2023 Report from Madison Tenant Power 

August 2, 2023

Madison Tenant Power

Madison has the fastest rising rents of any major city in the U.S. This year has been about expanding Madison Tenant Power’s reach by talking to new people, wheatpasting flyers, tabling at housing fairs for Black tenants, and developing our communications to keep a broader base of tenants updated on our activities. We are forming working committees to focus our expanded membership. More than anything, we have been having regular, biweekly conversations about our strategy and tactics that are open to all tenants. We are updating the Madison Tenant Power Strategy and Constitution to better reflect our shifting approaches, matching what we are doing with what we want to be.

Open House Renters’ Assembly

In July 2023, we organized our first Open House Renters’ Assembly, an all-day forum with interactive modules on questions related to: our needs and values as renters, our history and future as tenants, what a tenant union should and should not do, and how to take personal ownership of the tenant movement (see example program modules here). 

The Open House Renters’ Assembly attracted a couple dozen fresh faces (of all ages, of all walks of life). We discussed how to focus our priorities and build a strong community of mutual support, care, and trust in order to create a sustainable environment for tenants here in Madison. The conversation was an opportunity to bring fellow renters into movement work to share feedback and organize their own “shops.”

Current Union Projects

Last year, we designed Find My Landlord (https://findmylandlord.madisontenantpower.org/), a tool that gives tenants information about other properties owned by their landlord.  Now, we are working to clarify our processes for joining union membership. We designed checklists to support ongoing administrative tasks and developed a “Door-Knocking Toolkit” to support union members canvassing their buildings. We want to revisit our union structure to empower more community members to attend Madison Tenant Power meetings and events, especially those who contact us for support but are initially reluctant to organize, often out of fear of retaliation or lack of resources.

We want to feel like we are winning and not reacting. In November 2023, alongside the Madison WI Homeless Union, we crashed a charity event for Porchlight, Inc., the nonprofit that runs Porchlight Men’s Shelter and Porchlight Properties, in order to warn potential donors about dangerous living conditions.

Tenant Bill of Rights

We’ve begun drafting a “Tenant Bill of Rights,” imagining provisions like: multi-year leases, security deposit maximums, indoor heat maximums, prohibition on out-of-state landlords, protections and relocation support for tenants priced out of their homes, blocking landlords with a history of abuse or building code violations from buying more property, and strict reporting requirements when landlords choose not to re-extend a lease.

In 2011, on his way out of office, former Governor Scott Walker and current assembly-speaker + landlord Robin Vos installed anti-tenant preemption laws that limited individual municipalities’ ability to push forward pro-tenant and pro-union legislation, reversing many of the hard-won tenant protections enacted by the original Madison Tenant Union in the 1960s through 1980s. With our gerrymandered state legislature, we imagine the Tenant Bill of Rights as both a pragmatic strategy and an agitational tool. The Tenant Bill of Rights showcases not only what we could have as tenants, but also what we should have, if state lawmakers would get out of our way. 

As one tenant said during the Open House Assembly: “we sell hope to each other.” We want to use the Tenant Bill of Rights project to engage real policy changes (which has attracted more elders to our movement work) and challenge state preemption laws, without distracting ourselves away from the practicalities of doing for ourselves as tenants what legislators and landlords will never do for us. The impossible is only impossible until it becomes possible.

The Energy Is There

We are excited about the organizational growth we have witnessed over the last few months, which makes these years-long projects seem more approachable. One renter joined the union after Madison Property Management, the largest landlord in Madison, gave his entire building a week’s notice to agree to a 30% rent increase. The neighbor got half of the tenants in his 40-unit building to sign a letter demanding management negotiate -- after initially refusing, MPM negotiated the increase down by a third. The tenant has since recruited others to the union. 

As a union, we are learning while doing. This is both exhilarating and frustrating. We want to build a system that sustains itself. We want to build a structure that gives people enough confidence to join the system. We have momentum, but we don’t have the capacity to bring enough new people in to share the work. Still, we know the energy is there. The mass mobilizations in solidarity with Palestine have been some of the largest and most activated demonstrations we have witnessed locally since the 2020 George Floyd uprisings.