Campaign Report: Tenants Union Organizing Part 1, Chicago
A report from M. Rowton on tenant union organizing in Chicago by a member of the Campaign for a Socialist Party (CSP). Part 1 of a series of reports on tenant organizing across different countries.
The second time I speak to Brandon, London is getting cold. The last of the spiders that built their webs over the rubbish area in my close during the summer has died, or retreated into some little crevice in the brickwork to outlast the weather — which means we’re well into autumn.
I’m in a bad mood. I’ve spent my work week interviewing what our client, a branch of the civil service, calls its “vulnerable customers”: people who, for one reason or another, are deemed to be no longer capable of integrating into normal life. At the end of projects like these I always find myself struggling with ungenerous feelings of resentment towards these “customers”. Something about their isolation, and their helplessness, starts to seep into my skin.
I have an interview to finish before I talk to Brandon, but the woman I’m meant to be speaking to keeps wandering away from the phone to argue with a man somewhere in another room – and eventually I decide to give up on it.
“Technical issues”, I message the recruiter.
Going to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea, I realise I’m looking forward to talking to Brandon. The first time we spoke, it was clear that he was in possession of a massive amount of information and enthusiasm. A good antidote, I hope, to the fog I’ve been wading through all week.
I plan to hold the conversation in my sitting room, which doubles as a sort-of office, but it turns out my wife is watching TV in there – some show about a high-powered lawyer who moves to rural Maine and finds love. So, I have to call Chicago from the bedroom instead, trying to ignore my looming reflection as I perch next to the little Hollywood style vanity mirror.
I don’t know much about Chicago beyond the half-formed image exported to the UK: deep-dish pizza, unions, gang violence — and, based on watching Chicago Med over my wife’s shoulder, a surplus of attractive doctors.
Brandon, who’s been involved in tenants organising there for the last five years or so, gave me a more up-to-date background the last time we spoke.
“The big context for tenants organising is that there’s a real cost of living crisis in the city. Housing cost is a particular problem, there’s been something like a 35% rise since before Covid, and that’s pushed a lot of people into a precarious position.”
He also pointed out that much of the existing community organising in the city remains fairly disjointed, often organised along ethnic or religious lines rather than city-wide.
“You have big, strong ethnic enclaves in Chicago. A lot of the time, the community organising in those enclaves is strong, but it’s not universal. It’s like, you have to be a member of the Polish Catholic Church if you want access to it.”
“In some ways,” he added, “that’s what a Socialist Party could try to be in Chicago, at first — the Polish Catholic Church for everybody.”
That line touched on what I originally found so attractive about the Campaign – an explorative project aimed at investigating what already exists to see how, and if, it could point towards rebuilding a genuine socialist movement.
As Brandon put it: “The ideal is you find people who are already doing organizing, and you learn from them and their efforts, the skillset they have and you don’t. But you also learn what the ceiling is on what they’re doing, because there always is one.”
This time, we’ve agreed that our conversation will be less focused on the long-term goals of the Campaign, and more on the tenants themselves. We’re going to start by talking about the kinds of problems they face in Chicago. I expect this to be primarily about rent — the obvious thing that comes to mind when someone says, “tenants’ union”.
When I finally call through to speak with him though, Brandon surprises me.
“It depends on the context, but generally I would say rent shouldn’t be the first thing you focus on. In my building, for example, our best move as tenants right now is to help each other, fix stuff around the house, and never contact the landlord.”
Never contact the landlord isn’t something I had on my bingo card for this conversation, but Brandon explains:
“This is something that people sometimes struggle to grasp. We’re hidden from our landlord right now. She doesn’t raise our rent, but if we ever were to get it into our heads that we should get together and confront her, I guarantee you she would. Or she could just sell the building to a property management company or developer. It’s a nice building, and they could easily flip it to something less affordable.”
Thinking about my relationship with my own landlord, this has the ring of truth to it. He lives hours away, and the thing I like most about her is that he barely ever pays any attention to us.
And, Brandon explains, there are risks beyond just having your rent raised.
“Let’s say you’re one of three tenants bringing legal action against a big landlord, well you’re putting a target on yourself. Yes, technically, there are laws against retaliating against tenants for organising or invoking their rights, but you have to prove it. You have to enforce it. If you actually get involved in the legal process, generally the person with the most money is going to win.”
“That’s not to say you can’t organise around rent,” he adds, “but it depends on how much leverage you have. With a hundred tenants in one building, or a hundred buildings under the same landlord, trust between members and agreement in a clear plan, the situation would change. But for most unions, that’s just not where they’re at yet.”
If rent is not the best issue to start organising around, I wonder what is?
“Safety” Brandon starts by explaining “is a big issue. In a city like Chicago, it’s a really big issue. There’s a lot that a tenant union can’t do and some things that it can. Part of the battle is knowing the difference. If there’s a guy with a gun at the door, call the police, right?”
It’s a comically extreme example– but I understand the point.
“Being able to say, we can’t handle this, let’s call the cops. That can be really hard for a leftist to do sometimes, but it’s necessary in certain cases. I think the less we’re trying to act out our political commitments in that specific way, the better.”
The same he says, probably applies for the kinds of safety problems that occur within people’s own homes.
“One thing that’s really tricky is that the tenants union can catch wind of tenants who are in fractious domestic environments. We found we couldn’t deal with that as a union, so we try to keep our focus on people as tenants. But sometimes people connected through the union organise their own responses.
At least in one case, I had a group of people form a domestic-violence support network because of shared tenant needs. That ended up being a kind of separate thing from the tenants’ union.”
Despite these limitations, Brandon tells me a tenants union can provide real benefits when it comes to safety, particularly when it comes to the simple advantages that arise from connecting people to one another.
“One of the first things we do with any building is create a Signal or WhatsApp group,” Brandon says. “It makes a huge difference for safety, people can warn each other when someone’s at the door or something’s going on outside.
“It’s actually pretty nuts that people don’t do it otherwise,” he says. “A lot of the time you have to be the conduit for the most basic neighbourly things - setting up social events, that sort of thing. And it really does make a difference: more people out and about, more people aware of each other. Even having someone to call when you’re locked out,” he laughs, and I wonder if he’s speaking from experience.
“All of that contributes to both a feeling of safety and to actual safety for people.”
This communication then lays the groundwork for other kinds of organised action.
“For example, we had a building that had a really bad package theft problem in the front lobby. The way we dealt with that is, that the union would organise to take packages from the front room and deliver them to people’s doors internally within the apartment building. That worked, people liked it – and it became a small piece of community building.”
Many of these small safety measures - WhatsApp groups, shared tools, casual cooperation - blur into another major focus of tenants’ unions: repairs.
Here, Brandon says the law can sometimes be useful, especially for serious habitability issues like no heat in winter.
“Going after a landlord who violates the law, that’s technically possible – but most tenants can’t afford to go through a sustained legal battle in court, so that’s only really useful as a threat to intimidate less savvy landlords. There’s a legal framework for repairs though that’s more tenant friendly. You can request repairs, and if they’re not made within fourteen days, you can pay for them yourself and deduct that amount from your rent.”
That, he says, shifts the burden to the landlord to contest the repair later. Because court and filing fees often exceed the cost of the work itself, many landlords don’t take it that far. In the meantime, the tenants union organizes for basic habitability, including air conditioning and space heater drives during extreme weather.
“Some tenants might be trading a bit of disrepair for affordable rent in areas they’d otherwise be priced out of. Where their family is, their kids’ schools, or just an area that’s nicer than the one they’d end up in otherwise. Then you get something like an ‘artificial slum’, not for the poorest tenants, but for the stretched middle too: a teacher and a barista sharing a flat, just managing to stay in a neighbourhood they’d otherwise be pushed out of.”
In that situation, you might be better to fix what you can yourself, because asking the landlord may mean a rent rise or a sale.”
The law then, can be one tool in the union’s belt, but most activity, Brandon tells me, is focused on small repairs - the daily problems that emerge from living in a property that someone else owns.
“A lot of people have called the landlord 400 times about something like a loose door handle, when really they just need a neighbour with a screwdriver. So much of what the tenants’ union does isn’t glamorous, it’s organising repair fairs, sharing tools, making sure people know each other’s names.”
I wonder if Brandon can tell me more about these ‘repair fairs’ and he explains that these are days when “the building gets together, and everybody sort of agrees to lend their skills and go to each other’s apartments and repair what needs repairing on a small level. It’s how people get to know ‘this guy is handy’ — I can call him when I can’t figure out what’s wrong with my thermostat.”
He laughs “I called a neighbour recently about my thermostat, it turned out I just needed batteries. It was pretty embarrassing. But I might have been sitting in my house for a week calling the landlord, saying the heat’s broken. Instead, I got it sorted out.”
After a week of speaking to distant, unhappy people over the phone - I find the idea of getting something sorted, even something small, very attractive. Perhaps a little shaming as well; I can’t remember the last time I even had a conversation with my own neighbours.
I wonder if this kind of low-level activity is what Brandon views as the backbone of the tenants organising, and he says that it is.
“These are the kind of activities that keep people invested, because they’re immediately useful. They build a certain kind of trust that’s necessary for taking on more risks. A lot of people in this city are sitting at the edge of their means, and in that context housing is a big issue to gamble with. Moving to a new place, maybe facing a longer commute, finding a new nursery – things like this can tip that balance from ‘just managing’ to ‘not managing’. To push at the edges of what’s possible, to take on that risk, people need to know who they’re doing it with.”
That, I think, gets to the heart of why I quickly found myself liking Brandon. Throw a stone in London and you’re liable to hit some well-meaning activist, busily converting the people they organise into momentum for a larger political cause. Brandon talks, first and foremost, about what tenants want and need.
Not that that’s all the project appears to be about – the dim outline of a socialist party looms somewhere off in the background. For now, at least though, ideology goes on the backburner. The spectral party appears less as a prescription, and more of a question.
I wonder how much of Brandon’s outlook stems from the Campaign’s nature as an exploratory rather than a mobilisation effort.
“That’s part of it certainly” he says, “It’s less about trying to strong-arm potential into being through organizing at this stage than it is about exploring what’s there, building on it, and trying to create a space.”
I have, I realise, a lot more questions for Brandon – about the city and about the Campaign – but we’re about to run out of time. By now, a cold midday sun will be tilting westward away from Lake Michigan, and Brandon needs to get back to work. I shelve the other questions I have and tell him we can pick up next time wherever he wants to begin.
“Great,” Brandon says, “there’s lots to talk about.”
This report was contributed by Campaign Reporter M. Rowton (submitted November 21, 2025)
If you’d like to join the Campaign for a Socialist Party (CSP), become a Campaign Reporter, or read more of our reports, please email us at campaignforasocialistpartyUSA@gmail.com or visit our Substack: campaignforasocialistparty.substack.com.