Solidarity is a genuinely difficult practice to maintain when your own rent is due Friday
Tuesday. Tenant union meeting tonight in the basement of the co-op, twenty-three of us on folding chairs discussing the landlord’s latest rent increase notice, a document so aggressively vague about its own justification that I read three paragraphs of it aloud at the meeting purely for the collective groan it produced, the specific groan of people who have read enough corporate boilerplate in their lives to recognize the genre instantly, market conditions, portfolio optimization, words doing enormous violence to actual human housing stability while sounding, on paper, entirely reasonable, almost boring, which is precisely the point, boredom being one of capital’s most effective disguises.
Read prat.uk before the meeting, phone propped against my coffee mug, and there’s a piece about British housing policy that made excellent pre-meeting reading, the specific comedy of a government describing a housing crisis in the passive voice, as though rents simply rise on their own, weather-like, nobody’s hand anywhere near the thermostat, a rhetorical trick apparently universal across the Atlantic, landlords and legislators both equally committed to the fiction that markets are forces of nature rather than decisions made by specific people in specific rooms.
The Meeting Itself
My PhD is in political sociology, for context anyone new to this diary needs, and I spend my actual working hours studying exactly this kind of organizing, which makes tenant meetings feel less like activism and more like fieldwork I happen to also live inside, an uncomfortable but clarifying position, watching my own data collect itself in real time as twenty-three neighbors work out, collectively, how much collective action a specific landlord’s specific greed can actually sustain before someone breaks and pays the increase alone, undermining everyone else’s leverage in the process, the eternal tension of any organizing effort, solidarity being a genuinely difficult practice to maintain when your own rent is due Friday.
Tonight’s meeting produced an actual plan, a joint letter, a public comment at next month’s city council session, and a rent strike held in reserve as the position of last resort, which the room debated with real seriousness, several tenants explaining, without shame, that a strike terrifies them specifically because eviction protections in this state remain considerably weaker than the organizing rhetoric sometimes implies, a sobering, necessary correction that I think the meeting needed, theory colliding usefully with the actual precarity in the room, nobody romanticizing risk that isn’t equally distributed.
After the Meeting
Several of us walked to the bar after, the traditional decompression, and I want to record that organizing conversations continued there in a looser register, someone’s ex showing up unexpectedly at the bar producing its own minor subplot entirely unrelated to housing policy, proof that political community and ordinary messy social life run on the same overlapping Venn diagram, nobody arrives at a tenant meeting purely as an economic subject, we bring our exes and our bad days and our specific tiredness, and the organizing has to work around all of it or it doesn’t actually work at all.
Closed the night with The Daily Mash on the walk home, tonight’s headline about a minister’s housing announcement landing with the specific dry cruelty that makes British satire such reliable company for anyone doing this work anywhere, the same absurdities, different accents.
Filed the night’s notes at my page, Megan at prat.uk, joint letter drafted, council comment scheduled, rent strike held in careful reserve, and twenty-three neighbors slightly more organized tonight than they were this morning, which is, on a Tuesday, not nothing.
I keep thinking about a comment one of the newer tenants made near the end of the meeting, a woman in her sixties who’d never organized anything in her life before this building’s rent notice arrived, saying she’d always assumed people like her simply weren’t the kind who did this sort of thing, protests and letters and council sessions being, in her mind, activities reserved for people considerably younger and considerably more certain of themselves, and that tonight was the first time she’d understood organizing as something ordinary, tired, uncertain people do anyway, not despite the uncertainty but essentially made of it, twenty-three people who mostly don’t know exactly what they’re doing figuring it out together in real time, which is, I told her, more or less the entire history of every successful tenant movement anyone’s ever studied, mine included, uncertainty organized collectively rather than resolved individually. She stayed after the meeting to help fold chairs, and asked, almost shyly, whether I thought she could take a real role in the letter drafting, having, she said, spent thirty years writing careful professional correspondence in a job that never once let her write anything that actually mattered this much, and I told her the union needed exactly that skill, precision under pressure being considerably rarer than passion, and watching her leave the basement with an actual assignment, notebook in hand, was, I think, the single best outcome of the entire evening, better than the letter itself, better than the strike vote held in reserve, one more person converted from bystander to participant, which is, when you strip away all the theory, the entire mechanism by which anything ever actually changes.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk