Abstract
Homelessness and housing insecurity are often isolating experiences in the United States, where housing and well-being are constructed as individual responsibilities. In this context, mobilization around housing injustice can be challenging. The authors argue that the intersection of the Black Lives Matter protests, the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, and housing injustice created a powder keg for social action that was capitalized upon by a local tenant union and social movement organization called Kansas City Tenants. Through a real-time analysis of Kansas City Tenants, a grassroots organization with national reach, the authors explore how it managed to recruit diverse members to the organization, direct sustainable and impactful action toward the needs of those in crisis, and lay the groundwork for future policy and revolutionary initiatives both institutionally and extrainstitutionally.
In 2019, a full-time worker earning minimum wage could not afford a two-bedroom apartment in any county in the United States (National Low Income Housing Coalition 2019). More than half of all U.S. residents spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing that same year (JCHSHU 2019), an alarming figure that has only increased since (JCHSHU 2024). Only one in five households qualifying for federal housing assistance received it, resulting in more people renting from private landlords than ever before (JCHSHU 2020). Under these conditions, many people—especially people with low incomes and Black, Latine, and immigrant residents—were living one paycheck or emergency away from displacement or homelessness (García and Kim 2020).
Then, in 2020, paychecks disappeared, and many people became ill as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spread across the globe. Although the pandemic affected everyone, the severity of challenges was patterned by race, gender, and class, as well as other axes of inequality. Black, Latine, and Indigenous people experienced higher rates of COVID-19 infection and deaths compared with their white counterparts (Benfer et al., 2021; Ndugga, Hill, and Artiga 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic caused financial turmoil for people with low and middle incomes and disproportionately among Black, Latine, and Indigenous communities (Horowitz, Brown, and Minkin 2021; Parker, Minkin, and Bennett 2020). Finally, while rates of eviction increased for all groups in 2020, Black (23 percent), Hispanic (18 percent) and Asian (15 percent) were far more likley than white households (8 percent) to fall behind on rental payments. Black renters were the most vulnerable, with one in four Black renters (26 percent) reporting that they had fallen behind on rent, putting them at risk for eviction (Cornelissen and Hermann, 2023). Eviction affects the health and well-being of individuals and families and has been linked with premature death (Desmond et al., 2013; Desmond 2016; Graetz et al. 2024). It became increasingly clear how health, economic security, housing, and race were intimately linked (Michener 2022b, 2023a).
It was at this moment that Kansas City Tenants (KC Tenants), a citywide tenant union and grassroots organization that fights for safe, affordable, and accessible housing, emerged. Based in Kansas City, Missouri, the organization gained initial traction and visibility in 2019 because of the region’s contentious mayoral and city council election races, alongside increasing national attention to housing insecurity. However, as the pandemic caused people to lose their jobs and homes, the efforts of KC Tenants escalated. Their visibility intensified during the summer protests organized by the Black Lives Matter (#BLM) movement and coinciding fights for eviction moratoria in the city and across the country (Michener 2022b). As students were out of college classrooms, but still accumulating debt, their outrage mounted. As workers were laid off and struggled to make ends meet, their outrage mounted. But outrage is merely a first step. As Lorde (1981:127) explained, “anger is loaded with information and energy,” but how it is wielded determines the changes it can effect.
Academics and organizers alike have long been interested in the factors contributing to the emergence and efficacy of collective action and social movements (Du Bois [1935] 2014; Goodwin and Jasper 2015; McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996; Morris, 1984; Piven and Cloward 1979; Snow et al. 2018; Taylor 2016; Yerena 2023). Key to this interest is how political opportunity structures create possibilities for action (McAdam et al. 1996), how people come to be recruited to a movement (McAdam 1986; Swank and Fahs 2017; Viterna 2015) and what motivates them to take action through diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames (Benford and Snow 2000; Gamson 1992). A significant factor in mobilization is people’s “biographical availability”: do they have the ability to participate in social movements, or are they hampered by social, economic, or political obligations such as childcare or work? (McAdam 1986; Viterna 2015). People may be more likely to join a movement when they have that availability, but to what extent do they persist when other obligations crop up? Social movements often tap into preexisting communities (e.g., geographically bound) or organizations (e.g., unions) to engage in bloc recruitment, as it is easier to reach larger swaths when there are preexisting connections between members (McAdam 1986; Morris, 1984; Viterna 2015). People already connected through personal relationships or communities (e.g., churches) are more likely to be mobilized through strong and weak ties (Letelier Troncoso et al., 2019; Nelson 2013).
However, those experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity often experience their troubles in isolation rather than as part of a community (Desmond 2016). The very act of eviction or displacement disconnects an individual from physical neighbors. Consequently, it can be more challenging for these individuals to mobilize as a collective group. The same can be said about health or employment issues, which are treated as personal, individualized concerns in the United States rather than the consequence of structural factors, such as structural racism (Bonilla-Silva 2014; Michener and Ford 2023). Individuals often feel isolated shame for unemployment or illness rather than collective anxiety or rage (Mills 1959). Bringing together people for collective action around housing can prove even more challenging when considering the disparate groups of people facing housing insecurity and crisis. Housing comprises many articulations—eviction, foreclosure, discrimination, gentrification, slumification—each of which affects different individuals and groups. Bringing together diverse groups poses even greater challenges as whiter, more affluent and educated populations tend to hoard decision-making power within such organizations (Blickenstaff 2005; Rojas, Heaney, and Adem 2023).
This article traces how a particular local tenant union and social movement organization, KC Tenants, overcame such fragmentation and isolation to unify diverse people into a collective cause, sustain that momentum, and effect change both institutionally and extrainstitutionally. We traced these efforts in real time through interviews and ethnographic data as the movement emerged, a process rarely captured in social scientific research (Fisher 2019). On the basis of these data, we argue that the tripartite crisis—of racial injustice, a COVID-19 pandemic, and housing insecurity—helped mobilize people in collective action. However, the success of the organization to effect change was the result of a successful framing (Benford and Snow 2000), articulation of a politicized collective identity (Klandermans 1997), and balance between the needs and desires of its diverse base.
A Tripartite Crisis and Mobilization of a Movement: Housing, the Pandemic, and #BLM
Like many cities in the United States and worldwide, Kansas City’s history of discriminatory development patterns has left many neighborhoods in persistent distress, which affects residents’ health and well-being. Redlining, residential isolation and segregation, racially restrictive covenants, predatory lending, the building of freeways and other forms of urban renewal, and more recently, megaprojects and gentrification trends have brought prosperity for predominantly white areas, and concentrated housing insecurity, exclusion from wealth creation, exposure to environmental hazards, lower average life expectancy, and hindered access to employment and income for those in historically Black and Latine neighborhoods (Garay-Huaman and Irazábal-Zurita 2020; Garcia-Hallett et al. 2020; González-Pérez 2021; Gotham 2014; L’Heureux 2015; Wagner 2003).
The pandemic laid bare these existing racial inequalities, many of which were the direct product of historic racial segregation and, more contemporaneously, exclusionary zoning, predatory inclusion, and urban “renewal” projects (Choi et al. 2019; Howell, Whitehead, and Korver-Glenn, 2023; Korver-Glenn 2021; Korver-Glenn et al. 2023; Taylor 2019). COVID-19 caused disproportionate harm to historically marginalized groups. Specifically, Black, Hispanic, and Asian people had substantially higher rates of infection, hospitalization, and death compared with white people (Barkham, Vance, and Deese 2023; Magesh et al. 2021; Rubin-Miller et al. 2020). The “preexisting health conditions” such as diabetes, obesity, and hypertension that intensified the likelihood of suffering from COVID-19 morbidity and mortality can be traced to upstream causes, such as residential segregation and its effects, the absence of healthy food stores, green spaces, quality schools, and employment opportunities, as well as pollution, violence, and trauma (Waitzkin 2021; Weaver et al. 2022).
In the United States, issues of health and wealth are often understood as the product of individual (in)action rather than structural forces (Michener, 2023b; Lipsitz 2024). #BLM sought to challenge that understanding, by drawing attention to the structural nature of racism (Boyles 2019; Taylor 2016). The very framing suggested that Black lives were treated as though they did not matter by most U.S. institutions (Ransby 2018; Taylor 2016). As people took to the streets to protest the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, among other assaulted and murdered Black people, a national conversation emerged about the racism embedded in U.S. institutions, including policing, as well as real estate, financing, education, and health care.
In Kansas City, Missouri, the largest protests were held at J. C. Nichols’ Country Club Plaza. This neighborhood was named after a prominent Kansas City real estate developer, J. C. Nichols, who pioneered racially restrictive covenants: clauses inserted into property deeds that explicitly prohibited the sale or rental of properties to individuals of specific racial or ethnic backgrounds. Nichols ensured that these covenants were written into the deeds of his developments. As a result, white property owners were able to build equity and wealth and have access to greater resources such as quality schools and healthy food stores, while Black and other nonwhite populations were restricted to the east side of Troost Avenue, Kansas City’s primary racial dividing line, in neighborhoods deemed of “high risk” and therefore preventing businesses and homeowners from receiving the financial support to build and maintain property (see Figure 1).
(A) Neighborhood eviction filing rate (2015–2019) and Black/African American residents with (B) hotline calls (year 1) and redlining proxy.
Racial and socioeconomic segregation has been responsible for the persistent racial wealth gap but also inequalities in policing, education, and health. Without investment in infrastructure and amenities, these effects reverberate and intensify, as they did during the pandemic. #BLM provided a framework and collective rage to highlight these interconnected issues. It also mobilized significant numbers to the street, in part because of school and work closures but also because of the increasing financial strain experienced by so many. The recognition of injustice is what Piven and Cloward (1979:12) termed “transvaluation” and McAdam (1999) referred to as “cognitive liberation” (pp. 48–50). The tripartite crisis resulted in a breakdown of everyday life in ways that challenged the hegemony of the status quo (Gramsci 1971) and produced collective consciousness (Snow et al. 1998). In these ways, the tripartite crisis created an opportunity for a social movement to develop (Almeida 2018; McAdam et al. 1996; Meyer 2002). Although these protests began to dissipate at the end of the summer of 2020, the outrage and awareness of injustice remained.
The impact of the tripartite crisis on contentious housing politics was not isolated to Kansas City. Herbert and Ricketts (2024:12) similarly argued that Philadelphia squatters in 2020 were more successful in meeting “immediate needs for housing while also pressuring for recognition and formalization of rights to these properties” than squatters in other historical-political contexts. Specifically, they argue that the particular historical confluence of encroaching gentrification, evictions that violated public health orders, police violence, and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, as well as the way these unfolded against the COVID-19 pandemic, were integral to [a successful] outcome. (p. 11)
They attributed this to the confluence of these historical factors in conjunction of the particular political and nonprofit ecosystem in Philadelphia at that time.
However, no matter how acute a crisis may be, a historical moment is not enough to develop a social movement or revolution of the movement. A social movement requires a politicized collective identity (Klandermans 1992) but also successful “diagnostic frames” that reframe a situation as “unjust” and attribute blame or responsibility to particular actors or institutions (Benford and Snow 2000:615), “prognostic frames” that offer a solution to the problem, including frame-appropriate tactics and strategies to bring that about (Benford and Snow 2000), as well as “motivational frames,” which instigate individuals to take action (Gamson 1992).
Historically, tenant movements have cropped up worldwide in response to different inflection points in the housing market, yet few have yielded revolutionary or radical outcomes. As Bradley (2014) captured in his study of tenant organizations in England, most have adopted a “consumer model” of action, which demands better options from “the market” rather than overhauling the neoliberal market model of housing entirely. As a result, tenant organizations often seek “respect . . . from the politically and economically powerful” as a primary goal. “This desire to be close to the powerful, to be accepted, means the collective action in the tenant’s movement rarely ventures into outright conflict or open disagreement, since the goal is not to alienate powerholders, but to gain their acceptance” (Bradley 2014:129)
Similar to the context of England, “home ownership and the consumption of private goods have become synonymous with responsible citizenship” in the United States and therefore, “under the supremacy of market values tenants find themselves relegated to the status of flawed consumers whose citizenship is contingent” (Bradley 2014:52). Yet both the consumer and citizenship model continue to divide the populace into the deserving and undeserving, thus justifying the housing market and the inequality in invariably produces.
In contrast, Lefebvre’s (1995) call for the “right to the city” demands the return of urban spaces to the people. It frames the problem as the usurpation of urban space, the amenities within it, and the power afforded through congregation within that space by economic and political elites. This orientation does not seek recognition or respect from political or economic elites but rather seeks to establish collective self-governing in the absence of a regulatory state apparatus. This is the position taken up by Marcuse (2009:8) who similarly argued that housing is treated as an “instrument for profitmaking” rather than a “lived social space,” and this “conflict between housing as a home and as real estate” stands in the way of the “city dweller” reclaiming “the right to the city” (Lefebvre 1995). Michener (2023b) has chronicled how racially marginalized tenants also reject individualizing narratives, given their understanding of how structurally-produced health disparities have long been biologized (Du Bois, 1896; 1899, 1906).
The COVID-19 pandemic, the Movement for Black Lives, and the worldwide housing crisis intensified grievances, provided political opportunities and biographical availability, and offered mobilizing structures to connect activists to action. Yet how people oriented toward state actors was not self-evident. Although the U.S. government did not keep everyone housed, employed, or safe from COVID-19, it did increase unemployment payments and the child welfare tax credit and implement a federal eviction moratorium. In doing so, it made visible what was possible with the right political will to support the needs of the people.
Although these events and responses laid the groundwork for diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames for action, it was KC Tenants that articulated these frames in ways that produced action. They unified people through a collective identity and through tactics and strategies that were responsive to the diverse needs and desires of that collective. They also engaged in action that sought transformation both institutionally and extrainstitutionally, blending approaches espoused by both reformists and revolutionaries. This article traces how KC Tenants was able to capitalize upon this historical moment and build power in distinctive and inspirational ways.
KC Tenants: Unifying Diversity around Housing Justice
In many ways, KC Tenants was in the right place at the right time, but it was ultimately the decisions they made and strategies they employed to address conflict and tension within the organization that accounts for their rapid success. KC Tenants is a citywide tenant union and grassroots organization “led by a multiracial multigenerational base of poor and working-class tenants in Kansas City” (KCTenants.org). It “organize[s] to ensure that everyone in KC has a safe, accessible, and truly affordable home” (KCTenants.org). KC Tenants argues that “people closest to the problem are those closest to the solution,” meaning that tenants who have been evicted, displaced, and oppressed by housing violence are the ones who can forge a path forward “by teaching ourselves our rights, telling our stories, and laying out a collective path towards our liberation” (Mason Andrew Kilpatrick, who goes by MAK, a 28-year-old, Chicano, nonbinary, KC Tenants organizer and director of the hotline team). KC Tenants has been successful in drawing in a broad and diverse community in part because of their ability to meld a diversity of approaches and values while still centering the most affected.
This ability to navigate diversity was directly informed by its founding members, each of whom came from different social positionalities yet experienced and understood many of their experiences as a product of housing insecurity. KC Tenants was founded by Tiana Caldwell, a 42-year-old Black woman who had been living in hotel rooms for a year with her husband and son after being evicted from her home because she could not afford both rental payments and cancer treatments, and Tara Raghuveer, a 26-year-old Indian American Harvard graduate originally from the Kansas City suburbs, who was studying housing inequities and advocating for housing justice as an employee for the nonprofit organization People’s Action. Although Tiana and Tara were differently positioned, they each understood their precarity and vulnerability produced along lines of race, class, and gender. The two of them came together with Diane Charity, a 72-year-old Black mother involved in local housing justice politics who had also experienced eviction and slumification of housing, and Brandi Granados, a neurodivergent white mother who had been living in shelters with her children, to found the organization. Over its first year, the organization grew from 12 to 300 members, and by year 5 there were more than 10,000 members. In mobilizing this base to promote a series of targeted campaigns and political achievements, a local news outlet suggested that “KC Tenants . . . broke the system” (Cox 2021).
Yet it was not clear if breaking “the system” was the goal. KC Tenants did frame housing injustice as a product of structural forms of oppression that particularly affects already subjugated groups, including women and children, LGBTQ youth (Irazábal and Huerta 2016; Robinson 2018), immigrants (Dunn 2000; McManus and Irazábal 2023; Metawala, Golda-Pongratz, and Irazábal 2021), neurodivergent people, those experiencing mental health trauma (Mejia-Lancheros et al. 2021), and people experiencing poverty (Irazábal 2018). And yet much of KC Tenants’ actions were directed toward “the system,” reflecting a perspective that power is exclusively located within the state apparatus. This may have been influenced by the organization’s composition and the perspectives of those who were employed but also financial and infrastructural support progressive donors as well as People’s Action, a U.S.-based national progressive advocacy and political organization that seeks to “build the power of poor and working people, in rural, suburban, and urban areas to win change through issue campaigns and elections” (peoplesaction.org). Although KC Tenants believes that those “closest to the problem are closest to the solution,” ties to partisan interests shape the organization’s orientation toward institutional power.
In this article we explore the ways that KC Tenants sought to effect change both institutionally and extrainstitutionally and how this reflected tensions within the movement itself.
Data and Methods
We draw upon semistructured interviews with current and former leaders of KC Tenants (n=50) and others working the the broader housing ecosystem (n=15), as well as and participant observation of weekly meetings and direct actions led by the organization between August 2019 and December 2023. Most participants requested to be named in this research, and we recognize that there is power in being recognized for one’s work. As a result, we present them without pseudonyms. We anonymized only those who requested it.
Semistructured Interviews
We recruited individuals with differing levels of involvement with the organization to participate in semistructured, in-depth interviews. We recruited these individuals via personal connections to the organization and snowball sampling. Interviews took place over Zoom or in person. Most interviews were two hours in length. Although some were shorter, several took place in two parts and were more than four hours long. We interviewed 50 members of KC Tenants and 15 individuals who work in housing but were not members of KC Tenants. We include gender, race and ethnicity, age, and education demographics in Table 1. Michelle Smirnova created the interview guide, waiver of documentation of consent, and recruitment scripts with the feedback of Jordan Ayala and Clara Irazábal. Jordan conducted 9 of the interviews: 4 with KC Tenants’ leaders and 5 with people working in the broader housing ecosystem. Michelle conducted 42 interviews: 32 with KC Tenants leaders (1 was a follow-up with 1 of Jordan’s interviewees) and 10 with people in the broader housing ecosystem. Fifty-four percent of the KC Tenants interviewees had college degrees. We believe that this is slightly higher than across the base in general, but it does speak to the higher educational degree attainment of many members in this organization. This is a limitation of our interviewee pool, recognizing that the perspectives of people with less education are underrepresented.
Interview Demographics.
These interviews assumed a life-course perspective to understand how housing—as well as access to health care, education, jobs, or other social provisions as a direct consequence of (un)stable housing—had affected the interviewees’ lives from childhood until now. These interviews allowed us to understand personal and historical contexts and other external conditions and pressures that contributed to involvement, or lack thereof, in KC Tenants. The interviews explored whether there were patterned differences and triggering factors between those with greater or lesser participation in the organization. Using a constant-comparative, iterative, and inductive coding structure (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Timmermans and Tavory 2012), we identified the major obstacles that had thwarted individuals’ efforts or intentions to be more robustly involved, including but not limited to ongoing housing insecurity. Finally, we also asked whether KC Tenants helped improve their housing situations in tangible ways.
Participant Observation
We conducted virtual and in-person participant observation of base meetings, strategy planning, task-specific subteam meetings, direct actions, protests, and rallies between August 2019 and July 2024. We attended roughly 40 base meetings, 150 subcommittee meetings, and 20 direct actions in total, resulting in hundreds of hours of observation. During the height of the pandemic, all meetings were held online via Zoom; in fall 2021, they transitioned to partially online and partially in person. All three authors attended and participated in these meetings as participant observers between 2020 and 2022, taking notes and engaging similarly to other participants. During several base meetings, all three authors disclosed our research purposes to KC Tenants, and members voted to support and allow the research. However, we refrained from recording identifiable information in our notes to protect the privacy and confidentiality of those without direct consent. We coded these field notes using NVivo 14.
In addition, Jordan served as a member of the strategy team, the hotline hotties 2.0, the research and data teams, and language access from 2020 until 2021. Michelle continued observing and participating in the base meetings, direct actions, and as a member of the childcare and ceasefire teams until July 2024. Michelle also helped canvass for KC Tenants Power. Michelle and Jordan helped build out survey instruments and data collection techniques for KC Tenants to use as part of their hotline, which continue to be used by the organization. Jordan also helped with data visualization for KC Tenants’ data and is the designer of Figure 1. Michelle also helped collaboratively write several grants to support KC Tenants. Although unfunded, their research summaries helped the organization reflect upon and formulate new visions for power building.
Discourse Analysis
KC Tenants has received considerable coverage in news outlets, amassing hundreds of articles nationwide. They are also active on social media, including on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, and distribute a weekly newsletter. These outlets have served as places to signal diagnostic and prognostic framing, collective identities, and supportive versus antagonistic actors, as well as showcasing various organizational tactics and strategies. All three authors participated in a critical discourse analysis of these sources to understand the articulations of this movement in these capacities (van Dijk 2001, 2008). Using an abductive approach (Timmermans and Tavory 2012), we analyzed these materials using a “constant-comparative method” (Glaser and Strauss 1967:91). Instead of a purely deductive method that seeks to confirm theories and a purely inductive method that is not guided by theory, the abductive approach allows the development of theory (inductive) that is produced by “surprising” and “puzzling” data that emerged through a theoretically informed design and coding scheme (deductive).
Positionality
We recognize that effective research considers one’s own positionality in terms of how that affects the collection and interpretation of data (Clarke 2005; Harding 2004) and therefore share some contours of those social locations here. All three authors are tenants. Clara and Michelle bought houses during this work (i.e., own mortgages), which affected how they understood the value of KC Tenants’ “bank tenant” formulation. Clara and Jordan are both Latine, Clara emigrated from Venezuela for graduate school and work, and Jordan is a third-generation Mexican American. Michelle is a white woman whose parents and brother were Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union, a time when they were unhoused and without a homeland. Each of the authors has experienced housing insecurity in distinctive ways and has found themselves radicalized through the framing, training, and actions of KC Tenants. In those spaces, they have traced their own housing stories, the injustices they and their families have endured, and understood how we are all harmed by the extreme commodification of housing.
Findings
At the Right Place at the Right Time: Mobilizing a Movement in a Tripartite Crisis
In the summer of 2020, people took to the streets across the nation, declaring that Black lives matter (Boyles 2019; Taylor 2016; Morris 2021). As their forebearers had fought for during the civil rights movement more than half a century earlier, protesters called for attention to persistent inequities in policing, incarceration, and violence, as well as in education, health care, jobs, and housing (Morris 2021; Taylor 2016).
However, as the summer wore on, many protests became less attended. This was not because these issues had been resolved. Many were still out of work (Smith, Edwards, and Duong 2021) or in remote classrooms (National Center for Education Statistics 2022) and were outraged about the persistent racial, gendered, and class inequities. However, as a decentralized movement, it could be challenging to understand how to tangibly make a difference. KC Tenants provided an organization and union for people to channel their anger and seek connection rather than “just banging my head against a wall” or “screaming into the void,” as voiced by leaders. KC Tenants encourages members to be organizers rather than activists. Although activists will show up to protests or actions, organizers seek to build political relationships and commitments to one another and a policy agenda, seeking long-term sustainable work rather than a one-off action or initiative.
Lucas Rodriguez, a queer, 20-year-old Latino, describes how he started “going to some of the protests in the summer [of 2020] because I felt like, why not go? I mean, that was kind of like the thing to do. It was like this giant social justice movement happening across the country.” However, as the protests became less frequent and high school resumed in the fall, Lucas did not know how to channel his energy. He felt disconnected and alone. Then he read about KC Tenants “on social media, and I saw the work [they were doing and thought] it’s really cool. It’s really awesome to see a local organization doing that.” But he didn’t get involved because he wasn’t sure the issue of housing was directly relevant to him.
Lucas had volunteered at soup kitchens with his family but had assumed that “that [level of poverty] is never going to happen to us.” But then, a close family friend was evicted from her home with her three-year-old son. Lucas and his family helped support them through this harrowing time. Suddenly, it became “someone we knew” and something that “could happen to us, too.” He described how “as a Catholic, I was taught that we take care of the poor and advocate for the oppressed,” but “charities simply aren’t enough to solve the housing crisis we have in this country, acting as ‘band-aids’ over broken systems.” He went to a KC Tenants rally and connected with an organizer, Jenay Manley. Lucas describes how “for that, like fifteen, twenty or so minutes . . . we just kind of talked a lot about local and national issues and brought it back to KC Tenants and housing.” This was a revelation. Lucas says, “Until my introduction to KC Tenants, my politics were very national, like on a national level, but KC Tenants kind of taught me the importance of local politics and even statewide politics.” KC Tenants also helped him understand how housing was a racial justice issue, an immigration issue, a student issue. “It spoke to me and what I was going through.” KC Tenants managed to bring together people who were struggling with immigration status, student debt, antitrans legislation and broader LGBTQ discrimination, but also racial capitalism more broadly.
KC Tenants was also able to bring together people from diverse social locations as a result of the pandemic. To limit the spread of COVID-19 between members, KC Tenants transitioned its weekly meetings from in person to Zoom videoconferencing in March 2020. Although it was common for many groups to hold meetings online during these early years of the pandemic, KC Tenants was distinctive. As 24-year-old nonbinary Latine college student Magda Werkmeister describes, “I think that KC Tenants did Zoom better than anyone does Zoom.” Some online settings can feel sterile and bureaucratic, but KC Tenants managed to avoid that by centering human experiences and connection above all else. Meetings often began with emotional testimonials and ended with an energizing call to action, during which participants regularly supported the presented in the “chat” box of Zoom. These personal and often heart-wrenching testimonials served as a reminder to those who came out for what and whom they were fighting. This vulnerability also helped create an organization that was a community of people with intimate, interpersonal relationships that transcended the scheduled meetings.
The Zoom meetings also allowed students like Magda living outside the region to continue participating during the school year. The same was true for those local to Kansas City whose jobs transitioned to remote work. Ron Clark, a 30-year-old Black man who works in transportation, describes how these City Board meetings [were] like 9:30 in the morning during weekdays, like it’s kind of easy when I’m at work doing X, Y and Z [at home and I could easily] throw an LLC [limited liability corporation] or board meeting on in the background. So, in that way, some things have become more accessible.
Although Ron resumed working full-time after the early days of the pandemic and Magda returned to college hundreds of miles away, KC Tenants managed to create a way to sustain their participation.
However, there were others for whom the online modality was less accessible. This was the case for Denesha, “an older Black woman who had been experiencing some mental health issues, including like, just dementia, and like decline, and she can’t work Zoom.” Although “someone donated their old iPad and [someone else] taught her how to use the hotspot, it just ain’t working.” Denesha had helped write the Tenants’ Bill of Rights in 2019 and was a regular meeting attendee before the pandemic; however, “she doesn’t get what she got out of the in-person meetings like—she got to go somewhere, and be in community, and talk to people outside, and smoke her cigar on the steps, and hug people’s children” (Wilson’s recounting). Denesha’s online transition experience illustrates how the pandemic altered who was served and played a larger role in directing KC Tenants’ organizing efforts.
Online modalities reflected the prioritization of a mostly white, college-educated modality and interaction style, even if it also appealed to some nonwhite and non-college-graduates (Luna 2010; Yukich, Fulton, and Wood 2020). This is one of the primary reasons that meetings shifted back to in person in the later period of the pandemic, alternating between in-person and online meetings. The transition online had advantages for some but disadvantages for others, and KC Tenants sought to address that tension by switching off modalities. This tension also played out in several of their policy and practical decisions and was emblematically illustrated by their accidentally created crisis hotline.
Winning and Building Power: Listening and Responding to Diverse Needs and Desires
Before the pandemic, tenants in Kansas City facing eviction would search online for resources. They might type, “I’ve been evicted in KC, what do I do?” and the first hit was a Web site called Kansas City Eviction Project (kcevictionproject.org) with data about eviction disparities in the city. This site had a phone number at the bottom, so people called. That number was Tara’s cell phone, as the Web site was part of her college project. Although the original intention of the phone line was not to direct people to resources but rather to connect with a researcher to collect data, it was impossible to ignore the needs expressed by the callers. People were in desperate need of help.
In response to the demand, in the year following the first calls to the Kansas City Eviction Project, KC Tenants established a crisis phone hotline for tenants to report incidents, raise concerns, and connect with resources available to them in the city. Although some leaders were reluctant to spend limited time and resources on sustaining the hotline, it became a critical staple of the organization, which quickly became the most visible and outspoken organization fighting for tenants’ interests. But the hotline was resource intensive, and as one founding member describes, “we are not a direct service organization,” and so “we [had] to figure out either how to make this into a base building strategy or like shut it down because we can’t just continue this indefinitely.” As they explain, the “people who were calling us really just needed fucking help, right? They weren’t calling us because they wanted to organize. They needed the number of someone who could, like, help them pay their water bill, right? . . . but we’re a power-building organization.”
This posed a significant tension in the organization: should they respond to the need and provide these services and mutual aid or focus on their mission as an institutional or political power-building organization? The hotline team made a difference for those who needed it, but this came with costs. As another leader describes, “the original crew of people were feeling like really burnt out after like five or six months of taking calls.” All these people were unpaid. They worked full-time, often in multiple jobs, had caretaking responsibilities, and took on this volunteer role out of their commitment to the cause. The impact of hearing people in crisis after crisis for so long took a toll on their mental health, especially in a broader environment in which unemployment, illness, and displacement remained high in marginalized communities.
Some argued that the labor directed toward the hotline detracted from long-term work, such as electoral or voter campaigns, building a base of leaders, and systemic change. A review of the hours committed to the hotline revealed that at an hourly rate of $15, KC Tenants had invested nearly $100,000 worth of working hours into the effort in the first year, most of which was unpaid labor given that most people who worked as part of the hotline were volunteers. Others argued that it was the city’s responsibility to take on this work and that KC Tenants should direct their energy to advocate for the creation of a city-funded Office of the Tenant Advocate (OTA) that would do the work of the hotline.
Many joined KC Tenants with desire for institutionalized political change. This was because so much of KC Tenants’ political education and meetings focus upon this type of work, arguing that power is most centralized in existing power structures, such as political and city offices, tax structures, and political ordinances. When KC Tenants would lead training on the concept of “power” and “power building,” the discussions were often about gaining control over the political apparatus. The heavy emphasis upon institutional politics was also because KC Tenants managed to achieve several highly visible political wins in its first five years, and these were celebrated as signs of their power and success and an organization. Some of these wins included passing the Tenants’ Bill of Rights in 2019, establishing the Housing Trust Fund in 2021, passing the Right to Council in 2022, and a ban on source of income discrimination in 2023. On top of that, KC Tenants successfully waged a campaign in opposition to a regressive sales tax to fund a new downtown baseball stadium in Kansas City in the spring of 2024. These wins were formidable, especially from a group so young. They remained primarily focused on existing political institutions, many of which have historically excluded and oppressed marginalized groups. However, institutional political power is not the only form of power and this is particularly evident to groups who have been systematically and persistently excluded and oppressed by those institutions and have had to find ways to build power extrainstitutionally.
As Melissa Ferrer-Civil, a 33-year-old, Afro-Caribbean, nonbinary leader, argues, political and electoral interests . . . rub up against the needs of people. If you are always facing the enemy and you’re never facing your people, who ends up being left behind? Whose voices end up being silenced? Who is in those rooms? Who can stay? Who can bear to stay in those rooms? It’s most often white people, right? And that is a cautionary tale.
Political campaigns were “facing the enemy” while the crisis hotline was facing many of the Black and Brown leaders with KC Tenants who may have loved the idea of future policy change, but ultimately needed help now. Some examples of the framing of an “enemy” are illustrated through some of KC Tenant’s Instagram posts in Figures 2 to 4:
KC Tenants Instagram post of landlord.
KC Tenants Instagram post of city hall.
KC Tenants Instagram post of judges.
The tension between facing inward toward their people and facing outward toward “the enemy” was defining of KC Tenants and may reflect disagreements between white, college-educated leaders and Black and Brown leaders. Although white leaders were more likely to see solutions emanating from governmental entities and thus aspired to “build power” in political arenas, leaders of color were more likely to contest this approach. As Melissa describes above, these priorities were in tension within the organization, and the prioritization of “political or electoral interests” over “our people” may reflect the sensibilities of certain populations who feel as though electoral politics or government institutions have served their interests in the past.
The hotline was a resource that did not look to the state for solutions, and it highlighted communities in greatest need of support during the tripartite crisis. As can be seen in Figure 4, the calls to KC Tenants come from across Kansas City but are particularly concentrated in communities of color that were barred from housing elsewhere as a result of racially restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, as well as predatory inclusion. These are the communities that have had the least resources to build healthy and financially solvent communities.
The crisis hotline responded to immediate needs but also sought to redress harm. Magda describes how it was appealing and empowering to serve in this capacity as “a community alternative to the police, recognizing that bad things happen. People hurt each other. However, there is an alternative to calling someone who might just end up killing the person or putting them away forever.” Drawing from a restorative justice framework (Kaba and Murakawa 2021), Magda was drawn to KC Tenants’ voicing that “the way things are isn’t working. I think we’re just able to be like honest about that and . . . have conversations about what alternatives should look like.” Magda connected the hotline directly to #BLM efforts, which she was part of before joining KC Tenants. From her perspective, The KC Tenants hotline has very much two purposes, which are sort of equally important. The first is to tell people about the resources that are available. But then [second is] also saying like this isn’t enough, and you deserve much better, and the only way we’re going to get there is, if we stand together
to make a difference. For Magda, the hotline embodied the connection between immediate need and long-term power.
The hotline reflected an effort to build power extrainstitutionally: supporting people in crisis when the city or other entities would not. Although KC Tenants successfully advocated for the establishment of the OTA, which would have taken over the role fulfilled by the crisis hotline, the OTA has not been funded and therefore is merely a shell of an office. Given this situation, KC Tenants hotline needed to continue despite these costs and the desire for an institutional alternative. Although they continued their campaign to fund the OTA, they began to embrace the KC Tenants hotline as a vital resource. It also became clear that the hotline could serve other organizational functions. For example, KC Tenants identified the locations of both rapid response actions and mass canvassing efforts through hotline reports (see Figure 1). When many people called from the same building or properties owned by the same developer, KC Tenants started connecting these data and brought these patterns to the attention of media and political and legal authorities. It also encouraged callers to join one another to form a union and to join their ranks: “today we fight for your apartment, tomorrow for everyone’s.”
But these inward-facing initiatives were also about building community and channeling joy through resistance. As evidenced in some of KC Tenants’ Instagram posts (see Figures 5 and 6), they held barbecues and parties to focus on the collective as well as the action itself.
KC Tenants Instagram post for Party in the Park.
KC Tenants Instagram post for July Mega Canvass & Cookout.
It was important that leaders saw their problems as structurally produced, yet the solution might not be found exclusively in those institutions given their historical failures. As a result, the understanding of leaders as part of a joyful collective was a primary contribution of the organization.
This was the experience of Sabrina Davis, a 63-year-old biracial Black and white woman who was being harassed by her landlord and threatened with eviction. Sabrina ultimately won her case against her landlord with the support of KC Tenants, but she gained more than money or a residence. She describes how “MAK was coming to my house like every week and spending at least almost a whole day with me. Bringing me food because I was at the end of my rope.” During that time, she was having “panic attacks . . . my hair was falling out. I was just spent. I was in a horrible situation.” After she won the case, she became radicalized and inspired her to join KC Tenants. She recounts how she told MAK, I want to be a part of this organization. I can’t just be another sad story. I want to be a part of this. I want to help other people fight these dirty landlords. I can’t just sit on the sidelines and you all been here for me through this whole mess. You guys have been the wind beneath my wings for this full mess, and I love you. I love you all for everything you do and I want to be a part of this movement.
Sabrina was able to receive tangible support from KC Tenants, in terms of legal advice, food, and financial support from the mutual aid fund. However, she received more than that: she became part of a community.
We Are All Tenants: Framing and Identity
Wilson Vance, a 30-year-old white woman, never thought of herself as homeless despite almost a year of sneaking into “a building [to] sleep in the laundry room” or “sleeping on a couch, lying there awake as, like, I heard other people having sex in the other room.” When asked why she didn’t identify with being homeless, she replied, because when you think about homelessness, you think about someone sitting on a park bench or under an underpass. You think about like, the people that are standing on the side of the highway or like, you know, asking for money. . . . You don’t think about the couch surfers and the people that have a job.
Only after connecting with KC Tenants did Wilson begin to understand her own experience in new politicized terms. This was in part because of the framework as a tenant movement.
One of the most potent framing acts of KC Tenants involves its expansion of the concept of “housing insecurity” or the identity of someone affected by the housing crisis. Framing its work on behalf of tenants and people experiencing discrimination, KC Tenants reached a broader base of constituents. The U.S. Census Bureau has historically struggled to count homeless populations given that few people associate with the term, which connotes a negative image that misrepresents many people who live without permanent housing. Out of the 1,320 KC Tenants hotline reports in the first year of its existence, only 7 percent of reports mention homelessness. 1 As housing insecurity and poverty are socially constructed as personal troubles in the United States, KC Tenants offered a forum and community for people who have otherwise been isolated and blamed for their living situations. Doing so gave language and identity to those who may not have had it otherwise. It also helped individuals draw connections in their lives between redlining, persistent practices of racial exclusion, and present-day evictions, predatory inclusion, or slumification (Park 2020).
In 2022, KC Tenants expanded the concept of “tenants’ rights” even further to include individuals who had purchased their homes but still paid a mortgage to a bank—bank tenants—and students living in university dorms—university tenants. In doing so, they broadened their potential base in a way that emphasized that under the current model of financialized housing, almost everyone is a tenant. This is a phenomenal contribution to housing theory and practice, as it debunks the widespread misconception of homeownership associated with people paying mortgages to financial institutions. If they stop paying the mortgage, they are effectively evicted and lose “their” home, evidence that they are de facto “renting” from the lending institution. As the 2008 recession and COVID-19 pandemic revealed, even homeowners can experience housing loss through foreclosure, which is more likely to affect Black, Latine, and immigrant homeowners than their white counterparts.
This framework also expands the notion of “working class,” arguing that if you rely upon your work to pay for housing, then you are also a member of the “working class.” As Johnathan Duncan, a 37-year-old Black and Chicano KC Tenants organizer and elected city council person, argues, “working class means that you need a paycheck. You need to work for a paycheck in order to survive.” He presses on, “how many paychecks are you from being housing insecure? How many paychecks are you from being evicted? From being foreclosed upon?” In his eyes, if “you need to work . . . you are the working class,” and in this way, you are connected to the tenant movement.
Another group traditionally excluded from the category of “tenants” is students living in university housing. Most universities establish contracts with incoming students stipulating that they are not tenants and that the university is not a landlord. This may appear like a benevolent definition, given that universities often market themselves as “cultivating,” “providing for,” or “helping students grow.” Other universities explicitly describe a familial, and thereby nonfinancial or exploitive relationship. However, the contractual language of university housing is anything but familial or benevolent. Instead, it allows universities to circumvent local and state tenant protections, given that students are not tenants.
The fact that so many early leaders with KC Tenants were college students or recent graduates trying to navigate loan repayment alongside rental payments was significant. This shaped their understanding of how housing was an issue that deeply affected college students, many of whom had to drop out because of being unable to cover the cost of school in addition to housing, food, utilities, and other needs. After the dormitories at a local university flooded twice in two years, effectively destroying many belongings and displacing students indefinitely, students came together to form a student tenants’ union with the aid of KC Tenants. Within months, “nearly 20% of student tenants . . . [had] joined our union,” and the dean of students, the housing director, and the provost finally agreed to meet with them. Backed with the support of so many students and KC Tenants, many of their demands were met by the administration. As one student leader describes, We did not win everything, but we won more for staff and campus housing. A preventative maintenance program, moisture sensors to detect water issues, and more consistent communication. Just a few days ago, we received an email saying that every student impacted by flooding will receive compensation.
These gains were considerable given the nonresponse they had experienced in the year prior. Such action is only possible if students see themselves as tenants, entitled to the protections afforded by that identity, and the community and collective organizing afforded by groups like KC Tenants. KC Tenants argued that “we are more powerful together,” and they have expanded the people included in that “we.”
Outcomes
The political achievements of KC Tenants are significant. Understood though Michener’s (2022a) framework of building and breaking political power, KC Tenants both built and broke political power in significant ways. They built political power by negotiating with the city council and the mayor to pass the Tenants’ Bill of Rights, secured free attorneys for every tenant in eviction court through the passage of the Right to Council, won a $50 million bond for housing at or below 30 percent area median income, and established the Housing Trust Fund (institutional negotiation), and in their work to establish an Office of Language Access and a board overseeing the Housing Trust Fund (regulation and enforcement). They broke political power through their work in thwarting tax abatements and incentive deals (profit minimization).
However, they also went a step further to build community power extrainstitutionally through mutual aid relationships and knowledge, as evidenced through the hotline, childcare, and mutual aid initiatives but also the conceptual and educational campaigns about the financialization of housing, racial capitalism, and the notion of homeowners and students as tenants. They also halted thousands of evictions—nearly 1,000 during January 2021’s “Zero Eviction January” alone—through their direct actions and won building improvements and rent protections through the localized unionization of tenants. They built power through community organizing, coalition and social movement development, and institutional negotiation.
Unlike other community organizations in the United States and abroad (Donaghy 2018:17; Maeckelbergh 2012), KC Tenants did seek to build power institutionally, which may account for its visibility in media outlets which traditionally privilege coverage of state power. This was chronicled in both local and national news outlets that describe how “since its formation, KC Tenants has changed the city’s political landscape, putting housing instability at the center of the conversation” (Covert 2021). In its first five years of existence, the organization was featured in more than 700 articles, not to mention coverage on the evening news, social media, and radio (kctenants.org/press). The Pitch described how “KC Tenants flexes its political muscle” (Kraskee, Powell, and Alexander 2024); they are able to achieve “huge win[s] for the cause” (Hawley 2021). As “nationally-recognized activists,” KC tenants “has pushed city leaders to make affordable housing a priority and find funding to create more of it” (Quingly 2024). As described in a Kansas City Star article, “Since its founding, KC Tenants has flexed its we-can-get-things-done muscle” (Kansas City Star Editorial Board 2022). Reflecting on the decline of other local political organizations, the article argues that “if KC Tenant Power is as effective at building its ‘people’s platform,’ creating the massive voting coalition that its parent group envisions, then it’s likely to be a political power capable of influencing the outcome of candidate races, and votes on issues.” In an article in the KC Defender, a Black-owned and oriented news outlet, Ryan S. (2024) argued that as “a voice for the voiceless, fighting against the exploitation of public resources for private gain,” KC Tenants “signal[s] the strength and resilience of community-led movements in shaping the direction of urban development and public policy.”
Since the founding of the organization, KC Tenants has maintained a media team and has designated media liaisons for each of their direct actions and political campaigns. Their ability to get stories placed in media outlets reflects the social and cultural capital wielded by college-educated, upwardly mobile leaders and staff members in the organization (Bourdieu 1984) and their ability to act as “signifying agents” (Benford and Snow 2000) to journalists who are often working with scare resources and short deadlines (Rohlinger 2002). However, similar to other social movement organizations (McCarthy and Zald 1994), KC Tenants also makes liberal use of free media, such as on social media outlets such as Instagram and Twitter (see Figures 2–5). Media coverage allowed KC Tenants’ framing to proliferate and thereby create power through knowledge and identity transformation as well (Benford and Snow 2000).
Much of this diagnostic and prognostic framing remained oriented toward institutional power (see Figures 2–4). This contrasts with Donaghy’s (2018:17) finding that “community organizations across the United States and Brazil still largely seek to influence policies and programs for housing from the outside rather than seeking opportunities for decision-making power from within government institutions,” which preserves their independence but may limit their capacity. KC Tenants’ political sibling, KC Tenants Power, a 501(c)(4) organization that was established in 2022, has allowed political fundraising and action. Like KC Tenants, their sibling organization hit the ground running. In 2023, KC Tenants Power successfully ran two city council candidates, one of whom was elected, and one fell short by 2 percentage points. They endorsed five other candidates who were successfully elected to local office. As such, KC Tenants sought to build power extrainstitutionally via tenant unions and organizing efforts, as well as institutionally through electing officials and supporting the passage or thwarting of policies, ordinances, and constitutional amendments.
The reliance upon a discourse of “rights” was particularly resonant with political actors who also draw upon a rights-based framework (Benford and Snow 2000; Luna 2020). By framing “housing as a human right,” KC Tenants indicated an orientation toward the state for solutions. Rights-based rhetoric relies upon the state to enforce and protect. Although the framework may conceive of different actors seeking to infringe upon that right—landlords, developers, politicians, and judges—as “the enemy” (see Figures 2–4, in which such actors are constructed as adversaries), rights require codification, provision, and enforcement by legal-political systems and was at odds with an extrainstitutional approach.
Discussion
KC Tenants managed to capitalize upon the tripartite crisis in a way that amplified their visibility and influence. This included how they capitalized upon “biographical availability” of college students and other unemployed or underemployed leaders (McAdam 1986; Viterna 2015) and how they responded to the immediate needs of tenants in crisis, showing up for them when no one else would. By doing so, KC Tenants established bonds of trust, but also mutual support that helped maintain a robust and diverse base who would show up for institutionally oriented action.
One of KC Tenants’ greatest strengths is its ability to bring together otherwise disconnected and siloed individuals and groups and capitalize upon their perspectives, skills, and relationships. Although housing segregates along lines of race, ethnicity, and class, when people are brought together and recognize their mutual oppression under current conditions, they can support one another and build collective power in the short and long term.
This enabled KC Tenants to form coalitions with other movements and attract members from them. KC Tenants accomplished this by centering the experiences and perspectives of the most affected, which was reflected in the equal commitment to immediate needs (e.g., crisis hotline, food, childcare, showing up to encampments of buildings that needed immediate assistance) as well as the aspirations of long-term power building (e.g., union formation, political activity). It also drew from other local activist networks, which helped them populate direct actions, rallies, and council hearings with individuals and groups from all over the city and socioeconomic backgrounds. Its frames are built on the frames of national housing justice movements (e.g., People’s Action) and other justice movements (e.g., #BLM). It was through intersectional action that they were able to connect with and learn from diverse groups and produce “boomerang effects” whereby leaders centered their experiences with housing insecurity as part of the Movement for Black Lives, DeCarcerate KC, Stand Up KC, the Sunrise Movement, and other local movements in ways that highlighted how central housing is to each of these other social justice issues (Terriquez 2015).
Although KC Tenants became visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, they were careful not to overattribute the cause of housing insecurity to the pandemic. Instead, by drawing upon #BLM’s framework of structural racism and racial capitalism, they made clear that this is not a housing system in crisis, but a system operating how it was always designed to work (Dantzler, Korver-Glenn, and Howell 2022; Du Bois [1899] 1996; Raghuveer and Washington 2023). This is distinctive from Bradley’s (2014) findings on tenant organizations in England, where tenants did not see the system as flawed but rather the stigmatization of their position as tenants as flawed. As a result, the goal was a collaboration with state power, the inclusion of a tenant “voice” at the table, rather than an overhaul of the system entirely. This type of resistance can often reify existing structures of power rather than dismantle them (Smirnova 2012, 2014, 2018).
A similar tension exists within KC Tenants and might be seen as a product of their diverse base. The broad inclusion afforded by the “tenant” identity helped draw in a robust base and build coalitions with other groups. However, it also resulted in greater numbers of white, upwardly mobile, college-educated leaders who were more likely to see the state as having served and protected their interests in the past and therefore, more likely to assume that such institutions were redeemable. Given how privilege and oppression work in relation to one another, it is no surprise that “when it comes to social injustice, groups have competing interests that often generate conflict. Even when groups understand the need for transversal politics . . . they often find themselves on opposite sides of social issues” (Collins 2000:274). This was evident in the competing desires to seek change institutionally or extrainstitutionally.
Studies of social movements have chronicled how Black and other nonwhite activists are often excluded by predominantly white social movements (Luna 2010; Rojas et al. 2023; Yukich et al. 2020), often as a result of privileging white-favored interaction styles (Diaz-Veizades and Chang 1996; Yukich et al. 2020) or by creating racial hierarchies within the social movement (Wooten and Couloute 2017). Therefore, “if a social movement organization leadership is unable, or unwilling, for example, to use group styles associated with minorities, then they could prop up hierarchies that encourage relatively low participation” (Rojas et al. 2023, 3). Furthermore, if “movement leadership is not careful to counter the tendency to monopolize organizational resources or hoard opportunities, race-based inequalities may emerge in movement groups” that ultimately contribute to a “leaky pipeline” by which nonwhite participants leave a movement (Blickenstaff 2005; Rojas et al. 2023:3).
This might have happened at KC Tenants had it not taken deliberate steps to counter this “leaky pipeline.” Although many of their meeting structures emerged from a college-educated, white-collar class and thereby privileged individuals who felt comfortable through such interactional styles, the organization took several steps to address this. It practiced progressive stacking, ordering who speaks first in a meeting that prioritizes perspectives from the most marginalized (Jones 2021), and other facilitation techniques to center the perspectives of those “closest to the problem” of housing insecurity. KC Tenants also drew on those with backgrounds in more collaborative, grassroots settings, such as Parade Park, the first Black-owned housing cooperative in the United States, home to Diane, a founding member of KC Tenants. They also held meetings in person when possible, providing food and childcare, responding to structural gendered and racialized inequities (Collins, 1998; DeVault, 1991). In so doing, they emphasized community building and social power not only against or through political institutions. This centered on a radical Black feminist tradition and ethos of care (Collins, 1998; Naidu, 2023). The centrality of the 1:1, a meeting between two individuals of the movement whereby each comes to learn about the other’s self-interest in the cause, also serves to combat a bureaucratic culture emblematic of white institutions and interaction styles.
KC Tenants’ community agreements, meeting structures, and undergirding Freirean political ideology also promoted democratic decision-making practices, such as having base members split up into small groups to discuss topics and then reconvene as a large group to discuss the pros and cons of collective (in)action. The fact that the organization has paid staff members and fellows, and a strategy team that engages in agenda-setting and facilitation, necessarily invokes hierarchy into the organization, even if staff and the strategy team were primarily composed of people of color. Furthermore, the modality of meetings, using Zoom, slide presentations, and text-based chat, appealed more to college-educated, white-collar sensibilities, ultimately making those people more comfortable communicating and engaging in ultimate decision-making processes. The majority of the paid staff members were also college-educated, institutionalizing this bias.
To offset some of this bias, KC Tenants implemented a Black Organizing Fellowship program that paid leaders of color to build out campaigns; many of whom did not have a college degree. This structure allowed emerging leaders to devote time to issues that directly affected them, drawing from the resources and support of KC Tenants to build policy agendas and political and social capital to implement these initiatives. It was these types of responsive initiatives that allowed KC Tenants to strategically draw from the assets and abilities of their diverse base, while also being attentive to their diverse needs and desires.
These approaches are similar to those used by a “community of struggle” in Berlin that fostered “a lasting movement through three elements of sustainability,” which included engaging “in political practices that take into account the perspective of the most vulnerable members,” building solidarity across difference, and emphasizing the importance of place to solidarity (Hamann and Türkmen 2020:1). KC Tenants implemented a similar strategy of centering those “closest to the problem,” bridging across the differences that “the other side uses to divide us,” and establishing a strong sense of commitment to fellow tenants across the city in base meetings and place-based tenant unions. As KC Tenants engaged in political education about J. C. Nichols’s legacy and structural racism more broadly, they grounded this work in neighborhood-specific tenant unions, emphasizing the importance of place to community and power as Lefebvre (1995) had envisioned in reclaiming the “right to the city.” Such framing may have prevented the loss of Black or other nonwhite activists from the movement, as has been common in other social movements. Furthermore, the decision to focus on the immediate needs of people in crisis via the hotline and mutual aid alongside campaigns to win political power reflects KC Tenants’ ability to respond to the disparate needs and desires of its members.
The composition of KC Tenants may be more diverse than other housing movements in part because of its inclusive collective framing and emphasis upon structural conditions that affect everyone; this may also be the reason for its orientation toward state actors and state mechanisms for effecting change. KC Tenants more closely resembles the tenant unions studied by Card’s (2022:1) research of tenants’ movements in Los Angeles and Berlin. On the basis of 10 years of observation, Card concluded that “tenant movement organizations employed five mechanisms to affect policymaking: (1) making demands, (2) forming coalitions, (3) promoting referendums, (4) engaging government officials in dialogue, and (5) transferring agents to government.” In the case of KC Tenants, they (1) made constant and progressive demands; (2) formed, participated in, and nurtured initial coalitions (e.g., Stand Up KC, the Movement for Black Lives, Fight for 15, labor unions) but also including finding allies in local and national movements and government (e.g., Homes Guarantee, the Sunrise Movement), and also growing its members’ base including people paying mortgage and students in university dorms, and more recently, pursuing “language justice” reaching to people in other languages; (3) promoted referendums and (4) engaged government officials in regular dialogue, including forcing all mayoral and council candidates to respond to a questionnaire positioning themselves vis-à-vis housing policy and other matters that they then released publicly, influencing the results of the local elections; and (5) transferring agents to government as they successfully elected a leader from KC Tenants to the city council in 2023 and have had several leaders appointing to city boards related to housing.
This engagement with state actors and institutions is distinctive from other movements, such as the Movement for Justice in El Barrio, which was a community group based in New York City that drew inspiration from the Zapatistas in Mexico (Maeckelbergh 2012). This movement sought self-determination through self-provision of housing “rather than asking the state for better housing” (p. 661). Unlike the Movement for Justice in El Barrio, whose “distrust of the state” caused them “to put very little stock in the social movement repertoire of highlighting problems and demanding that these be taken care of by those who are officially responsible” (pp. 666–67), KC Tenants was more likely to engage in this political negotiation, even if this was not their exclusive approach.
This orientation toward the state may have been produced by the COVID-19 pandemic, given how during this period the state engaged in action that had previously not been seen. In the early days of the pandemic, many local and national governments worldwide sought to cancel or defer rent, halt evictions, put eviction courts on hiatus, and house people in unoccupied hotel rooms. Although KC Tenants and local officials clashed on many issues, the pandemic put them in conversation with one another given the perceived possibility for alignment and agreement during this historical moment. And yet, COVID-19 may have shaped the understanding of housing struggles as an aberration and a bounded “crisis” rather than a function of the system as it was designed (Marcuse 2009), thereby constricting visions for change.
Conclusions
We analyzed how KC Tenants could rapidly mobilize a robust base because of particular social, political, and economic events that heightened awareness and catalyzed action. The initiatives of KC Tenants were at times proactive and, at other times, reactive to the tripartite crisis of COVID-19, #BLM, and the housing crisis, which pulled and pushed the organization to respond to divergent needs and visions for social change. The tripartite crisis helped activate outrage and organizing, framing issues as structural rather than personal, and thereby people came to understand solutions as political and communal rather than economic and individual. KC Tenants managed to draw in a diverse base of members given its broad definition of the “tenant” and its coalition with other social justice organizations, but it was the way that they handled tensions and disagreements that allowed them to both gain visibility and legitimacy. Their visibility was often produced by political gains that were recognized by media outlets as indicative of their power, but their insistence on asserting that “those closest to the problem are closest to the solution,” forced them to balance their institutional efforts with extrainstitutional initiatives such as the crisis hotline, mutual aid fund, childcare, and provision of food and community events.
In this article, we delineated the diversity of KC Tenants’ strategies through its creation of tenant unions, direct actions, policy, and political campaigns but also through mutual aid, community building, and knowledge construction and dissemination, similar to the work of the Black Panther Party (Nelson 2013). Some of KC Tenants’ most important efforts are in education and reframing the narrative: they educate their base on the system’s injustices, the alternatives possible, several methods for organizing and taking action, and how housing instability is a structurally produced, and collectively endured problem rather than an individually experienced one. We argue that this was possible through strategic framing and capitalizing upon this historic moment. These factors shaped their tactics and strategies in consequential ways, such as transitioning weekly meetings online, capitalizing upon people being out of work and school, and partnering with those organizing around the #BLM movement.
The intersection of #BLM, the COVID-19 pandemic, and racialized housing outcomes created a powder keg for social action. KC Tenants capitalized on the righteous anger, biographical availability, and intersectional demands of affected and outraged individuals. Although the pandemic worsened the situation of many and made it challenging to reach those experiencing extreme hardship, it expanded KC Tenants’ base to include individuals with more time and need to participate and elevate their organizing efforts. Similarly, although the #BLM movement developed in response to persistent injustice, it captivated the world’s attention and helped inspire unprecedented numbers of people to act.
KC Tenants is an organization and movement that is intersectional in its mission, coalition, and individual embodiments. Many social movements are accused of being elitist because they require people to fight for “nonmaterial” ends, such as theoretical freedoms, rather than leveraging energy toward pressing material needs, such as housing and public political power over local governance structures (Inglehart 1977). As a result, only those who have those basic needs met often have the time and resources to participate. However, KC Tenants has been a successful ground-level movement partly because of its commitment to empowering its members to meet their immediate needs while building power economically, socially, and politically.
Of the tripartite crisis that propelled KC Tenants to stardom, only one pillar remains strong in the public consciousness and policy world: the housing crisis (Reyes et al. 2020). However, as Marcuse (2009) argued, the word “crisis implies that inadequate or unaffordable housing is abnormal, a temporary departure from a well-functioning standard. But for working-class and poor communities, housing crisis is the norm. Insufficient housing has been the mark of dominated groups throughout history” (p. 10). Given this enormous scale, there ought to be sufficient demand and support to overhaul the system. And yet the system remains. In facing these challenges, KC Tenants continues to grapple with a persistent question within social movement scholarship: is meaningful, lasting change effected in collaboration with or in opposition to existing systems of power?
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: University of Missouri, Kansas City’s Health Equity Mini-Grant and a Bernardin Research Grant.
1
Jordan’s calculation from KC Tenants’ hotline record system.