Tenants banding together in aftermath of freeze, pandemic
Raimy Aguilar had started grinding her teeth in her sleep.
After a year of rain leaking into her west Houston apartment and a week without running water, she had decided in February to join her neighbors at Villas del Paseo on a rent strike.
Texas law was not on their side. Whether or not an apartment is habitable or maintained in a timely manner, landlords have the right to evict if tenants withhold rent. But Aguilar and her neighbors felt trapped — they could not bear the living conditions, but they also could not see a way to escape until their leases were up.
“Something had to be done,” Aguilar said, recalling the stress of the situation. “They had to be held accountable somehow.”
Houston renters are increasingly reaching similar conclusions. In situations where they have little recourse under the law, they are banding together to exert pressure through other means, such as rent strikes and bad publicity. Coaching them behind the scenes is the Houston Tenants Union, a relatively new organization that acts as a consultant of sorts, explaining how the law works, which strategies might be used and how frustrated renters can connect with one another.
In Villas del Paseo, it was the Houston Tenants Union that recommended renters knock on their neighbors’ doors to get others, such as Aguilar, involved. And it was the tenants group that explained the stakes when renters brought up the possibility of withholding rent.
Stress built among the roughly
40 percent of tenants who chose to strike as months passed since they had last paid rent, and talks with Comuna Property Management, which operated the complex, did not progress. Aguilar broke down crying and asked her boyfriend, David Kinard, if he was OK being evicted. He reassured her that they would handle things as they came.
Aguilar and her neighbors wanted a $500 rent credit per apartment for the weeks spent without water, late fees waived and the ability to break their leases without penalty. They also called for regular progress reports on the repairs, mold inspections and treatments, and a promise to answer tenant messages and calls within 24 hours.
Renters making such demands, and getting them met, are nearly unheard of in Texas. Tenant attorneys have long lamented the ineffectiveness of Texas law in protecting those without the resources to go to court against uncooperative landlords. Some states more clearly define whether a unit is uninhabitable and how quickly a landlord must fix the problem.
But on May 10, after 71 days of a rent strike that began after the February winter storm, their landlords agreed to the rent credit, fee waiver and ability to get out of leases, according to organizers. Comuna Property Management did not respond to a request for comment.
Stephanie Graves, a member of the Houston Apartment Association board of directors, said that generally both tenants and landlords should work together to resolve their problems. The tactic of withholding rent worried her, she said, because the loss of income could force a landlord to sell and the new buyer could raise rents and evict tenants.
Instead, she pointed to the Houston Apartment Association’s resident relation committee, which receives complaints from tenants and attempts to resolve them, as a less risky route to address issues.
“Not paying rent and saying, ‘We’re not going to pay rent because we don’t feel we’ve been treated fairly,’ I don’t think that’s the right way to get a seat at the table,” she said.
Nonetheless, Aguilar said the
agreement has given her not only relief — she no longer grinds her teeth — but also a sense that the balance of power between renters and landlords has shifted.
“They listened and sat down with us and came to the table,” she said.
A growing effort
The Houston Tenants Union was founded June 14, 2019, in a Third Ward apartment living room. Many of the dozen people who gathered that evening were involved with other organizing efforts around the city. Oliver Lawrence and Zoey Stone, for example, had organized tenants in Greenspoint, where they lived. Gus Breslauer had done similar work in southwest Houston and Third Ward.
Together, they drew up a vision of what they hoped to achieve: a network of organized tenants spread throughout the sprawling Houston area that would be able to put pressure on landlords to address issues including mold, pests, lack of repairs, predatory towing practices and unfair evictions.
The last time community organizers remember a tenants union in Houston was in the ’70s. At that time, there were no state laws saying that landlords had to keep properties in livable condition, and the Dallas-based Texas Tenants
Union had chapters across the state.
According to Sandy Rollins, the group’s executive director, many tenants were organizing in neighborhoods such as East Dallas, where property values were rising but buildings were decrepit. There, some landlords would rack up code violations until the city shut them down then sell the property.
Now, housing advocates say, tenants are being squeezed anew.
During a recent panel on the state of Houston’s housing, Zoe Middleton, Southeast Texas director of the advocacy group Texas Housers, noted that much of today’s housing stock was built during the oil boom of the ’70s and early ’80s. A Kinder Institute report shows that 1983 was the peak year for construction of Harris County’s rental properties.
“We have a lot of that stock that is hitting the 40-year mark and is having to withstand severe … rains, extraordinarily high temperatures,” Middleton said. “And so you see this real problem with mold and other health impacts.”
At the same time, a growing number of people are having difficulty finding rents that meet their budgets. Housing is considered affordable if it takes up no more than 30 percent of a household’s income, yet 51 percent of both Houston and Harris County’s
renters pay more than that for shelter.
“Rents are rising and conditions are deteriorating,” said Stone, one of the Houston Tenants Union’s founding members, explaining why she began organizing renters.
The Houston Tenants Union launched a website, and in April 2020, during the pandemic, a renter reached out saying his deposit was unfairly withheld after moving out. The group has since grown to roughly 100 members, many of them staying on after previous campaigns. Aguilar, for example, still meets weekly with her neighbors at Villas del Paseo to discuss tenant issues.
Exerting pressure
A recent Thursday evening, Nina Mayers walked up to the pillarflanked door of a two-story brick home in West University Place. It was the home of a managing principal at Arris Real Estate Partners, which owns Mayers’ apartment.
While the hundreds of families at Villas del Paseo had strength in numbers — more than 40 percent of the complex decided to withhold rent until demands were met — a large share of renters live in homes or small-scale apartment buildings owned by mom-andpop investors.
In those cases, the Houston Tenants Union calls on renters from other properties to stand with the tenant making demands.
Roughly 30 people gathered on the sidewalk behind Mayers, many holding up their cellphones to capture what would happen next. When the residents of the West University home said they would not come out, Mayers took the loudspeaker.
“We have had more than a dozen repair requests go ignored,” Mayers said. “Property management failed to repair the mold, violating a landlord’s duties to remove conditions that materially affect the physical health or safety of an ordinary tenant, from the Texas Property Code 92.056.
“My roommate received a note from a licensed doctor stating that the prolonged exposure to the black mold has caused respiratory issues and that they personally recommend that our lease be broken. … Let us break our lease.”
Arris Real Estate Partners passed a request for comment to Asset Living, the property manager hired to oversee Mayers’ building. Joe Goodwin, vice president of student housing at Asset Living, disputed the accusations of black mold. He said that by the time a cleaning crew gained access to the apartment, the tenants had moved out.
Asset Living has not agreed to release the roommates from their lease, meaning they have been charged rent for time they did not live there. “After contacting the resident to discuss the matter at hand, we were unable to find common ground,” Goodwin said.
At the West University home, a police SUV pulled up, then a second, then a third. The group broke into a chant: “No more black mold!” then filed away. As they turned the corner, they broke into cheers.
A fourth SUV pulled up — not the police this time, but a man curious to know what was going on. “Whose house was that?” he asked.
Back at the parking lot, Mayers thanked everyone who turned out and urged them to continue to take organized action around housing.
“These are not unique conditions to myself,” she said. “We deserve accessible, safe, clean and habitable living. And that’s something we should be asking for if we are paying for it.”