A New Group Is Trying to Help Those Who Rent Homes Give Themselves a Leg Up in the Fight for Fair Wages and Housing in Houston
I spoke with one of the organizers of the event, Matthew Wackerle (who, in the interest of disclosure, I consider a personal friend), about the “ Fight for $15 ,” some of the struggles tenants face, and what organized and informed people might be able to do about these and other things.
What was the purpose of the presentation on February 4th?
We also approached it by proposing the idea of organizing a tenants’ union in Houston. Tenants unions exist in other parts of the country, particularly in the industrial North or Rust-Belt areas where you have a stronger tradition of progressive politics. It’s something you don’t really see so much in the South. In fact, I can’t think of any tenants’ unions that do exist in Texas whatsoever. There is the Austin Tenant’s Council, which helps low-income tenants with litigation, with advising, it educates people on their rights as tenants, but it doesn’t really do so much when it comes to organizing tenants.
We had about 25 people show up for the meeting, and it was a really good crowd of people. It wasn’t like it was a bunch of activists.
The usual types who show up to everything anyway?
What is a tenants’ union?
It’s not technically a union in the sense we think about labor for instance. There are very specific qualifications for an organization to be considered a labor union in the United States. The way tenants’ unions tend to operate is as an association of people who are renting homes and apartments from landlords. They might be paying dues into the organization so that it could operate in the same way people in labor unions do when they pay union dues. It’s there to enable them to speak with one voice instead of just being on their own facing their landlords.
That might mean compelling landlords to negotiate with multiple tenants in a given area, which would include their representatives from the tenants’ union if that would be possible. That would include educating the public on their rights as tenants, and even organizing things like tenant strikes, which we haven’t seen so much in recent years in the United States but wasn’t extremely uncommon in the ’60s and 70’s.
If all of a sudden, apartment owners here in Houston would want to dramatically raise rent, or if they were not meeting the needs and concerns of tenants, if they were treating them unfairly. Even things like, under Texas law, people might think landlords are obligated to get rid of bedbugs, but they’re not. There can be a massive bedbug infestation in an apartment complex, and landlords, especially for lower income apartments, they’ll be like “Screw you. No, we’re not going to do anything about that.” But, if, say, tenants start to withhold rent — if one tenant does that, they’re probably going to get evicted, but lets say everybody does that? That kind of changes the dynamics because you can’t evict everyone at once.
It’s also to draw attention to things like that to the public eye, to shame landlords who are abusive to the rights of their tenants, the safety concerns of the tenants, and sometimes even the tenants themselves. Sexual harassment by a property manager or a landlord is something that happens all the time. Telling residents “Give me a bribe, or else,” is another thing that happens a lot. Also, just providing a forum for tenants to get together and discuss their concerns either at individual complexes or multiple complexes in the city of Houston.
Low income residents, especially, are not informed of their rights as tenants, or the rights they do know of are not exhausted, or they may not even know they have any rights whatsoever. Quite frequently, the landlord or the agent of the landlord will lie to them about what their rights are or are not. Many low-income residents of Houston are immigrants or undocumented immigrants, and while it’s totally illegal under the Fair Housing Act to do something like threaten to call ICE on them if they don’t give a bribe. That’s illegal — that’s discrimination against someone based on their nationality. It doesn’t matter whether they’re here legally or not; that is not something that a landlord is allowed to do. But they’ll do it, and they do it all the time. They may not know there’s anything they can do about it.
There are also online resources a lot of people don’t know about, like Texas Tenant Advisor, where they can go if they need to dispute a deposit that’s been taken, or they need to make a repair request. What I’ve discussed about what can happen to tenants isn’t even the tip of the iceberg.
Where can people go for more information?
by Guest Author