Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 316: A House Is Not Always A Home (feat. Louisville Tenants Union)

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

This week we're joined by three members of Louisville Tenants Union—Jessica Bellamy, Josh Poe, and returning guest Haley O'Shaughnessy—to discuss tenant organizing in Louisville; the similarities between what's going on in parts of America and Palestine; the political economy of real estate capital; and how the rent is too damn high, among many other things. Please throw some money their way to help out the fight: https://www.gofundme.com/f/tenant-takeover-2023?utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet-first-launch&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer And you can follow them here: @LouisvilleTenantsUnion on Instagram @LouisvilleTenants on Facebook @LouTenantsUnion on Twitter Finally, you can support our Patreon at: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Welcome Welcome, Trailbilly fans. This week, we are joined by three members of Louisville Tenants Union to discuss, I don't know, a lot of things. Several campaigns y'all are currently working on. Maybe some developments in the louisville area tom also mentioned that maybe someone is going to jail is someone going to jail did i get that information wrong so i i did i didn't know if we were going to tackle that today or not but uh i'm sorry josh wait wait wait i need to i feel like i need to explain why that brought

got brought up josh i'm sorry i did in fact the scheduling yeah okay so that's a that's a wormhole i don't know if we want to go down or not but okay sorry we've already digressed uh we're joined by hayley o'shaughnessy who's been on the show before. We have with us Josh Poe, and we have Jessica Bellamy. So thank you all for joining us, and especially on this Thursday morning. Thanks for having us. Of course. Well, like, maybe just to get started, let's talk a little bit about what you all do.

Like, what are some, you know, what are we seeing happening right now in Louisville? I read an op-ed this morning from Attica Scott about the need for rent controls. I guess I can just say anecdotally, I'm looking a place in lexington and rents are insane everywhere you go it seems like rents are going up but interest rates are going up so like people are simultaneously locked out of home ownership at the same time that rents are skyrocketing it seems to me like a sort of combustible scenario in which something has to give in some way. But I don't know.

No, it's totally stable. It's totally stable. You're overreacting. That's what I thought. I suspected it might be stable. But yeah, tell me a little bit about Louisville. Tell me a little bit about what y'all are facing. Well, I think it's just like you said.

I think when you try to organize against a power structure in this country, you know, like all of our lives are dominated by real estate capital in one way or another. You know, the scenario you just described is literally like a scenario designed by Donald Trump's father. Right. Like that's that's the world as it was meant to be by people like Herbert Hoover and Fred Trump. And so there's an opportunity to build power around that. And so all of our work is really designed to build power against real estate capital and like challenge the control that it has over our lives and particularly around the government apparatuses that subsidize the fuck out of it. And so that's kind of where we we try to target those pain points. If you look at like most of landlordism is subsidized in one form or another. And so we can target that.

You know, we don't have the power in Louisville to take on BlackRock today, but we can target how they get funded. And then I think on a larger scale with the national tenant movement and the homes guarantee campaign, it's really about building a base of people in this country that they're getting, that can challenge the power that real estate capital has. When you look around the state, like a lot of our political organizations are really good at organizing money,

but they're not necessarily good at organizing people. So they get a lot of funding, but they don't have like a solid base and no one's really afraid of them. Right. So what we really try to do is tap into like the anger and the rage that working class people have, and then bring that anger and rage down to bear on power holders. You know, we like to say like, we don't lobby, we bully. And I think, you know, we can get into some more specific campaigns, but that, you know, it's like, if you're going to organize working class people you have to meet their material demands or not they're not going to show up they're not going to keep coming to meetings and so you know we don't we don't really lean into this idea that like working class people need

to be educated out of their predicament like know, everyone hates their landlord and that's a pretty good place to start, you know? And I think we, we kind of, uh, a lot of, you know, a lot of liberalism is really built around this idea of like appealing to people's moral instincts or, uh, education. Uh, and we kind of skip over that. Uh, and so what we really try to do is build like a, as big a base of people as we can around the idea that you know your rent's too high and um let's let's try to challenge that in some way either on like the building level or the city level state level or national level and so we try to just get a group of people together cut a cut a demand and launch a campaign you know based on whatever that is i think my first awareness of y'all was around 2020 shortly after brianna taylor's murder and um i'm curious i think it was maybe some sort of demonstration

that y'all showed up for and i'm curious like because i've always wondered about the dynamics like the housing dynamics in louisville that played a role in allowing LNPD to do that. And I was wondering if maybe y'all can speak to that and how that sort of very national incident sort of galvanized y'all's work going forward. Yeah. Just to like jump in a little bit on that subject. Like, So there is an entire methodology to policing that has to do with place, that has to do with the ability of those who have, those one percenters, the landlords, the property owners, the ruling class, for them to maintain the properties that they manage and be able to continue to make as much money off of that. There's an entire whole discipline is the first word that comes to my mind. That's all place based policing that our city adopted like back in 2019. and the city work together to identify where is development happening that we want to do,

that we want to have gentrification over here. Let's take the cheap properties in this neighborhood, push the people out, flip those homes, you know, so that you can bring in a whole market of affluent, wealthy people and make more, align the pockets of people that are deeply invested in real estate. And so like this methodology, it says, okay, in these areas where we know we want to gentrify, which for in the case of Breonna Taylor was the Russell neighborhood, Elliott Avenue, Elliott Avenue had a couple of houses on it that they wanted to try to like get access to because there's this whole Elliott Avenue development plan. Our city had gotten Yale architects and designers to like reimagine what this street could be.

Of course, without the knowledge of the residents living on that street. And since they know they have all these changes they wanna make, they went in, figured out where are the people that are the hardest to remove and let's come up with a plan to remove them. And that plan, based on the strategies of place-based policing, means taking away anything for that resident that brings comfort, ease, or convenience.

And so for Glover, who was like a person that lived, he rented a house on Elliott Avenue. The landlord was getting pressure from the city to evict him. And they were trying to like say, it's because we think there's substance use in here. We found paraphernalia. And they do this a lot, especially since we have a nuisance ordinance in our city that allows the police to push people out of properties if the police get called to that area. And that and those types of like calls can be about domestic violence. There can be like drug paraphernalia or whatnot found. But these are reasons that like people can get evicted within 72 days in our city under the nuisance ordinance. So targeting Glover, using place-based policing, if you're trying to get rid of anything

that brings him ease, comforts, or convenience, well, he wasn't actually getting his packages delivered to his house. He was actually getting them delivered to a friend's house. It was actually about 10 miles away, and that was Breonna Taylor. And Breonna Taylor, who did not even live on Elliott Avenue, became then a target of police to get rid of the comfort of this person who was living there.

Even though the postmaster had investigated the parcels that were coming to Breonna Taylor's house and said like, oh, yeah, there's nothing suspicious here. It didn't matter. They wanted to eliminate that comfort for Glover. So what they did was they eliminated her. Yeah. Like the fact that we're talking about this right now with what's going on in Gaza, like it is very similar tactics, basically trying to force people out. You are removing a lot of the things around them in an attempt to. I don't know. I don't know. It's basically like how Israel sort of like came out like a week after October 7th and said, like, move south. It's just like first they say and police do this, too.

It's like they sort of try to engineer the circumstances around people to get them to leave. And then when they don't, because of course they won't, because their homes, they've made their homes there then they then resort to yeah violent expulsion uh or liquidation entirely um and uh and so like in that sense it's it's you know is there something else that one of you said earlier i can't remember um that like the city also subsidizes this in more ways than one right like what what did you mean by that? Like, beyond just the policing aspect, like, what do you mean, like, when development is sort of, like, subsidized? Like, what is the city trying to do in that process? So there are a lot of different mechanisms.

One of the biggest mechanisms for subsidies, and we see this all around the country, are the affordable housing trust funds. And, you know, I was someone who, you know, kind of was under the veil of this, like, housing justice ecosystem in, like, 2010 to 2014, where we were fighting to get these affordable housing trust funds. It's like, you need affordable housing, let's set aside some government money to build affordable housing. What ends up happening though, is the affordable housing, you know, mechanism is really just a scam for developers. So what they, what you have in every city, you know, and this is a HUD definition, you know, it's called an area median income, which basically means you take all the incomes in a city, which in Louisville, that's the whole fucking County. Right. And then, you know, you, you base it off the area off the medium of that, of that county or city.

And then you define what affordable housing is. The problem is that most of the affordable housing that gets built in this country is at 80% area median income, which is just slightly below market rate, right? So developers are building something that's essentially market rate and getting heavily subsidized for it. And then when you build that in census tracts or neighborhoods where the median's below 35,000, which is like most urban neighborhoods around the urban cores, like 35,000, 30,000, rents are going up. And so not only is this a scam for developers to profit, it's also a vehicle that's triggering displacement. Jessica can talk a lot more about it. We have a local ordinance that's actually going in front of city council tonight that would totally cut off metro government from funding any project that would lead to displacement.

Jessica can talk a lot more about that. Yes, you and mine. I can jump in if you don't have a follow-up question for Josh. No, go for it. Dope. So I'm from a neighborhood called Smoketown that's in Louisville. It's one of the oldest historically Black neighborhoods in our city. I pretty much grew up at the beginning of my grandmother's dream where she finally had her own restaurant. She was like cleaning houses before she retired from being a school bus driver. And she was finally able to open a restaurant. So I grew up in Smoketown. And Smoketown is a community where the average income is at or below twenty five thousand dollars a year. And this community has been around since the end of the Civil War and has really just had to pull itself together.

Like, you know, like people cooking with each other, you know, no kid goes hungry, you know, like adults working together. It's the it's the first community that I've ever had that I didn't have to seek membership of and I did not have to create myself. And like so in my adult life, I've been so deeply attached to Smoketown, like everyone in my family, mom, uncles, aunts, everybody works at the restaurant or has at different points. And it stayed like really plugged in no matter where folks have lived. And when we hit 2011, that's when our city got a bunch of money to redevelop public housing that's in our neighborhood called Shepherd Square. And that's where my dad grew up. My whole family goes back, like the generations that it goes back in Smoketown for me are quite a few. And so when they did that with all that money coming in, a thing that happens that we learned by observing is that developers follow Hope Six

projects. This is federal dollars coming in to take public housing complexes and to make them mixed income. So there's people getting pushed out and they're trying to bring in new people and some people that definitely have like more money, right? That's the actual intent of the project. And so developers see that as an opportunity. OK, it's come into this area. This area likely has a lot of cheap property that I can flip for high, maximize my profit profits. And if I'm a nonprofit developer, I can likely get access to money, land and staff support to make this happen. And that's exactly what did happen. Just like I told you, the average income at this time was like $25,000 or less for the average person living in Smoketown. By the time we get to 2017, our city is, yes, redeveloping Shepherd Square, but they're also making deals with developers, both for-profit and non-profit,

where land is given away by parcels, like whole chunks of streets and money. And like, if you have code violations and those types of things, many of those things just wash clean off the slate. Don't worry about paying those. We know that you're going to be a good steward of this property, these properties and so forth and so on. 2017, we start getting mass evictions from areas where property was given to developers like on Breckenridge Street. And then by the time you get to that period of time, you have the nonprofit developers flipping houses at $150,000 starting. Then you get to like 2022, you've got for-profit developers flipping houses for over 200K. Then you get to now, where this year there was a house for sale in Smokey that was over $325,000.

What the heck? That ain't for the people living there. And all of those homes that got priced that way, whether they get sold or not, influences the market. Other homes, their values, the property values go up, which increases people's property taxes, making it more expensive to stay there. If you're a homeowner, if you're a renter, your rents are going up. You ain't getting your carpet changed or your blinds changed or any improvements on the property, no upgrades. No. Now you have to pay an extra hundred dollars this year, an extra 200. However much, some people's rent in our neighborhoods has jumped ridiculously to where they were not able to stay and had to move immediately. jumped ridiculously to where they were not able to stay and had to move immediately.

And so by the time we get to like 2019 or so, there's a neighborhood development, a neighborhood planning process that's launched in Smoketown. And the Smoketown Neighborhood Association had been revitalized back in 2015 by myself and a number of other residents. And so like we were very active and paying attention and losing, hemorrhaging many people that we knew in the community like year by year. And so when we get to this planning process, we're like, all right, let's be proactive. How do we make this community something where people can stay and get access to these resources and investments that are coming to this area? Because they obviously ain't for us. We realized in that process that the people that were given the power to make decisions were these nonprofit and for-profit developers

who were on like the advisory board of our plan and who were essentially using our plan as a fundraising mechanism to get more subsidies and lands and support. And so we stopped that mother swinging process, you know, and reclaimed the neighborhood plan. But we realized that's not enough, you know, and reclaim the neighborhood plan. But we realized that's not enough. Whatever plan we could build for, we need resources ourselves. And we got to stop the inflation of the cost of living in our community.

And so we started talking to other residents of other neighborhoods like ours. And man, they were experiencing the same sort of stuff. So we worked together and over the course of two years wrote a policy that then we called the Historically Black Neighborhood Ordinance. But since we expanded it to cover the whole city, because not all the neighborhoods that are vulnerable to displacement

are predominantly black or historically black, we expanded it over the city and renamed it the Anti-Displacement Ordinance and have garnered so much support in our fight because of our organizing skills and how serious we are to get this passed. I can't tell you how different it makes it to have people that are actually impacted by these decisions that our city makes. We're the only people that have the urgency to stop displacement. We're the only people that have the accuracy to know actually

what's happening and where the pain points are. And now we have brought on multiple co-sponsors, multiple ally organizations. We have a base around this campaign that's over 1,500 people at this point, and we have been killing it, you know, pushing forward. We got past committee last week on Halloween day, and now we're about to be in the main arena with the full council tonight. Jessica, you've mentioned, you know, these some of these for profit and nonprofit developers and my very limited experience in this sphere. I used to be on city council down in Wattsburg, Kentucky, and we were doing this renovation of this old hotel, the Daniel Boone Hotel on Main Street in Whitesburg. And we kind of formed this little ad hoc group of stakeholders.

I hate to use words like that, but, you know, that's what we called ourselves. And we kind of had this understanding that nobody expects to get paid off this. Nobody expects to make any money off this. We're going to kind of make the best decisions for what this space is is about to be about and then we actually got in bed with some folks in louisville including one of y'all's former uh city council people i won't mention here and it quickly kind of got away from us it started out as this cool thing where we were kind of soliciting some ideas from like uofl grad students and other other people that i was fine with and it quickly got in the weeds with some of these like consulting firms that uh people were writing these huge grants for to like pay

them to just say like you know how many people like we're going to turn it to a hotel again like how many people could stay there for a night or whatever it was. And, uh, yeah, I quickly learned that there's like, there's no such thing as nobody expects to get paid on these deals. Uh,

could you kind of speak to that a little bit in Louisville? I think it's probably a little bit different and, and our neck of the woods, but like, uh, you know, like some of these, I guess some of the sort of tactics and, and language and verbiage that they use to kind of get stuff over on community members and so forth.

Oh, yeah. I think one of the main tactics of folks that are trying to maintain a stranglehold on our communities is to try to like manufacture community consent. Like you'll see, oh, there's an event happening that the city is doing that has to do with my community. I have to be there. Then you go to that meeting and they put you through a process. They say, no, you can't say anything bad. This is only a positive space.

We only wanna talk about positive things. And they start a process that isn't designed for you to give feedback that is authentic to how you've showed up to this space and what you know needs to happen no it's a process designed to make you say in some way that you want the city to get the private market to gentrify your community in one way or another they do with all these smoke sheens and flesh and then they say the community asked for this. We're only gentrifying Smoketown because Smoketown asked for it. You know, who, you know,

but they put our names on it. But that's why I say it's a major one. Right. Yeah. So it's like one of those deals. Like if five people show up, they take that as tacit consent from everybody in the community. Exactly. You got it.

It's a hallmark of neol you know neoliberalism the public private partnership like the appearance of like public community buy-in that's obviously false uh but it is ultimately a mechanism to funnel capital into an area or into a development project it's also crazy you know just for the listeners, like adding historical context, like the whole process of financialization basically required that capital be reallocated for manufacturing into rentier activities.

So basically like what we're describing here, also everything from like insurance, like, you know, there's a reason the health insurance market has exploded i mean we don't really have productive capacity in this country anymore except like maybe in parts of the south and so what most capital surplus gets sort of how it gets you know funneled back up to the top is through rentier projects like this and part of doing that is this public private enterprise like we're saying like you you it's like if people just like looked at it on the face they would say oh these people are

coming from out of town and they're just taking our land and kicking us off of it so like they have to go through this naturalization process where they make it appear like there's buy-in and everybody wants this and i realized this because the daniel boone project that tom was just mentioning like i had written something that was critical of it a few years ago and people flipped shit they lost their minds because like any like any bit of criticism or like any bit of dissent makes it look like there's not whole community buy-in and that makes the whole project kind of fall apart um so anyways or go ahead i remember that project and i remember the

piece you you wrote and and there were so many aspects of that project that sounds so familiar to everything we see here in town and and you know i think anyone that's organizing really has to understand like the power structure of that particular place. And so what we've noticed, you know, Louisville is sort of like an open air museum to the Confederacy. Like the ruling class in Louisville were literally the people that wrote the Lost Cause. And so that's why, you know, it's just like that's why it's so important to organize in the South, because the power structure of this country rests with still rests with those families. Right. That's why we get people like Mitch McConnell and Strom Thurmond out of these places. And so, you know, so in Louisville, you have like the Brown family who, you know, were, you know, Confederate officers and now heavily invested in real estate.

And, you know, North Carolina, you got the Keenans, right? The Keenans, you know, were the bloody handed monsters behind the Wilmington Massacre. So they invested $5 million into a nonprofit to gentrify part of Louisville. And so a lot of these nonprofit apparatuses, a lot of the nonprofit programs are just an apparatus for the ruling class to funnel their money back into real estate. We had a situation here in Louisville where the Urban League got a new director. where the Urban League got a new director. And she was like, we want to do a financial audit because we think some of this money got funded into real estate capital and was actually meant for programs. Like the Brown family and the Jones family didn't know

that's exactly what was happening. And she was fired immediately just for requesting an audit. And so it's exactly the way you describe it. It's just another way that that that the ruling class can can avoid putting their money into the tax system and then control it privately it's fascinating what is qualified as a non-profit as well like we have a property here in louisville that has been aggressively organizing and josh can tell you a lot about that um and has had major wins and they're owned by the do you think i can get into the specific group oh yeah please okay they're owned by the community builders um or tcb and the the louisville metro

housing authority as well but the tcb is the majority owners and they're based out of Boston and they get almost a million in federal tax credits every year, along with other government handouts. They are the largest nonprofit housing developer in the country and they have 80 million in revenue a year. Their highest paid employee makes almost $500,000 a year. So the standard and the name of nonprofit, especially in housing, is such a stupid facade. If you look into it for three minutes, you'll know that that is not an appropriate label at all. And like Josh said, it's totally just a two-way tax solution. You're getting money from the government and you're getting money from the people who you

displace. And then you're also able to write it off. And actually, speaking of that, we have a leader in the tenants union. This is one of the first stories I heard when I joined was his. And he went to renew his lease at his apartment and he couldn't because he was told a new property group had bought the apartment building. But what he could do was renew if he wanted to sign a new lease. That was 20% more per month. So the property group that had bought the apartment building

actually bought it with an FHFA-backed mortgage. So this tenant's federal tax money literally destabilized his own housing. And it's crazy because if it's through a nonprofit, you write like it's shielded from expropriation by the government so it's like it doesn't go back anywhere it literally just lines the pockets of the people that are engaged in it and like the thing about real estate capital that's really wild to me is that as opposed to like productive capital and i don't even know if that's a correct term but let's just use it for now in this in the like the sense that like i have capital i start a factory i employ 300 workers

to make widgets in i mean that's bad their labor is being exploited a widget mogul i've always wanted to be a widget yeah yeah yeah i have an eye for widgets uh like at least in that sense it's not altruistic but it is just a process of capitalism there are workers that are employed their money goes back theoretically into equity building and all these other things in real estate capital like that that amount productive base gets gradually winnowed down. So you've got a layer of people at the very top who run these nonprofits. As you said, Haley, one of them makes half a million dollars a year to run a nonprofit. And then there's a layer of middle managers underneath that.

And then I guess beneath that,'s like handymen and like you know uh property there's the property manager right and and i think this is where a lot of tenants get fooled by this this sort of like layered management system that that non-profit that that hayley mentioned the community builders they hired two maintenance workers for 400 units so the way they make 80 million dollars a year is just by not doing the maintenance. And then they tell the property manager, you have to deal with the descent and the optics around just not doing any maintenance. And so that's where you get this heavy level of retaliation

against tenants by the property manager. So when you engage most tenants, they're like, I hate this property manager. Like we have to get rid of them. They don't really see it as like this systemic apparatus. And so, you know, they were like, we want to launch a campaign to fire the property manager. And then what, what our leaders have learned from doing that is that they just move these property managers around. Like you get one fired, they send them to Dayton. The one that the tenants in Dayton got fired, got sent down to Louisville. So it's like, it's really hard to get people to really understand like, you know, that, that property manager is actually not the problem.

And then get them to see it on a real systemic level and get them to engage with the owners. But the, the, the system that's been developed around this is really similar to like a labor management system and it's, and it's really effective. Yeah. And I just want to, i just want to stress that like for people like listening to this probably the vast majority of whom are renters i would assume that most of our listener base are tenants like i i didn't know a whole lot well but even the the thing that i didn't really consider sorry to interrupt you again um the thing that i didn't

really consider until i joined uh the tenants union is that even people who own a house, if you're still paying it off, own a house, own a trailer, own anything. If you have a mortgage with the bank or with a lender, then you are also, you are not autonomous in your ownership. So you are, what do you all call it? Bank tenant. Is that what y'all call it? We call it bank tenants. Yeah. I mean, we really base it around self-interest. We ask people, even if you are a first-time homeowner or you own your home and you're under the threat of dispossession, your self-interest might not necessarily be with real estate capital. Your self-interest is still with the tenant, still a tenant. So we're trying to define tenant as a class and make it a lot more broad than just do you rent, do you own?

and make it a lot more broad than just do you rent, do you own? Yes. And just to add an example, a woman who I lived across the street from growing up, who I played with her grandchildren, by the time we got to 2015, where all this gentrification was happening in Smoketown, developer, she owned her home and lived in it with her son and their kids and his kids. But when 2015 hit, people wanted her property. So you've got these developers who are now targeting that property, hitting it with fines from codes and regulations, doing whatever they can to make it unaffordable for that person to remain. Because let's be real, like people that grow up in our community, like when we grow up in our communities and we love our communities, we don't want to leave. And when we are able to get housing that stabilizes our families, why would we give that up? And so there are all these pressure

mechanisms for homeowners as well. If you live in an area that's vulnerable to displacement, that makes them have less control over their housing, just the same as a renter. Yeah. I think that's a very important point because in a world that is increasingly destabilized from climate change, land is an increasingly valuable commodity. And I think that there's several things like this process of financialization and reallocation of capital into these rentier forms like real estate capital began you know several years before like the climate crisis began but i do want to like put a fine point on it to the listeners that like this is a process that

really only has one logical endpoint which is mass policing for everybody because ultimately that's the only way that's their last uh tool of resort to get people off this off these lanes. Like they resort to all these other coercive mechanisms. And when people don't buckle under that, then they resort to the violent option. And again, once again, just to tie this into what we're seeing, like this, I think this basic process, like this is why our police officers are trained in israel like that that that situation is a is a paradigm of like how to displace people and like uh the various mechanisms that police use to um intimidate them terrorize them and then ultimately either liquidate or or you know clin you know make push them off the land so there's a reason our police are trained by them because it's it's hyper acute there

but uh obviously like it is becoming more and more systemic here and uh so again just to put the fine point on it like i think that that is kind of like what's at stake i i'd be interested in uh soliciting some thoughts connected back to the gaza uh situation you know i saw maybe it was last night or this morning there was a bunch of folks in black rocks building uh you know kind of you know making them aware of their culpability in that situation and josh had mentioned earlier in the show that, you know, we're not ready to take on the Black Rocks of the world just yet, but like just to dream a little bit and extrapolate out further,

like what could that look like when we need to kind of sort of, you know, sort of point away from a local focus and like more of a, you know, taking on something like that who i don't know i saw one of those like rise and grinder influencer people on tiktok talking about how like blackrock owns like 80 of the property in the world or something like that or and these are like the people that like uh you know if you've been negotiating like a a house buy or something like that they come in at like three million over asking in certain places and like do all kinds of crazy shit to acquire all these properties. But yeah,

just if we're, you know, looking toward the future, what would y'all say that that looks like? Well, I think we got to build a base, you know, and especially in the South and especially in Kentucky and, you know, like outside of labor unions, there aren't really a base of people organized around the thing in this, you know, and, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of organizing that happens without a lot of base building

happening. So the, the vision of like the national tenant movement and the homes guarantee campaign, which we're a part of is real is, you know, essentially that in the richest country in the history of the world, we can afford to house everybody. The methodology behind that is to build a massive base of tenants. And I think we've made a lot of strides here in terms of developing a shared methodology around the country, a shared language. We're all getting to know each other. Our bases of leaders are getting to know each other. I think that's a good step. But ultimately, the dream there is to build a large enough base of people in this country that we can hold a

national rent strike, crash this whole fucking system, and then dictate the demands that we want and ultimately move toward a socialist government. We have our rent and we have our labor. There really isn't anything working class people can tangibly organize around and i think when we think about climate change we think about cultural justice i think like you know this you know we don't have a lot of time you know and i think especially in places like kentucky we don't have a lot of time to like really turn the tide of rising fascism so we got really we really have to get serious about how we're organizing working class people and it's not going to be like the way people i think the way we're kind of like tuned in to think it is

where there's like this mass movement, it's literally going to happen for people, knocking on people's doors, building relationships with them and inviting them into a struggle. But yeah, but the vision there is, yeah, a homes guarantee and a national rent strike. I want to jump into that too

and kind of give an example that we talk about oftentimes with like that vision, how do we get to that place? Like when you think about 2008, when the market crashed, you know, and so many people weren't able to pay mortgages, so many people weren't able to pay rent. And the folks that were like the top 1%, the banks, the people that like their whole existence is predicated on their ability to take from us, whether it's through our labor, whether it's through our rents.

And so when we were squeezed like a dry rag and no drops could come out, we saw two things happen that we can like analyze intellectually that number one, here's our government bailing out all these mofos, right? So number one, we do have all, we have money to like address so many things from housing, food, all kinds of things.

And then two, that definitely the top 1% controls the government. Intellectually, I think we as a country saw that, but we didn't get in our guts also about what that meant. Because if it took the government bailing them out, then we brought those other mofos to their knees by not doing what we couldn't do, you know? And so if we can actually have a controlled moment, we can organize enough people to get clear on why they're self-interested in changing the material reality that they've been forced to live in. If we can get people clear on what power is and that they have more power than they know when we all stand together, then we'll be able to

make a moment like that happen. It's just going to take so many of us talking to each other, which we're actually discouraged to do. We're encouraged to have fear about our neighbors. We're encouraged to not talk to each other. We're encouraged, too, that our problems must come from something internal to us that is wrong, right? If we're not talk to each other. We're encouraged to that that our problems must come from some something internal to us that is wrong. Right. If we're not able to pay our bills, then we fail that adulting. What versus it being about the market? And there's all these myths that we keep telling ourselves and that we tell each other that we can break through the organizing methodology that we've been working with, which is why we've been able to grow so large and make the type of wins happen that we have in Kentucky. No, I think that it's a really great point. And I do want to just bring this back to the sort of national political atmosphere moment that we're

in. Something that you guys hit on multiple times was that the cost of rent has gone drastically up. Also, the cost of money. I mean, just that interest rates keep going up. And so, like I said, people are locked out of home ownership. And you've seen this recent move from a lot of pundits and a lot of commentators and Democratic Party operatives to paint the economy as good because wages are going up a little bit. Well, there's a lot of people other than him. You open up your opinion pages of the Washington Post or New York Times,

and they're saying this at least once a week at this point, that the economy is actually good, unemployment is down, wages are nominally up uh and that inflation is starting to decline a little bit but like none of this takes into account the rising cost of living it just keeps going up and there's a lot of other things packed into this as well you know debt rising cost of child care all these things that like don't get accounted for when we talk about like how is the economy actually doing? And like, you know, shouldn't we want to thank Biden and all this?

I think that like you kind of have to be on guard for a lot of these things, especially going into an election year, because a lot of people will try to scold you into saying like, well, things are actually great. You're just insane. And I mean, like we've seen how, you know, over the last month that you can you can try to scold people into that. And people, you know, if they're not standing together with other people, they can get in their own heads and say, like, well, maybe I am insane. Maybe things are fine. You know what I mean?

Like, that's really the kind of trick. And so I think that speaks to the importance of what you're doing being together fighting together it's the only way to kind of like maintain that like sort of mental resiliency against that like attempts to drive you insane yeah there's there's individual benefits to to that yeah well even what you're talking about like the things that are pushed by leaders and the media the economy's good unemployment's down that's being pushed at the same time that we're hearing people don't want to work right so it's like the pressure is still on and if unemployment is down okay but how many people have two three jobs one in four of my friends has like multiple jobs and also the economy is is good for who? Not for us. You know, when the Ford workers were striking, it was like they're going to ruin the economy, like they're going who is the economy good what economy are we talking

about like whose economy because with the disparity and how much people have and how much people make in this country and who controls it like jessica was talking about earlier there are different economies like i don't live in the same economy as these like property developers we don't live in the same economy as the people who are controlling the laws and the legislation so when they say the economy is good who is it good for so even just pushing back on those notions it all reflects on housing um yeah i just i like hate that that tagline too about unemployment being down because i'm like that's crazy like i have so many side jobs to be able to like you guys know i'm gonna move to new york like the amount that i've saved like that comes from doing all these stupid side jobs why did i work in a

bakery that's crazy that's not even my training i don't know anything about it you know i burned myself but i'm doing it because i have to. So, yes, whatever. All of those lines, like, I think they just are, they are not seeing even half of the entire landscape. It is funny how things like that get out there. I mean, like, it's kind of like the whole world became Eastern Kentucky overnight. Because as long as I've been alive in Eastern Kentucky,

nobody's wanted to work, you know, or court everybody. And then, like, I just hear that everywhere that's so funny that they said the strike would crash the economy and it's like it didn't yeah what did it do it just meant that like instead of making i don't even i'm like a 300 million okay sorry I made like 290 this year. So sad. That's not my economy. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Josh. Well, I am going to add that the last thing that the ruling class wants is for wages to go up. So when they talk about the economy, they get worried when wages go up because there's not enough surplus population to drive their profits. Well, also, you're right.

One of the central dynamics of capitalism, to be able to keep it perpetuating, is you have to take into account social reproduction. reproduction and so if the cost of social reproduction start outstripping the the uh pace that wages rise then you start you know to get into like a revolutionary situation um and honestly this is the thing that i've asked myself over and over again over the past like 10 years which is that like i don't even know if today's leaders take any of this into account anymore like that that that was something that they genuinely worried and fretted about like a hundred years ago, 50 years ago, but it seems very much like they are in kind of like we said it before,

sort of death cult mode, just like extract as much as you can get out and just, you know, let the fucking police take care of the surplus and the rest. And, um, so I don't know i think that these are all metrics that we should that we need to be looking at and we need to keep in mind but

like i said you can't do it alone and like we we we had a few months ago we had some friends on who have with the connecticut tenants union and so um you know I think that like their struggle, the things they told us about, like what they're dealing with, they are sort of dealing more with like rural housing and what you're both dealing with and see that there are a lot of similarities that people like try to like you know we talk about like rural voters rural america it's like well like systemically there's a lot of similarities it's basically the same processes um the political economy is a little bit different but like if we're trying to wage some sort of resistance against this, we have to be able to build across those divides. Yeah, we organize in a lot of trailer parks. I know it's an urban area, but it feels somewhat rural, and I think there are similarities there with what's going on

in rural areas. I'm from Roberson County, which is the smallest county in the state. And there's like a form of gentrification happening there, right? And if you talk to anybody out there, whenever they see someone they don't know, they're like, oh, someone from Cincinnati is buying up all the land and turning it into residential lots. And so the financialization is everywhere. What we found in trailer parks is that typically these trailer parks were owned by families. They were owned by like the local bourgeoisie. And even though the local bourgeoisie was typically hated and usually heavy handed tactics against the tenants, the tenants had contact with them. They could put their hands on them. They could they could you know, they had a relationship where

they could interact with them. Now, those trailer parks are being bought by huge corporations right and there's even like a there's even a school that investors can go to called trailer park university where they train you to buy trailer parks and and the and the the guy who started that has a quote that he says like owning a trailer park is like owning a waffle house except the customers are chained to their boots and so literally like they call it a cat they they're on these podcasts literally using terms like captive market like the people who own their trailers pay lot rent they can't move the trailer so we can literally raise their fucking rent as much as they want and this is a great investment tool what we find when we go into organized with in these places that the folks who live in those parks have no idea what the fuck's going on.

They don't even realize that like their property is owned by like some huge corporate investment firm. They're dealing with the property manager. And I mean, let's face it, like we don't have the best political, you know, we don't have the best education system in this country. It's really hard for people to like have any analysis around causation and so what we try to do you know is just really tap into their anger and then like invite them into a fight and so we've had a lot of success organizing in those places but um those places are also really vulnerable to the type of like fascist and national you know nationalist organizing that's going on so even if we can't you know we on so even if we can't you know we feel like even if we can't organize that whole park at least we're doing some form of

inoculation against the rise of fascism and i think that that that that plays out that's true that that can be true in rural areas of kentucky as well yeah the bowling or the the trailer park um situation in america i think is is one of the biggest aspects of the... Not the biggest, but it is a major aspect of the housing crisis. But it's also one that's not talked about at all. And I think because if you don't understand the specific situation, it's just not something that you take into account. But let's say that a property group buys a mobile home park from a mom and pop ownership like that was previously there like josh was talking about we actually went to bowling green to talk to

a mobile home park where that was experiencing exactly this you pay rent for that lot right but maybe you own the trailer itself or maybe you're still paying it off. Like in the case of a woman we talked to at that park, she was still paying it off. She was in the very beginning of the ownership process of that. So even if you own this property or own the trailer, the property group can come in and say, okay, actually, we're going to turn this into apartments. So I need you to leave um you know you're evicted and sometimes like for no reason or sometimes they make up a reason um but they can give you minimal notice kick you out the issue is okay you own a trailer in theory it's mobile

right but that's not the case exactly. That is a dream scenario because it costs 10,000, 15,000 minimum to move a trailer. And that's if it's eligible to be moved. A lot of them can't because they're too old. So it is literally a health risk and you're not allowed to. Let's say that somehow you have the money miraculously and your trailer is new enough. Let's say that somehow you have the money miraculously and your trailer is new enough. A lot of times it won't be accepted at another mobile home park. They have their own requirements. Maybe they only want ones that are really new. And so you have this thing that you own, but you can't take it anywhere and you don't own

the lot. So you are losing everything. Even the thing that you've poured this money into to call something that you don't own the lot so you are losing everything even the thing that you've poured this money into to call something that you don't rent anymore you own and in the case of one of the women that we talked to in bowling green she's like i'm i'm gonna be paying this off for the next like 10 years yeah and so that's and they're depreciable assets too like cars not like you don't build equity on my yeah exactly and you're not gonna like resell it um for more money you're right like it's it's yeah it costs 10 to 15 000 to

move a trailer um yeah so i that's like one of the the craziest things that i've seen so far and there's a mobile home park actually that has two tenants that we're taking into DC. And I want to talk about that campaign, the homes guarantee campaign a little bit. But this park's management knows exactly how much leverage they have, like Josh was talking about. And it is disgusting. They are rapidly raising the rent if you complain um a literal line that one of these tenants has been given is well you can just leave um one of their neighbors actually got evicted without just cause they came they had like a cop come down to the um trailer and made him move out but this man owned that trailer he's forced to leave right they're

like making him leave a cop's there he owns this trailer the property group goes in and changes the locks so this is again something he owns and when he confronted the cop about it he was like i don't know man i don't you might need to get a lawyer and then that guy had that he was literally living in his truck after that so this is the kind of situation that we're talking about with um the trailers like it is yes you own something but not really that's why yeah and then you know if it's going to cost you 10 to 15 grand to move i mean that's about 30 of what a new fleet would single bike that's insane also i want to point out the vulnerability of trailers to, again, climate change.

It's just like I, during the flood last year, it's like I don't know how many trailers I walked into. And I remember telling Tom, it's like go to your local office supply store and buy a few reams of notebook paper and then just soak them in water for a little bit that's like what the wall is like on a trailer home like these these things they're not it's not even like actual building material and furthermore to you know put

another fine point on that after the flood governor brashear uh recently reelected, actually, as of two days ago, has come out and said, like, oh, we're going to introduce an affordable housing program in eastern Kentucky for people displaced by the floods. This is very weird. ostensibly supposed to do is that if somebody takes the fema buyout uh if your flood has been home uh if your home has been flooded or like um caught on fire or by a natural disaster or something like fema comes in they says they say move your house um you can either move your house out of the floodplain or you can sell it to us and um nothing can ever be built on it ever again. They completely razed the land. Very weird thing. But to sensibly capture the people from basically leaving the region altogether,

they're building these higher ground affordable housing programs in eastern Kentucky. These homes are just trailer homes. They're not built with... They're prefab. They're not built with like uh you know they're prefab they're not built with any like resilient material or anything you can't build equity on it um and so like i do think that like that that is a thing and we you all mentioned it at the top of the program the whole issue of affordable housing and how a lot of times like these programs can get

sold to people to the community but they are are kind of masked forms of displacement in and of themselves. Very strange. Yeah. And I guarantee you that the developers profiting off that program is a key imperative of the program. And, you know, and that's the problem with the whole affordable housing model is that, you know, the developers have to profit. So if you can build a lot of units at market rate, but if you really try to build it for the people that need it, you're only going to build, you know, a few units because of the, you know, the developers have to make money. What we want to do is shift that whole model and say, you know, if we can subsidize developers and give them land and money, we can give land and money directly to tenants. And so

our short-term vision is really land. We're not necessarily concerned with electoral politics. I mean, we want to control, you know, we want to get the votes we need to pass our agenda, but we really want to get tenants land. And I think there's we're stuck in this model in this country, like post-World War II, where you're either a renter or a single family homeowner. And we've got, you know, we've got buildings organized where those tenants can take over ownership. And land in this country is political power. The rights of citizenship are very much connected to whether or not you're on property. And so that's what we're really pushing for locally.

Yes, and the local ordinance, the anti-displacement ordinance helps with that. It's really like the start of our whole social housing plan because once we can wrangle our resources, the land, the dollars and the staff support away from the developers who are pushing us out, that frees up those resources to be used for social housing. Yeah. So that's the beauty of the plan. Yeah. Well, sort of on that note, Haley, you had mentioned this campaign. Do you want to talk about that for a minute?

I think Josh said because he's been in from the beginning. But as a preface, I will say that, you know, earlier when you were talking about how this can become a national thing, this is, in my opinion, the closest we've gotten. And when people hear about this, I think they're very shocked that there's already kind of this national organizing going on and the amount of unions and where they're coming from is, I mean, it brings a lot of hope, to be honest. Yeah. Josh, do you want to talk about the campaign? Sure. And I'll just give some background. Yeah. Josh, do you want to talk about the campaign? Sure. And I'll just give some background. I started I moved to Louisville in like 2010 and I started working for a lot of like housing nonprofits and I worked for so many just terrible nonprofits.

And, you know, there's this whole like sort of housing justice ecosystem. And in that ecosystem, you have service providers and they are really, you know, they're after their service money out of city budgets. And then you have these sort of like developer driven nonprofits where, you know, they want to like deregulate zoning so that we can build more units. And we kind of throw all these groups together and label it housing justice. And that even is sort of a loaded term in itself, because housing is a commodity, right? If we're advocating for a commodity, we're advocating for a commodity, we're advocating for the commodification of housing. And so there was this sort of like evolution, I think, from 2010 to 2020, where the national tenant movement kind of like got itself

together and was better able to define what it was. And that housing justice is not necessarily tenant justice. Those are very different things. Housing does not need rights. It's a smoke screen. And a lot of that is really used to create the sort of affordable housing models that we talked about. So I think when 2020 hit and the pandemic hit, there was this split where the self-interest of those groups that made up this sort of bullshit coalition was better defined. And what you had was the service providers and the advocacy organizations really went hard for rental assistance. And this idea that like, Hey, we will manage the contradictions of the system by just subsidizing landlords to not evict people. Of course,

the landlord lobby was 10 toes down for that. And those service providers and nonprofits, you know, got, got on board. And though, you know, those of us who had like been organizing with tenants and were really trying to develop organizations led by tenants launched the cancel rent campaigns of 2020, which wasn't successful at all. But I think the massive rent strikes that you had in the big cities is what made rental assistance available. So there's this sort of dynamic that happens. Right. But But this split really helped us define what the national tenant movement was. And I want to give shout outs to Tara Ragavere from KC Tenants and John Washington. They both worked for the Homes Guarantee Campaign. The Homes Guarantee Campaign

regrouped after the council ran and really decided like, what's our next issue cut need to be? How do we even launch a national campaign against real estate capital? It feels pretty daunting. A lot of us didn't have a lot of experience with national campaigns. I've only organized locally. So we jumped in and we tried to get the Biden administration to write an executive order to regulate rents. In doing that, we took the first ever tenant delegation to the White House. We didn't realize that like these people have literally never sat down and talked to tenants before. They've only talked to landlords. And so we saw the new new deal. Yeah. Yeah. This is the first. This is historic.

You all were like, what? You know, that's that's mind blowing in and of itself. Right. So we took the first delegation of tenants to the White House and we felt like this was an opportunity for us to really define who we are. Because what happened was like a lot of those service orgs and advocacy groups, they do what they do. They ran out and scrambled to find a group of impacted people that could speak. And what they do is they sort of, they don't really build relationships. They don't build political relationships with folks. They, you know, they drag, you know, everybody's been, you know, I've had it happen to me where I get drug in front of a politician, you know, because somebody needs someone that talks like me to tell a sad story. And you just burn people out like that. So so they did that. And we you know, we chose the people we wanted to go very carefully.

We wanted people who could bring all the pain and rage that working class people feel into that room and would not be intimidated, intimidated by the people in that room. And so that's, that's, that's our, that's our, that's our methodology. We believe in it. A lot of people in power just never really deal with uncomfortability, right? They never really have to deal with any like emotional pain. And so when you, when you put them in a room with, you know, people who could bring that in a really structured, disciplined way, uh, and then put them on, turn the heat up on them and then, and then make's been very effective. And that's what happened. And even though we didn't win that campaign, the National Department Association just killed that campaign and they celebrated in public. Like, you know, we, you know, we made a couple calls and thwarted this group, you know, what they tried to do. And so, but we did get the attention of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the FHFA.

The FHFA is in charge of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And they said, you know, moving forward, we're going to listen to you guys and we're going to talk to you guys. And what that did was the large, you know, usually when that happens, when you build a lot of power, the really big nonprofits come in and just like eat off your table, right? They swoop in and take away the power that you built. But that didn't happen in this instance. So those other nonprofits kind of had to fall in behind us, which meant falling in behind a rent control demand, which they didn't necessarily like, but they really didn't have a choice. So the FHFA, basically the way it works is a multifamily landlord gets a loan from a bank. So they get a loan from Wells Fargo.

Wells Fargo never actually gives them the money because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy that loan. So they get our tax money and landlords love this. They call it leveraging, which basically means they get to operate with tax dollars and they like to stay leveraged. They don't want to pay these loans off. Right. They want to take on more debt and they can get really cheap financing and they have limited liability. And then they, you know, they can extract profit from a property. They can cash out and refinance if they want to. So they have all this freedom. And, you know, the FHFA is, it only meets with landlord, only meets with the landlord lobby

and they handle this money over and there are no tenant protections attached to any of this. So we launched our next campaign around putting rent control stipulations on all properties that get Fannie and Freddie loans, which would be 12.4 million apartment units in the country, about half their units in the country. And this is what we've been pushing forward with the FHFA. We managed to get 18 economists to sign on supporting this rent control legislation. I think we got 38 Congress people, including Chuck Schumer. And last year, Chuck Schumer wouldn't even talk to us. So we've built a lot of power in a short amount of time. Washington, Washington, DC next week, we're going to bring 100 tenants to DC to do a congressional briefing to meet with FHFA again, and then, you know, do some other things while we're up there. And so we're, you know, we're organized around this is like 50 unit tenant, 50 tenant unions around the country. And for us, it's, you know, it's, it's really validating, because I've sat

in rooms with people for like 10 years, who told me that like national rent control is is a laughable idea like you're just fighting a losing battle it's never going to happen and in a short amount of time win or lose like we're never going back to a world where we can't talk about a national rent control policy again yeah well i i think that's i honestly it is very inspiring i think that's a testament to the great work that y'all have been able to do and would encourage not only y'all to keep it up, but others as well. And I think if there's any way for others to plug into your work or to link up in any way, is there anything you want to plug or get out there? or get out there? Initially, I'd like to plug the fundraiser because it is actually very expensive

to get a bunch of tenants to DC. We don't want them to have to pay anything for this trip because they're already taking off work. They're getting babysitters for their kids. It's expensive. These are people who are struggling to pay their rent. So with that being said, we really could use some money.

And $5 would be great. $10 would be great. We're fundraising right now. And yeah, I will send you guys a link if you don't mind linking it. Put it in the show notes. Yes, that would be extremely helpful. We also have social media accounts. Is it at Louisville Tenants Union?

I'll post them in the chat. Okay, great. Okay, I will put those in the notes. Please go contribute to those. Please go check out those accounts. Anything else y'all would like to get out there before we sign off for the day? We could talk for another hour about a real estate capital. There's a lot of threads I would like to get out there before we sign off for the day?

We could talk for another hour about a real estate. There's a lot of threads I'd like to tease open, but we might have to bring you back on there. I mean, yeah, we can give a post DC update because we'll be able to spill a lot of the stuff that we are kind of having to hold close to our chest right now. And just to read through the list I just posted in the chat, if you want to find the Louisville Tenants Union online, you can find us on Instagram at Louisville Tenants Union. You can find us on Facebook at Louisville Tenants. You can find us on Twitter at Lou, which is L-O-U Tenants Union. Thank you so much, guys. And thank you for coming on to talk about this. I think this is a very important topic, not only for, you know, for people out there who are experiencing all the things we've talked about, but also just nationally. We've, you know, made a lot of connections here between what's happening on the other side of the world.

These things are connected. All right. Haley, Josh, Jessica, thank you so much. Thanks, Josh. Yeah, thank you so much yeah thanks right yeah thank you so much and we'll have to hear back from you after your trip thank you again for having us this is great thank you thank you uh well until next time everyone we will see you later Thank you.