Do Tenant Protections Advance Tenant Power? State Policy and Tenant Union Organizational Capacity

• In Event: Power, Protection, and Precarity: Evaluating Interventions in Housing Stability

Abstract

Tenant unions, which are renter-led organizations formed to advance the self-determination and rights of tenants through collective bargaining and other tactics, have experienced a dramatic resurgence across the United States since 2015, yet these organizations have emerged unevenly across states with vastly different tenant protection regimes. Some states offer rent regulation, just cause eviction statutes, and rights to organize; others actively preempt local tenant protections. Does this variation in state-level policy matter for the organizational capacity of tenant unions? Our findings suggest that governments and foundations should invest directly in the organizational capacity of tenant-led unions and associations, rather than expect that the regulatory environment will sufficiently balance the playing field in the market between tenants and landlords. 

We draw on an original census of 54 contemporary U.S. tenant unions that we gathered through a ProQuest search of 6,748 newspaper articles and a web scrape. We code each tenant union on ten organizational features capturing scope, governance, and strategic repertoire to create a continuous measure of organizational capacity. We measure state policy environments using six individual tenant protection variables and a composite index. We use those policy environments to explain tenant union organizational capacity using OLS supplemented by cross-validated lasso regression for variable selection and bootstrap resampling (1,000 iterations) for inference robust to the small sample. We find that state-level tenant protection policies, whether measured as individual variables or as a composite index, do not predict organizational capacity. Metropolitan population size and non-Sunbelt location are the only consistent predictors across all specifications. 

Descriptive analysis reveals nuance beneath this null result. Intermediate-capacity unions cluster in enabling policy environments (mean policy index 3.3 of 6, 79% with right to counsel), yet the most comprehensively organized unions emerge at comparable rates in hostile and favorable states (19% vs. 17%). At the state level, stronger tenant protections are significantly associated with more tenant unions, but not with greater mean organizational capacity. Older unions concentrate in higher-protection states, though cross-sectional data cannot resolve whether sustained organizing helped produce protective policy or the reverse. These findings indicate state policy variation alone does not explain the difference in tenant organizing across states. Favorable tenant protection regimes appear to increase the density of tenant organizing but not the capacity of these organizations. Policymakers seeking to support tenant power may need to invest in organizational infrastructure directly, rather than assuming that protective legislation alone will catalyze robust grassroots institutions.

Authors

• Megan E. Hatch, Cleveland State University
  Presenting Author

• Jason S Spicer, Baruch College (City University of New York)
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Kenton Card, San José State University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Michelle Smirnova, Rice University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Brielle Bryan, Rice University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Seth Kelly, University of Colorado Denver
  Non-Presenting Co-Author