Colorado Springs tenants is your citywide tenant union
purpose
strategy
Colorado Springs, like most parts of the U.S., is experiencing a crisis of affordability. Housing costs have skyrocketed over the past decade in the midst of stagnated real wage growth. Landlords and developers profit from this speculation on land, with their growth and continued accumulation of housing and land being directly proportional to how much rent tenants can be extracted for.
City and statewide leaders have proven themselves incapable of addressing this affordability crisis. Only a movement of tenants can end the affordability crisis and give those who inhabit homes control over their housing.
Most folks do not think of their housing as a political arena. The fact is, your home is vital to your survival and emotional wellbeing. We see the power to make decisions about a home as a political process. We organize building-level tenant unions to provide tenants the tools to directly challenge their landlord and gain power over their housing.
Tenants’ power is vested in two simple facts:
1) There are more of us than there are landlords
2) Without our rent, landlords cannot pay their mortgages
By building supermajority support within an apartment complex, tenants are able to coordinate and exercise this power utilizing tactics like the rentstrike.
We look toward Jane McAlevey’s conception of structure based organizing as our theory of social change. Apartment complexes are measurable structures of people with common self-interest—the desire for lower rents, safe housing, etc. Folks in these structures can made made into political agents by highlighting the political reality of the apartment complex. Inherently there is a power struggle and contradiction between landlord and tenant. The former treats housing as a speculative commodity. The latter needs housing for survival. By organizing on a structure-by-structure basis, we can intentionally develop the political consciousness and leadership abilities of everyday tenants that struggle with the current housing situation and highlight the inherent conflict that exists between tenant and landlord.
Vision
Through this process of developing regular tenants into powerful political leaders via building-level fights, we hope to create the base of organized and politicised tenants necessary to take on moneyed interests in Colorado Springs, tackle the city’s affordability crisis, and build a city where housing is treated as a fundamental human right. We envision a Colorado Springs where housing is completely decommodified and residents have control over the places they live.
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