Who We Are
The Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN-RSIA) is a North American collaborative of tenant unions who have chosen to remain independent of nonprofits, big foundations, and government funding in order to build power that is responsive to and led by tenants. We are committed to base building, building leadership from the poorest, and resisting the power of real estate capital that destroys our homes and our communities.
We held our first online conference call in 2018 to provide space for mutual support among tenants unions across North America. The monthly calls attracted a growing number of tenant groups interested in combining grassroots organizing, advocacy, education, and direct action. With each call facilitated by a different autonomous tenants union, ATUN has hosted discussions on numerous topics that have helped strengthened the work of tenants unions across the continent. ATUN has been a connecting point for tenants to give practical support in tenant union campaigns across vast distances.
After holding online conventions in October 2020 and October 2021, we held an in-person convention in July 2022 in Los Angeles, bringing together 200 tenant organizers from 25 tenant unions across the United States.
ATUN’s Points of Unity
The Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN-RSIA) is a collaborative of tenant unions in North America who have chosen to remain independent of nonprofits, big foundations, and government funding in order to build power that is responsive to and led by tenants. We are committed to base building, especially among the most oppressed and exploited tenants, and to resisting the power of landlords and real estate capital to destroy our homes and our communities.
Tenants have always been in crisis. Since before the founding of the United States, property ownership has been a requirement for full political recognition. To be a tenant is to stand on the losing side of a class relation: we pay tribute to landlords because they own land and we don’t. And they own land because landlords before them expropriated the original peoples who still live here.
Today, as land is monopolized by fewer and fewer landlords and as rents continue to outpace wages dramatically, the crisis has engulfed even formerly housing-secure tenants. Working-class tenants are increasingly immiserated, and people who are shut out of the housing market altogether are subjected to encampment sweeps, police harassment, and vigilante violence. Tenants live in neglected, unsafe housing, we face harassment from landlords, and we experience the trauma of housing insecurity and eviction. Black and brown communities in cities, often created by racist segregation policies, now face destruction as developers, politicians, and police create and carry out gentrification plans using mass evictions and other forms of state-backed violence.
Resolving these crises will necessitate overthrowing capitalism and establishing a cooperative political and economic system. As Engels wrote in 1872: “As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution to the housing question. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labor by the working class itself.”
We believe in the right to housing, the right to the city, and the right to stay put. We fight for a world without landlords and without rent. We fight to build tenant power in order to end the immiseration of the poor and working classes that housing represents under capitalism and to contribute to the struggle to end capitalism itself.
Points of unity:
We are organizations run by and for our members. We are not under the direction of paid staff, boards of directors, or state agencies, and we are funded primarily by our members rather than by grants or major donors.
We define a tenant as anyone who does not have control over their housing. For us, “tenants” includes unhoused tenants, tenants who are squatting, tenants inside the carceral punishment system, tenants in nursing homes, in university housing, and in state institutions.
We fight for tenants, not for housing. We recognize that this is a crisis of tenancy, a crisis of our place in the overall system of social reproduction. Calling this a housing crisis benefits those who design, build, and profit from housing, not the people who live in it. Tenants are full political subjects who will not be liberated by secure housing alone.
We are not service organizations; we are movement organizations. As such we practice and build solidarityーnot charityーacross buildings, neighborhoods, borders, and language barriers.
We assert that the interests of landlords and tenants are fundamentally irreconcilable, and we reject any policy that attempts to paper over this conflict. While we do not rule out on principle the possibility of temporary truces and agreements between landlord and tenant, we advocate for a strategy of class struggle. Our overall political orientation consists of opposing strategies that encourage collaboration between class enemies.
We fight gentrification so that tenants can remain in their longtime communities and support networks. We define gentrification as “the displacement and replacement of the poor for profit,” and we understand that it is purposeful and produced. Because Black and brown communities are specifically targeted for displacement, we view the fight against gentrification as one component of the larger struggle against systemic racism. Those who benefit from gentrification, including landlords, developers, and lenders, and those who manage it, including the police and politicians, are highly organized and need to be met with an organized, militant tenant movement.
We stand in solidarity with tenants in struggle around the world. We insist that tenants share interests across borders and we seek to build tenant power accordingly. We strive to adhere to an internationalist and anti-imperialist orientation in words and deeds.
We support demands for Land Back by Indigenous peoples. Indigenous communities are some of the most deeply affected by the tenant crisis. The system of capitalism and private land ownership in “North America” is dependent on the ongoing theft of Indigenous lands and genocide of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous communities bring cultural knowledge necessary to our movement regarding kinship, community, and our relationship to land and place.
We support demands for reparations for descendants of enslaved Black people. We recognize that slavery and ensuing racist practices across centuries shape the conditions that tenants experience in the present.
We support fighting for anti-discrimination in housing practices for those who identify as LGBTQIA2S+.
We are committed to language justice and aspire to create fully language-accessible spaces. We believe everyone has the right to understand and be understood in the language in which they are most comfortable and that language justice is everyone’s responsibility.
We organize democratically and we are committed to fighting oppressive behavior and systems in and outside our ranks. We seek a membership and leadership that reflects the people most impacted by the crisis. We are engaged in an active struggle against the forces of systemic oppression within our communities which restrict access to resources, education, healthcare, and housing for marginalized groups of people. Within our unions we commit to learning how to deconstruct oppression and oppressive ways of working. We are bringing tenants together across lines of race, class, gender, gender identity, orientation, ability, age, etc.