don't realize

this is like a protracted process right and I think that's something we've definitely like learned from and you know even as recently as our most recent mass meeting a couple nights ago I think we've done a lot better job of like trying to set expectations of like what's needed for this to go well and like emphasizing that like just us sending this demand letter isn't going to get the job done we have to be like really willing to fight for that of course we always have emphasized that, but I think still people kind of just, I don't know, I think it's easy to get like complacent and not really, I don't know, view it as like a service as opposed to like, I am organizing and I'm organizing this with this group. Yeah, I think this is a hard thing

for us as like external organizers to, or in particular like volunteer ones who maybe can give five or ten hours a week. Like, it's difficult for us to know, when to like say okay we've canvassed a hundred times like let us come and you know let us finish off that building for you versus sort of making the hard ask of like okay you need to go and chat with these people because otherwise we're not going to be able to get these signatures like like finding the balance between when to make the hard ask and uh you know develop people and um when to just sort of i guess step in um yeah yeah i can see that definitely being a thing it's it's also kind of a human thing um of yeah getting more excited about the initial thing

even if it's like in your own personal life, like I'm going to start working out on January 1st and then it sort of fizzles out. You've got to have that. I guess you were saying one way you can try to hedge against that is to front load these conversations. Like this is a protracted process. This is going to require some, you know,

initiative on your part and some work on your part. And I assume having some good tenant captains goes a really long way in keeping that momentum going. Yeah, and I think to, you know, like I think the blessing and the curse, like when we were talking about earlier, like as housing conditions deteriorate more and more, you know, there are more slightly better off tenants getting involved. And I think, I think at times too, that can be a problem in a way, because, you know, those people maybe don't have as much to lose as their, as some of their other

fellow tenants. But it's oftentimes those people who, like, will immediately, like, You know, I want to do something, but then it's not as like life or death to them, if that makes sense. And that's not, I'm not trying to, like, be overly negative or, like, shit on those people whatsoever. But I think it is just kind of, you know, objectively speaking. They're maybe a bit more secure than what we, than the type of people that we traditionally think of occupying, like, quote unquote, slums. And so they don't have as much invested interest because it is more easier for the, them to simply move and you know never mind like the trappings of their class consciousness as well but you know even though they are heavily exploited and they are workers they do have

this added degree of labor aristocracy one might say um attendant aristocracy yeah and so i think that uh can also create challenges too but um yeah and i i guess one interesting one that we had, for example, with, like, Fontenelle Hills, there was a, there's a brief moment where a guy that lived there reached out to us, um, and was talking about how I'm a, I'm really involved in my union, like, I, you know, handled negotiations. I was like, oh, cool, like, come to the next meeting, whatever. Well, it turned out that the union he was referring to was the fraternal order of police. So we were like, so we just like didn't really respond right away. and we eventually told him no

after we talked to the rest of the tenant captains and most of the tenant captains were in agreeance I think about half were just outright like I don't want this to happen and then another quarter were like I can see this sort of concerns and I don't have anything here either way then unfortunately there were there was one person who like really took great offense to that

and they had been one of the main organizers from the jump, apparently their parents are involved in real estate is what it turned out. They went back home for a weekend and they started like, as soon as they came back, they were spinning all these yarns

about how we could be sued for discrimination and shit, which we can know we can't. You discriminate against the cops? Yeah, you can't. That's not how it works. Go to jail for 10 years. But I guess I'd, so, but I mean, it was like kind of and so they left because they felt like, you know, if I'm going to be a part of something,

I want it to be for the right reasons and I can't stand for discrimination against anybody which like, you know, blow my brains out. But like, I guess like, but that wasn't unless, you know, it sucks to like see that happen, even though if I think it's like that person is obviously objectively incorrect and that's fucked up. And of course they went on to try to like spew bullshit about O2 and they tried to forcibly allow the cop into like the like social media group that we actually. created for tenants and stuff.

So, I mean, but nonetheless, you know, it is very disheartening to see, like, somebody who was initially, like, seemingly really on board, all of a sudden, like, just really crash out over, like, this cop question and go on, like, a spree of just, like, I mean, frankly, union busting and, like,

you know, wrecking behavior, yeah. And you worry about that spreading. Unfortunately, it didn't. You know, nobody else, like, left, over that but I think I say all that I think because it does show that there are a lot of class dynamics

in these places that like even though there might be some like shitty apartments with a lot of problems just because of how deep the housing crisis is you do get a lot of people that maybe come from slightly more privileged backgrounds and are living here due to circumstance or maybe they

come from like a weird ideological background and that's all a very like uneven territory to navigate you know there's no, like, tenant consciousness, I guess, like, collectively speaking as of yet. So you have to deal with, like, a variety of different, like, class backgrounds and class consciousness that can provide, like, serious challenges. Because, I mean, like, what if that, what if that person had gone around to, like, every single tenant?

It wasn't just, like, making, like, shitty posts on Facebook that we could delete really quickly, but, like, was, like, really going around trying to, like, slander things, you know? That would be, that would be, like, a problem. And I was frankly really fucking worried about that. And unfortunately, it didn't get to that. But those are just, that's just, like, one example of how there's a lot of different stuff at play that really creates a lot of interesting situations. And I think navigating that is a really big challenge, too. Yeah, I think that speaks, too, to, like, what I was talking earlier with, like, the problem of people not having experience being in an organization.

just to like I don't know given to build on this like if Omaha Times United makes a decision we've had this debate in a general meeting we've made a decision I'm on the losing side of the vote I'm going to go with that decision right like we're I'd say we operate in the democratic sensuous fashion in that sense on the sense people use it misuse the term but like and I think that most organizations should operate that way right like if you've made it you've got a question in front of you you've made a decision even if you don't agree with that decision you have to go along with that that's part of being in an organization having like responsibility and discipline to each other, given that there's, like, true democratic debate. And that's sort of what happened here, right? Like, we had this discussion about this situation. The majority of people felt like it was going to make us less safe. It was going to drive people away. And this single person disagreed with that decision and decided to go and then act poorly. Yeah, yeah. And I should also throw in there that the cop in question, before we even told him he couldn't join, proceeded to like go on a spree of not only blowing up our phone, but blowing up like women and them organizers phones that they knew were in the union and stuff at like midnight like making all these crazy

calls leaving long voicemails like which should have been all the confirmation that you need that like maybe like even if you set the cop question aside for a sec which you really can't like you would hope like in this like wreckers eyes they would see well this is definitely an unstable fucking person who should not is making the place unsafe whether or not they're a cop and you would think that would be the end of it, but there's just way too many ideological commitments there. Because I remember me and you discussed that at our sand volleyball league

about the cop situation, and it's not, it's not an inherently impossible thing. Like, there could be a situation where you have a bunch of tenants. One of them happens to be a cop, but he is humbly just like I do have these situations in my housing. You know, maybe I have

a young child, and the guy doesn't come over and fix my heating unit. Like, I could humbly submit myself to this broader organization, and process. I don't need to put myself at the head of anything. I just want to, I want to help everybody here. Like there's a, you can imagine a scenario in which, okay, and then you bring it to the people and the tenants are like, that's totally fine. I know the guy, you know, Gary down the thing, he helped me with my groceries once, or he's a nice guy, let him in. That's totally fine. You could imagine it, but yeah, just his personality where he immediately just is entitled

to it, doesn't get it, starts fucking up other, you know, blowing people's phones up, acting like a freak intimidating people basically by that unhinged behavior and it's like yeah well that's the exact reason we don't want to fucking cop in our organization well i think to be clear like even if like a cop like came like you know like said had in their hand like i get white people right be uncomfortable totally totally but just like let me know if there's anything i can do to help yeah it's still like never allow them like membership right well definitely not no to you i guess like for a local that's there's only so much we can say about that that's kind of local decision I think the other thing I tell people is like you have to know who can organize who right

and if there's someone that is like okay I'm fine with letting this person know what's going on second hand like they can come out to the I don't know I mean I was like thinking this soon as like what if we had a protest like who's going to come and you know respond to that protest it's probably like the police department interesting yeah we know that our police department here has interorganizational agreements with every surrounding police departments right even if he's a cop down in sarpie county or whatever like there's no reason to think that he wouldn't be undo that day against our action that we'd plan to you know there's deep deep real concerns for yes absolutely um one thing that comes out organizationally is like with this tenant organizing

you mentioned democratic centralism but also almost a de facto there's the there's the application of the mass line as well i don't think you could do tenant organizing without the mass line like what would that even look like right i mean obviously the mass line is a crucial to all forms of effective organizing um but particularly here it's not even like you have to implement it as some ideological conscious imposition on the organization is like that's how you tenant organize you go to the tenants you see their problems you collect them you synthesize their complaints you bring it back to them you have them vote on the demand list and you move forward collectively so I just once again you know even in the in the context of tenant organizing

these two crucial aspects of socialist organizing continue to pop up as superior and necessary forms of it yeah and oh sorry um to kind of connect This isn't, like, the cleanest transition here, but I was thinking that was earlier with your question about, like, I don't know, issues we're facing and whatever. The, and then you sort of gave the example of folks that are connected to the left purely through being, like, online or whatever. I think the quickest way to change that is to think through, like, how can I start to organize my own neighbors? And, like, I think one of the things that has changed in the last six months that we're doing a much better job of is, like, bringing in members to the organization who are joining because they want to do that activity, right? Like, they want to organize their neighbors, and they have a plan in place already to start doing that. And they need our support to do it, right?

Like, we have some expertise that we've picked up over the years of, like, here's some strategies and tactics you can use to, like, fight the landlord and to be more effective in, like, talking to people and running meetings. But they're wanting to go and run with this thing of, like, being more connected. And if you're, like, listening to this and you want to, like, know, what should I do first? Like, find out if there's a 10 union area.

But if there's not, like, you can start doing this. Yes. You can start to connect with their neighbors. You can start to figure out the problems they have. And you can start to fight back. The barrier to entry for tenant organizing is pretty fucking low. Yeah. Yeah, which really costs us printing paper, basically.

That's awesome. Now, the other part of that question we didn't quite get to was just like a horror stories about certain terrible conditions. We mentioned that Dino guy, the Saladino guy, whatever the fuck his name is, I forget it, as a particularly exploitative landlord, slum lord. But what are some of the worst conditions you've come across over your years at OTU? Or any story that jumps to your mind? I reject the question a little bit.

You know, that people want to, like, hear, you know, some sort of visceral thing. Like, it's people live in, like, people are forced to live in ways that are not just by all sorts of landlords. Like, with, and I think are just very just very dismissive of, like, how bad some things can be. Like, living with bugs, for example, like this, you know, the sort of psychological effect that that can have and like the insecurity it can create like mold is a really big one that we run into all the time where you know there's just like slow water leaks and i think it's invisible a lot of times right like and by the point where we're seeing these horrible pictures of like black mold and coming out of someone's ceiling in their bathroom right like the other side of that wall looks horrible um i uh yeah i mean i i imagine in any city you can go through the archives of your local channel three or whatever and they will have a photo gallery of horrible conditions that someone is dealing with. But you see bugs come up a lot and mold come up a lot, I assume.

Mold is fucking terrible. And the mold toxicity is absolutely brutal. If you have infants or elderly people or immunocompromised people, mold is, you know, extra disastrous. And it is so ubiquitous in so many different places, it's hidden. People go for years with certain conditions,

deepening neurological issues, and they can't figure it out. They bounce around doctor to doctor, and the whole fucking time it was mold on the inside of their walls and their home

turning your home the one place of safety for you and your family into its singular threat against the safety of your family it's terrible yeah and I think like I do want to be clear

too like you know things don't have to be like to that level of bad to begin organizing either like we don't seek out the worst possible places

that we can find in order in order to organize in them. The key thing is, is that, I mean, as we said before, like, you're in a fundamentally exploitative relationship here. Like, you know, landlords just profiteer off people endlessly for doing nothing. And so, like, even if it's not to the point where, like, black mold is all in the walls and there's roaches everywhere and stuff, there's almost inevitably at just about any building, something that can be organized around

and something that can like bring people together more in order to in order to get organized and fight back against their landlord and try to make concessions and show that like you know this is not just going to be like a one way out like relationship where we just send things but that like we're trying to balance this the scales and I think like you know Fontenelle Hills

there's a shit ton of mold problems there too, I guess I should have mentioned. But, you know, there, like I said, it's a pretty, it's a cool place. Like, it feels like a camp, like, yeah. It's hilly. It's a beautiful part.

There's deer walking through the, I mean, it's a beautiful part of the area. And I've even looked at it in the past when I was younger as a place I might want to live because it just is a really beautiful little apartment complex in a really nature-oriented area. And had it not been left to deteriorate, it would probably be a phenomenal place

to live. And, you know, it's still not like, I mean, it's not like the ceilings are falling in and stuff, but there's a thousand percent, there's a thousand like concrete ways in which that place can be improved. And that gives us a thousand different ways to organize people around common issues and, you know, participate in class struggle and really begin to build tenant power, which is, you know, our ultimate goal is to build like a citywide tenant senior. And these little locals, there are the seeds of that. And so it's not just about trying to solely go to, like, the worst conditions possible, but finding places that provide good organizing opportunities.

Yeah, and we've talked a lot about, like, the sort of negative vision of tenor-raising, right? Like, we have to fight the landlord. But we also, I think, very much have a positive vision. And that is that, like, one, we don't need landlords. We can bring people together to begin to take care of each other, to begin to look out for each other and to be able to run our own lives and there's no reason that like that you know beautiful place and the hills can't be turned into like you know not to take a stance on like top a tenant opportunity and purchase and like work co-ops and things like that we don't need to jump and all that

but like that we really do not need landlords people don't need someone to do the sort of basic job of well in this case ignoring their maintenance requests and cashing the checks but generally speaking of you know holding people a ransom every single month we are able to run our own lives and the mechanism that we will be able to do that, I think it won't necessarily look like the tenant union structure, but I think that that carries a lot of the answers for what it might look like. Just like the boss needs workers, but workers don't necessarily need the boss. Landlords need tenants. Tenets don't necessarily need a landlord. And our vision for the future of a democratically egalitarian cooperative society,

where there are no exploiters, no rulers, nobody benefiting off the poverty or immiseration, of another is a world without these relationships at all. And so part of the process of getting there is to struggle on behalf of the side of these relationships that are the exploited against the exploiters, always with that broader vision of a dignified society with these sort of relationships, these social relations of exploitation and domination don't exist. And I really actually do appreciate Jade earlier. You said you sort of reject the question of these visceral horror stories because what

we're talking about is not necessarily. the headline-grabbing horror stories of look at how terrible this situation is, but just the baseline dignity of having a safe, clean home and a prompt response to issues when they arise. That is what should be focused on and should be the baseline. And the horror stories are certainly out there and they're everywhere, unfortunately. But just literally, just the dignity of having a safe and clean home is what we're fighting for here. Yeah, and a response of, If you're going to be a landlord, if that's your position, you're going to make your income off of that, do your fucking half of the bargain when you need to. At least do that, you know, before we move to a world where you don't exist.

Yeah. And I think, you know, to Jade's point about, you know, having a positive program of, like, what social housing could look like earlier. I think going back to, like, the challenges part, I think that's actually, like, the biggest challenge. Like, I mean, we can talk about a million different, like, micro challenges in any given or. organizing campaign that we do. I think the biggest challenge is how do we connect this to a broader political struggle and avoid just simply being economists and, you know, just only getting like small, short-term gains for people, which, you know, is positive. And again, like, I think that is useful because it shows people that class struggle can work to change your material

conditions. But I think ultimately, like, as communists, if we view this as a part of a broader revolutionary project, we do got to think about, well, how do we form this into like a real, like, political movement? That's really, like, demanding more. And those are tough questions

to answer. I mean, my answer would be, and Jade probably disagree with me, is that we need a revolutionary party in order to do that. But, you know, in our, like, Marxist study group right now, which, as I mentioned before, a couple of the tents we've been organized and been coming to, we're reading

JMP's politics in and the taxonomy of Economism, who I know he's come on to talk about that book before. And so we are trying to be even more serious about, like, working through those problems. You know, market side group isn't, like, necessarily an O2 thing, even though a lot of O2 people

are involved. But, you know, I think we're trying to take seriously that question of, like, how do we go from just, like, getting these wins, which are great, again. Like, I'm not trying to, like, denigrate or minimize those at all because I think they're extremely important but how do we at some point

take that a step further you know we got we got three tenant unions right now um hopefully knock on wood two more on the way um so like at what point does that you know we can make every like tenant union in the city like but at what point is like does that become not enough like how do we cross that threshold into like this is like a serious like political force demanding like fundamental transformations on how society works and like at the end of the day that like that to me is the ultimate goal but that is that is a hard that is a very hard threshold to cross and so but it's something you know I take very seriously and that's why we're trying to actively study those questions but I think that is fundamentally the biggest challenges how do we

keep this from just being like an ends to itself although it may be a very positive ends don't get me wrong it's not it's not stopping capitalism it's not it's not stopping our planet from uh you know being completely fucking microwaved so it's like how do we use this to advance the class struggle more broadly um we don't quite have the answers to that yet but i think that's absolutely critical And I, you know, and I think, like I said earlier, starting to, like, collaborate with other organizations more, like, doing anti-imperialist work and tying these, like, specific struggles together. I think that's, like, a step in that direction. But, you know, that's still a very small step. So I think that's, like, the biggest, like, long-term challenge to me, too.

Incredibly important. I'm just really quick. I am pro-party, just for the record, here. I think we have some different ideas of how to maybe arrive at that position and yeah in the long term, not even in the medium term. No, you're totally fine.

This is maybe overly simplistic, but I think we have a chance to live out communism through the organizing that we do. And like, when we talk about like basic democratic rights, like the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly we were talking about earlier, we did that. Like, the right of tenants to have

conversations with their neighbors was directly challenged by the landlord in this organizing context and we said that that's not the case this is something they're allowed to do um and if we want to like take the sort of um like step by step thing that like in order to uh have like a communist revolution you to have full democratic rights and those are things we can agree to disagree or whatever on that specifically but those are i think that is necessary i think it is necessary to have those basic things to build a vote to live in a legitimate democracy um and we can do that in small places in very small places and then expand this. I think the vision of socialism and communism has to be tied to that radical vision

of expanding democracy. And there are, you know, short-term issues you have to deal with, and we all know these arguments about, you know, and being attacked externally and even internally by the forces of reaction, and that distorts things. But we should never fetishize the fact that certain democratic rights have not been able to be able to be stabilized over the long-term or expanded. We should see that as an unfortunate reaction. action to certain events, but always keep in mind that, yes, I mean, a communist society is a deeply egalitarian democratic society where people have control over their own motherfucking lives. And if that is not a part of your vision of communism, then genuinely we're not interested,

you know? So, no, I think that's, that's fucking crucial to it. And I always keep that vision in my head because I believe in human dignity. I believe that human beings are capable of governing themselves in the right context are capable of controlling their own fucking lives and that is part and parcel of real radical democracy. The democracy we hear about that this system is always

pretending to defend is always a false democracy. It's a mirage of a democracy and we want the real damn thing. Yeah, I mean I can think a few things that are more affirming to your dignity than be able to look your boss or your landlord in the eyes and say like fuck off. Exactly. This is something, you know, you can't take this from us.

And in the long run, nothing more affirming of your dignity to stand shoulder to shoulder with other human beings as equals to work toward a higher quality of life for everybody without any hierarchies of power and domination and exploitation at all. That's the ultimate vision. All right, well, let's go ahead and move then towards the end of this conversation, which is for those listening out there, what advice would you give for those who might want to start their own tenant organization,

maybe from scratch or maybe they're just beginning, what sort of general baseline advice would you all? offer. I think that you should find, you should try to find five people that would like to do it with you. That's the very first thing of it. If you can't get people in the room for a project, you know, that we can, I guess we could give you some advice on how to do that, actually, sort of thing.

Yeah, but let's jump into that, actually, because we, I think we didn't go into this in our sort of history of OTO thing, but we were in a phase for a while, about a year where there was not many active meetings going on, and we faced that same question of, like, how we rebuild this organization and bring people into this project and we just started holding like a reading group actually and invited people we knew and started to do again like kind of smaller scale like single tenant kind of cases maybe trying to bring four or five neighbors together around a thing while this kind of reading was going on and we were just kind of studying the contemporary tenant movement I think we read a few other like I don't know theory pieces along

with it kind of mixing and matching stuff but more just to have like a reason to get together once month and talk about this project that we were trying to do. And those turned into monthly meetings and the sort of where the organization is at today. But yeah, get people together, start talking about tenant organizing, just politics in general, and figure out what are places that you can start to make an intervention in small ways and connect yourself to the, like, existing tenant movement. And you might, like, not think that there's an existing tenant movement if there's not an organization that's, like, representing tenants that considers themselves leftist.

but in every single place there are tenants there are tenants that are fighting back in some fashion or being exploited and not having the tools and sort of mechanisms with which to fight back. So yeah, I think connect yourself to that. I think like we sort of mentioned this earlier but like as we've been building we've been finding that there are a lot of people that are already ideologically

committed in some fashion or project that are not connected to it and we're finding them and we're bringing them into organization and making Omaha Tenants United a place where people who want to do this thing who want to stand up against their landlords can find support in that project rather than going out of it alone and I think no matter where you're at there are people that want to do that yeah as far as sorry I'll circumvent the advice thing really quick just like build on what Jade said really quick because I want to mention earlier I think it's been really

interesting too to see how many like tenants come to us after like running up against a wall of like trying to do things the right way like people obviously try to submit maintenance requests, then they may get so far as to call the city inspector, only to find out, well, the city inspector doesn't do anything other than condemn buildings if they're that bad. And then thirdly, people will try to find lawyers. And I can't tell you the amount of people that have reached out to us after they've found that they cannot get a lawyer to represent them because all the lawyers represent landlords. And they literally won't. I mean, And like Jets that, there certainly are landlords, there are lawyers in town that, like, will, but they're very few and far away.

It's really difficult to, like, make money as a lawyer representing tenants because there's very few, at least here in Nebraska, ways for tenants like bill landlords for their, like, sort of, like, there's just a few aspects of the law that allow them to both get money for the tenants in some fashion, like if they've been wronged and make money for themselves to actually do the pay their own bills. It's far more profitable if you're, if you know anything about the tenant landlord. law to represent landlords. Absolutely. Sorry, that was an aside. You can chop that out if you want. But I guess my advice, though, is just try to push back and see what happens, because especially like when you're first starting out with what was largely small private landlords,

which I think is another interesting trend. It seems like we're coming up more and more against corporate landlords on our regular basis compared to at the beginning, I recall, it was largely individual landlords, you know, running their particular company. But anyway, I say that to, like, like, when you push back, you'll be shocked at, like, how many landlords, particularly those individual ones, are just, like, scared shitless and will fold immediately just because they don't want it going any farther than that. And I think that's maybe, you know, I think that's one missed opportunity that we

had in the early days when we were largely pursuing like individual things just to show that this like method worked was that maybe we could have tried to bring those around into more collective struggles sooner because it's very clear like in multiple instances where like landlords would just as soon as OTO got involved would just like kind of capitulate immediately and I think that that showed a definite sign of weakness and so I think that's probably one criticism that I'd have of ourselves back then as we maybe didn't recognize that that was a point. a weakness and that they are so scared that it would turn into a bigger thing that they were willing to just like give up that quickly that we could have you know maybe took in some of those opportunities

to build larger collective struggles but all that to be said i guess is that like um landlords aren't used to being confronted in a collective manner whether that's an individual with an organization behind them or multiple tenants coming together to form a union they are simply nobody puts their foot down with them. Usually people throw their hands up in the air and get exhaustics. Like I said, they try every option that you're supposed to use and find none of them work and they kind of just give up. But when like people don't give up and when you like really push them when you get them off of their home turf, which is you know, basically in the courts and just kind of individual relations, when you're

taking collective action, whatever form that might happen, they they're very put off balance quickly. Yeah, they don't expect it. And they don't expect it. And like, I think you'd be surprised just how quickly you can find success organizing around these issues. And it may seem difficult, but it's really pretty simple. And you just got to dare to struggle and do it to win.

Yeah, I think one of the ways that we presented, like the work we're doing is like we're trying to build structures through which people can do communism and that's like a really nice way to put what we're doing another way to put what we're doing is that we are taking the existing legal rights that tenants have and we're actually trying to enforce them and we're trying to help tenants enforce them because the almost all of these sort of like organizing we're doing the demands we make are actually just asking landlords to follow the law and we're trying to enforce that following of the law outside of the courts through direct action and through tenant struggle but very rarely are we asking for things that go beyond

the legal rights that tenants are already granted. And I think that is probably where I would start is like, you know, to a certain extent, like figuring out what some of those basic rights are in ways that you can take action and whatever sort of method works best to, like, fight them. If we had better laws for like tenants and tenants were able to represent themselves, we might actually use the courts as a site of struggle. It just doesn't work. Like there's no reason for us to waste our time doing that.

If that's a situation you have, though, where you have a history of tenant's struggle and, like, that's something that's possible. like you should use whatever battlefield you can. And also, on the other token, don't be afraid to go above and beyond what's in those laws. Because, I mean, frankly, we operate in a highly gray legal area. I mean, any landlord could just, like, tell us to fuck off, basically, and ignore us. And that would be that. I mean, I think there's an implication that we could follow up on the sort of laws that we mentioned in our demand letters in the courts and maybe would be found correct.

We just don't see any reason. Generally, we don't need to. Yeah. But, I mean, also, I mean, we've been able to get stuff that's well beyond what is outlined. Like, I can think of one example. Actually, one guy who found out about O2 through Rev. Left is funny. Reach out, because I mean, his wife were having a bunch of problems with their AC being broken for months on end. I mean, it was like, there was like 80 plus degrees in there on a day-to-day basis. They had to move their daughter back to her baby daddy's.

because she was having heat exhaustion symptoms. They bought, like, a bunch of cooling units and stuff to try to, like, make it, you know, livable. And that, you know, was just pouring money down the drain, basically. They had these crazy elevated electrical bills and stuff. And we were able to, we sent out the demand letter in demand that the landlord sit down with us to discuss these problems. Once again, the problem was nowhere near as complicated as, landlord made it seem that we were able to get the AC fix the next day and not only that but um and

the tenants did a lot of meticulous work on this because I'm not a math person so I would have been able to do this but they were they calculated roughly like what they were paying above and beyond what they would have if they were had a if they had a functioning AC because the thing is still running the whole time obviously it's just not pumping out cool air um and we're they asked like can we ask for us money is like we can sure as fuck try and uh we we squabbled over the details a bit with the landlord but eventually we were able to agree on like two thousand dollars and excess electrical fees and they sat and wrote a check right then there and that's not something that's like within the law like landlords don't have to do that by any stretch of the

imagination but i mean i think um you know they're a very skis And B, you know, we have a decent enough platform at this point where we can bring some bad press to landlords too as a threat as well. And so I think you can definitely overshoot your demands. And you should always overshoot because you want to have something to bargain down to. The money back is always going to be more difficult. Landlords aren't going to be willing to do that. But if you're asking for that on top of like the immediate repairs that need to be made, it gives you more negotiating power to be able to, like, get down to just make these fucking repairs to do it at the end of the day.

Yeah, I don't think we've ever told someone like, oh, actually the law doesn't say you get to ask for that. We ask people what's going to make you feel whole, what's going to make you feel like this is a justified situation after you've been wronged, and we sort of give them advice on how that might go. That's a good approach, yeah. What can make you feel whole about the situation? But, yeah, like, you know, even going in the early days of OTAU, getting one person's deposit. closet back, getting one family's repair done quickly impacts a person's life. And that in of itself is a real service to another human being. And you can do that relatively quickly.

And then I assume just some basic knowledge of probably even a small amount of law of your local area about, you know, what are the basic tenants rights here? And if you could just cite to a landlord this specific law, you know, on the books, that in and of itself can be powerful in getting something done or fixed. Like you are required by a lot of do. Like, oh, these people aren't just random people who are upset about something. They've looked into this. And that gives you an air of seriousness that the landlord can't deny.

And we do a lot of creative interpretations. That's a lot to that. Like, I don't know would mess. No landlords are listening to this. Absolutely not. You know, that probably wouldn't hold up in court. Or, you know, they could if the court was doing what is like nominal. supposed to do, but definitely in practice wouldn't. But I think, you know, like you said,

just putting like a well-articulated, asserting it confidently can really shake landlords up and get them to grant some concessions that they might not otherwise. I think it can also change how the law is interpreted by landlords when they're doing their job, you know, doing their sort of landlording things. Like you mentioned earlier, like it's, it is great to give a single person a deposit back or help a single person get their seat back on but we also believe that that has an impact on how landlords operate going forward because of the facts that we were talking about earlier about how network that they are and how much they communicate right them knowing that there is a fighting force that's bringing tenants together is uh affects their actions yes absolutely

absolutely all right my friends well where can listeners find and support omaha tenants united it online. We have a website, omahatnestunited.org. On there, I think you can find like a donate page. That's the easiest way to give in support. Like, some of the small costs we have,

like reserving meeting places, paying for printing, paying for food for tenant meetings, things like that. Most of our, like, actual sort of publication, like write-ups on things we've been doing is on Facebook, so same thing. Omaha Tennis United,

if you Google, it should come up pretty quickly. We have some longer form, or medium form writing on the like organizing we've been doing if you have a tough time I think kind of following like the sort of step by step we laid out like audit through audio we have written up some of that stuff as well cool but we'd love to do more resources for other people and a chance to support even a small amount of money goes a long way because your overhead costs are not very high so if anybody has disposable income and they like what they hear and they want to help this effort donating a reasonable a relatively small amount could really help you know things for a long time So consider that if you're one of those people. Yeah, and we've also gotten a lot from the Autonomous Tennis Union Network. And I think that the member unions there, if you kind of go to their website, we'll have some basic tenant organized resources that, you know,

we haven't put together those resources quite as well for people, like, just go and download a PDF. Like, here's how to kind of do this thing. If you're looking for those, I would just check that out and then find those unions. And then DSA's Housing Justice Commission has done a good job of supporting people and starting new unions as well. Sweet. All right, my friends.

Well, thank you for the work you do locally. and thank you for coming in and sharing that with us today. Keep up the good fight.