How We Failed to Organize a Tenants’ Union

An abridged version of this article appears in the print edition of Issue V

Introduction

This reflection describes challenges and victories from the organizers of the Ann Arbor Tenants Union in our effort to organize Ann Arbor Woods. Ann Arbor Woods—owned by Hayman Company—is a complex of approximately 320 one or two bedroom units spread out across four main campuses, with 28 individual buildings. We had some success in attaining momentum and bringing tenants together in a way we surely would not have had without our campaign — but we lost steam and failed to achieve meaningful wins for tenants.

This piece has two parts: a timeline and details for the record, and a dialogue among the organizers for us to reflect on what went wrong and right with our campaign.

Part of writing retrospective reflections after a campaign is for us to encourage and inspire each other by showing what we’ve achieved, and celebrating our accomplishments. In the words of the late Jane McAlevey, whom we have learned much from, “it’s not just enough to fight. What our side needs is to fight back and win.” Fight back and win—to make real gains, to raise the stakes for future fights, and to win back a kind of hope that has been robbed from us by the long march of capitalism.

At the same time, we should be clear that every organizer and movement will at some point lose—and arguably losing should simply happen sometimes. Waging that fight and losing doesn’t make your effort fruitless, nor does it mean you have failed to build anything of value. To build a fighting tenant movement, we must learn from our mistakes even as we dive back into the fight. 

We lost in this campaign. There are many small victories we experienced en route to our end outcome, but we’d be lying if we said we won in that last instance. So, this piece can’t show directly how we as a movement can win or encourage newcomers to action by providing a glimpse of victory. It’s instead for other organizers, and in particular those who may already have momentum but could use a fuller understanding of the challenges involved in tenant organizing.

A history of our association

Background: July 2023 – July 2024

In July of 2023, a small group of tenants and allies began convening as the Ann Arbor Tenants Union. The Ann Arbor Tenants Union (AATU), founded in 1968, had been effectively defunct since 2004, with various attempts to revive it following that shutdown and the most recent attempt prior to our effort beginning in 2020 and ending in 2022. 

Within those first few months of reviving the tenants union, we did different kinds of things—teach-ins, flyering, talking to councilmembers, making social media posts, tabling, helping plan rallies and protests, researching the old AATU. But our goal at the time to lay groundwork for a tenants union and our own inexperience with organizing resulted in performing administrative tasks more than assembling a growing set of relationships in an effort to build power. 

Initial phase: July – Oct. 2024

We pivoted slowly to emphasize structure-based organizing—pooling our capacity into sustained organizing at a specific site to create lasting organizations where membership is based directly on residency at a given building or complex (in that sense, we organize based on existing structures). This strategy differed from our previous approaches that moved between building an advocacy group that people self-select into, and supporting collective actions at buildings that were encouraging but quickly fizzled out. Ann Arbor Woods was one of our first large-scale efforts to build these kinds of lasting organizations that speak directly to tenants’ existing needs and relationships.

Our organizing efforts at Ann Arbor Woods began with Nathan hanging out with his neighbors during the spring of 2024 and chatting informally about issues at the complex and the idea of forming a tenant’s association. Neighbors had serious issues like roofs dripping and caving in, pests, and persistent (but somewhat accepted) exorbitant rents. 

The group decided to move forward in July 2024 with a tenant association. On July 13, Grace and Nathan flyered entryway doors, inviting tenants to join the new association by filling out an online form and joining a group chat. The flyers had Nathan’s name and phone number. 

Two days later, Nathan received a lease violation notice from Hayman Company property manager Jamie Howard, who accused Nathan of soliciting (inviting folks to join a tenants association), littering (the posters we had left), and destruction of property (because of residue left by the tape we used on the glass doors). This seemed nonsensical and repressive, but we decided to focus our efforts on 1:1 outreach and talking with tenants in a group chat with the few dozen tenants that had already responded to our form.

We held our first meeting as tenants on July 28 and saw it as a success, with 15 participating tenants who expressed enthusiasm for the tenant association. Afterward, the AATU organizing committee discussed how to move the conversation towards collective action and not just venting, and how to agitate other tenants without getting “ahead” of them by too quickly presenting a course of confrontation with management.

We continued outreach to our 300+ neighbors. With our organizing core now including several new friends from the complex, organizers placed flyers on car windshields of cars and taped them to easements between the property and the street. Since the flyers withheld individual names, management responded by sending an email to all tenants accusing us of littering and soliciting, and stating that posting flyers on easements (not their property) was also a lease violation. They noted that they would call the Ann Arbor Police Department if any organizers who did not live at Ann Arbor Woods were found distributing flyers.

We were happy by this response, for the most part. Our neighbors might not have seen our flyers, but they probably saw the email that was sent to more than 300+ tenants which referenced the association. Sure enough, this got people talking in our association WhatsApp and several new tenants filled out our form online, indicating that they were curious after management’s email. As in labor organizing, the boss is the best organizer, we joked.

We continued inviting all tenants to meetings and tried to come together on specific issues. Issues like a cockroach infestation in one building, management’s horrible mishandling of a wasp nest in the same building, and more generally the high rent and poor conditions, like flooding. These were important moments in bringing together tenants who were upset, but weren’t really effective in building the association as a whole.

Struggling against management – Nov.–Dec. 2024

At this point, we weren’t really angry or scared by management’s responses, as they seemed more energizing than repressive. We could use them to make our case to fellow tenants: look, management is so cartoonishly evil, and they behave that way because of the power they hold over us as our landlord. But things changed as we continued building the association, trying new tactics, and responding to management.

In September, a core of tenants and AATU organizers continued distributing flyers and began regularly knocking on doors to have face-to-face conversations with residents. Doorknocking was essential to tenant organizing, even if it takes more time than passing out flyers. 

The individual conversations we engaged in through doorknocking allowed us to learn about our neighbors’ struggles and their innovative ways of surviving as a tenant. It was necessary to hear the issues that spoke most clearly to them, the relationships they held within the complex, and the capacity and role they saw for themselves in the association and in the complex. We expressed our own perspectives on these issues as well. Establishing and nurturing those relationships is crucial; a union is only a set of relationships—people that trust each other, that can think together, that act together—and we built those relationships through repeated conversations we could have by doorknocking.

On November 11, Jamie Howard sent out another property-wide email condemning these outreach efforts, and sent another lease violation to Nathan accusing him of solicitation. This time, we were accused of being aggressive towards other tenants, who ostensibly went to Jamie because they were afraid of retaliation. We found this ridiculous, not only because we had no mechanism to “retaliate” against our fellow tenants compared to the threats of eviction Jamie leveled with each accusation but because we were so conscious of being on good terms with our neighbors. 

We knocked with a whimsical pattern, introduced each other as their neighbors, and tried hard to end conversations when the tenants we spoke to wanted to, no sooner and no later. Some conversations went on for half an hour or more due to tenants wanting to vent—other tenants were in a rush and we didn’t try to force a conversation. 

We continued doorknocking each weekend despite management threats of eviction, seeing this as something we’d have to ride out. Even at this point, we weren’t “scared” per se — if they wanted to evict us, that’d take months to years, and we had some confidence that if this were ever before a judge they would find this as ridiculous as we did. 

On November 22, a leasing office staff member began following us around as we were doorknocking and filming us. We then spotted two police cruisers about fifteen minutes later, which we took (but couldn’t confirm) as an indication that management made good on their promise to call the police on all non-resident organizers.

Police involvement solidified our need to act. We had to knock on doors and we knew we needed to mount a strong collective response to do so. We needed public outrage to protect our comrade while strengthening our relationships with tenants at Arbor Woods in order to build a tenant union ready and willing to act collectively, even when threatened with eviction or the police.   

However, the situation was stressful and we found ourselves throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck. We began collecting signatures from tenants and non tenants alike, and had legal counsel and a City Councilmember correspond with management to get them to back off. Legal protections for tenant organizing are unfortunately next to none, as the landlord can call the police on anyone and call whatever they’d like a lease violation. 

The only way we could have overcome this strategy was by coming together and acting as tenants, but our neighbors were divided in what might have been the first tension within the A2 Woods Whatsapp chat, which had around 60 members at the time. Many saw us as unnecessarily provoking a fight and moving away from the real issues we sought to solve. There was much truth to what they were saying. We tried to reach our 300+ neighbors without developing a cohesive sense of trust among the tenants we had already gathered. Nor had we cultivated a collective sense that unionization was a fight, nor had we a common sense of what we would even fight for. Though this came five months after we began our organizing efforts, we were prematurely entering this fight with management.

Trash campaign – Jan.-June 2025

After the doorknocking fight, some of us decided to form an organizing committee for the association, bringing the same people together week-to-week to make organizing progress. We returned to planning monthly tenant-wide social events, hoping that these would help foster relationship-building and allow us to recruit more people. However, our success was limited; few tenants showed up, perhaps a function of our decreased level of doorknocking. A few of us who happened to be in the same building put some energy into canvassing the full building and trying to chart the issues and intra-tenant relationships.

In February, some tenants organically expressed frustration and anger at the landlord over our monthly trash fees. Like some Ann Arbor apartment complexes, Ann Arbor Woods contracts with a company called Valet Living to take tenants’ trash from a designated spot outside their apartment to the dumpster, charging a mandatory $25 per month fee to do so. Since dumpsters are close by and the service is notoriously unreliable—many times Valet Living does not show up or refuses to take recyclables, and many tenants aren’t provided a designated trash can—most tenants take out their own trash and are frustrated to learn about the $25 monthly charge. Some tenants find such a service helpful, but have varying success using Valet Living given its issues.

After a general tenant association meeting, where eight people showed up to discuss a plan of action, we drafted a petition to the landlord calling for the correction of trash service issues and the ability to opt out. A few of us drove the signature-gathering effort, and through phonebanking, texting and doorknocking, 24 tenants signed their names. Along the way we found that the issues with Valet Living were broadly felt. Very few people felt that it worked for everyone, though not deeply enough for more tenants to take ownership of the issue campaign.

When we sent the property manager our petition, she responded with very limited concessions. Blaming Valet Living, she promised tenants an open meeting with their representatives and also pledged to distribute brand new trash bins to all tenants. While this did not directly address the problem of tenants having to pay a monthly fee for a low-quality service, it was the first time that the landlord acknowledged a collective concern of a group of tenants. We take this as a small victory as a proof of concept that collective action by tenants, even at a small level, can have a meaningful effect. Unfortunately, only a month or so later many tenants’ leases ended, including members of the organizing committee, and the turnover has left the association in a low-activity state.

Fizzling out – Apr 2025 onwards

By this point, our group was operating at startlingly low energy and capacity. Our social events had increasingly lower attendance, and several organizing committee members took a step back for personal reasons. Given two of us expected to move out, we made an effort to recruit new organizing committee members, but interest was extremely limited. We eventually had to accept that we could not create the capacity to sustain the organization and chose to stop organizing after reflection together.

The causes for that ultimate slowdown are multiple and hard to untangle, ranging from distrust sown after our fight with management, the inevitable fading of initial excitement from tenants, class interests from tenants, poor coordination from organizers, an unclear path to victory for any given demand, and more. We make one attempt to deconstruct this in the reflection following this history. For now, the struggle continues as it always has—tenants at Ann Arbor Woods still find ingenious ways to struggle against the same maintenance challenges, rent issues, and disrespect that we sought to resolve. Our organizing, however, might be more productive at other sites, in other forms. 

Making sense out of our outcomes 

What obstacles in our fight in Ann Arbor Woods could we have seen (if we had known better) even before we began our campaign?

Grace: An obstacle we could have foreseen (although one that we perhaps understand the seriousness of only now) was the lack of social ties between tenants at the complex. Most tenants are fairly atomized, few know their neighbors. Although there are more common spaces at Arbor Woods than at most complexes in the area, few people seemed to generate meaningful relationships with their neighbors in those spaces. With the exception of the dog run it was not common to see tenants making use of them. 

Although we identified and responded to this obstacle by holding social events, it wasn’t sufficient to build the relationships we need for a fighting tenant association. I’m starting to think that being a good neighbor is the only way—saying hi to folks in the hallway, learning their names, asking for favors and offering help, hosting neighbors with motives that go beyond checking an organizing box, etc. In labor unions we have the benefit of working with our coworkers on a regular basis, while at home we can easily ignore neighbors. By taking steps to create a culture of collective action we can fight atomization and lay the groundwork for strong organization. 

Nathan: I agree with Grace, and this is a lesson we learn different aspects of as we continue to do tenant organizing work. Tenants are generally atomized in Ann Arbor at this moment in history, but it is unevenly so. At Courthouse Square, a senior apartment building we’re organizing at now, the community’s conditions allow those more organic sets of connections to be formed. As a senior community, folks have more time to talk to each other, smoke together, and prioritize each other over coworkers or careers.

That means part of what we offer as tenant organizers is a chance to build that community that has been robbed from people—but articulating this to other tenants as we organize is hard to do, other than through those everyday actions that come with being a good neighbor. 

What went wrong or right with our response to management cracking down on door-knocking?

Michael: The responses at the time—publicizing the issue and pressuring management from the outside, while calling an open meeting of tenants to try to find a path forward within the complex—made sense. The fact that no organized response within the complex occurred, and that we were forced to shift efforts, was unfortunately a reflection of our organizing being weaker than we thought.

While many tenants engaged with the association on some level, from joining the WhatsApp chat to attending an occasional meeting, there were very few sustained relationships among tenants in the association. From our experience, many tenants did not even know their immediate neighbors. As a result, the vast majority of tenants simply did not have connections to each other that made them feel confident taking collective actions carrying serious risk. The management crackdown was the first illustration that forming a tenant association would entail risk. A couple tenants with the help of AATU staff led the organizing efforts, and when this small core was targeted by management, no one stepped up with an idea of how to fight back collectively.

Two instincts emerged in discussions among the association at this time in response to our state of relative organizational weakness. One was that the most active organizers should moderate our positions, avoid conflict with the landlord that might scare off neighbors, and generally try to represent the “average” tenant. The other was to go back to basics: focus on building a strong organizing committee, then find an issue campaign resonant with tenants to launch on our own terms. I believed (and still do) that the latter was the right approach, though admittedly it was very challenging to build a consistent organizing committee of more than a few people. Maybe we could have put more focus into trying to work with those few tenants who really knew their neighbors.

Were there any long-term positive takeaways from organizing at Ann Arbor Woods?

Nathan: The core of the Ann Arbor Tenants Union was built through organizing at Ann Arbor Woods; we each gained experience organizing and learned to trust each other. Growing that core through reflection, especially in times of failure, is pivotal for building an organization that can fight for a while.

I visited the Socialism conference in Chicago earlier this month, and went to a few panels hosted by the Autonomous Tenant Union Network (ATUN). I was talking to an organizer from ATUN and Brooklyn Eviction Defense about our struggles in the Ann Arbor Woods Tenant Association, and how it felt like every other organization had membership especially figured out but we hadn’t.. The organizer responded immediately to say, “No dude, nobody has it figured out. Membership is a problem everyone is struggling with.” Suddenly I felt so reassured—maybe it wasn’t the fact that we were doing something existentially incorrect or that there was a lesson we had missed, but simply that this is the fight we signed up for. It is not encouraging in the way that a strategy to win is—but having that sense of trust, vulnerability, and shared struggle is a side of organizing that might be a prerequisite for the campaigns we do actually get to win.