A story in Austin American Statesman on April 1 announced the creation of the UT Tenants Union. Congrats to the Statesman and congrats to the students.
Historically, students have been mistreated by landlords, who abuse the transitory nature of students. They take advantage of student’s lack of access to lawyers and their general lack of experience with tenant laws. The AAS story talked about other current ongoing efforts around the country.
PHIT would like to add some Texas history to this story.
The Texas Tenants Union was created in 1973 in east Dallas by the Bois d’arc Patriots. They were a group of young activists concerned about landlord rent gouging and gentrification. It still exists.
Austin established a branch office in 1978. Glenn Scott, founder of People’s History in Texas, was the local director. Her archives now reside in the Briscoe Center for American History and there are, at the minimum, a couple of boxes of the records of the Austin branch. They may not be processed yet, but should be available soon.
In Austin in the 70s, landlords were quite rapacious. The Texas Tenants Union organized rent strikes, advocated for tenants, worked with Austin Tenants Council to change local laws, and raised awareness of shady dealings in the Swede Hill area.
The Texas Tenants Union worked closely with Ron Shorties, who was the UT lawyer for students. His salary was paid with their student fees. He advocated for students and represented them in court. UT seems to have continued this tradition, although bear in mind that lawyers advise and the organizing is conducted by the students and the renters.
A local attorney, Jim Simons, who also was a founding lawyer of the Austin Law Commune, helped write the Texas Tenants Handbook which explained what rights tenants had. Here is a picture of my old and tattered copy.
PHIT produced a short documentary called Defending Dissidents, which used oral history to tell the story of the Austin Law Commune, which existed from 1969 to 1977.
Here are some of the accomplishments of the statewide Texas Tenants Union, pulled from their website.
Establishing the landlord’s duty to repair through a 1978 Texas Supreme Court case brought by a member of the East Dallas Tenants Alliance. The decision was codified in state law in 1979
Expanding protections from retaliation in 2013 to cover tenants who establish, attempt to establish, or participate in a tenant group (and in 1995, to cover tenants standing up for rights granted to them in their lease, or in local, state or federal law)
Establishing the tenants’ right to a complete copy of their lease in 2013;
Prohibiting landlords from making tenants waive their right to a jury trial in 2015
In Austin, the Texas Tenants Newsletter publicly raised the issue of Bromet Properties, a company which, on principle, never returned security deposits. Students and renters had to go to court to get judgments against Bromet, and even then it was difficult to collect. Ultimately, laws had to be changed to allow for damages if the owner did not specify and document expenses.
In Swede Hill, on the east side of I35, a company arbitrarily evicted all the long standing tenants without proper notification. Although the evictions were being challenged in court, the company bulldozed the neighborhood of the affordable rent houses but… they kind of forgot to apply for a demolition permit. TTU helped the tenants get recompense and moving expenses and, by publicizing the problem, prevented the company from profiting from their illegal activities.
The Austin branch also advocated for rent control. Glenn Scott and Richard Croxdale traveled to Santa Monica, the birthplace of the modern rent control movement, to talk to advocates about how to set up a working rent control that would be able to handle rent increases that reflected costs and not just profiteering and greed. TTU had begun raising the issue and talking to the city council when the Savings and Loan Crisis hit Texas and all of sudden rents were reasonable because the crooks all went bust. And Texas went into a depression. The Briscoe Glenn Scott Archives holds a box or two that deals with those studies.
The point of remembering history is so younger folks don’t have to recreate everything. Which is why this Substack offers history that has been forgotten and should be remembered. And the history of tenant organizing in Texas has been mostly lost.