The Madison Tenant Union was
formed in the aftermath of two important battles in the history of
tenants’ rights in the United States. From 1963 to 1965, tenants in
Harlem protested poor living conditions with pickets and rent
strikes. This mass tenant mobilization won a series of significant
victories. The City Buildings Department conducted its first
large-scale inspection of slums since the 1930s. The MFY Legal
Services Unit, which offered free legal aid to low-income tenants,
was founded, as was the Tenement Housing Program, which kept records
of the worst slumlords in New York City and coordinated legal action
against them. The city government established the Emergency Repair
Program, an agency designed to facilitate maintenance in slums where
landlords seldom responded to tenants’ requests for repairs.
Tenant militancy spread from
the East Coast to Madison, and calls for a city-wide tenant union
organization began in 1967, and the first general meeting of the
Madison Tenant Union (MTU) was in September 1969. Fifty people
attended the first meeting. Half of those in attendance were
students. The organizers agreed on two priorities: making sure that
the tenant union was not primarily an on-campus project; and moving
beyond the rent strike. Rent strikes in a single neighborhood were a
popular at the time and highly effective tactic in some cases. MTU
decided to use a labor-union model of organizing, where rent strikes
would be only one of many tactics used to fight for tenants’
rights. They organized tenants into unions that would engage in
collective bargaining with landlords. They also offered one-on-one
tenant counseling and education locally and around the state. They
published a monthly newsletter, and they lobbied at the state and
local levels of government.
Some key figures in the
early history of MTU were Phil Ball (later an aide to Mayor Soglin),
Eugene Parks (a future alderperson), and Paul Soglin. To get the
union started, they did door-to-door membership solicitations and
researched landlords and property holdings of politicians.
By 1970, MTU had established
its first area local in the Miffland neighborhood. Then gubernatorial
candidate Patrick Lucey sold five parcels of land in that
neighborhood to real estate developer William Bandy. Bandy told the
residents in those properties, known as the Mifflin collective, that
he would not raise the rent and that they would have first option to
purchase the land if he ever decided to sell it. Within days,
residents learned that he had already commissioned an architect to
make plans for a high-rise development on the land and that Bandy
intended to sell the properties to a Milwaukee firm that would raise
the rent from $800 to $1500. Bandy refused to negotiate, and the
Mifflin Collective began a rent strike. In response, Bandy leased the
houses to the C. C. Riders, a motorcycle gang, with the expectation
that the gang would forcibly evict the Mifflin Collective. The
Collective armed and barricaded themselves in their houses. A series
of conflicts and months of tension eventually led to a stalemate. The
houses were abandoned and eventually destroyed to make way for a
development.
In December 1969, MTU
organized tenants living in properties owned by landlord Phil Engin.
Ninety tenants went on rent strike to protest Engin’s failure to
make needed repairs. Engin sued MTU for conspiracy, and MTY
countersued, asserting that Engin and several other Madison landlords
were conspiring to fix rent prices. MTU and Engin eventually settled
out of court. No tenants were evicted, but MTU had to pay some
tenants’ rent to prevent their eviction (approximately $5,000).
This was an immense expense for the organization.
In the early 1970s, MTU
moved into outlying neighborhoods, establishing tenant unions in the
Sherman Terrace buildings among other places. Several student tenant
unions also formed during this period. The recession in 1973-75 and a
downturn in local activism made this a relatively quiet period in the
history of MTU. MTU was understaffed and organizers underpaid.
MTU gained new life in the
mid-1970s with new sources of revenue and organizing power. The
organization raised money by selling Tenants’ Rights in
Wisconsin, an informational pamphlet, and it received several
major grants. Also, the city of Madison funded a grievance program.
In 1977, the city government
passed the Rental Relations Ordinance, a law that stipulated that,
when fifty-one percent of tenants living in a property decided to
form a union, they had the right to bargain collectively with their
landlord. The ordinance had a sunset clause set for three years
later. The law was a compromise, passed to appease demands for rent
control, which was subsequently banned by an amendment to the state
constitution.
The ordinance initiated
something of a golden age for tenant organizing in Madison. A board
of three tenants, three landlords, and three homeowners was convened
by the city to administer the ordinance. The board heard complaints
about failure to do good faith collective bargaining. Empowered by
this ordinance, many tenants formed unions. The landlords in Madison
immediately fought back, hiring local attorney Fred Mohs to represent
them before the board. Landlords also put pressure on moderates on
the city board to prevent the rental relations board from being
renewed. This effort was successful, and the ordinance ceased to be
in effect in 1980.
MTU’s organizing efforts
were not limited to Madison. In 1979, MTU created the Coalition on
Landlord Tenant Reform, a statewide group of organizations and
individuals interested in protecting tenants’ rights. Through
COLTR, MTU worked to strengthen tenants’ rights in the state law,
and their efforts are responsible for many of the consumer
protections Wisconsin tenants enjoy in Chapter 134 or the ATCP Code.
In 1980, sensing the threat
posed by landlords’ opposition to MTU, the organization split into
two organizations: the Tenant Resource Center, a 501(c)3 tasked
solely with providing information to tenants and landlords; and MTU,
a 501(c)4 still capable of political activity. This proved to be a
smart move, because the Apartment Association (a landlord
organization) would eventually outmaneuver MTU. One of the final
blows dealt to MTU in the early 1980s concerned a large grant of
$30,000 that MTU had won from the Campaign for Human Development, a
national charity run by the Catholic Church. The Apartment
Association pressured the local bishop by threatening to withhold
contributions to local parishes if the grant went through. As a
result, the local bishop stepped in and blocked the national
organization’s grant. MTU struggled on for a few years, and
eventually closed its doors for good in 1985.
