How a local housing campaign won pro-tenant reforms by recruiting homeowners

This article How a local housing campaign won pro-tenant reforms by recruiting homeowners was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

If organizers learn anything from election results this year — and potentially any year — it might be a reaffirmation of the need for groups to work together in advancing progressive priorities. A loose coalition of anti-MAGA voters kicked Donald Trump out of office four years ago, but around four million of those voters chose to simply sit it out this year. 

Those coalitions are just as important when the goal is to move a policy agenda, rather than win an election. A case in point is the unexpected success of a few housing organizers in Greensboro, North Carolina — known as “the Gate City,” in a nod to its once prominent role as a railroad transshipment point across the South. In fact, their recent victory might give us all a roadmap for how to win in 2025, including one particularly relevant detail: The journey grew out of a series of losses. 

A campaign that grew from failure

Terrell Dungee and Cecile Crawford are organizers with the American Friends Service Committee’s North Carolina office. From 2020 onward, they both participated in local activist mobilizations, gravitating towards supporting tenants with abusive landlords. 

Last summer they were contacted by tenants at three different apartment buildings in Greensboro reporting severe negligence, illegal rent hikes and other serious problems. As is often the case, tenants at all three buildings struggled to recruit a majority of their neighbors to participate in any effort to use their collective power to force changes. In each instance, at Crawford and Dungee’s suggestion, a handful of tenants canvassed their neighbors, urging them to attend organizing meetings onsite, visit the city’s Code Compliance office, show up at City Council meetings or to take part in a regional day of action targeting a corporate slumlord, alongside tenants in other cities. The result was always the same: The tenants who had been willing to organize “threw in the towel” and moved on after a few months, often after receiving targeted harassment and threats of eviction.

Crawford and Dungee felt discouraged by the losses. That feeling of failure had become familiar to Greensboro activists. Over the last decade, hundreds of residents participated in mobilizations focused on winning local policy votes, like reforms to policing practices or stopping handouts to private developers. Only a few times had grassroots organizers been part of wringing significant concessions from elected officials — and Crawford and Dungee participated in one of those rare organizing victories. In 2022, they successfully mobilized affordable housing supporters alongside local basebuilders Siembra NC, who helped a Latino mobile home park tenant association win a $10 million fund for tenant relocation assistance. Following that experience, they knew the current City Council could be persuaded to fund tenant protections if a large enough coalition — including pro-tenant homeowners — could be galvanized to turn out in active support roles. 

Still, the idea of organizing for pro-tenant policies, even with people who weren’t renters, wasn’t one they had often seen reflected in other cities. Crawford and Dungee had closely followed tenant victories around the country, seeing grassroots tenant groups win significant changes to the landlord-tenant balance of power in political geographies similar to their own. In Kansas City, Baltimore and Philadelphia, organizers were winning mandated, universal right to counsel in eviction court and a legally-enforceable tenant bill of rights. But most of the groups behind those victories were centered around building-based tenant organizing. Crawford — despite having been an unhoused single mother who received an eviction notice in 2007 — was now a homeowner, as was Dungee. And many of the volunteers they had recruited weren’t experiencing unstable housing. 

Nevertheless, with the national political winds blowing against the landlord-dominated status quo, Crawford and Dungee thought there might be a way to win pro-tenant reforms in Greensboro. The question was whether they could win without having first organized a strong tenant union. 

Struggling to stay housed and build governing power in Greensboro

Greensboro is a city of about 300,000 people in Guilford County, which has over half a million residents. Both city and county have relatively similar municipal operating budgets of $802 million and $834 million respectively. Voters have exclusively elected Democrats to Greensboro City Council since 2018, and the Guilford County Commission has been dominated by Democrats for just as long. But local activists and organizers have struggled to galvanize support for ambitious progressive policies, even as Durham — 45 miles to the east and with nearly the same population size — has become a national leader in funding alternatives to policing. Durham is even spending far more on affordable housing than Greensboro, even though the latter has a 30 percent larger municipal budget. 

It’s no coincidence that Durham’s basebuilders have built more and deeper containers for grassroots power. Members of Durham Beyond Policing, the Durham People’s Assembly and the Durham Educators’ Association have teamed up over the years to elect their champions to the council, school board and county commission — and continue to collaborate on the difficult challenges of co-governance.

In recent years Greensboro has had among the largest average rent increases in the state — and among the most evictions per capita, with 16,000 filed in 2023 alone. Ninety percent of the tenants in the county’s eviction court don’t have legal representation, but 90 percent of landlords do. Affordable housing is in short supply, and over the last several years the issue of “homelessness” has often dominated City Council meetings. But it came to be framed almost exclusively around how to manage people who are currently unhoused. Meanwhile, media narratives positioned “disruptive” local homeless advocates — who often interrupt council meetings — against downtown business proponents “just trying to get by.” 

With the public conversation around the lack of affordable and safe housing having been reduced to this narrow polarization, Crawford and Dungee spotted an opening: What if the issue were reframed around the need to prevent homelessness, by keeping people in their homes? What if, instead of asking whether people who lose their homes should receive public support or be allowed in public spaces, the question was: “How can elected officials use their policies and municipal budgets to keep people housed?” Crawford and Dungee thought that might build more support for pro-tenant policies across the political spectrum. 

Scoping the problem and ‘cutting the issue’ 

Up until that point, Crawford and Dungee had been thinking about rebalancing the playing field in favor of tenants through the lens of tenants they knew. Landlords could often get away with providing unsafe housing, and state laws kept local penalties weak. But when tenants withheld rent to extract concessions, they could be taken to court and evicted in just a few weeks. Crawford and Dungee decided to explore housing court as a potential place to both give tenants a leg up and to spotlight the harms of the eviction process for the entire city — a process organizers call “cutting the issue.”

In Greensboro, eviction court convenes Monday through Friday, and many landlords are represented by a single law firm, Loebsack & Brownlee, whose attorneys are permanent fixtures on one side of the courtroom. If tenants get lucky, they’ll end up in court during one of the eight hours per week someone from the Tenant Education Advocacy and Mediation program, or TEAM, is available to advise on their case. But they might not even know to talk to the friendly faces unless a magistrate points out — after ordering them to surrender their home — that TEAM can help them file an appeal, which could easily give them another month to work out a payment plan or find a new place. Of course, neither the magistrates nor the sheriff’s deputies who deliver eviction court notices are required to notify tenants of the program’s existence, and so a majority of tenants don’t even attend court hearings. 

Although severely underfunded, TEAM is very effective. According to American Friends Service Committee research, the program is currently helping an estimated 15 percent of all tenants in court avoid eviction. After researching it further and spending time in court, Crawford and Dungee realized the program could be a way to keep more tenants in their homes — and help build towards a stronger mandate by local elected officials to provide legal representation to all tenants. 

They learned the city and county, combined, spend around $16 million annually on managing homelessness, with the county contributing $440,000 in federal COVID relief funds for a tenant mediation and support program — the only local contribution to preventing people from becoming homeless, beyond occasional rental assistance funding. Doubling the budget, and therefore doubling the number of tenants TEAM might help avoid eviction, would only cost less than a percent of Greensboro’s annual spending. 

Launching a campaign to ‘Keep Gate City Housed’

After six months of planning, it was time to launch. Crawford and Dungee had honed their call to action and invited people to join them in a campaign to “Keep Gate City Housed” — with the goal of convincing the City Council to kick in $440,000 to dramatically expand TEAM. If they were successful, it would be the first time in known memory the city had stepped up to fund an anti-eviction program, and the city was often averse to contributing to anything designated a “county services issue” like housing support. 

Starting in mid-December 2023, their small volunteer crew had dozens of one-on-one conversations canvassing apartment buildings, bus stops and other public spaces. Almost everyone they canvassed thought the lack of renter protections was a problem, and many knew tenants who had been taken to court or had experienced an eviction themselves. But those conversations rarely turned into new faces at the group’s biweekly organizing committee meetings. By the end of February 2024, when city staff began finalizing their budget requests for City Council, Crawford and Dungee were worried about whether they would generate the momentum they needed. 

Their fortunes started to change in March, when they set up a biweekly court watch program to find out how often tenants were being told about their rights during hearings. Sometimes volunteers chased after forlorn renters — after they had been told to vacate their homes — to let them know they could get help from TEAM staff on filing an appeal. An initial group of five volunteers began to recruit even more people to join them at the courthouse, and many of the group’s contacts, who had been reluctant to join organizing committee meetings, started turning out in droves to the public “budget workshops” city staff began holding all over town. At every one, “affordable housing” led the list of priorities identified by attendees. New recruits kept appearing, repeating the group’s talking points about how evictions destabilize schools and neighborhoods, as well as make us all less safe and lead to job loss and homelessness. 

New recruits like Anita Washington, who Dungee met at a bus stop while canvassing, joined the effort. She was a single mother and National Guard veteran fighting an eviction, and had already connected with Legal Aid of North Carolina, and was struggling to get the city’s Code Compliance department to hold her landlord accountable. After coming to the group’s first public action, she got involved in the court watch program and organizing committee meetings. (Later on, she helped lead a subcommittee through a six-week study group on “right to counsel” ordinances.)  

By April, the group’s quiet outreach to elected officials and staff enlisted a councilmember who promised to support adding TEAM funding to the budget proposal. But many other council members hadn’t acknowledged their requests to meet. Dungee and Crawford knew they would have to turn up the volume on their demands in order to secure the four other votes needed to win.  

As City Council hearings on the city budget kicked off, the group held a mock “People’s Eviction Court” on the steps of City Hall, using props dreamed up by artivists at Look Loud that dramatized how “Team Tenant” was often outmatched by “Team Landlord.” They invited supporters to phone-bank their friends and contacts, asking them to send emails, make calls and attend budget hearings. They continued canvassing and, through multiple public actions, finally recruited tenants who had experienced eviction into the organizing committee — some of whom just happened to encounter the group at City Hall. Over the course of May and June, dozens of Keep Gate City Housed supporters flooded council meetings, persistently waving signs in the shape of door keys that read “$440,000” and “Join Team Tenant!”

Finally, they found out they had probably won from a City of Greensboro Facebook post that prominently listed their budget demand among the city’s official top priorities. Nevertheless, the group turned out in droves with coalition partners from the county-wide grassroots organization Guilford for All, as the council unanimously approved their line item at the first of two budget votes. At the second vote two weeks later, the group took a kind of leadership development victory lap, inviting organizing committee members to stand on the steps of City Hall and tell each other what they were proud of having contributed to the organizing win. Then they got some surprising news: In meetings with council members and staff, the group had urged the city to also set aside money for rental assistance, $1.5 million of which landed in the final budget document. 

Members of the group were joyful, but they knew it was just the first step of many towards their “north star” vision. They want a Greensboro that ensures all residents have access to safe and stable housing, and with municipal and state policies that make life as good for renters as it had become in Kansas City. After an actual victory lap at a nearby restaurant, the group reconvened to debrief the campaign and plan their next phase.

As of Fall 2024, they’re mapping out the homeowners, renters and students they’ll need to recruit in order to win the next phase of their vision. As Dungee told some of the group’s members, “We’re not Baltimore or Kansas City yet, but we’re on our way.”

This article How a local housing campaign won pro-tenant reforms by recruiting homeowners was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/12/greensboro-keep-gate-city-housed-built-a-diverse-coalition-and-won-pro-tenant-reforms/