By Heather Knight
Autoworkers in Detroit. Actors and screenwriters in Hollywood. Teachers in Portland, Ore.
During a wave of labor unrest over the past year in which more than 500,000 American workers went on strike, a small group of San Franciscans has brought a similar vein of activism to a different arena: their homes.
Tenants in 65 San Francisco households have been on a rent strike, some for nearly eight months, withholding their monthly payments over a host of issues they say have made their living conditions difficult.
A handful of rent strikes have occurred before in New York City and Los Angeles. But activists, with renewed fervor, are now trying to organize tenants around the nation, saying that corporations, rather than mom-and-pop landlords, are increasingly buying up apartments and not taking care of the units.
“Most tenants these days don’t know their landlords. They’re nameless, faceless LLCs,” said Tara Raghuveer, director of the Homes Guarantee campaign, which is working to establish tenant unions such as the one in San Francisco. “Naming and shaming doesn’t work. Rent strikes will become an even more necessary tactic.”
San Francisco has one of the highest concentrations of renters in the nation, about two-thirds of households, similar to the share in New York City. As a result, the liberal politicians who lead the city have long considered renters a voter base that they must woo. Although rents have fallen from pre-pandemic highs, San Francisco remains one of the most expensive cities in the country.
In 2022, city leaders passed Union at Home, the first legislation of its kind in the country. It lays out a path for tenants to form their own associations and requires landlords to bargain with them, just as an employer must meet with unionized workers.
The law protects tenants who want to use common spaces for organizing activities or invite advocates to talk to residents about their rights.
Within a year, tenants in 55 San Francisco buildings formed their own associations that called for a range of improvements, including quicker repairs, lower charges for utilities and translation of materials for renters who do not speak English. Most of the associations have not initiated a strike.
Tenant associations exist in other cities, but they do not have the city-provided leverage to demand that their landlords bargain in good faith that San Francisco tenants have.
In the Tenderloin neighborhood, where low-income immigrant families cluster because of relatively cheap rents, tenants have begun to organize. They live in one of the city’s roughest areas, full of older, worn apartments near open-air drug markets and homeless encampments.
Luisa Rodriguez, 38, immigrated to the United States from El Salvador in 2020 with two children, now 9 and 18, and had a third child in San Francisco. The family lives in a small studio apartment on the sixth floor of their building and are charged $1,600 a month. Rodriguez, who works as a cook, has not paid her landlord since June. Tenants on strike are paying their rent instead to a trust fund that is being held until their demands are met.
Rodriguez and her children sleep together in two beds pushed against one wall to put as much distance as possible between them and a space where mold has continually appeared.
She showed pictures on her phone of green fuzz on the window frame that stretched down the wall. She said it had spread to clothes in a closet near the window, too, forcing her to throw out items she could not afford to replace.
She showed copies of letters from a doctor at the San Francisco Health Network that told her landlord, “The mold is endangering the health of your tenants,” and asked for immediate action.
Veritas Investments, which owns the building where the Rodriguez family lives, said that workers repaired a crack in the family’s window, used drying equipment to address water intrusion, and treated, sealed and painted the window and frame to prevent the mold from returning.
Although the mold was no longer visible on a recent night, the family was not confident the problem had been solved. Dara, 3, continues to cough at night, keeping the family awake, Rodriguez said.
The dispute highlights a big problem in San Francisco’s housing stock: old buildings that are increasingly expensive to maintain and, in a city notoriously short on housing, among the few options for low-income renters.
Veritas is one of the largest landlords in San Francisco and owns most of the buildings where tenant associations have declared a rent strike. Its holdings in the city, though, are shrinking. Like other building owners in the city roiled by the pandemic, Veritas defaulted last year on loans and is selling parts of its huge portfolio.
Ron Heckmann, a spokesperson for Veritas, said that many of its buildings are more than a century old and that the company has worked hard to address the concerns of tenants, spending millions of dollars on improvements. The elevators are so outdated that replacement parts must be custom-made, he said. The plumbing, wiring and heating systems are aging and complex.
Heckmann added that just a fraction of the tenants in the company’s thousands of units around the city have joined the strike. He dismissed the strikes as ideological grandstanding driven by Brad Hirn, a tenant advocate with the nonprofit Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, who has organized the tenant associations and led the fights.
Hirn, though, said that the buildings have real problems that include cockroaches, vermin, mold, and broken mailboxes and elevators. Heckmann said that whenever problems such as these are raised by tenants, the company works hard to quickly address them. Hirn said tenants will call off the strikes when the company gives rent reductions for code violations, improves health and safety protocols, and translates materials into other languages.
“With enough support, they can win things they never thought were possible,” he said.
Knight writes for
The New York Times.