Tenants Unions Anticipate Housing Policy Gains After Progressives Win in Rhode Island

This story is part of the series Taking Back the Public Commons.

The housing crisis emerged as a central issue last month in Providence, Rhode Island, as Democratic socialist David Morales unseated incumbent Brett Smiley in the Democratic primary for mayor and a slate of progressives won their city council races in primaries throughout the Ocean State’s largest city.

In April, Smiley vetoed a rent stabilization ordinance passed the day before, and a month later the city council came up one vote short of overriding his veto.

“The campaign for rent stabilization and Brett Smiley’s veto of it laid the whole framework and groundwork for both David Morales’s race and the council slate,” said Daniel Denvir, co-chair at Reclaim Rhode Island, a member-led housing justice and progressive organizing group that is driving the growth of the Rhode Island Tenants Union. “It was a race around rent stabilization and with a clear mandate to pursue social housing — and we won every single contested race in the city. Now, Providence will be really an unparalleled site for innovative progressive solutions to the housing crisis.”

Reclaim grew out of connections organizers made working on the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign in Rhode Island and has had some major successes organizing tenant unions across Providence County and in fighting to ban practices that drive rent hikes and profit for landlords, like algorithmic rent setting. One of its biggest wins in the tenant organizing sphere came this June when residents at Charles Place launched their union with supermajority support, becoming the largest chapter of the Rhode Island Tenants Union. The 200-unit apartment block is home to Section 8 tenants, many of whom are aging or disabled. The union has forced the building’s landlord to the table to negotiate an agreement expected to fix persistent problems, including broken air conditioners, an unreliable elevator, and absent management.

After the rent stabilization ordinance in Providence was quashed and an earlier Reclaim-backed effort to protect tenants from unreasonable evictions by codifying just-cause eviction at the state level failed, the organization shifted some of its efforts to organizing around progressive candidates who could help overcome institutional barriers to its just housing agenda in the legislature.

The City of Providence is among the nation’s least affordable for renters. Last year, the city council’s housing crisis task force found that almost half of the city’s renters are spending beyond their means on housing.

“It’s a working-class city, it’s a diverse city, it’s a young city, it’s an artistic and bohemian city, and the unaffordability of housing threatens all of those things that make Providence special,” Denvir told Truthout. “That’s an objective social and economic reality, [and] the role of political organizations like Reclaim Rhode Island is to organize the objective crisis into a collective political response that brings people together to exercise collective power to solve that crisis.”

With progressives expected to hold a majority, if not a supermajority, on Providence City Council after the general election, local organizers are looking forward to implementing the solutions they fought for on the campaign trail.

While candidates were campaigning ahead of Providence’s September 9 primaries, Reclaim fielded about 200 volunteers who knocked on thousands of doors on joint canvasses for Morales and progressive city council candidates. “We won this on the doors,” said Miguel Martínez Youngs, who defeated incumbent John Goncalves by 68 votes in the Democratic primary in Ward 1. Youngs will run unopposed in the general election on November 3.

Ward 1 includes downtown Providence and historic neighborhoods where residents have faced waves of gentrification and displacement. It also includes College Hill, home to Brown University and one of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods. Goncalves has represented the district since 2020 and bills himself as a progressive. But he was also a deciding factor that saw Smiley’s veto of the rent stabilization ordinance stand when he opted not to show up for the vote to override it. “I got good on the campaign trail saying, ‘It wasn’t a no vote, it was a no show — which is worse,’” Youngs told Truthout.

It was a move that fired up Goncalves’s eventual opponents. “We mounted a really hardcore campaign to try to get that veto overturned but fell one vote short,” Denvir told Truthout. “In the process, we issued a clear warning to Goncalves that if he did not support rent stabilization, we would primary him, defeat him, and end his political career.”

Goncalves spent about $160,000 on his campaign in the year leading up to the September 9 primary. Youngs told Truthout that, in contrast, his campaign spent about $30,000, raised through small-dollar donations. But Goncalves’s spending was no match for the people power that Youngs tapped into, including volunteer canvassers from Reclaim and RIFT/AFT Local 6516, a union of graduate student workers at Brown University, as well as endorsements from other local labor unions and Rhode Island Working Families Party.

“I had days where there were like 40 or 50 people going out for me, and we literally covered the whole ward — and that was such a sign,” Youngs told Truthout. “It was inspiring in my campaign the way that progressivism fell back on [its] roots, to people coming out.”

Reclaim also mobilized its network of organized tenants to help propel Morales and his allies to wins last month. Caleb Madison, Reclaim’s organizing director, said Morales differentiated himself by offering real fixes for common problems facing low-income tenants.

“A lot of politicians use Section 8 tenants in high-rise buildings as vote farms,” Madison told Truthout. “They’ll show up there once every three or four years for their reelection campaign, give everybody coffee and donuts and say why they should vote for them. Meanwhile, Morales comes through with an actual grounded plan about ways to improve their lives — things like more building inspections, more code violations, more people to call. That’s what really inspired tenants to show up for Morales.”

Similar messaging is resonating with voters elsewhere, too, as the housing affordability crisis deepens nationwide. Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in last year’s New York City mayoral race rested in part on his promise to freeze rents for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments. This election cycle, left-wing candidates running on implementing or expanding rent control, curbing corporate development, or other measures to support tenants have also seen success in races as diverse as Washington, D.C. City Council, a congressional seat in central Michigan, and one of Florida’s seats in the U.S. Senate.

Denvir told Truthout the wins reflect the fact that housing affordability has become a “profound crisis to which only the left is offering a compelling response.”

Now, with progressives expected to hold a majority, if not a supermajority, on Providence City Council after the general election, local organizers are looking forward to implementing the solutions they fought for on the campaign trail. Morales has committed to working with the Providence City Council to pass and enforce rent stabilization within his first 100 days using the model developed under the outgoing council, which would cap rent increases to a maximum of 4 percent in a 12-month period. Morales has also said he plans to task the city’s redevelopment agency with acquiring vacant buildings and empty lots to transform them into permanently affordable homes.

Youngs, who helped draft Providence’s rent stabilization ordinance in his previous role as deputy director of policy for the Providence City Council, said he sees his job as an incoming city councilor as having two parts: First, he’s committed to delivering on the day-to-day needs of his constituents — from repairing broken streetlamps to installing a new bench at the neighborhood bus stop. Second, he wants to help ensure Morales can follow through on promises to the city’s tenants. “My goal is to be someone on council who’s trying to whip a council together that could be as supportive of the mayor [as possible] and making sure that we take care of my priorities, and rent stabilization is on the top of my list,” he told Truthout.

“On the municipal level, you can swing these elections by 100 or 200 votes — that’s one union being able to flip direct control of the city. If we can get more and more tenants into these unions, they will have more and more ability to decide who is in or out of office and who actually is going to speak to their needs.”

With pro-tenant changes all but assured in Providence, Denvir told Truthout that Reclaim’s advocacy arm may once again set its sights on the state legislature. “It’s quite possible that we return to the State House, now that Providence has clearly shown the power of the organized working class and the left in Rhode Island, to insist that we get just-cause eviction done,” he said.

The organization’s tenant organizing work will continue as well, and Madison told Truthout he hopes organizers in other cities will take a page from Reclaim’s book and recognize the power of tenant organizing to effect change, especially in local politics. “On the municipal level, you can swing these elections by 100 or 200 votes — that’s one union being able to flip direct control of the city,” he told Truthout. “If we can get more and more tenants into these unions, they will have more and more ability to decide who is in or out of office and who actually is going to speak to their needs.”