Here's a story about a trailer park, a tenant union, and a bully who thought he could dismiss poor people in Kansas City and get away with it. (Spoiler: He didn't.)

In 2021 @KCTenants organized Heart Village Mobile Homes when the County evicted the residents to build a jail. Dan Tarwater, a longtime County legislator, was a leading proponent, calling the trailer park the "perfect" site for the jail, thinking nothing of the 120+ families who would be displaced as a result. KC Tenants went door-to-door and organized the 111 households into a union.

It's impossible for me to tell you how it feels for thousands of people in Kansas City to vote with the tenant union. We've knocked doors and talked to people who don't know there's an election, don't know a candidate's name, but they know the tenant union. The stuff of dreams. @KCTenants and @KCTenantsPower have changed Kansas City forever. It's not one election, it's not one candidate. It's a powerful collective of people who are clear on what we deserve, they're willing to fight for it, they're organizing across all lines of difference to get it.

An inflation reduction strategy that doesn’t prioritize rent regulation is doomed. Housing costs are American households’ biggest monthly expense, and rent is a key driver of core inflation. Now is the time for federal action to regulate rents, by any/all means necessary. Rent is different than gas. Gas prices will go down. Rents… don’t go down. Landlords charge rents—not based on the condition or quality of our homes—but on whatever the market will allow. It’s the Wild West out there.

The courts are just one venue for eviction. Landlords use all sorts of means to displace tenants and these are evictions, too: rent hikes, lease non-renewal, sale of property, refusal to accept assistance/vouchers, harassment, threats, utility shut offs, uninhabitable conditions. If you're looking only at formal eviction data to understand how landlords are pushing tenants out, you're missing a much bigger story. The court numbers don't account for the power that landlords have over their tenants in a world where tenants have almost no protected rights.

I can't believe that no one has written a scathing exposé about how Missouri has evicted people BY CONFERENCE CALL for five months.

For the love of all things good and holy, please slide into my DMs if you want to write this story. The Courts have provided zero guidance to tenants about how they're supposed to join their eviction proceeding if they don't have a device, if they don't have internet, or if they have a disability.

Eviction is voter suppression. Poverty is voter suppression. Forcing people to hustle between multiple jobs so they can pay rent is voter suppression. Stealing people's time and labor through patchwork social services and labyrinthine bureaucracies is voter suppression. How can people be motivated to participate in an election if they've lost work, they're being evicted, they're living in their car, they're paying everything they have to stay in a motel? What remaining bandwidth will people have to go out and vote?

Today @BernieSanders previewed his housing plan. We have to take a moment to acknowledge something major: his plan comes from movement demands to upend the housing system, to put people over profit, to move more housing off the market and into public hands. Most Americans spend most of their income on housing. And yet, housing has been ignored in national politics. It was basically a non-issue in 2016. Now, Bernie joins Warren, Booker, Harris, Castro in presenting a housing agenda. That happened because the movement demanded it.

Today is historic. People impacted by the housing crisis are proposing a #HomesGuarantee: a complete overhaul of our economy, and a vision to eradicate housing insecurity and homelessness once and for all. Nothing short of this will do: homesguarantee.com The #HomesGuarantee: 12 mill social housing units, massive reinvestment in public housing, a tenant bill of rights including universal rent control, reparations. A climate and racial justice intervention, it’s what we need to meet the scale, breadth, depth of the housing crisis