How To Organize a Tenancy Bloc with Your Neighbors

An Ithaca Tenants Union Guide

What is a tenancy bloc?

A tenancy bloc (a.k.a. a tenant’s association) is a voluntary organization run by tenants who share the same landlord. A tenancy bloc is created and operated to more effectively deal with landlords regarding repairs, rent increases, evictions, etc. through collective negotiation.

For example, a landlord is much more likely to make a repair if there is pressure from an organized group of their own tenants. A low-risk action for a bloc entails sending a collective letter to the landlord. A high-risk action might require withholding rent to get tenants needs and demands met. Unified blocs curb the risk of retaliation from landlords attempting to target an individual tenant for any reason.

What steps can we take to build a tenancy bloc with our neighbors?

Power Mapping

Before you start, it’s important to assess what power you already have. Unlike landlords, tenant power comes from your relationships and solidarity with each other. Even a casual conversation with a neighbor about your landlord — how they treat you, what problems you’re facing — is a form of power building since sharing information can lead to solidarity and action. A good first step to building you tenancy bloc is identify existing relationships, and start having one-on-one conversations with the neighbors you already know — and to make a plan for getting to know the others.

The Ithaca Tenants Union (ITU) has a database of every property owner in Tompkins County, which you can use to find out which additional properties your landlord owns. You can also connect with other ITU members who have reported your landlord. To get this information, contact the ITU through email (ithacatu@gmail.com) or by phone (607–358–5048).

Initial Tactics

For getting neighbors you don’t yet know yet to join your tenancy bloc, ITU recommends door knocking and putting letters under your neighbors’ doors. Here is a sample flyer you can use (which ITU can print for you). You can make it official by getting signatures of those who wish to join the bloc or create the bloc around a specific issue that you need signatures for.

Once your tenancy bloc has some active members, establish a method or methods to communicate going forward. Does it make sense to meet weekly, or with a different frequency? Are people more comfortable communicating in person, over the phone, or on Zoom? Or maybe start a text group chat or an email chain. It’s important that your communication plan works for you all.

Tips for Having Successful Conversations about Organizing

When having organizing conversations with neighbors, both when building a tenancy bloc and getting support for specific demands, the goal is to help your neighbors see the support and power they would have in collectivizing, and to move them to a place where they feel empowered to join our struggle for better living conditions and treatment.

To be clear, one-on-one conversations shouldn’t look like sales pitches — experienced organizers often recommend organizers do only 20% of the talking. As an organizer, your job is to listen, agitate, translate grievances into demands, hatch a plan to win, inoculate, and reconfirm.

What the heck does that mean? You can start listening to your neighbors by asking them how they’ve been treated by the landlord, and what they might want to change about their living situation if they had the power to do anything. Agitation is about allowing your neighbor to feel angry by validating and reacting to their existing frustrations.

In ITU, we like to throw in some “fuck that!”s when a tenant is telling us what awful thing their landlord is doing to them as part of agitation. “That’s totally unacceptable!” “That sounds illegal!” and “That’s really messed up” are also cool. Once you get a sense of what’s going on, you can start discussing demands and a plan to win, which we’ll touch on below.

Before you end the conversation, it’s critical to “inoculate” your neighbors, which basically means informing them of the risk involved in taking action.

The goal is to listen to the tenant’s concerns, validate them, and make a case for why winning the demands is worth the risks. For example, someone might be worried about withholding rent and may fear eviction as a form of retaliation against that action. It is unlikely that a landlord would evict all its tenants, which is why getting a high percentage of tenants to participate is critical. Ultimately, showing the tenant what they stand to gain here is critical, especially if you’re organizing around the specific situation of only a few tenants. Tenants taking risks in solidarity with their neighbors still have much to gain, since engaging in the struggle shifts the power balance and will likely inadvertently help all tenants in the bloc.

What can you win with your tenancy bloc?

The short answer: anything, as long as your collective actions are costly enough to your landlord. To determine your demands, ask:

What exactly do you want? A winnable demand might be a repayment plan with no evictions, or it might be reduced rent for two months. Maybe the biggest complaint is something other than rent altogether — maybe people are upset that essential maintenance is frozen. Good demands should have these qualities:

• A demand should be specific and given with a timeline that is communicated to the landlord and known by the whole bloc.
• A demand does not need to “go for the gold” right off the bat. In fact, demands often fail if their ambition exceeds the collective power already built. What your landlord is likely to give up is roughly equivalent to the cost (lost money, social reputation, or political capital) your collective action incurs them. Smaller demands can be won more easily initially, such as simply getting a video chat with your landlord when they wouldn’t previously. These smaller wins build up the collective confidence needed to achieve the bigger demands. Building power within your bloc over time also allows you to test the landlord’s response to collective action.

Who has the power to fix the problem? For smaller companies and individual property owners, the answer to this might be easy: the landlord’s name is on all your rent checks. For larger developers, it may be less clear, and might require some digging, but the Ithaca Tenants Union can help, too.

Which tactics can work? Tactics can leverage social, political, and/or financial pressure on a landlord. Social pressure means impacting a landlord’s personal relationships, social standing in their community, or reducing their sense of power over tenants. Political pressure means leveraging media, city officials, and legislative means to influence a landlord. Financial pressure means jeopardizing a landlord’s profits. Typically, financial pressure — like collectively withholding rent until demands are met — is most effective when combined with some political pressure.

What specific actions can your tenancy bloc include its plan to win?

Here is a list of escalating organizing actions that can help achieve those goals:

• Get your bloc of tenants under same landlord to meet as a small group
• Report your landlord’s violations to the housing inspector or, in the case of landlords refusing to accept section 8, to the Attorney General of NY (call Mike Dannaher of the AG at (607) 251–2749 or email Maria at LawNY mvargas@lawny.org who tracks this)
• Organize a mass call-in to the landlord’s office or cellphone
• Define demands: for example, 3 month reduced rent, maintenance issues taken care of, repayment plan with no evictions
• Write out your demands into a letter and gather signatures on it
• Send your letter to the landlord’s email via our ithacatu@gmail.com account or a new tenancy bloc email
• Deliver your letter to the landlord’s doorstep
• Set up a Facebook page for your campaign
• Shame the landlord on social media
• Circulate an online petition
• Send complaint letters to the charities and associations the landlord works with and to their place of worship
• Organize a collective meeting with landlord, making them face you
• Flyer outside your landlord’s house
• Speak to the media to shame your landlord
• Organize a car protest circling your landlord’s house
• Initiate an Eviction Blockade — the ITU has a team of folks easily able to show up at people’s houses to blockade landlords, law enforcement or others from entering someone’s house in order to evict a tenant. These blockades can prevent illegal evictions from occurring, and make legal evictions a general pain in the ass
• Collectively pay rent late
• Organize a Rent Strike where you collectively withhold rent until demands are met. This is an incredibly powerful tool, and often even a protected action when landlords are engaging in illegal actions (For more information, here are rent strike resources)

A Final Note

As you set off to build your tenancy bloc, know that you’re surrounded by a network of organized tenants through the Ithaca Tenants Union who want to support you however you need. It’s about time we have more power over our landlords to get the better living conditions we deserve!