In San Francisco, tenants are using labor tactics to challenge their landlords

Auto workers in Detroit. Actors and screenwriters in Hollywood. Teachers in Portland, Oregon.

During a wave of labor unrest that caused more than 500,000 industrial accidents last year As American workers went on strike, a small group of San Franciscans have taken a similar form of activism to another arena: their homes.

Tenants in 65 households in San Francisco have been on a rent strike for nearly eight months, withholding their monthly payments due to a host of issues that they say have made their living conditions difficult.

A handful of rent strikes have occurred before in New York City and Los Angeles. But activists are now trying with renewed enthusiasm to organize renters across the country, saying companies, rather than homeowners, are increasingly buying up apartments and not caring for them.

“Most tenants these days don't know their landlords. They are nameless, faceless LLCs,” says Tara Raghuveer, director of the Home Guarantee Campaign, which is working to create tenant associations like the one in San Francisco. “Naming and shaming doesn't work. Rent strikes will become an even more necessary tactic.”

San Francisco has one of the highest concentrations of renters in the country, about two-thirds of households, similar to the share in New York City. As a result, politicians in the famously liberal city have long viewed renters as a voter base to woo. Although rents have fallen from pre-pandemic highs, San Francisco remains one of the most expensive cities in the country.

In 2022, city leaders passed Union at Home, the first legislation of its kind in the country. It outlines a path for tenants to form their own associations and requires landlords to negotiate with them, just as an employer must meet with unionized employees.

The law protects tenants who want to use common areas to organize activities or invite advocates to talk to residents about their rights.

Within a year, tenants of 55 San Francisco buildings formed their own associations calling for a range of improvements, including faster repairs, lower utility costs and translation of materials for tenants who don't speak English. Most associations have not yet gone on strike.

In other cities, tenant associations do exist, but they do not have the city-provided power to require their landlords to negotiate in good faith, as tenants in San Francisco do.

In the Tenderloin neighborhood, where low-income immigrant families cluster because of relatively cheap rents, renters are starting to organize. They live in one of the city's roughest neighborhoods, full of older, worn-out apartments near open-air drug markets and homeless encampments.

Luisa Rodriguez, 38, immigrated to the United States from El Salvador in 2020 with two children, now 9 and 18, and had a third child in San Francisco. The family lives in a small studio apartment on the sixth floor of their building and has to pay $1,600 a month. Ms. Rodriguez, who works as a cook, has not paid her landlord since June. Tenants who strike instead pay their rent into a trust fund that is held until their demands are met.

Ms. Rodriguez and her children sleep together in two beds pushed against a wall to put as much distance as possible between them and a room where mold has consistently appeared.

She showed pictures on her phone of green fuzz on the window frame that stretched along the wall. She said it had also spread to clothes in a closet near the window, forcing her to throw away items she couldn't replace.

She showed copies of letters from a San Francisco Health Network doctor who told her landlord, “The mold is endangering the health of your tenants,” and asked for immediate action.

Veritas Investments, owner of the building where the Rodriguez family lives, said workers repaired a crack in the family's window, used drying equipment to prevent water from entering and treated, sealed and painted the window and frame to prevent that the fungus returned.

Although the mold was no longer visible last night, the family was not confident that the problem had been resolved. Dara, 3, continues to cough at night, keeping the family awake, Ms. Rodriguez said.

The dispute highlights a major problem in San Francisco's housing stock: old buildings that are becoming increasingly expensive to maintain and, in a city notoriously tight on housing, are among the few options for low-income renters.

Veritas is one of the largest landlords in San Francisco and owns most of the buildings where tenant associations have declared a rent strike. However, its importance in the city is decreasing. Like other building owners in the pandemic-hit city, Veritas defaulted on loan payments last year and is selling off parts of its huge portfolio.

Ron Heckmann, a spokesman for Veritas, said many of its buildings are more than a century old and that the company has worked hard to address tenants' concerns and spent millions of dollars on improvements. The elevators are so outdated that replacement parts have to be custom-made, he said. The plumbing, wiring and heating systems are outdated and complex.

Mr Heckmann added that only a fraction of tenants in the company's thousands of units in the city have joined the strike. He dismissed the strikes as ideological grandstanding driven by Brad Hirn, a tenant advocate with the nonprofit Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, who has organized the tenant unions and led the fights.

However, Mr Hirn said the buildings have real problems, including cockroaches, vermin, mold and broken letterboxes and lifts. Mr Heckmann said when these types of issues are raised by tenants, the company works hard to address them quickly. Mr. Hirn said tenants will call off the strikes if the company provides rent reductions for code violations, improves health and safety protocols and translates materials into other languages. .

“With enough support, they can win things they never thought were possible,” he said.