Tenants’ Unions
Friends and Constituents,
I hope you got a chance to enjoy the excellent weather this weekend if you were in Indianapolis. I mowed the grass, did some yard work, and filmed a short video outside.
So far in 2026, I have focused on two major local issues:
Fighting AI Data Centers
Helping tenants organize
Though the fight continues on data centers after some very bad news last week, today I’m focusing on tenant issues. Watch this video and then come back and read the rest.
I’ve written before about my conversations with the management team at TWG, who are seeking tax abatements for new affordable housing projects, even while dealing with some very poor maintenance and responsiveness issues at existing affordable housing projects. As a result of these conversations, I started reaching out to tenants at TWG properties to hear directly from them.
This week, a group of TWG tenants from multiple different properties came together to talk about their frustrations, their previous attempts to find justice, and their desire to help organize in order to protect their neighbors and themselves from bad treatment.
Indiana has some of the most anti-tenant laws on planet Earth. In most cases, landlords can evict tenants for no reason at all, tenants have no right to withhold their rent money until habitability issues are resolved, and the vast majority of tenants facing eviction have no legal counsel to help them.
Retaliation against tenant organizing is illegal in Indiana, yet it still happens - frequently. I am currently working with a tenant of another landlord who was illegally evicted from her apartment - despite never being late on her rent - in order to penalize her for reporting the building to the housing regulators for unsafe conditions.
The reason that slumlords take draconian action to penalize tenants is because the landlords understand intuitively that the biggest threat to their profit is an organized tenant base. If they can intimidate most of their residents by threatening the leaders, they can make much more money than they would otherwise.
Earlier this month, I attended a meeting convened by the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance. The meeting featured two sets of speakers: first, we heard from helpful and well-meaning attorneys from Indiana Legal Services who explained what limited rights tenants do have in the state. But second, we heard from people who had successfully organized their fellow tenants in order to win real victories against bad landlords in their areas. In Richmond, Indiana, the Richmond Tenants Union is continuing to gather steam. And other successful projects from around the country are forming a federated network, the Tenant Union Federation or TUF.
The reason collective action and collective bargaining is so important is simple: with power comes leverage. As the oil industrialist J. Paul Getty famously said, “if you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.” In short, bigger and more powerful organizations don’t have to sweat the small stuff like paying bills on time - that concept is reserved for the poor and powerless.
At TWG properties, over and over again I’ve heard about subcontractors, maintenance crews, safety personnel, and sanitation workers not being paid for months on end. TWG and their property management company have floated bills of tens of thousands of dollars at a time, to the point where vendors threaten lawsuits or simply quit performing any services until they are paid. This has led to disastrous situations for residents, including disabled senior citizens being stuck in apartment buildings without functioning elevators for weeks at a time. But very rarely does TWG or Elmington Property Management seem to be stuck paying any late fees for the severe delays in their accounts payable.
Compare that to the experience of the disabled senior citizens at many of the TWG / Elmington properties seeking to pay their rent: TWG charges each resident a $2 fee every month for the privilege of paying their rent, on time, with a money order. If tenants are just a few days late, they can be charged up to 10% of their rent in late fees and can be threatened with eviction, even if they pay the fees in short order.
By organizing and negotiating collectively with TWG, individual residents can use the same economy of scale to become “too big to fail”. As the old union song goes,
“When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?
For the union makes us strong!”
I hope everyone reading this attends a No Kings protest on March 28th. But if you’re in Indianapolis and want to stop by our first residents’ council meeting, we’d love to see you in the afternoon. It will take all of us working together to improve residents’ conditions and improve housing in Indianapolis.
In love and solidarity,Jesse