In September 1907, residents of one big tenement house in Buenos Aires were told their rent was going up by 47 percent. They refused to pay. Within weeks more than 750 buildings had joined them, and by the end of the year the count was nearly 2,000. Historian James Baer, writing in The Americas, put the number of strikers at nearly one tenth of the city’s population.
It remains one of the largest rent strikes on record, and it is a useful place to start, because tenant unions are an old idea that keeps being rediscovered.
Association, union, coalition
The terms get blurred in everyday use. Greg Baltz, in a 2024 article for the Yale Law & Policy Review, separates them. A tenant association gathers renters in one building or development; many never grow past that. A tenant union is a membership body that organizes across several properties or whole regions, and it often recruits from existing associations or helps them get started. Unions can in turn band together in coalitions covering a city, a state or an entire country.
What unites them is the model borrowed from labor. What they lack is the legal backing labor enjoys. Baltz notes there is no overarching statutory framework setting out the rights and duties of tenant unions in the United States. In most jurisdictions they are not even separate legal entities, so they fall under the rules that apply to unincorporated associations and non-profits.
That gap shapes what they do. Without a bargaining statute, unions lean on rent withholding, lawsuits, pressure on government enforcers and direct action. Baltz studied ten modern campaigns across the country and found that unions won concessions both where collective bargaining frameworks exist and where they do not. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he writes, organizing has been surging: rent strikes, eviction defense networks, tenants barricading courthouse doors, evicted families reoccupying homes.
Older than it looks
Prince Edward Island saw an early case. The Tenant Union of Prince Edward Island, known as the Tenant League, was founded on 19 May 1864 in Charlottetown. Tenant farmers pledged to pay no more rent to estate owners and pushed for the sale of the land to the people farming it. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, crowds of up to 200, summoned by tin trumpets, surrounded sheriffs and their assistants. By mid-1865 the authorities could not enforce landlord-tenant law by ordinary means, particularly in Queens County.
The government under James Colledge Pope brought in troops from Halifax in August and sent them on two long forays into the countryside with the sheriff. The league seemed to collapse under that pressure and was apparently defunct by mid-1866. The troops cost the government, though. The encyclopedia lists their use among the factors in the Conservatives’ defeat on 26 Feb 1867.
The international side came later. Ten national delegations met in Zürich on 21 May 1926 for the first international tenant congress, and chose the Austrian organisation as the secretariat and Dr Carl Wirth of Zürich as chairman. The delegates agreed a two-page set of statutes and sent a message to the continent’s renters: “Tenants of Europe! For the success of our work, the active support of every tenant is absolutely necessary.” The group met again in Prague in 1929, with delegations from Germany, France, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia.
Sources
- Tenant Union Law (Yale Law & Policy Review, Volume 43, Issue 1, Fall 2024, by Greg Baltz)
- Tenant Mobilization and the 1907 Rent Strike in Buenos Aires (The Americas, Cambridge University Press, by James A. Baer, 1993)
- Tenant League (The Canadian Encyclopedia, by Ian Ross Robertson)
- History (International Union of Tenants)
