TENANT HORIZON ISSUE #12
- Valley Tenants Union
- 3 days ago
- 15 min read
Updates
What is VTU?
Valley Tenants Union is building poor and working-class power, block-by-block, in the so-called Phoenix Metro area. Landlords organize to profit off unlivable conditions, to get away with their abuses, to raise our rents, to displace us from our homes and even the streets, so we organize as tenants, housed and unhoused. The change we need, a revolutionary transformation of housing into a world without rent, comes from us.
We organize with the people and not for the people. VTU is autonomous and grassroots - we’re not interested in grants, charity from wealthy donors, working with politicians, and the control they impose. Since the laws serve our exploiters and enforcement means carrying out the violence of eviction, we reject collaboration with the police. Solidarity is our strength, so we strive to unite with interconnected struggles against racism, capitalism, and imperialism.
How does that look in practice? Union-wide, we have monthly general assemblies and committees focused on specific domains, like eviction defense. Otherwise, we’re primarily organizing tenants associations in our residences, committees across the block, and locals spanning our neighborhoods. Why? To build deeply rooted power, we need to bring the movement home and connect our homes to the broader movement.
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Evict ICE! Not Us!
“EVICT ICE, NOT US!” This chant pierced the sterile routine of the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors late last year, as a coalition spearheaded by LA Tenants Union (LATU) disrupted their meeting. The Board hoped to placate the people’s rage by proposing to ban masking by ICE agents; they responded, “you want to unmask the kidnappers without stopping the kidnapping, without stopping the mass deportations aided by evictions”. The coalition left a report, Disappeared and Displaced, which depicted widespread detentions, missing students, and the majority of surveyed migrant tenants considering self deportation due to an inability to pay rent.
Their steadfast demands for lasting eviction protections and to increase the threshold of rent debt for eviction recently won concessions for unincorporated areas in the county. They admit it’s an inadequate victory, yet it reflects the growing strength of their movement. They aren’t alone in this struggle: the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance (new fellows in the Autonomous Tenants Union Network) began demanding an eviction moratorium in October while the newly united Twin Cities Tenants Union did so in January through the federal government’s deadly siege.
The echo of these efforts represents a simple truth: every ICE kidnapping ripples beyond itself. The threat of deportation scares people away from their workplaces. Jornaleros lose work from those afraid of getting busted. Losing providers hurts the ability of whole families to provide for themselves. Fear permeates, and landlords, abusers, and other oppressors take great advantage. Being forced to sell your labor and pass the wages to a parasite to keep a roof over your head (or being proletarian) squeezes you in particular. Besides those closest to property ownership and comfortable wages, most tenants taste this bitter bind to a lesser degree. It’s the indigenous peoples of this continent and the peoples facing the brunt of imperialism and colonialism who understand this contradiction best as a manifestation of war.
The first steps undertaken in this war are often necessarily defensive, like sharing a Gofundme or organizing a kermes supporting neighbors who have been taken. We form rapid response networks to gather information on raids and communicate with families who are often otherwise left in the dark. Where neighborhoods are already more strongly organized, we form watches along school bus routes, buy groceries for each other, share tips with whistles and groupchats, unite fellow teachers against raids, and even create street checkpoints. Notable examples include the LATU and National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) led Home Depot Defense Centers, the Union del Barrio neighborhood patrols, as well as the armed patrols from the Indigenous Protector Movement in Minneapolis.
Besides calling for eviction moratoriums, we go on the offensive in other ways, whether through the widespread shutdown and partial general strike in Minneapolis, mass student walkouts locally, and even the mobilization to demand to stop building a concentration camp in Surprise. The extent that these efforts will succeed depends on each movement’s capacity to enforce their demands in actuality. State institutions will be more likely to bend (or break) if those demands are backed by a greater threat to upend a resignation to the decaying status quo.
In our region, we must understand our historical position and the ecosystem we inhabit to intervene successfully. Where LATU has organized Home Depot defense centers out of existing neighborhood local organizing, it’s closer to the inverse here. For example, the Barrio Defense Committees emerged out of the fight against raids on jornaleros at Home Depot, racial profiling, and Sheriff Arpaio (plus those he represented) to later sustain tenant struggles against eviction, like at Periwinkle, Weldon Court, Las Casitas, and Mesa Royale mobile home parks. Their autonomous self-organization of families, based in the calpolli in Mexica society and housed by the deeply rooted Tonatierra, lends itself to this adaptability.
The kaleidoscope of nonprofits fulfill various functions in an opaque way that can hinder collaboration beyond their directors and staffers. The division of labor can create a mindset of “staying in your lane” rather than making the most of how our tasks interrelate. It has become clear that neighborhood defense is better than countywide networks coordinated on group chats, but adaptation has been tricky. Just as well, which organization’s neighborhood committee or anarchist assembly do we join?
Despite the scramble, the result has been people in neighborhoods coming together, some meeting likeminded neighbors for the first time as they respond to raid reports or adopt day labor corners. We see newly politicized people throw themselves into the struggle even after seeing what happened to those like Renée Good and Alex Pretti, or even bystanders like Keith Porter Jr. This provides the potential to forge solidarity with those facing the greatest pinch from state violence and capitalist exploitation, where durable organization can be linked and strengthened in apartments, mobile home parks, and on the corners.
However, this shouldn’t be taken for granted. Many of the newly active are coming from liberal organizations or lack any related experience. Mass rapid response trainings and council mobilizations often feature a predominance of white people, some who anecdotally want to help the day laborers that they hire. This comes with all the limitations you could expect, like myopia, unintentional chauvinism, a misunderstanding of targeted communities’ existing self-organization, and a more trusting relationship in state institutions that antagonize us. Even so, their resources and time make them useful for initiatives like rapid response.
Those affinities, and the historical tendency we’ve seen from many nonprofit organizations, may lead people back into a Democratic Party whose culpability in the terror currently enrages their base into action. Electing friendly seeming Democrats might demobilize many of these people entirely, as if the deportation regime simply doesn’t exist beyond Trump. If it becomes convenient, why wouldn’t another Ruben Gallego, Kyrsten Sinema, or a Kamala Harris turn against migrants and campaign on their criminalization once more? Economic crises make them easy scapegoats, and our system ensures habitual crises.
Our experience with grassroots base building, focus on language justice, political education, and autonomy from big donors, foundations, and the government gives us a strong footing in this predicament. It’s complicated: our greatest inroads this past year have been into HUD-funded buildings, transitional housing, and shelters, where migrants without documentation are absent by definition. Even so, proximity to colonial violence and capitalist exploitation has made our base sympathetic to ICE’s primary targets. If we turn to organizing locals in the neighborhoods around some of the associations, we can bridge this divide.
Additionally, we’ve made connections around where we live and through Intercambio. Members have already been joining rapid response networks, NDLON day labor corner watches, and other efforts. These are often scattered efforts, like 5 different group chats trying the same thing, so we can help unite them where helpful, uphold the historical memory of struggle, and share all the best practices we’ve learned. There will likely be opportunities to organize locals and associations from the connections built, though we will have to carefully emphasize the leadership of the most precarious over the best off with time to spare.
If we consider entirely new outreach in affected areas, we will need to devote attention and organizational weight to doing so. One off efforts without a clear commitment have struggled to take root. We will need to dedicate ourselves to building spaces for popular decision making and uniting them with what already exists, even if that will involve navigating language barriers, cultural differences, and new challenges. We always say that the change we need will require the revolutionary transformation of property relations and an end to this colonial empire; our efforts can build the vehicle to drive us home.
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If not us, then who?
Every day, our neighbors are deported, detained, and displaced. We can't wait for another election while our neighbors are torn from their families and homes.
Our direct action can slow the violent arms of fascism. Our government fears tenant and worker organizing because of its effectiveness. Whether it's simply fixing a cabinet or preventing a family from living on the street, we accomplish in days what elected officials fail to do in years.
If you’re fortunate enough not to fear this rampant displacement and detainment, you have more power to create change than you may realize. In a world where private property is valued above dignity and well-being, our only true safety net is each other.
What’s happening in Minneapolis can just as easily happen here in Arizona. ICE is already operating in the valley, and its enforcement can intensify at any moment. As the tedious wheels of bureaucracy slowly turn, violence rushes into our communities. Elected officials may try to intervene, and judges may issue temporary injunctions, but only after ICE has ruined lives. Our government did nothing to prevent the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, or Keith Porter Jr.
Organizing is our best chance for immediate change. A herd is strongest together, even without a shepherd to guard us from the wolves. If there is no shepherd, who will protect us? If not us, then who? If not now, then when?
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Naming the moment
Our reflections point to a core organizing reality: fear and isolation are the default operating system of tenancy. Institutions like landlords, transitional housing staff, shelters, or even “helping’ nonprofits exploit that isolation by stripping dignity and shifting accountability onto tenants. Organizing wins when it can reliably convert private, individual fear into shared action through trust, education, and material
solidarity.
Across the tenant interviews we listened to and read, the most repeatable pattern we observed is that knowledge (such as rights, processes, options) is necessary but not sufficient. People act when they believe they will not be alone, and when the organization can show up consistently, especially in stressful moments: inspections, court, shelters, rapid response. A Tenant Associations’ (TA) real role goes beyond simply providing information to tenants; it expands to protection, to connection, and to a credible and reliable threat of collective response.
Our strongest leverage points are clear:
Language justice. Information in the wrong language is functionally the same as no information(rights) at all, and becomes another tool of exclusion and control
Leadership from within. Durable power comes from tenants inside buildings and shelters taking the lead, rather than relying on outside organizers/helpers that substitute for real tenant agency
A predictable TU cadence. This means weekly commitments, recurring meetings, and a communications rhythm that makes participating in the union feel normal and sustainable.
Our constraints are also clear: burnout and capacity limits. Anger can catalyze action but becomes unsustainable without concrete structures for solidarity. Too many committees can slow execution and silo knowledge, but too little structure makes it difficult to scale. The goal is a union structure that’s simple enough for someone new to immediately understand where to plug in, but strong enough to support the union’s growth: barrio defense/rapid response, outreach + onboarding, communications, leadership development.
The local tenant struggle sits inside larger systems of imperialism, extraction, policing, and the housing-to-prison continuum. Naming the enemy and rejecting individualizing narratives (“pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, “deserving/undeserving people”, etc.) helps align tenants around an aspirational program: a future with no eviction, no private property, and tenant organizers everywhere(“every tenant is an organizer”), built through disciplined organizing, soft power, and mutual aid.
Next steps
Make weekly commitment expectations explicit for union members: what does it mean, what are our expectations of membership?
Continue to focus on language justice: Intercambio, interpreters, bilingual outreach + rights materials
Consolidate org structure into a few lanes(maybe 2-3 committees, not too many) with clear owners, clear ways to onboard and participate
Prioritize leadership development from within buildings and shelters; outside organizers can help with certain responsibilities and carry expectations, but fostering local leadership is essential to reach the union’s ultimate vision
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Upendo Umoja
Say it ain’t so! Franmar Manor has finally seen the last of another careless property manager as a new hire began training at the end of January. News of Chandler, the previous manager, leaving has been floating around the complex for weeks which has given the residents a sense of uneasiness as to how their maintenance requests would be fixed and when. It was important for us to realize that it doesn’t matter if the complex is having difficulty finding a new property manager, the tenants still remain and their rights that go along with it. Plans are still in the works to strategically bring forward a collection of complaints from tenants to the new manager. One major request is making sure everyone in the complex has a properly running refrigerator that does not leak all over the floor. This change in management has ignited several conversations about capitalism in this country and how it creates poor living conditions for those in government assisted housing and low income housing. We all can see the owners of this property do not invest in better appliances, maintenance, and safety for those who live here. Chandler told some residents that he was leaving to find a job with better pay, making it clear Franmor Manor also does not want to invest in better management! Low wages attract people who do not care for tenants they are supposed to be responsible for and the tenants suffer from this while the owners squeeze more and more money out of them. We all deserve better.
The people that make up Upendo Umoja are still trying to find solid ground to make sure this tenant association is long lasting. Long lasting change requires true leadership from inside the struggle! It is important for union members and tenant organizers to remember we are not like any old nonprofit organization that comes in with all the answers, hosts meetings, and tells the people how to solve their problems. The core members of Upendo Umoja know this to be true and have taken it upon themselves to switch meeting roles around and make other changes to better empower leadership within the group. It has been mentioned in the past but it bears repeating of how difficult it is to connect and organize with other neighbors while not knowing how to speak their language and relying on other family members for translation. One of the points mentioned when discussing how to build up leadership within this tenant association is how to strengthen our communication between each other so each one of us feels seen and valued.
Recently we welcomed a new union member to the group to help the fight against shoddy property managers as two other union members will be limiting their capacity for organizing in the coming months. For those who want to help make a difference in West Phoenix, please attend Upendo Umoja tenant association meetings, held at Franmar Manor at 39th ave and McDowell every Wednesday at 7pm.
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Downtown Local
While the bathroom at Civic Space Park remains unopened, our conversations at downtown local meetings have begun to shift. Where some of us believed in pressuring the city to yield access, we haven't seen much in the way of opening the bathrooms, but just the opposite. Another parks employee was supposed to attend another meeting in January, but he did not show. We are frustrated with the disregard (although expected) of the park's employees but it has caused a shift in our efforts toward just conditions. We are collecting resident testimonials of how the lack of a bathroom affects them and continuing to discuss what we can do outside of government pleading in order to get what we want. What can we do to invest in the space?
Following the union wide reflection, we addressed some goals for the New Year. We want to reach more tenants downtown and have considered going to other parks outside of Civic Space as well as developing stronger outreach in the places where housed members and frequenters of the park are living. The fight continues!
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Transitional Housing
From carceral living conditions to moldy and raw food being served, to security guards and shelter staff abusing their power, tenants in our Washington Warriors Tenant Association have been dealing with unlivable conditions for far too long. For the past few months, a handful of union members have been organizing at the shelter and officially formed the Warriors Tenant Association at the beginning of January! We have been having ongoing discussions with tenants about the prison-like conditions, security guards and staff mistreating them, and the inedible food served weekly. The majority of tenants have suffered from severe food poisoning due to expired, moldy, and undercooked food served, which has been an ongoing issue since we started organizing here. Shelter staff frequently change rules without notifying tenants, which leads to tenants being punished for rules they were not aware of. Security guards in the shelter abuse their power to intimidate and make tenants uncomfortable. Tenants have to deal with random room searches and staff looking through their personal belongings.
A sentiment we often hear echoed by tenants is, “I feel like I'm in prison” when staying at the shelter. The parallels between prison and the shelter are undeniable, from the 24/7 use of digital surveillance and listening devices, to the constant security presence, tenants are treated as prisoners and are unable to feel safe or at ease in their own home. Tenants face strict curfews and even stricter rules. They risk punishment or the dispossession of housing if they do not comply with the stringent and frequently changing rules. In order to increase organizing within the shelter, we have discussed tenants meeting with their dorms and discussing minor issues such as cleanliness to create a foundation of trust, then bring up larger issues such as the shelter conditions as the meetings continue. Over the last few weeks, tenants in the shelter have started to create a practice of documenting and logging the mistreatment they face. The Warriors TA plans to leverage this documentation of abuse over the Shelter. First, the TA plans to deliver the documentation to management with a list of demands for better living conditions, then, if the demands are not met, we will escalate to a public campaign against the shelter.
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YMCA
BACKGROUND
Late last year, most members of our union who lived in the YMCA were unjustly evicted with little to no reason and mandated to leave in a short period, with the longest time being 5 days. In researching, we found that the parking lot of the Downtown YMCA was sold to the developers of the future Astra tower, “the largest building in Arizona”. Most members of our union who lived in the Y were unjustly evicted with little to no reason and mandated to leave in a short period, with the longest time being 5 days. In a swift response, union members held a rally outside the YMCA, exposing the organization's failure to disclose the recent purchase of its parking lot or the closure of the daycare program, and how this could be an indicator of potential closure for the YMCA.
One of the victims of this cruel eviction process, Lucus, passed away shortly after being forced to leave his consistent housing. As we, as a union, reeled from this loss, our grief period also caused plans of Y organizing to come to a halt. But because of Lucus, we are back and ready to put up a fight.
THE NEW FRONTIER OF TRANSITIONAL HOUSING
Unlike traditional rental housing, transitional housing tenants lack even the minimal protections renters have, such as a somewhat standardized eviction process with the ability to appeal, or a clear path to report subpar housing conditions outside of filing a "grievance". The biggest questions we are asking is how do we spur a current-tenant led movement when the chance of retaliation is not only palpable but almost threatened when staff played a video of the rally denouncing all those involved? What is justice when dealing with a closing housing structure and imminent gentrification? As we restart organizing, we hope to work with our ex-Y resident union members to create and strengthen bonds
CURRENT ACTIONS
This month, we will have our “meeting” where we hope to discuss current conditions and the possibilities that can open when tenants band together and demand change. As we are a new initiative, all strategy ideas and advice are welcome.
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Grant Park
Tenants in South Phoenix March to Management
In late January, residents received a sudden 48-hour notice from management announcing upcoming city inspections. Tenants were warned that if their units failed inspection, their leases could be terminated. The notice included a long list of “health and safety” requirements and placed the responsibility squarely on tenants to make sure their units were up to par.
What management failed to acknowledge was that many of these issues—broken appliances, pest infestations, and plumbing problems—had been reported repeatedly by tenants over the years. Maintenance requests had gone unanswered, sometimes for years, and now residents were being threatened with eviction over conditions they did not create and could not fix on their own.
The tenants had enough! Instead of waiting any longer, tenants took matters into their own hands. Each resident wrote a personal demand letter, documented the conditions in their unit with photos, and prepared to confront management together.
The tenants went as a group to the management office to deliver their letters, submit formal repair requests, and most importantly stand in solidarity with one another. That collective action paid off. One tenant was able to stop an eviction and finally received a new washer and a repaired sink. Another tenant, who had lived with a broken refrigerator for years, had it finally replaced.
There is still work ahead. We are watching closely to make sure these repairs actually happen and that no tenant is targeted or retaliated against. This action showed what’s possible when tenants stand together. The residents of this apartment complex are committed to showing up for one another—and this is just the beginning! Pay attention to the tenants!
