When Tara Raghuveer founded KC Tenants in 2019, she saw a big problem for working class renters in Kansas City.
Rents were rising, even as renters were subject to poor living conditions, evictions and predatory landlords. Raghuveer saw that the only way to fix it was organizing tenants to take back their power.
“There’s a voice that’s missing from the conversation, and that voice is people who are people who are actually impacted,” she told KCUR’s Up To Date in 2019. “My theory of change is the people who are closest to the problem are closest to the solutions.”
Raghuveer rallied fed-up tenants, building by building, to form unions and collectively bargain with landlords. KC Tenants quickly turned housing into a primary issue for the city — and one constantly in public view.
Leaders have chained themselves to the doors of the Jackson County Courthouse, rallied in front of a judge’s home and gone on monthslong rent strikes.
Their work has been largely proven effective. KC Tenants was the driver behind the city’s tenant bill of rights, right-to-counsel program and a source-of-income discrimination ban, although the Missouri legislature passed a law making those protections unenforceable. The group also launched a political arm, KC Tenants Power, which got four of its six endorsed candidates elected to Kansas City Council in 2023.
They’ve also gained tangible wins for renters, including improved conditions and lower rents at some of the region’s worst apartment buildings.
“Kansas City is the vanguard for this new methodology in tenant organizing. But it's not altogether new,” Raghuveer said. “What we're doing is, it’ll sound familiar to listeners, because it's in some ways just borrowing from labor organizing.”
Seven years later, a new leader is taking the reins of the organization. Jenay Manley, a longtime leader with KC Tenants who previously ran for City Council, will become the new director. Raghuveer will head up the Tenant Union Federation, an alliance of unions across the United States that KC Tenants helped form.
Under Manley’s leadership, KC Tenants will continue to focus on organizing large apartment buildings.
“For the last three years, rents have continued to go up in Kansas City, and tenants don't know where to go,” Manley told KCUR’s Up To Date. “If we're really going to start getting serious about that, we have to continue to build majority property unions where tenants can say, here's the rent we can afford. Here are the conditions we know we deserve. And we're not going to stop organizing until that's possible.”
- Tara Raghuveer, founder of KC Tenants, director of the Tenant Union Federation
- Jenay Manley, director, KC Tenants
