Housing & Tenant Justice Working Group

Housing is not a commodity. It is a human right. Yet across the Flint Hills region — as in communities throughout the United States — tenants face rising rents, unsafe living conditions, retaliatory landlords, and a legal and political system that consistently prioritizes property ownership over human need. Flint Hills Tenants United (FHTU) is our chapter's response to that reality: a tenant-led organizing initiative committed to building working-class power from the ground up, one building and one block at a time.

FHTU is grounded in the union federation model — the understanding that durable tenant power requires more than isolated campaigns or reactive advocacy. We work to build lasting tenant unions within apartment complexes and housing communities that can federate together, sharing resources, coordinating tactics, and presenting a unified front against landlord exploitation. The Tenant Union Federation, the national body whose model informs our approach, describes this work plainly: organizing tenants to wield power at a massive scale, to bargain for tenant protections, to disrupt the flow of capital to those who commodify our homes, and to establish tenants as a political and economic class that cannot be ignored. That is the vision we are building toward, here in the Flint Hills.

The organizers behind FHTU have actively been preparing for this work. Chapter members completed extensive training through DSA's Housing Justice Commission, including the Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee (ETOC) program — a national initiative launched in 2022 to promote the formation of militant, autonomous tenant unions through tenant-to-tenant training and mentorship. ETOC's curriculum covers the fundamentals of building tenant unions on a citywide or regional scale, developing both the administrative skills — running meetings, managing communication, sustaining membership — and the political skills required to make hard asks of neighbors and realize the transformative potential of collective action. Members also trained through the Tenant Union Federation's Union School, deepening their grounding in union structure, federation models, and the strategic foundations of the broader tenant union movement. That investment in training is not incidental — it reflects our belief that effective organizing requires rigor, and that the people most harmed by the housing crisis deserve organizers who take their craft seriously.

Our organizing is explicitly anti-capitalist. We understand the housing crisis not as a series of bad actors or policy failures, but as a structural consequence of treating shelter as a vehicle for profit. We build toward a future where housing is decommodified, publicly controlled, and guaranteed for all. If you are interested in tenant organizing, join us!