Person

Three Buildings, Three Fights

IF Imani Freeman

People ask what tenant organizing actually looks like day to day. It is not a rally. It is knowing which apartment to knock on second. These are three campaigns I ran, including the one we lost, and the curriculum I hand out for free.

01 The Campaigns

Two wins and a loss, written honestly. Timelines, what it cost, and the moment each one turned.

Alabama Avenue, 44 units, 2016 to 2018

My own building. Boiler out three winters, owner selling to a flipper. Eighteen months from first meeting to co-op ownership.

We got the notice on a Tuesday in March and had forty five days to register interest. Nobody in that building had ever heard of the law. Neither had I. What worked: we held the first meeting in the laundry room, not a church, because everybody already went to the laundry room. We got 39 of 44 units signed in eleven days. What almost sank it: the owner offered eight families a cash relocation payment individually, which is legal and effective, and we lost two of them. Eighteen months later, closing. Share price set at 2,500 with a payment plan for anybody who needed one. Nobody was displaced. The boiler was replaced in month four of ownership.

Fairlawn, 62 units, 2024 to 2026

The biggest building I have taken. Closed in July. The turn came from one tenant on the fourth floor who spent four months saying no.

Seven years of complaints, three code enforcement cases, an owner who had stopped answering the management company. I got the call from a resident who had been in my organizer course two years earlier, which is the whole argument for teaching the course. Sixteen months of meetings. The association incorporated in month three, chose counsel in month five, and got a usable capital needs assessment in month nine after firing the first engineer. Financing was the hard part and I will not pretend it was elegant. What I would do differently: I should have spent the first six weeks only on unit 407 and the people she trusts, and nothing else. It would have saved four months.

The One We Lost, Stanton Road, 2022

28 units. We had the signatures and lost the financing. Ended in a repairs agreement and eleven families relocated with assistance.

We registered on time, we had 24 of 28 units, and the association was strong. Then two lenders passed inside a week because the deferred maintenance number came in at 61,000 a door on a building we could not buy for less than the contract price. I told them the truth in a meeting that lasted four hours. We pivoted to a repairs and relocation fight and got assistance for eleven households plus a written repairs schedule for the rest, which the new owner has mostly honored. I include this here because organizers who only show wins are not teaching anybody anything. Sometimes the math does not work and your job is to get the best possible landing, then say so out loud.
02 Take the Curriculum

Everything I teach is free and public. If your city has no purchase law, run weeks one, two, four and six as a repairs campaign and it works the same.

Session by session outline, the door knock script, the building map worksheet and the meeting agenda template I use. No signup, no email capture.

🔗Six week course outline and handoutsward8tenantpower.org↗

The Building Map, One Page

The single most useful thing I do. One sheet per building that answers who lives here and who do they already believe.

Columns: unit, names, how long they have lived there, language at home, who else in the building they know by name, and whether they have ever complained to management. You fill it in over three or four weeks of knocking. When it is done, the leaders are obvious and they are almost never the loudest person from the first meeting. Usually it is somebody who has been there fourteen years and watched three owners come and go. I have never run a successful campaign without one and I have failed at two campaigns where I skipped it because I was in a hurry.