Upstream - From The Frontlines Tenant Organizing W Josh Poe And Tara Raghuveer

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

In this episode, part of our ongoing From the Frontlines series, Tara Raghuveer and Josh Poe join us for a conversation about tenant organizing. Tara Raghuveer is a tenant organizer with KC Tenants based in Kansas City, Missouri and with the Tenant Union Federation. Josh Poe is the organizing director with the Kentucky Tenant Union, formerly known as the Louisville Tenant Union and organizes with the Tenant Union Federation along with Tara. Our conversation opens with a introduction to tenants unions before diving into the specific work that is being done by our guests. We discuss some of the ongoing fights being waged against private equity and corporate landlords by the Kentucky Tenants Union across the state of Kentucky and by the Tenant Union Federation across the country. We explore the root causes of skyrocketing rents and the housing crisis, the idealogical and legal barriers to organizing in the south, and some of the false and real solutions. Finally, we explore what a logical and humane housing system could look like. Further resources: Kentucky Tenants Union Donate to Kentucky Tenants Union The Tenant Union Federation Kansas City Tenants Connecticut Tenants Union Southside Together Bozeman Tenants United Related episodes: Listen to our ongoing From the Frontlines series Intermission music: "Forest Floor" by Witchdream Mansion Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants—just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for Upstream stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going—socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. patreon.com/upstreampodcast For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

The rent is too damn high. There are more people sleeping outside and in their cars in the richest country in the history of the world now than ever before. And things are only getting worse. People are paying more money to live in worse conditions than they've ever endured. The thing that I think many of us keep thinking about recently is that it just can't go on like this. Something has got to give. And the question is not whether tenants revolt. The question is whether that revolt is from a place of desperation or from a place of power. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. The cost of a home has doubled since 2009, and the average age of a home buyer in the United States is now 50, years old. And you don't have to look at other countries like China, where 90% of people own their

home and the average age of a home buyer is 29, to know it doesn't have to be like this. You just have to go back to 1981 before this stage of neoliberal capitalism really kicked in, and when the average home buyer was 31 years old, to know that the state of housing in this country is a mess. Because of this, the vast majority of people are thrown into a renter's market that highly favors the landlord class, a class that wields power over the most basic element of our lives, our housing. Today, we're joined by Tara Ragabir and Josh Poe to discuss all of this and more. Tara Raghavir is a tenant organizer with KC tenants based in Kansas City, Missouri, and with the Tenant Union Federation.

Josh Poe is the organizing director with the Kentucky Tenant Union, formerly known as the Louisville Tenant Union, and organizes with the Tenant Union Federation along with Terra. And before we get started, Upstream is entirely listener-funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Please subscribe to our Patreon. for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes,

and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through this support, you'll be helping keep upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going. Post-capitalist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Tara Raghavir and Josh Poe. All right, Tara and Josh, it is great to have you both on the show. Thanks much. Nice to be here. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And so maybe let's start with introductions. If you could both introduce yourselves for our listeners and talk a bit about the work that you do. Sure. I am Tara Ragavir. I'm a tenant organizer. I'm based in Kansas City, Missouri. and for the last seven years, I've been organizing with Casey Tenants, the citywide tenant union in the Kansas City, Missouri area. And over the course of that time, we've fought and we've won, we've fought and we've lost, we've worked on policy campaigns, we've worked to shut down a sales tax that would have funded a downtown stadium. our political organization has elected people to city council. And I think probably most importantly, we've organized with tenants and trailer park residents

across the metro. And many of those fights we fought and we've won those changed material positions for people across my hometown. And over the course of the last several years, I've also connected with organizers like Josh in other places that are both similar and different to Kansas City. And together we've started building what I think of as a new methodology for tenant organizing to meet the needs of the moment. And so together we've started a national

federation called the Tenant Union Federation. And I'm an organizer there too and really excited to be building that with Josh and the powerful team at the Kentucky Tenants Union. My name is Josh Poe. I'm the organizing director with the Louisville, with the Kentucky Tenet Union, formerly known as the Louisville Tenant Union. I grew up in Kentucky from Appalachia. Being Appalachian is a big part of my identity and how I identify. I grew up in generational poverty in Appalachian. I think that gives you a unique vantage point on this country and seeing this country has, seeing the material reality of this country, seeing class divisions. And so I started organizing at a really young age. And through my time organizing, housing was always the number one issue in every community we went to. You know, I lived in Seattle in the early 2000s in the Central District, which was a black community that was being gentrified. I moved from there to Cincinnati, which was experiencing a very rapid police-led sort of brutal gentrification that was happening. And so I saw these issues everywhere I went, rural America, urban America, and, you know,

the early days of the housing crisis. One, we knew we had to build power for working class people to fight it, and tenant organizing seemed like a great vehicle for that. So I started organizing tenants in Kentucky around 2012, 2014, without any real methodology or structure. And over time, met people like Tara, met people like John Washington and Buffalo, and really developed out this methodology. The Louisville Tenant Union was founded in 2022. The first couple of years were largely an experiment. However, we did win a lot of building campaigns and we passed legislation to stop developers from getting public money that would cause displacement. In 2024, we gratified a constitution, developed a structure, elected our leadership, and then expanded statewide. So we

have chapters all over the state of Kentucky now, eastern Kentucky, southwest Kentucky, Louisville, in all areas in between, and feel really good about spreading this methodology in the south. especially in rural areas, and really excited to be part of the Tenet Union Federation in doing that. Awesome. Yeah, thank you for that. And Tara, actually, I was going to ask you if you could tell us a little bit more about the Federation, like just give us a sense of what different cities or towns are included in that and sort of the intention behind the Federation. I'll start with the intention, because I think this is part of what connects me and Josh so deeply. as organizers and comrades, the rent is too damn high. There are more people sleeping outside

and in their cars in the richest country in the history of the world now than ever before. And things are only getting worse. People are paying more money to live in worse conditions than they've ever endured. The thing that I think many of us keep thinking about recently is that it just can't go on like this. Something has got to give. And the question is, not whether tenants revolt. The question is whether that revolt is from a place of desperation or from a place of power. So to me, the tenant union federation exists to try to ensure that it's the latter. And we're doing that by trying to figure out what it even means to be a tenant union in today's context. We're pushing ourselves to a place of clarity and clarity of practice,

clarity of organizing practice around what it actually means to be a tenant union today in a highly financialized context, in a context where the multifamily housing market is in crisis, in a context where more and more tenants have no clue who their landlord is by design because the landlord's hiding behind LLCs and registered agents and property managers. We're organizing in a context where tenants are told that they are each other's enemy as opposed to the landlord being their shared enemy. So that's the kind of context around our organizing. And the Federation basically exists to try to figure out this methodology of tenant organizing that we need right now in order to make sure tenants can wield power at a massive scale. There are more of us than there are them. But that only

matters if we figure out how to assemble together, build a new kind of power. And then critically, how we exercise that power. That's the work of the Tenant Union Federation. A lot of what that's looked like in the last year since our official launch is that we're coaching each other, we're training the field, we just wrapped a three-month intensive training called Union School. We're a bunch of organizers like Josh and other organizers from across the founding locals got together and trained over 300 people across the country and across the world on how to apply this methodology in their own context. It also looks like us campaigning together

and actually sharpening one another by picking fights alongside one another in a different kind of way. So right now we're organizing across one landlord's whole portfolio. And part of that work is about trying to win better with the tenants who rent from this particular landlord, Capital Realty Group. And part of that work is also sharpening one another,

actually being in space together, picking a fight together, shows us the ways in which we're strong, the ways in which we're weak, the ways that some of us have things to offer others. So again, that's the work of the Tenant Union Federation. We were founded by five locals, Kentucky Tenants Union being one of them, Casey Tenants, my local being another Connecticut Tenants Union, Southside together on the south side of Chicago, and then Bozeman tenants in Bozeman, Montana. And that's a kind of random group of organizations geographically, but it's a group that we saw as very connected when it comes to analysis, commitment, and practice. And even among that starting

five, there's real differences in analysis, in commitment, in practice. And we are starting small on purpose. We've all, I think, seen a lot of experiments with national power building go really wrong. And a lot of what we're trying to do from the beginning is build with intention, with clarity, organized from a place of power as opposed to anxiety. And that means starting small with a real intention to get big. Let's back up for just a second and kind of describe what attendance union actually is. I'm sure a lot of people that are listening right now are somewhat familiar. Some may not be. I know everybody's familiar with the concept of a union. What is a tenants union exactly? Like, how do they work? Do you focus mostly on like larger buildings? What kind of context do you organize in?

And what are sort of the usual demands or the outcomes that the unions are fighting for? Just give us like a broad picture and Josh, Tara, either whoever wants to tackle this one first, please go ahead. Yeah, a tenant union in its most basic form is a group of neighbors that come together to do collectively what they can't do individually to get the landlord to do what they're supposed to do and to stop doing what they're not supposed to do. That's its most basic form. I mean, anytime a group of tenants exercise their collective power, I think that could be a tenant union. we've developed a framework and a methodology for actually structuring this out. One thing about, you know, one thing about tenant organizing is we don't have 100 years of methodology to study. And so a lot of the stuff that we do, it's a process of evaluation, assumptions and evaluation.

So we've developed a structure of what we think tenant unions should be and kind of aspire to. In our own local organizing, we require unions to get a supermajority. So at least 60% of the tenants in a property would need to join to become a chapter and move on under our local structure. I think most of the locals have a similar structure, but there are some subtle differences. So we look for really any tenants that want to do this. We've got tenant unions in subsidized buildings. We've got tenants in market rate buildings. We've got tenant unions in, you know, what's considered to be like more luxury condos, or more luxury apartments, rather.

And we find the same issues across all three of those. surprisingly. So any group of tenants that really want to come together to do this, if they feel like they can get a super majority in their building to challenge the power of the landlord, we encourage them to do that and we move them forward. The typical demands are usually around maintenance. That's the biggest issue. You know, we get tenants in a room. They vote on their demands. And it works very similar to a labor union in that the goal is to bring that landlord to the table to negotiate a contract around the demands that they vote on. So typical demand we get are the ability to repair and deduct.

You don't want to live without a water heater for months on in. So if you can repair it yourself and deduct that from the rent, that's the kind of thing that people are focused on. But there are also different demands in there. Like we always encourage tenants to ask for the opportunity to purchase in their demands, right? Landlords are likely to give that to them. And so we're trying to solve the immediate crisis that people are in, but we're also thinking long term about collaboration.

collective ownership and tenant-owned building. So we want those tenants to have a contract that protects them for the landlord and also sets them up for more power building down the line. Awesome, awesome. Yeah, that's really helpful. And so it seems to me, too, that there's kind of, there's this issue of maintenance and having landlords be responsive. I think we're all familiar with. We've all had that experience. It's impossible sometimes to get your landlord to respond to you or to address an issue. And then there's also the issue of like rents skyrocketing in this country. And just a really, you know, I'm here in the Bay Area and it's just insane how much the rent has gone up.

I saw a statistic recently, well, this isn't rent. This is the cost of a home. But obviously the two are tied together to some degree that housing prices have doubled since 2009, which in 2009, they were still. not not at like cheap in any way shape or form so I guess this is kind of a bigger question but is rent like the the amount of rent something that the tenants unions generally focus on is that something that you have power over and like how is that connected to landlords themselves versus that sort of being this like bigger structural issue that we're dealing with in the

United States I know that's kind of a amorphous question but maybe if you could tackle that, however, you know, whatever comes to mind for that. Yeah, I mean, I think an important starting point is the rent is not a measure of the quality or condition of our homes. It's whatever the market allows. It's whatever landlords can get away with. And they, the profiteers are the architects of the market. The market is not something that just exists. It's a set of rules and bounds that they create to benefit themselves, their friends, and their

bottom line. So the rent is actually not a measure of the quality or condition of our homes. It's whatever they can get away with. And the story that you've told of rent skyrocketing, it's a story about power. Who has it and who doesn't? Who gets to set the rules and who has to comply? Who calls the shots and who has to deal with the consequences? That's what we're talking about when we're talking about the rent. So tenant unions, I think, are

necessarily confronting the rent. And it's actually something, it's a very interesting question, actually, because when we go to door to door, sometimes it's actually not the first thing that comes up because people are so socialized to accept this ludicrous proposition that we all pay over half of our income in rent. I know people who pay over 80% of their income, people on fixed income, social security paying nearly 100%, if not more than 100% somehow of what they get in in a given month in rent. But there's such strong social conditioning. We've all come to accept that this is just the reality, that this massive bill that we pay just is what it is. So sometimes it actually does take some work on the doors and Josh can attest to this. Sometimes it takes some work to be like,

that's not right. You mean to tell me you're not filling your prescriptions because you're paying this much in rent? That's not right. Sometimes it takes a little bit of extra agitation. But the reality is there is an intuitive sense among tenants in this country that something is deeply wrong. It's not just not right. It's deeply wrong. So the rent is central to everything that we do. And I'll let Josh describe this a little bit more, but what this looks like is at a property level, often the union will come up with demands that have to do with their rent. We've had unions fight for and win rent rollbacks. There's been an increase. They demand rollback that increase. We've had unions fight for and win rent freezes, lease renewals and rent freezes and eviction protections, right? We've had tenants

organize and win all sorts of odd deals where, you know, there's a property that I organized where the tenants pay $400 in rent and the city pays the other half. And because there's city money involved, the landlord is on the hook for an additional set of protections. Right. So there's all these types of solutions, proposals, wins that we've secured related to the rent. There's also a lot that we've tried to do that we've not succeeded in. For example, we've tried to get rent protections attached as conditions to these massive federally backed loans that many of our landlords benefit from. We organized, like our lives depended on it, for years to try to win these types of rent regulations under the previous administration, and we didn't get them. And frankly, even if we had,

they probably would have been rolled back by now. But there's much more structural ground that we need to go seize on this front, because as I said before, we just can't go on like this At a certain point, people have nothing left to give. And at that point, I don't want to live to see the consequences of what that desperation results in if people aren't organized. Yeah, I think what's interesting about that scenario is that to Tara's point that the rent is so arbitrarily set that if tenants can force a negotiation around the rent, that the arbitrariness of it works in our favor.

So, for example, if you're going to create a demands, around maintenance. You have to create demands around rent. Otherwise, landlords will just use the new maintenance as excuse to jack up the rent more. So these things always work hand in hand. The rent is such a source of our misery, but it's also the source of all of our power. They literally cannot function without it. And so like Tar said, there's a lot of political education that is involved there of actually getting tenants to see this thing that they're paying every month that's destroying their lives is actually the source of their power if they come together collectively. And so, yeah, it's it's all about the rent every day. And then, like Tara said,

once you force the negotiation with the landlord, anything can happen. And what we're seeing right now is in our campaigns is that these landlords are not used to negotiating like this. They're used to negotiating in a court setting. So they're relying on legal consultants. And since our campaigns are not focused on legal solutions, the landlords are actually kind of baffled about what to do with us in these campaigns. So one of the things that your team shared with me when we were first talking about having this conversation was around like this really big and exciting unionizing campaign that you're all undertaking right now. And I think earlier, Tara, you had mentioned the capital realty group. And so it's like this big private equity firm

that owns many affordable housing complexes around the country. And so you're working on fighting them as a union. So maybe just give us a sense of like what this group is and tell us a little bit about this campaign, like what you guys have been doing in terms of organizing against them? The whole story actually starts last year. Basically, we launched tough and immediately got busy and got ourselves into a fight. And that fight was around trying to organize majority unions that were strike-ready in a set of properties with federally backed loans last year. And this is part of a multi-year effort to try to win those rent regulations from the federal government as a condition of these loans.

And that first big swing that we took was extremely instructive. First of all, it gave us a first opportunity to test out this methodology that was new to some of us or that we were in the process of refining the methodology around building majority unions. And when I say majority union, I mean 50% plus one of the tenants in the property are, members of the union. And these, we think, are the strongest types of unions to build. In fact, we're always aiming for supermajority, at least 65%. And when we say strike ready, we don't mean that we're always gunning for a rent strike. Really what we mean is we're trying to build fighting unions. These are not just unions where people sign their name on paper and, you know, they hang out

and have tea time in the lobby. These are unions where people are test. and flexing their power, and they're ready to escalate until the point that they may be ready to go on strike if they don't get their demands met. And we started testing out this methodology last year. One of the big lessons from that first big swing was that we were dispersing our power by organizing in a bunch properties with different landlords, even if they shared a lender. So one thing we wanted to experiment with this year was what it would be like to organize in one landlord's portfolio. And obviously, there are a universe of landlords to choose from. We ended up selecting Capital Realty Group, New York-based corporate landlord. They're heavily subsidized by HUD. Basically, their whole business

relies on checks from the federal government. They own a bunch of senior buildings, a bunch of buildings that are home to immigrants and domestic businesses. violence survivors, and they're a very typical HUD-supported landlord. And they also own properties in 28 states. It's over 14,000 units across the country. So for a lot of different reasons, after doing some scouting in their properties, we decided that this was a pretty viable target of our organizing. And we trained together, and then we spent the summer organizing. And then starting at the beginning of August, over the course of six weeks, we launched not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, but seven majority unions across their portfolio.

We're now organizing an over 1,000 units owned by Capital Realty Group from everywhere from Billings, Montana to New Haven, Connecticut, and everywhere in between. And that organizing is actually expanding as we speak. And it only took two union launches before we got to the bargaining table with Moshe Eichler, who's the CEO of Capital Realty Group. right after the Detroit launch, he was on site on the property in Detroit the next day. And then the next week, we sat down for our first bargaining session. Since that time, we haven't seen Capital Realty Group come back to the table. But in the meantime, we've been building and wielding a lot of

power as we try to figure out how we're going to get them back to the table. And I should say also, it's not just about getting them to the table on the way. We're winning in a material way at every property where we're organizing. The elevators are getting fixed at Paraclete Manor. There's mold remediation at Rose Park in Billings, Montana. And it's this type of stuff that matters as much and sometimes even more to the tenants that we're organizing than actually getting to the table with the landlord himself. And Josh, maybe you can tell us a little bit about the similar campaign that you're engaged in right now that's a little bit more localized like the state of Kentucky, but it's against like a similar group, right, that owns multiple buildings, I believe OSPM. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, OSPM. They are based out of New Jersey. And what you have in Kentucky is a lot of corporate landlords coming here to buy property simply because there are no regulations. Taxes are low. And it's in the south corporations know they can get away with murder. And so OSPM came to Kentucky to expand their portfolio. Like Tara said, one thing we've learned is organizing separate buildings isn't as effective as organizing across the landlord's portfolio. So we voted back in the spring to launch that portfolio campaign and actually expand out into the state. And so we actually went out to rural areas of the state, talked to the tenants in OSPM buildings. We found exactly what we thought we would find there. We found tenants living in horrific conditions. And one thing that's been different

in rural areas as opposed to urban areas is that the level of violence on the part of the landlord property manager is very high. Every landlord has an equation in their head, right? They're going to raise rent. They're going to cut staff. They're going to cut maintenance. What that means is that you have a lot of angry people living in these buildings. The imperative becomes, it becomes a sort of like natural imperative that the landlord ends up hiring a very ruthless person to manage those buildings to quell any tenant descent and basically control the optics around that. So the natural tendency is for the landlord or the property manager become very heavy-handed. Those property managers also in rural areas kind of run these sort of like quasi-futable systems where they start bringing their own family

members, their own friends to live there. A lot of times they're participating in legal activity because they simply have free reigns. So what we found in the rural areas is that when the landlord goes to evict somebody, they don't go through, they don't go through the courts. They show up with a bunch of thugs and say, get out in the middle of the night or we're going to put your stuff out on the street. So our message to tenants a lot of times is that no one's going to do this for you. The government isn't going to intervene. They're actually in bed with the landlords.

There's not a legal solution. Nonprofits aren't going to help. They're controlled by the landlords. And what we found is that in rural areas, this messaging is really effective because tenants are already living that. They're already experiencing that. They know that in their guts. So when we come and offer them an opportunity to fight, they're taking it.

and they're taking it very readily. We just did a car drive last night in a building in Western Kentucky, a OSPN building, and almost got a third of the building signed up in two hours. So tenants out here, they're already calling HUD. They're already calling whatever legal aid service exists and getting nothing. So we've unionized two of the buildings in the OSPM portfolio. We actually filed a restraining order against OSPM in the courts to stop harassment.

Already one contempt charge against the landlord. They had to pay a $10,000 fine. The judge ordered the CEO of the company to come back to court next week. He's been sending his employees, which really pissed the judge off. So this legal victory is unprecedented in Kentucky. Nothing like this has ever happened before. And one of the things we're actually able to do is get the judge to rule that if the landlord retaliates against a tenant in one building, it affects all the tenants across the state.

So we don't usually look for a legal solution and we don't usually rely on it, but it's always good to get it when we can. So this has been really helpful. The landlord in that portfolio agreed to come to the bargaining table on October 16th. He's since backed out and ghosted, but we think bringing on the other building in Western Kentucky will bring him back to the table. And so at the end of the week, we will have over 100 tenants organized into this campaign all across the same. state. And so what this looks like is we have, you know, rural people from eastern Kentucky coming to union launches in downtown Louisville. We have tenants getting on Zoom calls and power mapping the state from all over the state. You've got to understand in the rural south,

there's an organizing vacuum. There really isn't any organizing happening except for the right. And there's nothing on the left that's anywhere near as developed as how the right is organizing, how structured it is, how intentional it is. We hope tenant organizing can be the antidote to right-wing nationalist organizing in the South. And what we found is that people in the South really have no vehicle to express their class hatred. You know, electoral politics doesn't do that. Labor unions have largely disappeared down there. And so when we go into an area and organize one building, we usually end up organizing that entire county

because that one building exposes the class divisions that already. exists there that people have no way to tap into. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Tara Raghavir and Josh Poe. We'll be right back. That was Forest Floor by Witch Dream Mansion, Robert's old band. On that note, we're running low on listener music submissions. So if you're in a band and you'd like us to feature your song during an intermission, hit us up. Now back to our conversation with Tara Raghavir and Josh

Poe. One thing I really appreciate about tenant organizing was like you're saying it, like uncovers these really tangible contradictions within capitalism. And it highlights the tenant landlord relationship as this like ultimate point of irreconcilable contradiction, right? And I think there's like you know, oftentimes there is this intuitive feeling of that, but there's not always the language or there's not always like the analysis that allows you to develop that into a class politics. And I'm wondering if you've noticed in your experience doing this, both Tara and you, Josh, and actually I'm also interested, like, do you infuse your organizing with that kind of like higher level political analysis and are people receptive to that or is it like mostly people are just

interested in getting the repairs done and they're not as interested in sort of jumping into organizing more broadly and like broadening out this idea of class politics? Yes. Yes, one, we do that. I think from the very beginning on a door, everything we're doing is a form of political education, constant political education. Let's let's back of a second. So the way the right is organizing in rural areas is really a very gendered form of organizing.

You have high rates of male unemployment. And the only unemployment that's really offered to males is often military or police. And you also have areas devastated by the opioid crisis. So the right is targeting those males for organizing. What we do is the opposite of that. So a lot of times we will start. talking to a tenant, for example, about a maintenance issue or a group of people about a maintenance issue. And their first question is, well, why doesn't the code inspector do anything?

Why doesn't the city do anything? Why doesn't the mayor do anything? So unions in this country were a great avenue for political education. I don't think we talk enough about how unions have become decimated. There isn't political education really happening in these communities anymore. So when we get tenants in a room and we start doing the type of target analysis to answer those questions, what they find is that the code inspector gets money from real estate, the mayor gets money from real estate, the city council people get money from real estate, and they start to develop their own political analysis that also comes with an agitation that they can intervene in that process. So for example, I think in our rural buildings that are happening right now, I think next year

we're going to see tenants run for mayor of those counties. They've already written legislation to pass in those counties. So the tenant union is just, it's a natural, to intervening in a larger political process that they really have no no one's inviting them into that right now the only type of organizing that's done outside or outside of the right is you know the democrats show up every four years and ask for a vote and they don't even do that anymore in rural areas so there's literally a vacuum there that we can step into and offer people something really powerful i think both josh and i were also giggling a little bit when you asked if this kind of high level analysis was part of everything we do. And I think what Josh said is absolutely right,

that it is actually infused into every conversation we have with people from the doors to the training room to the thick of a fight. And Josh and I are kind of giggling a little bit because I think he and I are actually devoted to the practice of organizing that makes the complicated clear. And I think neither of us are the types of organizers who are knocking on a door. talking about racial capitalism in an explicit sense. Like we're not using that terminology, but we are talking about racial capitalism in a different sense. And we're asking questions, I think more importantly,

we're asking questions that actually draw out people's intuitive understanding of how the world works and their intrinsic anger about the injustice that they deal with every day. And the tenant union, I think, becomes a container for what, people already know. And then the union becomes a sort of vehicle for educating ourselves and each other. Whenever we do trainings, we always try to open with saying, you know, the person in front of this room is not here to teach you something that you don't know. The person in front of the room is here to steward your own acknowledgement of what you know, of what you know intuitively. So when we talk about things like class struggle and class anger, there is a difference in how we do that

as organizers that I think to people like me and Josh is a very, very important distinction, because there's a lot of other ways that it's done that can actually be extremely alienating and don't do the work of bringing people together across the lines that might otherwise divide them. And do you butt up against, because Josh, you mentioned that like the areas that you're organizing in are quite red, right? Like, do you butt up against, like, ideological barriers often? People who may be experiencing the challenges that everybody is experiencing when it comes to working with landlords and all of the difficulties. But then also, like, have sort of the set of, like, ideological beliefs that come with, like, growing up or living in a right-wing place.

that creates a barrier, or is that not really an issue that you've come across? Let me, let me, are you asking if we have a like, we have a lot of Trump supporters? Um, and just people with bad politics in the union? Yeah, sort of. I mean, not just like limited to Trump, but, you know, I would imagine there might be people who are not really receptive to the idea of unions in general, maybe, or like organizing or people who think that the issues might not be like structural, but just like one bad landlord and that, you know, the whole arrangement of, you know, landlord tenant, like there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Just ideological barriers that make it so that it's more difficult to organize because, I mean, here in the Bay Area where I'm at, it's a, you know, liberal state and definitely like in, it's arguable whether the Bay Area is right wing or left wing, but there's at least probably quite a big difference between where I'm at and the organizing that you're doing in like a largely red rural area. So I'm just curious if that's something that you've come across. Yeah, yeah, it is different. And I think it's important thing about why it's different too, right? There are, there are barriers everywhere. You know, I think if we were going to organize, you know, if I were going to organize in the Bay Area or in the West Coast, one of the

barriers, it's that it's almost overorganized. You know, somebody's door's been knocked on 30 times in the last 15 years. In the South, it's really the opposite of that. There are stories in the South that if you organize, you will experience violence. And what's been really interesting to me doing rural organizing is how fresh the stories are in the memories of people about past union campaign. So in the building I'm in now, the community, the Teamsters tried to organize there in the 70s, and someone got shot. And everyone has told me that story. Like that story is so fresh in people's minds, which tells us a lot about the history of organizing there. There was one campaign, there was violence and we never tried this shit again, right? So that's really what we're up against

more than the ideological barriers. It's pretty easy to take someone from bad politics to understanding the corporatization of real estate, right? Like, why is your landlord getting rich of our tax dollars? Do you think that's right? Like, that's a pretty easy jump. I think what's a harder jump is just overcoming how much people feel abandoned by unions and how angry people are at the Democratic Party. So I actually think a lot of the bad

politics in the South from the inside, if you talk to those folks, it's really outrage at the Democratic Party and outrage at unions at how they've abandoned the South and didn't support the South. So what you have in the South are a lot of failed union campaigns.

And let's just contextualize for a second how devastating it is to lose your union. people never get over that, right? That's generational rage from the result of that. And that's what you have all over the South. So we agitate people, we push people, we try to educate people. And what we found is the majority of the people, if they're offered a chance to fight against the ruling class and against their landlord, they will take it. And then you get people in the room. And I think, you know, I think we have a lot of people in the tenant union who voted for Trump. in our rural chapters, I don't think they would ever do it again as a result of being in the Tenning Union, though. Yeah, thank you for that. And so one of the things that I wanted to ask you both about is, and you've mentioned the sort of the legal landscape already a little bit, and I know that it varies throughout the country quite a bit, but what is the legal landscape in your region? How does it compare to the general legal, like federal legal landscape,

in terms of like the balance between tenants' rights and landlords' rights and who the laws are written by and for, and how have you been able to navigate some of those laws in that legal landscape? I'll start us off because I think Josh and I probably have a very similar answer to this question because Missouri and Kentucky are similarly sunk in places, and that's kind of how I would refer to the state of protections for tenants versus enshrined power for landlords in states like ours. And in many of the states where we're organizing across the country,

there's almost no protection for tenants in any kind of formal law. There's no legal scaffolding for the type of organizing that we're doing. There's no formal process around unionizing or bargaining. And the landlords have almost all the power. And understanding the history behind that is actually really important. in many of our state legislative contexts, being a state legislator is a part-time job. And that's because way back in the day, it was family farmers. It was people who were like agriculturalists, sort of barons of the land in a different sense, who then part-time went and did their work as state

legislators. And so the laws were sort of designed around white landowning men and their needs. And then to this day, many of our state legislatures, those jobs are still part-time jobs. And the last thing I'll say here, and I think an important thing to say is that organizers like Josh myself, I think, are actually pretty unconcerned with the formal legal structure out of necessity. We can't concern ourselves too much with like the laws that are written on the books because they were not written for us or our people. They do not serve us and our people. And that actually undergirds, I think, a feeling of responsibility to build different kinds of power that are kind of extra legal, right? We've taken a lot of tenants in Missouri, which is a sunken place. We've taken a lot of tenants,

hundreds of tenants in the last couple of years on rent strike. And the first, first question those tenants will ask us as we're considering the strike, the first question the news media will ask us is, is this legal? No, the answer is no. The answer is no. You know what else is not legal? The landlord not delivering on his part of the contract, right? So some of what we're here to do is actually heighten the contradiction of who gets to benefit from the laws that are written, who is asked whether or not their activity is legal, whether it's allowed, et cetera. Like a lot of what we're doing, I think, is directly confronting the failure of what exists and inserting some imagination, like material imagination of what could be, what should be,

by just making it real. There's no playbook. There's no framework. There's no path. So we have to write a playbook. We have to build a framework. We have to walk a path. And that's that's the work that we have signed up for, I think, for the rest of our lives and maybe beyond.

One thing that I think about a lot is like, because you don't really think about it. It's often like very easy for this stuff to be normalized, like just the fact that like you have to pay security deposit oftentimes first and last month's rent. And that's like such a huge, not just burden, but. it's like obviously that benefits the landlord, but there aren't very similar laws in place, for example, or like even just like cultural customs or whatever where it's like, no, actually you get to ask the landlord for references from three previous tenants or like, you know, just reversing the way that we're so used to these things working. It really makes you realize like, oh, wow, like all of this stuff is written in the favor of the

landlord, like probably by landlords. And, yeah, I don't know. I just think about that a lot, like these little things that if they were reversed, how much more convenient and like how much better life would be for people who are looking for a place to live or for looking to, you know, live in a place that's maintained well and has a portable rent, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, your response just kind of made me think about that. But I want to zoom out a little bit right now and talk about some of the more structural issues. I know we only have a few minutes left together. So we talked a little bit about this at the top,

but like we've seen over the past few decades, like housing has really transformed into a commodity in ways that, you know, it's led to private equity groups like BlackRock buying up like literally tens of thousands of residential homes. In the Bay Area where I live, there's absolutely like, you know, I'd say every other city and region in the United States, like a huge housing crisis.

But it's not necessarily like a housing crisis in terms of there's not enough housing. It's an affordable housing crisis, right? Because like here in the Bay Area, we have many luxury units that are just like remaining uninhabited. So maybe if you could address like this issue, this argument that we hear a lot about, well, we just need more housing. and it's a matter of like the housing stock and they're not being enough housing. And if that is something that you think is part of the equation or if like the housing crisis is something that can't be boiled down to an issue of quantity. I know Tara and I both talk a lot about this. So I'm going to be briefed and I'm going to let her take it. There's a shortage of I think 4.4 million

houses in the country. So any system that is that short has failed. And we don't have to be briefed. I'm don't have enough housing for the same reason. We don't have enough jobs. So if unemployment is high, you can keep wages as low as you want because there are an army of unemployed workers at the door, right? If we have a shortage of 4.4 million units, you know, this country is basically a lottery every day where, you know, we roll the dice and some of us are going to have a job and be housed and some of us aren't. If there is an army of houseless people on the street, we can charge whatever we want for rent. And that is literally ransom to keep. keep us off the street and in the near future likely be put in a cage by ice if we're on the street.

So the system is functioning exactly the way it was designed to function. And the argument that it's a supply issue and we just build more housing is really a false argument made by landlords to get more public subsidies to construct housing. Like we're not going to build our way out of it. But I'll let Tara dig into more of the economic points of it. Yeah, Josh is right. I mean, there is real shortage. and that shortage is by design, right? There's a manufactured higher demand than there is supply of housing.

If we dig beyond that, right? Like if we buy the premise that there is the shortage, which is just the truth, we also then need to dig in to understand what exactly the contours of that shortage are. We have a shortage specifically of housing that people can actually afford. The shortage is not of market rate housing. it's not of luxury condos. It's a housing that people can actually afford. So if we actually aim to solve the affordable housing supply shortage,

and I'm using all of these terms and kind of heavy quotes because I think they're often weaponized by the industry. But if it's our basic goal to solve that shortage, that's going to require types of interventions that are never really discussed when we have debates about housing supply. You know, the abundance guys are out here talking about housing supply in a way that's both power agnostic and also really uninformed about the realities of housing finance. I talk to developers all the time. In most markets that are not New York and maybe not the Bay Area and not L.A., the biggest constraint to them building more housing and especially building more housing that people can actually afford to live in is not zoning.

It is actually housing finance. Okay, amazing. That's great to know because then we can start to design solutions that protect people around that. If a landlord who wants to build affordable, quote, affordable housing can only do so with public subsidy. That gives us power. That gives us leverage if we have the means to actually go use it, right? If we acknowledge the reality that anyone who considers themselves, quote, affordable housing provider relies on public money to run their business, suddenly we have power if we choose to use it.

And we can attach all sorts of conditions, strings, requirements, protections to essentially what is a public subsidy for those private businesses to operate and hopefully win a lot more ground for tenants to be protected. The other thing I will say here is that part of the reason the supply debate is so frustrating to me is we are hemorrhaging what could. be considered affordable supply at a rate that we simply can't rebuild. And we're hemorrhaging that supply because we are not regulating rent increases. Rent hikes are allowed across the country at a degree of scale that has created this crisis that we see today. And as a result of our failure to regulate rent increases, we are losing what could be affordable housing supply in this country. And we actually

can't build that back at a pace that keeps up with the loss. So there's some basic failures to understand economics, housing finance, and power that underlie a lot of the mainstream discourse on housing supply. And that also then leads to our critique, which informs our organizing practice, which is really about wielding power effectively and acknowledging, you know, the realities of this market that tenants have to face every day. Can I add one more thing just for the abundance folks, the model of supply that most of the discourse is based on is only relevant if one landlord owns one house. And we know that that is not the case with BlackRock. We have huge monopolies. We have a huge amount of collusion among landlords to set the price. So the only people taking that

seriously are people who are either in love with economic models or funded by developers in some way. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you both for that. And so my last question is it's kind of like a bigger one. Like I really want to zoom out here. I saw a statistic not too long ago that's just like really burned itself into my brain, which is that 90% of people in China own their homes. So 90% of the people who have a home or live in a home rather in China own that home. And you mentioned earlier about working towards like tenant ownership, right?

like collective ownership and that kind of thing. I'm wondering if we really zoom out here and not to get like utopian or whatever, but like to really understand like what the ultimate housing situation, the ultimate ideal housing situation is like if you're, if you just say like this is our end goal. Like is the end goal to have like, you know, landlords who are like responding to emails about mold or is it much larger than that? Like, how would you like to see people's relationships to homes? And is that something that you think is achievable under our current capitalist system?

I think we all know the answer to that. But just really want to get your ultimate vision here. Yeah, it cuts into the contradiction, right? Like, the contradiction is landlords need to profit. People need to home. Our vision is that everyone is housed in the richest country and the history of the world. We can afford to house everyone. we have to acknowledge that the market is not going to create that situation. So this is not complicated. This is going to take a massive public investment into social housing and bring a lot of the ownership models to the table. Right now in this country, you're either a renter or you're a homeowner. That's exactly the way Herbert Hoover and Donald Trump won it. That's the system that they created for their benefit. And so that's not the inevitable. We don't have to live in that system.

And so, but I think we have to really deal with how that system came to be. We have to deal with, you know, the suburbanization, how the housing system was used to crush the labor movement, how homeownership came to be, how the suburbs came to be, how we subsidized that and really owned that history. And then if we know why we chose this path, we can choose a different path. But in 1978 HUD's budget for public housing construction was $83 billion. By 1993, it was zero. Like this system is functioning the way it was designed to function. But again, none of that's inevitable. Josh is saying something that reminds me of a quote from one of our union members a couple

years back. He said, we got here, we can get somewhere else. And I think people, especially in America as young as this experiment of a nation, tend to forget that everything we have today was just the invention of some group of people who had the audacity to say, this is the way it should be. And that includes public housing was the invention of some group of people who had the audacity to say, this is the way it should be. And then the demolition of public housing in a literal sense and otherwise was the invention of another group of people who said,

this is the way it should be, tear all this shit down and we're going to privatize it all. So we got here, we can get somewhere else. And, you know, I think Josh said it beautifully. we don't dream of a world where we have to pay 80% of our income to a private landlord who lives in another state and hides himself behind an LLC. We dream of a world where we can live, we can breathe, we can thrive in community, in relationship to our neighbors, where our homes are not treated as commodities, where our lives are not treated as line items in some guy's budget. And that dream is actually not that far away. It doesn't feel utopic to me.

And when we talk about these types of things in our unions, whether it's in the Grace and Hope Church in Louisville, where I've attended meetings with Josh and his crew or in the basement of the building where we do our meetings here in Kansas City, another part of the intuition of our union members is they know that that dream is not utopian. They know that that's actually what they're owed.

And I think it's that level of clarity about what our people are owed that is going to get us. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Tara Raghavir and Josh Poe. Tara Raghavir is a tenant organizer with KC tenants based in Kansas City, Missouri, and with the Tenant Union Federation.

Josh Poe is the organizing director with the Kentucky Tenant Union and the Tenant Union Federation along with Tara. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Whitchstream Mansion for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robbie. Upstream is entirely listener-funded.

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