The tagline for this newsletter is Housing Authority, a newsletter about fighting landlords. One of my intentions when starting Housing Authority was to discuss tenant organizing in practice. We’ve mostly been brain-dumping about our current housing system and wonky policy shit. Not to discount all that we’ve been learning together, that’s definitely important! We’re setting the stage! We can’t be successful without material analysis but we also can’t theorize our way to a better future. That will take work.
The case to start organizing: This shit changes lives 🌈
Pop psychologists and columnists talk about how and why it’s so hard to make friends as an adult. They talk about the challenges of modern life, long commutes, competition between friends and romantic partners, having or not having children. On the left we understand the loss of strong friendships and communities is a symptom of alienation under capitalism. The old May Day slogan “8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will” feels a little flat when more work seeps into the 8 hours for what we will.
Dissent recently published an article by Zoe Hu that explores one of the responses to this kind of alienation: tradlife culture. It’s easy to recognize tradlife as reactionary, role-playing the golden age of mid-century life with nuclear families and stay-at-home motherhood. What is special about tradlife “is that it also includes earnest criticisms of life under capitalism” while spanning all sides of the political spectrum, in appearance if not in substance.
The rise of tradlife tells me that we are not alright.
But within the nightmare, organizing has become one of the most fulfilling things I have ever done. Many of my comrades say the same thing. Nothing else has engaged all the different parts of myself from big picture strategy, to operationalizing goals, to my love for gossip, to disrupting things, to indulging elitist philosophical pursuits, to fucking off with my pals. If you are a human, there is a place for you in organizing.
You might have thought that I’d start with all of the big wins like successfully suing my landlord and protecting people from eviction. And yeah, I started organizing because of spite, because I wanted to change things, but I would have burnt myself out ages ago if that was my only motivation to stay.
Because organizing centers around relationships, it’s the perfect antidote to our hegemonic loneliness. Bringing people together around a shared set of values? It’s life changing. And it’s something everyone can do.
Organizing builds power ⚒️
When we were first organizing the Watts Street apartment, Cam and I had these doorstep conversations with our neighbors asking them how they were dealing with the stress of the pandemic, what video games they were playing, and what they thought about our property manager’s shitty letter.
Now that I have more organizing hours under my belt, I recognize these conversations as one-to-ones. Smarter people than me call one-to-ones the bread and butter of organizing. They’re just simple conversations like you’d have with a stranger at the bar or a catch-up over coffee with a friend you haven’t seen in a while. They provide you with the chance to understand the other person’s situation, motivation, values and gives them an opportunity to get more involved with organizing.
The conversations with our Watts Street neighbors ended up being critical to our success because we learned who was still working, who was worried about getting deported, who didn’t qualify for unemployment. We also attached real people to the effort to fight against our landlord.
Relationships create the foundation for power. Unions are recognized when a majority of workers vote to join the union. That majority is important when it’s everyone’s employment on the line and we’re all broke and exhausted, access to people is one of the few sources of power we have. We are the masses, we create our own leverage.
But what is power? Very simply, power is the ability to help or hurt. Cops have a lot of power because they’re literally allowed to lynch Black folks without any repercussions. Bosses have a lot of power because they can raise your wages or they can fire you.
Organizing takes power away from those who hurt us, and empowers us to help ourselves. Not in the self-helpery way, in the changing material conditions way. By building relationships with your neighbors you can resist or counteract the power of your landlord by outnumbering them, by financially impacting their bottom line, by enacting new consequences on them.
And you can ruin your landlord’s life 😇
It starts with saying hello in the elevator or when you’re walking your dog. You can make new friends, participate in the legacy of liberatory movements AND you can be a petty bitch and screw over the people hoarding resources? I can think of nothing better.
This will be part of a longer series about the nuts and bolts of tenant organizing. Next time I’ll be talking about how you can ruin your landlord’s life.