In December of 2021, residents of about 100 one-bedroom units at Foxcroft Apartments in Oklahoma City found themselves struggling to stay warm in freezing cold apartments with no heat. Their gas lines had been cut off for months and apartment owners, Foxcroft Exchange LLC and Regional Management Co., seemed to be in no hurry to fix the heat.
Surviving the winter with no warmth during a pandemic, when uncertainty and anxiety were rampant, was terrible, said former resident Janny Granados.
Some residents without heat resorted to boiling water on electric ranges, even leaving oven doors open to generate warmth. Granados and others ran as many space heaters as they could, racking up enormous electricity bills.
The longer the gas outage and colder the residents got, the angrier they became. Baron O’Connor, an organizer of Oklahoma Tenants Union , heard about the situation and started knocking on doors at Foxcroft, looking for ways the tenant union could help.
O’Connor said he thought there might be a grievance they could organize around and go from there. He and several tenants formed the Foxcroft Tenants Council. The council wrote demand letters to the landlord, notified the press of the situation and prepared a class action lawsuit.
In Oklahoma, tenant unions are slowly taking root and growing in numbers and power. In a state ranked sixth worst for evictions , Oklahoma renters have few protections and little power individually.
Some tenants express concern about joining and making themselves known as tenant union members for fear of retaliation by their landlords.
Tenant unions are legal in Oklahoma, however the state does not have anti-retaliation laws to prevent landlords from finding ways to evict or otherwise penalize residents with whom they have issues.
An anti-retaliation bill was before the legislature during this year’s session, but the bill stalled, as did every other bill intended to empower Oklahoma tenants.
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Despite the risk of retaliation, Oklahomans are seeing the value of creating tenant unions for their apartment communities.
In the Foxcroft case, State District Judge Anthony Bonner handed down several decisions, banning the complex from evicting tenants during the gas outage and allowing tenants to break their leases in order to move.
The complex was forbidden from charging tenants rent, but was later sued again for accepting rent from tenants, including Janny.
Collective action brought attention to the Foxcroft tenants’ situation, with as positive an outcome as might be expected, given the imbalance of protections for landlords and tenants in Oklahoma, said attorney Ryan Owens, who led the lawsuits against Foxcroft Apartments.
Though tenants did not receive any compensation for inconvenience or pain and suffering, the owners and property managers were punished for failure to make necessary repairs and defying the judge’s order to suspend rent.
“Oklahoma’s Supreme Court has pretty consistently ruled that the Landlord Tenant Act supplants any other remedy that a court might otherwise be able to afford tenants,” Owens said.
Oklahoma tenants unite for a wide range of concerns
Tenants at Vicksburg Village Apartments in Norman formed a tenant association to demand a safer playground at the complex and a place for the resident teens to play sports.
Mark McNalty, 62, has lived in the complex for 17 years. He’s watched kids in the complex grow up and said he knows everyone who has been there for longer than a year or so.
McNalty became frustrated watching the apartment playground equipment deteriorate over the years. The old metal slide and other equipment got so hot in the summer, kids were getting burned.
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Meanwhile, resident teens who needed a place to hang out were taking over the playground. The teens needed a place to stay active, separate from the children’s playground.
Caleb Creed, a leader in the organizing branch of Red Dirt Collective, recently met with McNaulty and several other Vicksburg residents to start the Vicksburg Village Tenant Union.
Red Dirt Collective is a Norman organization that provides services under branches known as mutualism, organizing and politics. Under its organizing branch, the group trains tenant leaders with a set of common strategies and tactics used to put negotiation in the landlord’s best interest, Creed said.
After creating the Vicksburg Village Tenant Union, the group met to negotiate with their property manager who agreed to update the playground and add an activity area for sports.
United Tenants of Tulsa fights for neighborhood safety improvements
United Tenants of Tulsa broadens its collective action focus to include not only landlord-tenant concerns, but those of entire communities.
Recently, the groupheld a mayoral candidate accountability session during which Allied Communities of Tulsa Inspiring Our Neighborhoods leaders asked mayoral candidates Karen Keith, Monroe Nichols and Brent VanNorman to confirm whether they would address community concerns.
Tenant union leaders took an informal survey of people living in low-income areas to find out what changes they need to be safer and more comfortable in their homes.
The union leaders, such as Makayla Ewen, delivered short presentations to the three mayoral candidates, describing the problems residents had identified. Problems included difficulty for school children who walk up to 1.5 miles to and from school with no crossing guards where children cross major thoroughfares.
The tenants also described problems with dark, unlit streets, stray and dangerous dogs and inadequate bus services that force some tenants to pay for ride share rides.
Tulsa Tenant Union operates under the umbrella of Allied Communities of Tulsa Inspiring Our Neighborhoods, known as ACTION Tulsa.
“I feel very, very overwhelmed by a lot of things that happen in society,” Ewen said about why she volunteers as a tenant union leader. “Instead of just sitting back, I like to get involved and to take action.”
Faced with 600 Tulsans in a packed Trinity Episcopal Church, the three mayoral candidates at the Tulsa Tenant Union Mayoral Accountability Session committed to acting on all the concerns the union expressed if they are elected Tulsa Mayor.
Finding common ground between tenants and landlords
Relationships and communication are core to collective action, among tenants themselves and with landlords, property owners and other stakeholders.
Oklahoma union leaders agree that a lack of communication between tenants and landlords is a problem across the state. Building up tenant-landlord relationships is a first step to positive collective action and bargaining, Bounds said.
“Politics is about self-interest and it’s about power,” Bounds said. “And so we have to understand the self interest of the people in power, which are the landlords, and then figure out what issues we have a common self interest in.”
O’Connor compared tenant unions to labor unions that operate on a regional level.
“A lot of this, we’re kind of poaching off labor strategy,” O’Connor said.
Workers are in a relationship of exchanging their labor for profit; tenants are exchanging rent for their housing. Rather than producing value for a boss, tenants pay for a service.
“And in that sense, the worker, just like a tenant, has the same kind of relationship of dependency,” O’Connor said. “So building up an organizational capacity among tenants, like what you see with labor unions, is how the tenant union should be functioning.”
For landlords, one angry tenant can easily be replaced. But a cohort of tenants, with supportive connections to groups that advocate for collective action, can hold far more sway over a landlord who needs to keep their apartments occupied.
Oklahoma tenant unions often formed under crisis
Unions are often formed during crisis situations, such as during the Foxcroft Apartments gas outages. However, times of crisis aren’t always ideal for implementing tenant unions, Emilee Bounds, lead organizer at ACTION Tulsa said.
Building the kind of collaborative power needed for success, she said, doesn’t work as well when people are in the midst of crisis.
“I’d say the big difference between what we’re doing and what you might view as a traditional tenant union is we are trying to build relationships and relational power, and negotiate instead of being in an oppositional fight,” Bounds said.
Creed isn’t against using strong tactics to influence landlords in antagonistic situations with tenants, he said. In some cities, such as Los Angeles, tenant unions are known for their aggressive tactics to coerce change, sometimes using fear and threats.
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“In Oklahoma, there is enough crisis to go around that we could spend all of our time putting out fires, and justifiably so,” Creed said.
Creed said one should consider the tactics some landlords use against tenants when considering actions that unions can take against landlords, such as marching outside a landlord’s home, strikes and protests and other directly confrontational actions.
“Is this something that the other side of this relationship (the landlord) does in a way that’s normalized?” Creed asked.
If tenants kicked in the doors at landlords’ homes, threw them out on the street and sold their belongings, Creed said people would correctly recognize that as violence.
When the same happens to tenants, Creed said, people accept these actions as normal.
“Maybe that’s not normal,” he said. “Maybe that’s something we’ve accepted because it happens a lot, but not normal in the sense that it’s something we don’t want to have in our society.”
What are the risks associated with tenant unions?
For the Vicksburg Village Tenant Association, fear of eviction is less of a threat because the complex is subsidized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which offers federal protections against landlord retaliation. Tenants have the right to organize on HUD insured or subsidized properties, HUD spokesman Scott Hudman said.
But Oklahoma’s lack of anti-retaliation legislation detracts from many renters’ abilities to take collective action without fear of losing their homes to angry landlords.
Unions could use collective bargaining to gain protections such as anti-retaliation via contracts between landlords and unions, Michael Figgins, executive director of Legal Aid Services Oklahoma said.
“I can tell you that (landlord retaliation) is a valid concern,” Figgins said. “LASO does not have a way to prevent a landlord from evicting people as soon as their leases are up after they unionize.”
It can be really hard to balance the need to sort of grow power in working people and to then to use that limited power to fight ongoing situations, Creed said.
“I will say even where there is legal protection, people are still evicted,” Creed said.
Sometimes, Creed said, the best protection comes from being part of a large organization of people.
“If you have 20 people in an apartment complex that can protest or send letters to investors or speak at city council meetings or march on the office and make demands, even in Oklahoma there are tactics that a collection of people can take,” Creed said.
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org , is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma tenants are unionizing to demand repairs, neighborhood safety: How it works
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