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Bull City Tenants Union:

A Summation

1. Landscape
2. Early Foundations
3. Our Approach
4. Our Structure
5. Our Campaigns
6. Major Challenges
7. Key Lessons Learned
8. Conclusion

In the summer of 2020, a small group of community activists came together in Durham, NC to build a new organization that would fight evictions and organize for tenant power. By November 2022 we had wound down our last campaigns and key organizers had moved on to other projects. Over those two and a half years we learned a lot, had some significant successes and some crushing challenges. Why did we do things the way we did? How did that change over time? What didn’t work? What can we carry into our future work from our experiences, and what could ongoing tenant organizing in Durham look like? As we reflected on these questions, we realized that our project was broken in some fundamental ways, and that our strategy and organizing method did not match the social and political conditions we were in. We decided to share our answers to these questions in the hope that it will be useful to organizers planning similar projects down the road.

Landscape

Durham development history:

Durham had transformed in recent decades in a similar pattern to many other US cities: downtown Durham is 51% more white than it was 20 years ago, and many historic Black neighborhoods had been broken up and gentrified. Fully half of Durham’s population are renters, and before the pandemic hit, there were about 1000 evictions per month in Durham County for at least a decade, making the local per capita eviction rate the highest in North Carolina, and twice the rate of the country overall.

Balance of NC political forces:

Many states practice some form of “Dillon’s Rule” or preemption policies, whereby a municipality’s policy autonomy is limited by and/or subservient to the state government. In 2020, it was worse here than it is elsewhere; North Carolina had the widest-reaching preemption policies in the country at the time. Municipal progress is sharply constrained by the Republican Party, which has held a constant majority in both legislative chambers since 2011. The degree to which municipal officials’ hands were tied by the right-wing state legislature had created a context in which city officials were afraid to take political risks on even glaring problems, such as inadequate housing codes for slum rentals. And historically, when municipalities had tried to push the envelope, the legislature had responded severely to restrict progressive policies, and punish progressive cities. Furthermore, even when progressive city officials were elected and committed to enacting progressive policy, their only source of indepence from the state legislature was city tax revenue, which is mostly derived from local property taxes. This means that even progressive city officials may have justified pro-development, pro-luxury-housing policies in order to generate higher property taxes and expand the municipality’s ability to fund other progressive policies.

The pandemic:

With regard to the housing justice movement, the early pandemic was marked by the call to #CancelRent, which sprang up across the country as millions of people were laid off with little relief from their regular bills. Congress then passed a short-term eviction moratorium as part of the CARES Act, which expired in late July 2020. There was a month where things were unclear — would another moratorium be coming? Would an extension be up to state or local judges, or other policymakers? Millions of tenants nationwide were behind on rent, and Durham was no exception. An estimated 50,000 Durham renters were at risk of eviction by early September. Meanwhile, the number of office jobs going remote transformed the US rental market, as rent fell in major urban areas and increased in smaller cities. In these first 6 months of the pandemic, rent went up more in Durham than anywhere else in the country. BCTU was formed in the middle of all this, just over a month before the CDC’s September 2020 eviction moratorium went into effect.

Early Foundations

A handful of members of the Lakewood Community Project (a small mutual-aid organization that had been operating in Durham’s Lakewood neighborhood for a few years) and a few other local activists first envisioned the organization that would become BCTU with the original goal being to pressure City and County officials to do everything in their power to prevent mass evictions in that uncertain moment of August 2020. We weren’t initially planning to build a major long-term organizing structure as much as recruit a coalition of existing organizations and mobilize tenants to get short-term immediate concessions from the County Court. So, we quickly recruited local activists to a few committees (tenant organizing, policy, media) to pull the anti-eviction campaign together. In the crisis of that moment we failed to build a strong organizational foundation, which contributed to many challenges later on (discussed more in depth below). 

Our Approach

Our initial intent was to mobilize many tenants to speak out about evictions publicly as a pressure campaign on county officials. Given the conditions in August 2020, we’d assumed that we would find a lot of people who were worried about eviction and behind on rent – however, we learned quickly that more people cared about slum conditions (roach infestations, leaks and mold, overflowing garbage in dumpsters, etc) than about evictions. There were a few tenants who were facing eviction that we supported and who were ultimately able to stay in their homes, but we quickly learned that organizing around evictions within apartment buildings was really hard: the family being evicted is in a crisis state, while their immediate neighbors may not be facing the same issue, and a surprising amount of people even blamed their neighbor for not paying their bills on time. Individual evictions were an exceptionally challenging thing to build unity and momentum around within a given apartment building. When the CDC eviction moratorium was announced in September of 2020, we changed tack and shifted toward trying to organize tenant unions to confront their landlords over the slum housing conditions directly. We did this for a few reasons:

1. First and foremost, the eviction moratorium changed the terrain in which we were organizing. It didn’t stop evictions by any means, but it stopped most formal eviction proceedings, and evictions weren’t the issue at the front of most tenants’ minds. The tenants we were speaking with had serious conditions problems, and the landlord was the person who had immediate power to do something about them. People wanted to confront their landlord, and we wanted to support them in that.
2. We knew the City couldn’t give us rent control, but under enough pressure, a landlord might give rent reductions, and they certainly could do simple things like fix plumbing leaks or ensure more frequent garbage pickup.
3. We were influenced by the Los Angeles Tenant Union’s formulation that the urban housing crisis is a result of the power imbalance between landlords and tenants, and that therefore the solution to the crisis can come only by way of organized tenant power.
4. We believed that the most effective way to fight racial capitalism is by building democratic, multiracial organizations that aim to transform the economic structures that exploit and abuse working class Black and brown people. 
5. The majority of us on the initial organizing team were coming from labor backgrounds and were interested in applying labor organizing methods in the community.

Given all this, a tenant union structure seemed to make the most sense, and especially after hearing about the work of Stomp Out Slumlords in the DC area, we fell into a semi-syndicalist vision for BCTU. This meant we aimed to build organizing committees within an apartment complex that could get every neighbor within their complex involved, aiming for a majority and pushing for 80 or 90 percent involvement, for tenants to collectively identify achievable goals and lead campaigns to pressure landlords and win improved conditions. BCTU organized, taught strategy and built up tenant leadership, and supported neighbors to build internal relationships and structures that would continue to grow toward greater future campaigns. Our ability to put this method into practice improved over time. Initially organizers were doing way too much for tenants instead of asking them to build their own organization. Participating in Jane McAlevey’s Organizing for Power trainings in 2021 made a huge difference in our skills, sharpening our tools, especially semantics and structure testing, and led to improved internal structures for onboarding, training and supporting new organizers. With every campaign our organizing and leadership skills improved, but this did not lead directly to enduring success in the project overall.

Our Structure

As the organizing team changed its focus from fighting the County over evictions to fighting landlords over conditions issues, BCTU’s structure slowly shifted, and the initial working groups started to function more individually, which caused problems later on. Gradually, the communications team lost momentum, leadership, and eventually dissolved. The policy team lost momentum for a while, but retained their leadership and enthusiasm. They sought guidance and collaboration with the organizing team, but as so many of our organizers were stretched thin it became harder and harder to effectively collaborate.

Recognizing this capacity challenge, we put more effort into building an in-depth organizer training program and recruiting more volunteers. We began to formalize our leadership structure in order to have ongoing mentorship and guidance for the newly trained organizers. Initially we had two informal leaders, one who mentored and led the new organizers while the other, who had the highest skill level and time commitment in the project, kept the first campaign going, with support from a few others. This became a problem as the one with the largest skill and time commitment became the group leader by default, leading to them constantly putting BCTU’s needs above their own, with no plan for others to take more of a leadership role.

Toward the end of the Garden Terrace campaign (discussed below), the organizing and policy teams collaborated on a Tenants Bill of Rights campaign to try to get some policy changes by working with the City Council, and this eventually led to a split between the two committees. Due to the previous drift between the policy and organizing teams and lack of communication leading up to the campaign there was friction and misalignment on how to wage the campaign and work together. This led to significant conflict that became irreparable after Mayor O’Neale struck a blow to the campaign by tabling the initiative for further study in January 2022. By February, the two teams agreed to split and become separate organizations.

In Spring of 2022, we completely restructured when our primary leader left the group. BCTU formalized a new 3-person leadership team. This was a large shift from our horizontal, consensus-based system into a clearer leadership structure. At this time we recruited a new group of volunteers and improved our training program with all of the things we had learned from Organizing for Power and through doing this work for 2 years. We formalized more mentorship relationships with most of our experienced organizers mentoring new volunteers.

Our Campaigns

In terms of building tenant organizing committees and supporting them to win improvements from their landlords, BCTU had mixed success in our 2.5 years. When the project seemed to work, it depended on the following factors:

• Organizers that were skilled, constantly available, and willing to put the campaign’s needs above their own for extended periods of time
• Tenants that had a preexisting social fabric within their apartment building, took responsibility for building their own organization, had common issues, and were raising winnable demands
• Landlords who were local and therefore vulnerable to the social pressure of a shame campaign

Most of the campaigns we attempted were ultimately missing at least one of these elements. We were never able to develop a quick, effective system when probing a new apartment complex as potential turf and subsequently would spend months talking with tenants in an apartment complex before the organizing drive collapsed. Consequently, there were only a few campaigns where tenants ended up making the decision to go public. Two of the most important fights were at Garden Terrace and the Braswell Apartments.

Garden Terrace

Garden Terrace (GT) was the first campaign in which we were committed to being at one turf and targeting a specific landlord. Organizers chose to start focusing on GT after doing a lot of shallow, broad canvassing at four other apartment complexes. We invited tenants to a neighborhood meeting and GT had significantly more tenants present and also seemed to have the most energy for organizing against their landlord. Tenants at GT were dealing with horrible living conditions and repair issues that the landlord, Jonathan Dayan, refused to address. Families were forced to live with mold growing throughout their apartment, broken appliances, water leaks, roaches, and huge amounts of trash left uncollected around the complex. One family even had mushrooms growing out of their walls. While tenants were dealing with all of these issues they were also being consistently threatened with rent hikes and additional charges for water. Tenants had been individually asking Dayan and Wilson Property Management to address these issues but the landlord and property management ignored them. Wilson would not respond to maintenance requests and lie to tenants about never receiving the requests in the first place. On multiple occasions, Dayan entered tenants’ homes unannounced while they were at work and then would surprise them when they came home in order to yell at them. 

Due to all of these issues, tenants were extremely motivated to push Dayan to start improving living conditions at GT. The campaign lasted about a year and during that time tenants were successful in getting some repairs made, leading to significantly better living conditions. Dayan delayed implementing new water surcharges, while other apartment complexes Dayan owned had these fees enacted a year earlier. Another significant win came after tenants organized a march on Jonathan Dayan’s home after he repeatedly refused to meet with the union to talk about a collective contract and refused a lease renewal for one of the leaders in the union. Tenants decided that if Dayan did not show up to the next meeting they would march on Dayan’s house to demand that he meet with them and stop the eviction. Tenants and organizers invited many members of the public and neighbors from the Lakewood neighborhood and staged a march of about a hundred people to Dayan’s house. After that action he offered the tenant leader a new lease and dropped some previous debts that he had been trying to hold over this leader’s head.

While tenants were able to win some victories, it became clear that many of the tenants’ larger demands were never going to be met. As the campaign continued and tenants asked for bigger things, such as a collective contract, Dayan started stonewalling them, refusing to recognize the tenants’ organization or come to the bargaining table. At this point we switched tactics to getting the city involved by calling code enforcement. City inspectors inspected about half of the units at GT, and even though broken appliances and mold are not even considered in the code, they still found 121 housing code violations in the 30 or so units they checked. Yet Dayan faced no punishments or serious repercussions for these violations, so he only fixed some things and didn’t make the serious improvements that were really needed. Our inability to either move Dayan directly despite a lot of public shame, or effectively use the City’s processes to hold him accountable, showed that both City policies and the attitudes of City officials would have to change to give tenants more leverage to win larger demands.

Braswell Properties

Braswell Properties is the second campaign in which we saw moderate success. Similarly to GT, success at Braswell was possible due to interest and energy from the tenants and the community at large. A few of our organizers started supporting Braswell tenants in December of 2021 after the ten families who were living there received letters informing them that they were being evicted and they had until the end of the month to leave their homes. These apartments, owned by local landlord Vinston Braswell, were in horrible disrepair, and these families had been living there for decades. Braswell had allowed these homes to deteriorate for years, then sold them when the land went up in value. As part of the deal, Braswell agreed to evict all of his tenants. Braswell, the new owners, and the new property management company, Reformation Asset Management, all made the decision to evict these 10 families during the peak of the Covid-19 Omicron wave while giving them less than 30 days to find a new place to live. Braswell profited by refusing to make repairs for years while continuing to collect rent, then selling the buildings to new owners who would just tear down the current structures and build new luxury apartments in their stead. 

After receiving the letters that informed them they needed to be out of their homes by the end of the month, tenants decided collectively that they wanted to be given more time and money for moving expenses. Organizers and tenants went on to plan a very quick campaign in order to put pressure on Vinston Braswell, new landlords Reformation Asset Management, and Durham City Council in order to have these evictions stopped. After organizing a press conference and building community support, tenants were able to achieve their main goals – Reformation Asset Management backtracked, and the tenants were given until April 2022 to move out. The Walltown neighborhood also rallied around these families, and a local church raised about $15,000 to help cover their moving expenses. While this was about as positive an outcome as these tenants could hope for, this sadly is not an uncommon situation in Durham and across the country. In fact, Reformation Asset Management’s entire business plan revolves around evicting entire low-income apartment complexes and flipping them for maximum profit. 

There was a critical difference between tenants trying to fight back against their own individual evictions — such as those we’d supported in August 2020 — and tenants being evicted en masse and choosing to fight back together, as happened at the Braswell apartments. It was the combination of rich relationships and the shared urgency of a 3-week mass eviction notice that galvanized the families and the neighborhood to push back. In this case, this campaign was an outlier among BCTU’s other work. 

Major Challenges

Throughout our existence, we encountered many challenges. We were able to solve a number of them, but this list represents the most significant challenges that we were not able to overcome, and which prevented us from reaching our most ambitious goals.

1) The organizing method never seemed to fit.

A fundamental barrier to success in our campaigns was that our organizing method was based on workplace organizing, which often proved to not be as effective in tenant organizing, at least in most of the complexes in which we organized. Co-workers tend to know each other and share a workplace culture and social networks that can lead to the emergence of organic leaders for organizing campaigns. This may also be the case in small apartment buildings where tenants have lived there for a long time and know and support their neighbors, like Braswell Properties. Such places are likely to have local private landlords who would be more vulnerable to pressure and publicity.

But these kinds of living situations are increasingly rare – apartment complexes now tend to be larger and more impersonal, and are often owned by distant corporate entities that are in turn controlled by private equity conglomerates. These landlords can afford to be indifferent to tenant demands. Such complexes have high turnover, and tenants hardly know their neighbors, or even answer their doorbells. Organic leaders often don’t exist in these spaces, and therefore trying to organize isolated individuals toward building a campaign quickly collapses when faced with even small adversities, especially when confronted by the “lack of leverage” problem.

2) The political conditions are hostile to tenant organizing.

As previously mentioned, the NC political landscape ensures there is little legal protection for tenants, and we’d initially underestimated the narrow bounds within which City officials are willing or able to operate. Additionally, we’d underestimated how the lack of legal levers for tenants, such as rent withholding mechanisms or enlisting code enforcement officers to fine landlords, make a situation where tenants have no material recourse against landlord abuse.

Additionally, there isn’t much of a recent history of tenant organizing in Durham or NC as a whole, and being a right-to-work state, most people have little everyday experience with unions or campaigns for building collective power. When this dynamic combined with the threadbare social fabric within apartment complexes, and the lack of leverage (which meant “tenant power” stayed an abstract idea), the result was that it was very hard to convince people to undertake a risky project when they haven’t seen that it can work.

3) Lack of capacity in the all-volunteer model was a permanent crisis.

Inside BCTU, our major challenge was lack of capacity – as a small all-volunteer organization where almost everyone had full-time jobs, finding the hours necessary to do this work consistently was almost impossible. There were never enough people or enough time and the bulk of the work often fell on one or two key team members. Burnout was inevitable. People left, or became unreachable for periods of time, and that increased the burden on the remaining team. Apartment-building-based organizing is labor-intensive work. Organizers need to quickly build relationships with and between tenants as well as identify, recruit, and develop tenant leadership. Equally as important was evaluating and growing the leadership and skills of tenant committee members and keeping the campaign moving forward to maintain a collective sense of optimism and momentum. Tenants often wanted to move their campaigns along faster than organizers had capacity for, and campaign success usually depended on organizers overextending themselves. We also found ourselves shifting our time away from external-facing relationship building with other organizations to pour everything we had into base building where we could have built allies or a coalition to support tenants rights. Instead we gave every ounce of ourselves to trying to make the organizing drives succeed; it was never enough. 

4) The relative homogeneity of our team held us back.

Throughout its existence, BCTU was majority white, majority 20-somethings, majority college-educated, majority monolingual English speakers. Although we at no point were an all-white organization, we struggled to recruit meaningful numbers of people of color or bilingual (Spanish/English) speakers to our organizing team in particular. We believe one of the main reasons for this is that the potential recruitment pool of Durham activists who are unaffiliated with other organizations, have a lot of time and energy to give, want to learn how to do this particular kind of organizing, and are interested in prioritizing tenant organizing as their political work, is exceptionally small and disproportionately white. That pool becomes even smaller when looking for bilingual activists. At the beginning of the project, we had a tunnel-vision “crisis response” approach, and recruited our initial team based mainly on whoever was interested in participating. Thus we quickly became a majority-white and -monolingual organization. This had a few effects:

• The challenge we always felt most acutely was the language barrier. In some apartment complexes around town — including where we experienced some of the most success, Garden Terrace — most of the tenants are Latine immigrants. For most of BCTU’s life, we had a skeleton crew of volunteer meeting-interpreters and document-translators, and only one fully fluent Spanish-speaking organizer (who also ultimately became the de facto interpreter & translator). While it wasn’t fair, it necessarily became that person’s main responsibility to hold all relationships with anyone who didn’t speak fluid, conversational English. Because of this, we were only minimally able to facilitate relationship-building between tenants across the language barrier, and tenants’ campaigns were less effective overall. While bilingual organizing was incredibly hard, primarily because we only had one or two bilingual organizers at a time, we were still able to do some incredible work and some of our greatest successes were anchored by Spanish-speaking tenants. 
• We developed a reputation within some parts of the Durham political scene as a white organization. This gave some members of our team (especially those in less contact with tenants directly) anxiety, hesitation, and doubt about whether it was right to participate in BCTU. It may have contributed to local BIPOC activists steering clear of the project entirely, and it may have made it harder to build trust with Black tenants in particular, who rarely saw Black people leading meetings. And it certainly gave some of the members of the City Council who opposed tenants rights an opportunity to rhetorically delegitimize both the organization and the ordinance proposal we had put forward.

5) We were not as attentive to our organizational culture as we should have been.

There were certainly many elements of the BCTU organizational culture that were nourishing and/or effective, but also a number of significant flaws that we must avoid in future work. Here are some of the most significant mutually-reinforcing shortcomings in how we worked together:

• Magical thinking:
  • From our overarching hopes for what we could achieve in this project to what we thought it would take to build an apartment complex committee, from what we thought we could win from City Council or from a private landlord, we were constantly overestimating what was possible and underestimating the amount of work, skill, and time something required. Our inability to put together a specific and credible plan to win on any scale led tenants to take us less seriously, and the mismatch between our hopes and the “results” we saw from our work led to significant feelings of futility and despair among our team. 
• Mistaking strategy problems as skills problems:
  • The fact that one of the people in leadership often forcefully misdiagnosed our insufficient concrete success and feelings of despair as a problem of inadequate organizing skills, instead of a problem of inadequate strategy, meant that we were simply unable to correct our biggest mistakes, and many of us blamed ourselves individually when our work didn’t add up.
• Conflict avoidance: 3 types, and each caused problems:
  • When people were acting badly toward each other, we did not always confront them and resolve the conflict. Instead, we sometimes let problematic behavior grow, and ultimately do more damage than it otherwise would have had we acted promptly.
  • When people were falling short on their commitments to the project, we did not always quickly intervene to help them stay accountable or change their commitments. Instead, we often let balls drop, and multiple campaigns broke over this.
  • When people disagreed with each other about strategy, we did not build a practice of openly and collectively engaging with each others’ thoughts to find a way to a unified position. Because we couldn’t engage in truly generative disagreement, we became stuck in a strategic rut and were not able to meaningfully reorient ourselves when things weren’t working. In addition to driving our strategic inflexibility on an organizational scale, this dynamic also hampered individuals’ growth in strategic thinking.
• Uneven distribution of work & leadership:
  • As a group of volunteers who struggled to build a culture of positive accountability, we were not able to maintain relative workload balance between our team members, and fell into an “each according to their ability” distribution of responsibilities. This early-stage imbalance led to people with more responsibility developing their skills, confidence, and relationships more thoroughly, and thus taking on more leadership and responsibility over time. Those who initially had fewer responsibilities found it increasingly difficult to develop their skills, confidence, or relationships as much, and subsequently became less engaged. The overall result was all-around resentment, burnout for our leaders, shame for those who were not contributing as much, and less cumulative leadership development than should have been possible.
• Inadequate big picture evaluation; absolutely no big picture planning:
  • The urgent nature of the moment in which BCTU started demanded a lot of action quickly; we had very little time to brainstorm and make thorough organizational plans and procedures. We developed an orientation against planning, and instead built a pattern of “just take action and then learn from it later,” into our organizational culture.
  • While we were great at planning for and evaluating our small steps (a single conversation, a single meeting), we did not have a practice of planning and evaluating bigger steps (3, 6, 12 months at a time). Since we never reflected or planned on that kind of timeline, and since we were always operating beyond capacity and stretched thin, it was hard for our leaders to see the broader trends that were unfolding in the organization. As a result, we were slow to recognize a great number of the challenges facing BCTU.
  • Capacity problems also shortchanged the planning process, leaving little space for strategic thinking or even rethinking what was not working. Taking more time between campaigns for research, reflection and planning might have prevented other problems down the road, providing time for analyzing targets, power mapping, and identifying leverage points for more effective work. Having no clear plan to win made burnout so much worse.

Key Lessons Learned

We did not write this document simply to count our failures. We have always understood BCTU as an experiment, and thus “failure” would simply mean “we learned nothing” instead of meaning “we did not see the results we anticipated.” Many of us learned and grew immensely through BCTU, and it is our aspiration that present and future community organizers — especially those who live and work in similar conditions — can also learn from our efforts. Here are our top lessons learned:

1)  The “tenant union” strategy: 

Given what we had to work with, and the conditions we were working in, this was simply not the right thing to do. If one reason we reached for this strategy was because it was familiar to us, another reason, perhaps, was that we let indignation drive our choices: Nearly everyone who came through BCTU at one point or another has experienced abuse by a landlord without any recourse, without any path to justice.

Lesson #1: The lived experiences of our members gave BCTU an instinctive urge to fight landlords, and we mistook that emotional clarity for strategic clarity in this project. Instead of just assuming that the problem that feels the most urgent is necessarily the most strategic thing to confront directly, it’s better to survey the landscape and construct a well-informed plan to win on the front end.

Lesson #2: Between our thin volunteer capacity, the challenging political conditions including lack of legal leverage over landlords, and the absence of organic leaders in apartment buildings, it gradually became clear to us that this particular organizing method and strategy was wrong for this particular context, and that our efforts would never add up to more than the sum of their parts without fundamental changes in approach.

2)  The political conditions: 

We believe that for tenant organizing that targets landlords directly to succeed, we first have to win policy changes from the city and state government that would provide tenants with legal leverage to use in the face of abuse, such as the right to withhold rent, or meaningful penalties for housing code violations. A well-planned campaign in coordination with other local organizations could likely win some minor changes that support tenants and tenant organizing at the municipal level. On the other hand, because so much government power is concentrated at the state legislative level, transforming the NC General Assembly into a progressive body should be a long-term goal.

3)  The all-volunteer model: 

Lesson #1: A project of this type, in these conditions, cannot succeed on volunteer power alone. Some amount of staff capacity is a necessary precondition for sustainable growth in a project like this. With that said:

Lesson #2: It is possible to make huge asks of people. A political project that gives its members a sense of purpose, community, growth, and success is incredibly compelling, and if you can put together an organization that can deliver those things, you can recruit a very sturdy team. Our minimum commitment for new organizing team recruits was 10 hours a week for at least 6 months. Those who stepped into leadership regularly had to give more than 20 hours a week, with more demanding periods approaching a full-time commitment at times. At peak, we had 12 people participating at these levels – an immense amount of volunteer capacity. 

4)  Multiracial organizing:

Lesson #1: It is possible for people to build trusting, high quality relationships across racial & other demographic lines. However, we found that white activists were often reluctant to step into leadership, fearing criticism of racism and thinking that since they themselves did not grow up in a working class Black community, for example, they did not have the legitimacy to be able to canvass in certain buildings or neighborhoods. As a safeguard against this hesitation, some white activists were overly deferential to the leadership of people of color. This resulted in a number of errors: 1) the tokenization of tenant leaders by our policy team, 2) white activists leaving the project in the face of criticism from a Black former leader who struggled to let go of control over the direction of the project after stepping away, and 3) confusion about accountability. For example, one white organizer wanted to put our Garden Terrace campaign on hold during a period of escalation and high tenant participation in order to recruit a “fifth-generation Black Durhamite,” who they imagined would protect the project from racial criticism.

As discussed above, there were challenges we faced as a mostly white team, but it would be irresponsible not to acknowledge that one error was white people getting in their own way. At times, some of us got caught up in activist drama that working class tenants of color didn’t care about, and they were sometimes willing to let down our actually existing leadership team of working class Honduran moms at Garden Terrace, for example, in favor of an abstraction that better fit the activist Left in Durham’s racial narrative about who is allowed to be protagonized.

We can absolutely build real relationships across racial differences–whether as peers and comrades, as mentors, as organizers and leaders in shared work. We cannot, however, build those relationships (of mutual respect, honesty, directness, camaraderie, and accountability) when we subscribe to a racial politics that requires white deference. Our relationships are more shallow and our political clarity is muddied when white activists hold back their thinking, their leadership, their willingness to try something and be wrong and face criticism, when they idealize their Black and Brown comrades and assert that they should be calling the shots based on identity alone rather than values, skills, commitment, and leadership. The same is true when activists of color assert that because of their identity, their thinking must be correct, that their behavior must be above reproach, and that disagreement from a white comrade is rooted in racism. The truth is that we all have a responsibility to take risks and to meaningfully engage in principled struggle to arrive at a stronger, clearer place across political differences when they arise, and we can only do that if we are showing up as our full selves. This requires comrades of any racial background to be willing to show up with both humility and courage, directness in offering feedback and openness to receiving it, and above all, mutual respect.

Lesson #2: The size of the volunteer commitment that we asked for from our organizers, and our failure to find meaningful ways for people to participate in the organization on a less-engaged basis, was a contributing factor in the relative demographic homogeneity of BCTU: it was hard to recruit and retain renters to be volunteer organizers when they had a high level of financial instability, or had different family structures and demands, were at different life stages, etc. We believe that effectively bringing members of an organization’s base into higher levels of leadership requires substantial levels of technical, emotional, and financial support. 

Lesson #3: Native English speakers simply have to learn Spanish en masse.

5)  Organizational culture:

Lesson #1: Simply put, organizational culture is important, and should be tended to in an ongoing way. When we aren’t intentional about a group’s culture, bad habits compound into larger problems. 

Lesson #2:  Effective leaders have to find ways to model a robust pace for the work and push others around them to stay accountable, proactive, and enthusiastic by demonstrating all those qualities themselves. And at the same time, at least in an all-volunteer setting, an effective leader should not move too much faster than everyone else, as major imbalances in responsibility breed resentment and damage team efficacy; there must be a kind of balance found in this tension.

Lesson #3: Prioritize accountability to the group. When balls are dropped, or when someone acts out of alignment with what the group has determined, we must promptly have direct conversations with each other about that. Tensions grow and campaigns fail when we aren’t able to hold each other accountable in our shared work. Everyone has a responsibility to communicate when they are no longer able to fulfill a commitment, just as everyone has a responsibility to demand better from each other when a ball is dropped instead of just saying “it’s OK, don’t worry, this is fine,” as a way to escape the uncomfortable conversation.

Lesson #4: Be prepared to manage political and interpersonal conflicts within the organization. A culture of conflict avoidance allows problems to grow much bigger than they ever needed to be. In conflict, the priority goal should be to rebuild unity and trust, but we must not be afraid of setting boundaries or separating, if need be.

Lesson #5: It’s usually better to join an existing organization instead of starting a new one, but if you must start something new, be slow & intentional in the early recruiting period. Later in our recruitment process we had a formal screening process in which we would screen potential volunteers for their ability to take feedback and do important self reflection. Having these requirements directly named to our volunteer recruits resulted in less conflict and better organizing work later on.

6)  Organizer Training:

It is possible to take people who are completely new to organizing and teach them how to have effective conversations, run effective meetings, and build effective campaigns. It is possible to take people who struggle with conflict avoidance, self-confidence, personal systems of organization and accountability, or other individual traits that hamper collective work, and support them to grow into new skills and ways of being. The ingredients are mentorship, training, role-play, opportunities to actually use the tools, frequent evaluation and course correction, and peer support structures in which people don’t feel alone and can push each other to grow. We did not have much success in BCTU overall, but on this count alone, we knocked it out of the park. Here is a link to our trainings folder.

Conclusion

BCTU was an experiment in bringing labor organizing principles to tenant organizing in Durham, NC; the simplest form of our conclusion is “tenant unions are not it,” mainly because the strategy and organizing method do not match the social and political conditions we’re in. Our organizing method depended on social fabric and organic leaders, but these were just not present at most apartment complexes, and the political conditions denied tenants leverage over their landlords due to the state legislature being so anti-tenant and pro-landlord. Without strategic work to transform the policy landscape and expand tenants’ rights, the crisis of gentrification and mass displacement will worsen. 

While we concluded that a syndicalistic vision of tenant committees each fighting their landlords directly won’t work in our conditions, we do think that there are other avenues or possibilities for tenant organizing that could be interesting to try. Large-scale base building for tenants rights at both a municipal and statewide level is needed to change the laws and create the levers that tenants need in order to protect themselves from their landlords and build tenant power. As we also saw the most success with our Braswell campaign, it could also be interesting to try to integrate crisis response “hot shop” organizing alongside the base building and political campaigning that is needed; this would not only help people who are facing the most harm but also build more collective consciousness around tenant organizing and the need for a change in tenant laws.

As Bull City Tenants Union, we experienced many disappointments, made many mistakes, and learned many lessons the hard way. And while in the scheme of things, we intend to win, and be part of the mass movement that rids the world of racial capitalism, we also know that it is better to be trying, failing, and learning, than to fall into the traps of inaction and pessimism. We firmly believe that smart organizing has the capacity to change the world for the better, and we hope that by sharing some of the lessons we’ve learned, our experiences may help pave the way for others’ successes in the future.

Download PDF Below!