TENANT HORIZON ISSUE #7
- Valley Tenants Union
- Aug 14
- 16 min read
Tenant Horizon returns with our August issue! Work continues across the valley as tenants organize to secure a dignified living amidst increasingly stratified conditions. This work is taking a variety of forms, among them neighborhood meetings in several languages, reading groups downtown, and door to door organizing from the ground up.
This month, the A/C committee reflected on the effectiveness of their program during another summer of heat deaths. Eviction defense continues their work in developing a strategy on blocking and mitigating eviction proceedings, a cruel and well oiled machine here in the valley. The West Valley and Grant Park outreach projects continue their respective organizing, developing relationships that may soon bloom into tenant associations and a struggle against poorly maintained properties by careless landlords. The reading group at civic space park continues, along with biweekly meetings that hope to establish a organizing local downtown. If you are interested in joining the fight for a world without rent, there couldn’t be a better time.
Interested in contributing? Reach out to any Research and Analysis Committee member or email us at ValleyTenants@proton.me.
Updates
A/C Summer Program
NO MORE HEAT DEATHS!
This past month, The Elton Apartments became the site of a social murder. A disabled elderly man who lived alone died after the air conditioning units broke down across the complex. Tenants reported that a similar outage occurred last year. This time, they received coverage from local news and a cease-and-desist letter from the Attorney General. This addressed the problem at least for the moment.
Attention from the press and politicians can be fickle, so a nearby member stopped by to talk and share our brochures. We learned that management is doing damage control and acting unusually generous. Before the coverage, some tenants were told that management, whose A/C in the office worked fine, couldn't afford portable A/C units or stay at a hotel. After the A/C was fixed, they were given a flyer offering them both.
A couple of families with young children described the strain they went through, with one young girl suffering a nosebleed while her pregnant mother had to be hospitalized. They showed us the brown water still pouring through the faucets and described harassment from property managers. They were interested in organizing themselves to form a tenants association, so we shared contact information and await notification for a meeting.
For the working group as a whole, our organizing slowed down this month. We hosted an art build night with members of Artists for Liberation and Barrio Defense Committees. Our organizing at one apartment complex ended, which we reflected on later in the newsletter. While there are some tasks still in progress, we proposed to shutter this working group as the energy and direction has declined lately. No matter what we do, we know our output has been helpful unionwide through a cruel summer full of A/C breakdowns.
Eviction Defense Working Group
This month the eviction defense working group sought out to learn more from our fellow union members. Part of our “solidarity casework” proposal was to investigate our union’s experience and general knowledge of navigating the eviction process. What we found out was the brutally honest truth that the majority of us are not ready to assist a friend or loved one under the threat of an eviction! The good news is, for those unprepared, they know where to turn to and how to find resources within the union. We have some members who have helped their neighbors or friends successfully go through the gauntlet of a retaliatory landlord and illegal evictions and we value their experience immensely. One of the goals of this working group is to give EVERYONE in the union the confidence and resources to know what to do when we get the call saying someone is at risk of losing their home.
The eviction defense packet is a work in progress and we plan on debuting it at our informational meeting planned for August 20th at 7pm location TBA. We will run through real life scenarios to boost confidence among those who attend and answer any questions. We hope to see you there!
Grant Park Project
Here we come! Landlords better run!
Over the month of July we have been working on building a tenant association at an apartment complex located in the Grant Park area. We have been taking the time to build relationships with the neighbors there by holding bi-weekly meetings, door knocking, and sharing community meals together. Through this we have learned from the tenants the various ways in which management has been neglecting them. The issues range from AC to mold and broken appliances to unfit units. So far, we have assisted a resident in putting pressure on management to fix their broken A/C unit which left their apartment in dangerous levels of heat. We notice that A/C outages are a common occurrence with this complex which can lead to life threatening effects on the residents. In our next steps, we have encouraged the start of a messaging system for the residents to stay in contact with one another. We are hoping to inform more residents of this growing group and encourage them to grow in numbers and come together to write a demand letter to their management.
West Valley Project
July was a busy month for West Phoenix Outreach! Since our last update, we held another community day at the end of June with more involvement from the residents themselves, which was successful. People brought food, games, toys, and we even had a dance party! Later in the month, neighbors and union members weathered a monsoon to solidify community agreements, and we built trust while navigating a situation where management got notified of our organizing. While no action was taken on the property manager's part other than confronting a tenant, we made sure to address the situation in a meeting and discussed how to proceed with organizing. Throughout each step, collective decision-making has been an important part of working together and moving forward as a nascent tenant's association.
In July we've been focusing on building a tenant's association at the complex, and over the past several weeks we have built a core of 6-8 committed neighbors. Our main practical activity has been finalizing a TA announcement and demand letter and collecting signatures from neighbors to show support, which has been a slow but consistent process. The plan is to submit the letter after collecting signatures from at least 1/3 of the complex, and we are nearing that threshold! Our goal is to submit the letter as a group very soon, and we aim to make an escalation plan and plan for next steps as well. We've learned a lot through this process, and will continue to learn more alongside neighbors at the complex! Here are some successes and key takeaways from this past month:
We have consistently been able to hold meetings in 4 to 5 languages, depending on who all is in attendance! Keeping track of who we've connected with that speaks multiple languages has been instrumental in determining neighbors we can reach out to for help.
Face-to-face communication is most effective; relying on texts and phone calls for outreach and reminders is inconsistent. This brings up the challenge of developing a system of communication and reminders that is more run by the tenants themselves versus union members as ""outside organizers"".
Consistency and building relationships has been instrumental in being able to meet week-to-week with the same group of people.
The youth at the complex are a large part of the social life there, and while some initial connections have been made with the get-togethers we've had, we still need to find ways to involve the kids living there—a few of them have expressed interest in a meeting to learn things together though!
Maintaining momentum and focus in organizing is something we are working through.
Although we're focused on building with neighbors at this specific complex right now, if you live between 35th Ave-43rd Ave and Van Buren-Thomas and want to organize with your neighbors to address shared issues, reach out to us via text or phone call: 602-726-9849!
Civic Space Reading Group
Organizing is taking off at Civic Space Park this July. Seeds are planted, foundations are built, and housed & unhoused tenants are ready to organize together. We had our first ever downtown local meeting on Sunday July 27th. We discussed lack of public bathroom and running water access, carceral policies at heat relief centers and shelters, increased interpersonal violence and agitation due to so many people being in crisis, police harassing someone over by the new transit center construction, trinity and grace lutheran discontinuing breakfast services "until further notice" (the same term that was used when the civic space bathrooms were closed), and more.
Tenants expressed frustration at people’s complacency and called for more seriousness in fighting back. It was agreed that we are building a foundation that more people will join in time.
Earlier in the month, tenants had a conversation with LATU organizer Annie Powers over zoom in Civic Space Park. We talked about the conditions for unhoused tenants in Phoenix, LATU's downtown local formation, strategies for unhoused tenant organizing in and outside of shelters, tactics for bathroom and shower access, notes on how unhoused tenants in the Echo Park Rising encampment related to one another as a community, Annie's research on the National Union of the Homeless, and more.
We also began outreach at a union member’s shelter! Following a shelter organizing model from LATU’s downtown local, we began outreach outside the shelter on Tuesday July 29th and invited tenants to an all tenant meeting on Friday August 1st. We spoke to tenants about their negative experiences in the shelter. Some concerns people had about the shelter included a lack of privacy, gross food (beans all the time!), patronizing shelter staff, curfew, and tenants not being able to pick out clothes for themselves from donated clothes. On Friday we plan to suggest forming a tenants association and writing a demand letter!
The reading group has continued on as well. We are continuing through the Homeless Industrial Complex Syllabus. In July we’ve read Project No Key outlining UTACH’s (Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing) struggle against the prison-like conditions in LA’s SRO Project Roomkey. We also read Take Back the Land: Land, Gentrification and the Umoja Village Shantytown about the Umoja Village Shantytown, which positioned Black community control over land in the Black community in Miami-Dade county as paramount to liberation. As we come up on a year of reading group this fall, we have undoubtedly improved on making connections between the reading materials and the lives of housed and unhoused tenants who come to the Sunday meal. As we begin to explicitly organize tenants at Civic Space, the readings and discussions will serve as a space for connecting shared issues and strengthening tenants’ belief in a better future and understanding that organizing is the path to get there. Go tenants!
Cold outreach in the summertime
Organizing without someone on the inside can be daunting. For the Summer A/C Project, it meant a summer night loitering over hot asphalt and chatting up tenants parking their cars and dumping their trash before we realized the back gate had been wide open the whole time. Not our best moment! At worst, it brings to mind missionaries like the mormons who closely followed us knocking doors in the
South/West local last year.
Nevertheless, this kind of cold outreach is important and necessary. We don’t live in all the places where solidarity from a valleywide movement of tenants would be most useful; if we want to connect to all who do, we’ll have to get uncomfortable. In that spirit, the Summer A/C Project found ourselves in the parking lot of a member’s former apartments hoping to share our new A/C rights pamphlets where issues were known. 2 months and several meetings later, our contacts said they couldn’t continue. Why didn’t things work out? Here’s what we thought.
Challenging conditions
The 200+ unit apartment complex that we chose had a history of tenants getting press coverage about widespread air conditioning breakdowns. It’s near the Blade and is considered low income, “affordable” housing. Built in the 70’s, it was purchased a few years ago by a Toronto real estate entity that owns about a dozen properties across the continent. Most of the tenants we met were workers and/or living on disability or other social services. One warned us neighbors would thus be scared to stick their necks out, even as another had suffered abuses in part due to her disability.
We quickly recognized that high turnover and weak social bonds were obstacles. Many tenants had just moved in, others who were upset about their treatment were about to move out. Tenants mentioned that this created an atmosphere of distrust and fear, compounded by an english/spanish language barrier. Most are more likely to let their shadowy landlord walk over them or flee somewhere else (probably owned by another awful landlord) if they can’t trust that their neighbors will have their back.
Our theory was that A/C breakdowns would still be an issue even years after complaints made the news, and that was true. However, these problems were felt and addressed individually, including ones unrelated to A/C. Some tenants would get functional portable units and others wouldn’t, some would get harassed by management and others wouldn’t, and so on. This meant that issues weren’t necessarily widely or strongly felt. In our early tenant meetings, we all agreed that organizing social events like a barbecue or pool party would help with both the distrust and the sense that problems were on the individual.
We found that the tenants who seemed the most passionate and politically aligned were not the most motivated in organizing with their neighbors. Being against capitalism, for example, didn’t mean that they could commit, whether it was from tricky work schedules, school, and whatever else. Bridging the gap between theory and practice continues to be a challenge. These conditions were tricky (what’s new?) but the question is always how we navigate them.
Making mistakes
On reflection, we didn’t go in with a clear enough strategy. We wished we had planned better on collecting contact information (we didn’t consistently do this at first), early followups, when we should move on, etc. This hurt our ability to show up how we could have. One of us mentioned how there were some people we met who we never were able to connect with again because we didn’t note contact information. Even the choice of the apartment complex was fairly haphazard.
Our weaknesses in initial strategy also contributed to a heavyhanded organizing approach. A common mistake is in organizing things that tenants would need to, like setting meeting times, location, doing outreach, etc. We took over those while knocking doors a few times to reconnect with some of the people whose information we didn’t receive. In the future, we would prioritize connecting tenants to each other. We tried to correct the course by sharing a list of tenants who were interested yet unwilling to do outreach with those who were down, though this would have been more effective earlier on.
We also recognized that we needed to be better organized. We didn’t consistently keep track of who we spoke to and their opinions, nor did we centralize contact information. Previous experiences have made us want to avoid being bureaucratic and compiling data that’s inaccessible to tenants themselves, but there are ways to dodge that without getting disorganized, like charting on paper as a group for example. As it was, important details were scattered, incomplete, and difficult to share with anyone else joining.
Casting a wider net during our initial outreach would have also helped our efforts. Usually, only a fraction of the community take initiative, the most practically advanced among the tenants. We only completed outreach in a portion of one of the two building blocks, so we suspect that the leaders who stepped up among them felt isolated. For example, we waited to organize the bbq until more tenants met to plan for it, yet attendance only declined. The flipside is that trying to maintain connections with too many people can stretch us thin and weaken relationships, but we went too far in the other direction.
Otherwise, the most prominent issue we noticed was our lack of clear commitment. We went in thinking it’d be a light lift, but it became obvious that success would take more work. Members were already dedicated to other projects, so our feet were halfway out the door. One of us had been very active initially, yet she went out of town for a while, and those who remained couldn’t offer the same attention. We realized it’d be essential to have 2-4 leads committed to this, but nobody could step up.
The path forward
Despite our errors and ultimate failure, we had to acknowledge the positives. First, we came away thinking that cold outreach does have promise when there are known issues. Tenants responded well when we talked explicitly about forming tenants associations. Even if we didn’t come in with a clear strategy, we knew when to stop without trying to make something nonviable happen. We learned about the practical differences in organizing without already knowing leaders on the inside, which we hope will be useful to future tenant unionists.
When taking on outreach, carefully investigate the existing social fabric. If there aren’t already strong ties, prioritize building them as soon as possible to uncover that struggles are shared and that we’re interdependent. Focus on the most advanced first, meaning those who are willing to lead the charge to connect their neighbors more so than those who say things we agree with on an abstract political level.
If you want to make an outreach project happen, make sure there are at least 2-4 people committed to organizing for the near future. Develop a clear initial strategy, including plans to collect contact information, where to compile it, when to follow up, how, and when to move on. Cast a wide net to find enough people ready to lead the way, and focus on helping them connect to their neighbors and equipping them to win over more passive supporters. Success will be most likely if they’re spearheading outreach, organizing meetings, and so on. Stay organized without being detached and bureaucratic; tools like mapping who we know and charting our conversations should be useful for everyone.
Update & reflection on an old vtu proposal
In September of 2023, vtu members who were also members of phoenix food not bombs logistically and structurally presented a proposal to vtu that amounted to: organize among tenants who eat in the phoenix fnb space and if possible, establish a neighborhood association here. The two of us who were dual members had seen the inability of the local fnb chapter to have a lasting effect on the lives of Phoenix residents; activists rarely introduced themselves or asked the names of those eating the food they’d prepared. The chapter’s organizing focused more on quotas of meals distributed and good intentions than building a self-sustaining weekly gathering bound by a collective understanding of our local + common enemies. After our proposal passed, us dual-members decided to attempt to merge fnb’s faulty mutual aid work into the union as a strategy for organizing. We began by familiarizing the union with the people who live in and around the park and vice versa. We attempted to highlight the importance of building relationships and mutual trust between both union members and park resident/neighbors and create a weekly neighborhood meeting. This was done intentionally with the aim of dissolving the inherent divide between housed and unhoused tenants as highlighted by an activist-led/service-centered organization.Together, we talked, ate, read Abolish Rent + more texts and discussed their relevance to our local conditions, getting to know each other more personally in the process. A lot of dissent stymied our original goal as more activists and liberals joined after the 2024 election results. Some newer members of fnb disagreed with how our priorities differed from those of the global fnb network. As of July 2025, those who originally wanted to meld fnb’s aid work with political organizing have divided themselves from the fnb chapter. Our merger and planned dissolution of fnb phoenix failed, yet the organizing work we have done so far seems to be yielding some long-awaited fruits! Now we look ahead to the newly established weekly meetings of the downtown local of vtu! Go tenants!
Below is a reflection of a fnb member who first joined food not bombs in the middle of this tumult and is now a member of the valley tenants union.
I wanted to share some thoughts I had on our local Food Not Bombs (fnb) chapter, especially in light of recent conversations about our direction and purpose. I joined towards the end of 2024, which is recent enough to feel like a newcomer, but long enough to witness the incredible organizing work that others have built over the last several years. What I found when I started coming wasn't just food distribution, but a vision of community power-building that used food as a tool for deeper relationship building and collective action.
Food Not Bombs chapters have always had autonomy to define their own work and approach. While food mutual aid is central to the movement, the Phoenix chapter has spent years developing an approach that uses food as a foundation for broader community and power-building. This evolution came out of intentional partnerships with groups like Valley Tenants Union, deepening our understanding of how food justice connects to housing justice and other community struggles. This evolution represents years of learning from our neighbors and responding to what our community actually needs, and that work deserves respect, not dismissal.
While I have deep respect for anyone who helped start the FNB chapter, appeals to founding member authority and emphasis on original literature shouldn't outweigh the very real work this chapter has done to build community and class power in the park and surrounding neighborhoods. What matters is the relationships and trust that have been built through years of showing up, listening to community needs, and doing the slow work of organizing.
Our chapter has evolved beyond protest against hunger; it became a space for building collective power with the people most affected by the systems we're trying to change. The folks we cooked with, ate food with, etc, weren't just recipients of our service, but became teachers, strategists, and community members with deep knowledge about how power works in this city. I watched others approach this as organizing, building relationships that could translate into collective action around housing, policing, and city services. The conversations that happened long after food was served, the trust-building that supported broader struggles, the centering of directly impacted voices; this wasn't "dismantling FNB," it was FNB at its most powerful.
Characterizing the years of dedicated organizing work as an attempt to "dismantle" or destroy Food Not Bombs disrespects and dishonors the relationships and community trust that VTU members have built through consistent presence and care.
Our changed approach, which was based on the tenant organizing model, strengthened our connection to the communities we serve and deepened our impact beyond what simple food distribution could achieve. When people raise concerns about charity models, that's not an attack on individuals; it's an invitation to examine how FNB’s work either challenges or reinforces existing power structures. These conversations are worth having, and dismissing them does a disservice to the communities we claim to support.
We’ve noticed a shift in the group's goals: a shift towards treating food distribution as the end goal rather than a tool for building collective power. This loss should concern all of us.
We’re not trying to assert control over anything mutual aid - but simply reflecting on the organizing work witnessed and hoping we can build on that foundation.
Any path forward should center the voices and leadership of folks we share meals with in the park; they are the experts on what their community needs. The organizing vision that members achieved over years of relationship-building honored that principle. Any future direction should build on that foundation.
Commitment means respecting the work that came before, learning from people with deeper relationships in the community, and staying accountable to the goal of building power with, not for, the people most affected by the systems we're trying to change.
I hope distro continues to build community and power this summer.
