TENANT HORIZON ISSUE #9
- Cece N.
- Oct 23
- 7 min read
Hello all tenants! Things are finally cooling down outside, but inside our union organizing is heating up and lighting a fire under the seats of landlords and their lackeys!
Read on to check in on the temperature of internal organizing at VTU, trust-building and politics in transitional housing, the West Phoenix Upendo Umoja tenants association, the Downtown local and reading group, plus our work on the Eviction Defense and Language Justice committees.
In addition, this is the second issue to combine Spanish and English translations in one document. One of Valley Tenants Union's core values is our commitment to linguistic justice: we must continue to strive for true equality of experience for all union members.
Interested in contributing to next month's issue? Call any member of the Research and Analysis Committee at 480-861-8459 or email us at ValleyTenants@proton.me.
Interested in contributing? Reach out to any Research and Analysis Committee member or email us at ValleyTenants@proton.me.
Updates
West Valley Project
Day by day, hour by hour, we are building umoja (unity) power! Tenants in the complex and VTU's West Valley Project started this month by celebrating the birthday of one of the young residents and ended by looking outward to involve more neighbors in Upendo Umoja. We came together weekly, discussing in sweltering heat and multiple languages, how to effectively address issues residents face throughout the complex. A few weeks ago, we drafted a demand letter based on the concerns and issues people have brought up throughout the meetings we've had—things like a lack of written and verbal translation, excessive and unannounced inspections, and widespread 5 day notices as an intimidation tactic. Members then circulated the letter to their neighbors and collectively delivered the letter and confronted the property manager about the ongoing issues. Even though the group that took the letter to the manager was a small fraction of tenants in the complex, it was still a successful collective action, and left people feeling empowered!
Though we've walked with tenants in taking their concerns to the manager, this is only one step of many towards building the power of tenants in West Phoenix to shape their own conditions. Moving forward presents us with new opportunities and challenges. For example, one of the asks was a collective meeting with the property manager to work on getting the above concerns addressed, but unsurprisingly that hasn't happened yet. As mentioned above, we ended the month by making a plan to connect with more residents who have communicated they have issues but haven't taken any action yet.This is reflective of both growth in the TA and a challenge we must confront: on the one hand, there's a greater sense of ownership and a recognition that to accomplish more we need more people, and on the other is the actual task of bringing people in.
We still have many areas for growth and challenges to confront, and new and wider-ranging issues loom large on the horizon. From intracommunal threats towards youth (mentioned in Tenant Horizon #8) and other safety concerns to navigating tensions between housed and unhoused tenants, involving the young people at the complex in organizing, and starting up the community garden, there's lots of room to expand this project in many different directions. This requires not only strategizing, but (primarily as of now) getting more hands on deck through bringing in more neighbors. We've discussed a bit about how to do that, and will put these discussions into practice moving forward! As always, we strive to connect the realities of poor housing quality with the greater struggle against the capitalist system that commodifies not only housing but all basic needs, and against “U.S.” imperialism oppressing and dispossessing black, indigenous, and global south peoples at home and around the world. We should do so not only theoretically, but in the concrete reality of the lives of those we organize with to build power and push back against these manifestations wherever we can.
If you have advice for setting up shade screens or other community garden things, have landlord issues in the West Valley, or want to help us organize, reach out to the West Valley Project on our shiny new °•⊹.⟡VTU PHONE⟡.⊹•° !
Go tenants ദി/ᐠ - ⩊ -マⳊ !
Downtown Local
At downtown local, we’ve focused our last couple readings on fighting for public bathroom access. Especially relevant since this park bathroom was once open to the public, but now has been closed for years. After reviewing different strategies from groups that worked to get park bathrooms open in Tucson and LA, we workshopped a demand letter addressed to the City Parks department with our downtown local members.
We also outlined our next steps that take place after the letter is sent. How we will move forward… well, that depends on the city’s response. If you are interested in keeping up with our progress or want to join us at downtown local, reach out to the downtown organizing committee.
In addition to our Civic Space efforts, we are shelter organizing every Tuesday evening. Food is a constant issue, as we’ve heard from tenants that the meals provided in the shelter system are either bland and boring (beans and rice all the time!!) or gross (undercooked 🤢). So we provide food, snacks and drinks if we can, to break of the up the monotony of the same meals every day.
But it’s also just a chance to sit down and see how folks are doing as they navigate living in places that unfortunately work hard to take away your autonomy. We’ve heard about issues about access to power outlets, access to showers, being able to bring in your own food, restrictive curfews and more. In talking to our downtown and unhoused tenants, one of our biggest obstacles to organizing continues to be tenant fear of retaliation.
A very real fear that they will get kicked out of their residences if they get together to discuss or speak out about things that they think could be improved or when they are treated unfairly.
We brought up that forming a tenant association can provide them with some defense against retaliation, but also foster solidarity and support amongst their members.
Also, despite these challenges, we still have some big wins: even though these institutions are trying isolate people, perhaps in their most vulnerable moments, we see folks still looking out for each other, and people still willing to advocate for themselves.
Language Exchange
The Intercambio/ Language Exchange group met twice last month to practice our English/Spanish. The group meets on Sundays from 12-2pm to practice and improve our English/Spanish skills through conversations, readings, interpretation, and there was that one time we did karaoke!
Last month we started reading and interpreting speeches from “Habla Malcom X,” from Spanish to English.
On September 7th, we read, No soy norteamericano sino victima del norteamericanismo (I’m from America, but I’m not an American), a speech given at the University of Ghana on May 13, 1964. The following Sunday, September 14th, we read El Sistema No Puede Producir Libertad Para El Negro (The system can’t produce freedom for the black man) about the Harlem ‘hate-gang’ scare, given at the Militant Labor Forum on May 29, 1964.
Eviction Defense
So…. What's new with the eviction defense group? We are chugging along, trying to get a better understanding of our union as a whole and where everyone’s at in their capacity to support other neighbors in times of crisis. There is a workshop and social event that we’re putting on in October to get the union refreshed on their solidarity casework abilities.
We discussed the current and past tenant crisis that we have supported in the past month; from the Hernandez family and their fight against the church to eviction support for those in the most precarious positions, at a shelter where they could get evicted for any minor rule break and kicked back out to the streets, to a last minute effort for neighbor solidarity for a nonpayment of rent eviction. In the nonpayment of rent effort, we gathered signatures from two neighboring apartment complexes within 24 hours and helped them deliver the letter to the landlord on the day of the eviction court case. Not an ideal situation by any means, but they were able to get their demands met for an extended time to move their belongings instead of the measly 5-days waiting around for the constable to come.
VTU Survey
Hi data analysis results!! During the course of working with a family experiencing eviction and a legal case this summer, a few VTU members led this eviction defense and tried out our solidarity casework strategy. Those of us committed to eviction defense in the union, via the Eviction Defense project, felt that we needed to do a large amount of personal and direct outreach to the whole union, especially members who live further from where our events happen or members we haven’t heard from in a while. It is hopefully in the union's best interest to engage in semi-consistent conversations with the union’s full membership, especially considering the urgent nature of eviction defense. To me it feels like a lot of last year’s same problems have not been resolved even though we’ve changed our approaches. Our tenants union is made of many tenants at large, but the work of building the union itself and organizing tenant falls on only a few people. Usually this number is only a single digit.
If we are unorganized and isolated within our union, such that some of us are working on a really urgent matter and those who live closest are unaware of the matter completely, this feels like a big problem with a fairly straightforward solution. Some of us might be free at the time a tenant is going to court, or looking out for the constable, but unable to make a lot of VTU’s events which happen in central phoenix during evening hours. Hopefully committing to “internal organization” with the goal of more effective support will make it less stressful for those of us in eviction defense. Let us get a better handle on which members of the union could be called to support.
In the interest of transparency and gauging the actual makeup and activity of our union, I surveyed all the members we have listed and here are the results! (disclaimer: almost half of the people of our union contact list did not answer after 1-3 attempts via phone call were lumped into the “no” answer to visualize this data correctly.
The results: Out of our contact list, 10% of our union has left in the last six months, 34.5% are currently organizing, 17.2% have the capacity to take on more organizing, 49% self-identify as a VTU member, and 34.5% pay dues. However, of those who answered in phone or in person, 86% self-identified as a member.
