Victory!
Tenants Gain New Rights Vs Corporate Landlords
Wall Street Hijacking San Francisco Housing
In San Francisco, as in cities all over the nation and the world, corporate investment firms are buying more and more apartment buildings to trade like poker chips on Wall Street for quick profit. Key to their profit making is to jack up rents as high as possible regardless of what tenants can afford.
Under this increasing corporate land grab San Francisco rents have been skyrocketing for decades. Especially since the 2008 and COVID financial crashes these housing price increases are driving people out of their homes and into the streets.
These distant absentee Wall Street landlords have little awareness or concern for the lives of their tenants, and all too often badly neglect their properties. (Sometimes this is even done on purpose to get tenants to leave rent controlled apartments so that they can be rented and sold at higher prices.) There have been endless cases of insufferable living conditions for San Francisco tenants.
A big part of the problem is that California law has simply not been strong enough to enable tenants to fight back against these big corporate interests.
Tenants Gain New Protections & Leverage To Fight Back!
This situation changed dramatically, when in 2022 housing justice organizers joined with then Supervisor Aaron Peskin to pass the strongest tenant rights law in the country known as the "Union at Home" ordinance. Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, Our City, and other groups and experts, helped write and pass the new law.
Union at Home does exactly what its name suggests. It gives tenants the legal tools and the power to form tenant unions in their buildings and legally demand their corporate landlords sit down with them to negotiate over rents and building conditions - this in the same way that labor unions can demand the corporations they work for sit down with them to negotiate pay, benefits, and the conditions of their work.
The Power To Strike!
Just as labor unions can go on strike, in buildings with organized tenants unions in San Francisco, if a corporate landlord refuses to negotiate, tenants can now legally refuse to pay rent! This new power of rent refusal is called a "Rent Strike".
Tenants Win Building Repairs & Over $100,000 In Rent Cuts
Since the Union at Home law passed in 2022, tenants have used the legal protection and leverage it gives them to win over $100,000 in rent reductions, and serious improvements in building conditions and repairs. Now when a corporate landlord neglects a building in San Francisco tenants have the power to force that landlord to clean up their act, and pay in rent reductions when their neglect causes harm to tenants.
Union at Home Expanding To Berkeley & Beyond
Seeing the success of the San Francisco law, tenant organizers in Berkeley, California put Union at Home on the local ballot, and in the November 2024 election the ballot measure passed! Other cities in California, the US, and the world, are now considering passing similar laws.