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By: Steve Dubb
This article was originally published by Shelterforce on August 12, 2026.
In the world of movement organizing, few groups in the past decade have undergone a faster demographic transition or greater growth than the Democratic Socialists of America, better known as DSA. Between 2015 and 2017, boosted by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, the average age of DSA members dropped from 64 to about 30, and membership tripled from 8,000 to about 25,000, according to Washington Post reporting. Growth has continued since then. As of December 2025, DSA reportedly had 92,912 members—more than 10 times the number from a decade earlier.
DSA is best known for its electoral organizing. Famously, last year, in New York City, the local DSA chapter played a major role in supporting the successful mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani. But DSA’s organizing extends far beyond elections.
A significant number of local DSA chapters have adopted tenant organizing as a focus of their work. In some communities, the local tenant union and the DSA tenant organizing working group are one and the same. More often, DSA housing organizers and tenant unions are close allies, though they operate independently of each other.
A motivating factor for DSA members is the opportunity to use organizing to make a material difference in people’s lives. This effort to connect with people’s material conditions has deep roots in socialist organizing. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was not uncommon for democratic socialist activists to join labor unions as a way to build stronger bonds with the working class.
As a Jacobin article notes, these efforts echo today in institutions such as the union democracy group Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the publication Labor Notes. DSA similarly supports union organizing through its support for such institutions as the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.
Tenant organizing has now become an important vector of DSA activity alongside labor. There is a history here as well. As John Altas, one of Shelterforce’s founders, explains, Shelterforce itself was founded in 1975 in an environment in which “the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the National Lawyers Guild [were] engaged in tenant organizing in several cities across the country.”
Shanti Singh, a member of DSA San Francisco who has long worked for Tenants Together, a statewide tenant coalition in California, says the 2008 housing crisis drove a resurgence of both tenant unions and DSA.
“Everyone needs housing. … It’s a very easy way to connect people’s everyday lives to larger economic systems,” says Nicole Zimmerman, a member of DSA’s Montgomery County branch in Maryland, adding that this makes it an obvious entry point for power building and political education. “When you’re talking to tenants or talking about landlords, there’s a very clear class divide there. … There’s power in numbers and [in] bringing people together to take on the landlords.”
Singh makes a similar point. “Rent eats first, right?”
Sebastian Fernandez Giraldo, a member of DSA’s North Carolina Triangle chapter, argues that tenant organizing is an easier way for DSA chapters to reach working people than labor organizing because it doesn’t require organizers to first get employed at the worksite to be organized.
Tenant organizing is also powerful, Fernandez Giraldo adds, because it “creates the opportunity for people [who might] otherwise [not] be in touch with each other to talk about their issues and to see how they have a lot in common.”
A National Commitment
The convergence of DSA and tenant organizing dates to 2016, when some local DSA chapters—including Asheville, North Carolina; Flagstaff, Arizona; the San Francisco Bay Area; Chicago; Des Moines; and New York City—launched local tenant organizing efforts. Nationally, DSA established its Housing Justice Commission in 2019.
Allison Geroi, a member of DSA’s Metro DC chapter and an organizer with its tenant organizing affiliate Stomp Out Slumlords, wrote in a description of DSA’s 2019 convention that there was support for tenant organizing but also a concern that a national resolution might lead the national body to push a favored approach and discourage local experimentation. This concern was addressed by an agreement that the “national housing group would function primarily as a space to share resources and develop a strategy for national targets, rather than a campaign-in-a-box that would be exported to locals.”
By the time this language was developed, support was strong, but other delays made it “clear that we would not reach the housing section of the agenda.” Supporters felt strongly enough that housing should be a DSA priority that they “actually ran up to the stage right as the convention was about to end and pushed that resolution through,” recalls Singh, who was among the delegates who did so.
In 2021, buoyed by an uptick in tenant organizing across the country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the national DSA passed a resolution that established “housing justice, with a focus on tenant organizing, as a national priority campaign”; dedicated the equivalent of one full-time position of national staff time to support local tenant organizing efforts; and “establish[ed] a permanent and ongoing train-the-trainers education curriculum and regular intake of new organizers seeking to establish or strengthen tenant organizing programs in their chapters.”
In 2022, DSA implemented that resolution by launching a national tenant organizer training program, the Emergency Tenants Organizing Committee (ETOC), which “connected with over a dozen DSA chapters to share experiences and learn about their on-the-ground local organizing.” By 2023, it had trained 18 DSA chapters and mentored 14 new local tenant unions “from as far west as Honolulu to as far east as East Tampa.” Between 2023 and 2025, nearly 300 tenant organizers participated in ETOC trainings, and DSA members contributed to the formation of eight new tenant unions.
DSA’s support of tenant organizing was reinforced in 2023 through additional training, funding, and a commitment to translating organizing materials (especially into Spanish). In 2025, the national convention committed to undertaking a national mapping assessment of tenant organizing capacity and sought to link workplace and tenant struggles under a nationwide campaign with the theme of: “Organize your workplace, organize your building.”
Building Power, Community by Community
Although tenant organizing has become a high priority at the national level, DSA is a highly decentralized organization in which local chapters have considerable autonomy; not all of them have made tenant organizing a core part of their work. Those that have embraced tenant organizing have adopted varied approaches, depending on their local conditions.
Mark Firla, who actively participated in DSA and tenant organizing in Connecticut between 2020 and 2023, relates that he and some of his fellow DSA members realized that there were unutilized state and local tenant protections on the books that they could use to generate interest among tenants and help them flex their political muscles. For example, a state statute allows the formation of local fair rent commissions to examine and eliminate excessive rental charges, and New Haven, where Firla lives, has had one since 1984.
More than 70 percent of New Haven’s population are renters. This means the city has considerable, if latent, tenant political power. Firla says DSA worked to activate that power by “literally cold knocking doors and saying, ‘Hey, who’s your landlord? Do you have issues? Are they responsive?’” and then pushing the city to implement or enforce preexisting rules. This had concrete effects in terms of increasing local political power; it enabled the chapter to position itself to help lead a lobbying effort to pass a statewide right-to-counsel law in 2021. “One of the outcomes that the state has seen over the last three, four, five years is much more significant involvement [among] organized tenants,” says Firla, which, he adds, is likely why a lot more cities in the state now have fair rent commissions.
But from a DSA perspective, Firla says, the power-building opportunity that tenant organizing provides has largely been squandered in the state. “If you’ve got a town of 20,000 people … and you have 200 organized community members or tenants, and those folks are willing to go work for a politician or work against a politician … they’re going to have a profoundly outsized impact,” he says. Instead, however, according to Firla, tenant organizers and DSA largely parted ways, and he argues that the state’s tenant organizing looks more like traditional lobbying.
In Albany, New York, the relationship between DSA and the local tenant union has been much more symbiotic, according to Bebhinn Francis, who is both a Capital District DSA (CDDSA) member and lead tenant organizer at United Tenants of Albany (UTA).
UTA, which was founded more than 50 years ago, is clearly independent of DSA. It receives its tenant union training from the Tenant Union Federation, not from DSA’s ETOC program, says Francis.
But in terms of the actual work of forming and supporting tenant unions, UTA and CDDSA are highly integrated. Without DSA volunteers, UTA’s tenant union organizing program would effectively consist of only Francis. Francis goes so far as to say that without the work of CDDSA members, the local tenant movement “would not even exist.”
With DSA volunteers, however, the situation is quite different. Working with CDDSA, Francis has helped lead eight large tenant union building campaigns, with the largest building housing 250 families. The people power from DSA greatly speeds operations: At one 150-unit building, Francis says, the team of door knockers from the CDDSA housing committee enabled organizers to amass 62 percent support for a tenant union in just three days.
“CDDSA and I work hands-on throughout this process,” says Francis. “CDDSA helps with the outreach, the sign-ins. … When a tenant is afraid to give testimony for whatever reason … it’s a Capital District DSA member who reads that testimony on behalf of the tenant.”
In North Carolina, the level of integration between DSA and tenant organizers is less pronounced than in Albany but more pronounced than in Connecticut. Another difference from Connecticut is that North Carolina lacked tenant-friendly policies or political environments at the state or local level. Therefore, the approach of making existing policies work for tenants was not available.
Tenant and housing organizing in North Carolina, in short, often had to start from the ground up. Fernandez Giraldo joined the Raleigh branch of DSA’s North Carolina Triangle chapter in 2018 and became very active in Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. After that campaign fell short, he saw the 2020 eviction moratorium as an extraordinary opportunity to reach people where they were and engage them politically.
Fernandez Giraldo and a friend looked up addresses where evictions had been filed. “We figured out which ones were apartments,” he says, “and we would knock on every door in the apartment complex, and be like, ‘Hey, you’ve got these rights. There [are] also these resources that you can access.’” Slowly, he says, others within the DSA chapter joined in, eventually connecting with people in Chapel Hill and Durham to create the Triangle Tenant Union. The union includes DSA members, but it is institutionally autonomous.
Fernandez Giraldo notes that the Raleigh City Council is “very right-wing, very controlled by real estate.” Other DSA chapters in North Carolina faced similar situations with their city councils, so they independently decided to focus on building tenant-union infrastructure and later linking up to create a statewide network of city- or regional-level groups. In 2024, with support from the Cypress Fund, a local philanthropic group, these groups formed the North Carolina Tenants Union. As with the Triangle Tenant Union, the tenant groups intentionally remain politically autonomous, even though many of their organizers are also DSA members.
Perhaps ironically, given that the initial focus on tenant unions stemmed in part from local policy not looking promising, the new statewide tenant infrastructure is beginning to enable tenant organizing groups to advance policy at the local level. A major breakthrough occurred last fall in Durham, where, after years of tenant advocacy being stymied, the city council passed a resolution strengthening habitability rules. Tenant organizers are already mobilizing at the building level to remedy unsafe conditions.
In Washington, D.C., the pandemic fueled a DSA chapter’s tenant organizing. Metro DC DSA already had a directly affiliated tenant organizing project, Stomp Out Slumlords, but it grew sharply from 2020 to 2021, increasing from 13 to more than 40 organizers and from 7 to 20 sites.
In fall 2025, tenants organized by Stomp Out Slumlords won a $41 million judgment in a case brought by the tenant association and the District of Columbia against the former owners of Marbury Plaza apartments in Anacostia. In her order, Superior Court Judge Yvonne Williams noted that mold remediation had been “required in 645 of 672 individual units and all 98 common areas.”
Zimmerman says Montgomery County, Maryland, has focused first on achieving policy wins, notably the passage of a rent stabilization ordinance in 2023, while D.C. proper has focused more on building tenant unions to stand up to landlords directly. Zimmerman serves on a coordinating committee that seeks to bridge the two strategies by advising the D.C. group on policy issues and connecting folks in Montgomery County with DSA Stomp Out Slumlords tenant organizers in D.C. when Maryland tenants are seeking to organize a building.
In California regions with preexisting tenant organizing, such as the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the DSA chapters can directly channel electoral energy into housing, through initiatives such as right to counsel and taxing vacant apartment units. DSA San Francisco has enough political energy around housing to maintain two working groups, one on tenant organizing and one on social housing, says Singh.
In other, more traditionally conservative regions of the state, such as the Central Valley, Inland Empire, and Orange County, Singh says, tenant unions are a newer phenomenon, and DSA chapters are helping many of them get off the ground. “Our dream,” she says, “is that every city in California above 100,000 people should have a tenant union.”
Negotiating Tensions
Firla notes that DSA chapters getting into tenant organizing face the familiar tension between pursuing the kinds of wins achievable by professional tenant association staff and the leadership development at the heart of successful long-term organizing. While the D.C. tenant union is an official DSA affiliate, this is not the norm.
Formally, as stated in DSA’s 2025 housing justice resolution, the organization’s goal is “to create and strengthen tenant unions led democratically by rank-and-file tenants and not NGOs.” But maintaining a “rank-and-file” orientation can be easier said than done when funding often depends on philanthropy, with rank-and-file dues collections often secondary.
A 2023 report from Stomp Out Slumlords captures this tension: “Organizational institutionalization in the current context virtually requires becoming a grant-seeking nonprofit and all of the restrictions on political advocacy and militancy that entails. At the outer limit of our hopes in 2021 was a collective entity with a thousand dues-paying members, but even if that were achieved and dues were set at $100 a year (well beyond most tenants’ actual willingness to pay), this would only support a single staff member and no office space.”
According to Firla, in Connecticut, a lack of political education weakens the power that could come from tenant organizing. It’s “a really exciting opportunity,” he says, “if you can get folks to understand that same set of facts and have a broader understanding of who … we are as a community, and how we can exercise power that, in many cases, working people don’t understand they have.”
Francis also emphasizes the importance of political education in maintaining alignment between DSA volunteers and tenants in tenant union organizing. “We’re really, really clear in our political education when we’re communicating with our tenants about lines of division and what class is,” she says. “There’s basically the ruling class and the working class. And even though our paychecks might vary in what they look like … we are all closer to the homeless side of this equation than the big CEO who’s owning these buildings, sitting in their mansion … in New Jersey.”
Tenant Power Drives Electoral Wins
DSA’s electoral ambitions have benefited from its focus on tenant issues. This may be particularly evident in New York, where DSA members have secured high-ranking political positions and advanced housing policy. For instance, State Sen. Julia Salazar, the first New York DSA member elected to the New York State Senate (in 2018), has consistently run on housing issues. In April 2026, Salazar introduced the Tenant Power Act to create legal protections for tenant unions. In New York City, a call to freeze the rent for rent-stabilized apartments—realized in late June—helped propel Mamdani to victory.
In Washington, D.C., Aparna Raj, a DSA-backed tenant organizer, won the Democratic Party primary for city council in Ward 1, typically tantamount to winning the general election. Her campaign, notes The 51st, centered on housing and “addressing the District’s affordability problem.” Janeese Lewis George, D.C.’s Democratic mayoral nominee (and hence the city’s presumptive next mayor), is also a democratic socialist and won with the endorsement and active support of Metro DC DSA.
In San Francisco, Singh notes, tenant and electoral organizing are often intertwined. “A lot of our electoral stuff has to do with housing,” she notes, including a ballot measure in 2026 that would raise $100 million for affordable housing in the city.
As Singh says, “You can’t have economic [justice] and leave real estate capital untouched.”
Steve Dubb is strategic initiatives editor at Shelterforce. Prior to Shelterforce, Steve worked as senior editor of economic justice at Nonprofit Quarterly. Before that, he worked at The Democracy Collaborative … and was also previously the executive director of NASCO (North American Students of Cooperation), a U.S. and Canadian association of housing cooperatives, focused on campus communities. Steve has authored and edited multiple books. Most recently, he co-edited (with Raymond Foxworth) Invisible No More: Voices from Native America (Island Press, 2023). Steve is based in Boston, Massachusetts, and actively volunteers in the area with multiple groups on economic justice work.
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