Emery Brush and Michael Plowman went door to door on Friday at the three buildings that make up the Brentwood Apartments near Loring Park in Minneapolis. Since the Brentwood Tenant Union formed earlier this year, canvassing is routine for them. This time, it was to check which apartments were vacant and update them on the outcome of litigation against their landlord.
After two consecutive winters of erratic heating in the apartments, things came to a head when the buildings didn’t have heat and water for six days this January. “It was cold as [expletive] in here,” said one of the tenants. “I went to my mom’s to stay.”
Frustrated by months of inaction by the landlord, the residents decided to form a tenants union.
It’s a tool more advocates are pushing to bring property owners to the table and address tenants’ needs, said Edaín Altamirano, organizing director at Renters United for Justice, a tenants’ rights nonprofit. “At the end of the day, the landlord doesn’t live in the buildings, and they don’t know what is happening most of the time in the building,” she said.
According to Home Line, a nonprofit tenant advocacy organization that offers free legal services to tenants through its hotline, there was a 4% increase in the number of tenants reaching out for support compared to last year. Their biggest grievances? Repairs and evictions.
Brush was one of the tenants who started putting out flyers to urge other tenants to call 311, leave notes about their apartment issues, form a group chat, and eventually, start meeting. Now, over half the occupants of the 102-unit complex are part of the Brentwood Tenants Union.
“I wasn’t aware of my rights as much, so we didn’t really get together,” said Brush, who is a board member of the union. “I truly believe that that issue, or several other issues in the building, would not have been addressed had we not organized in the way that we have.”
Through litigation against the landlord, the Brentwood Tenants Union reached a tentative agreement that the residents who lived in Brentwood last winter will have one month’s rent relief.
He said that besides getting issues addressed by their landlord — locks on doors, regular security and ongoing efforts to fix heating issues completely — the union has also brought the neighbors together. “I didn’t know any of my neighbors. And now, I know most people in all three of the buildings.”
One of the larger groups, the year-old South Minneapolis Tenant Union meets with South Side tenants every week to discuss and address their grievances. And they are seeing increasing engagement and participation in their meetings, said Nadia Langley, member and organizer with the union.
Langley said that the union has also conducted training for members on how to better understand the terms of their leases, look up their landlords and their offices in the city, and how to respond in case of immigration enforcement agents in their neighborhoods.
Organizers like Ivory Taylor, the associate director at the nonprofit Housing Justice Center, say tenant unions give residents collective bargaining power over their homes and living conditions. “It’s much easier for [a landlord] to ignore one person complaining about a thing,” she said, “but when a group comes together, it’s much harder to dismiss that.”
Tenant unions aren’t new, but community organizers say that they are seeing more and more tenants in the Twin Cities wanting to organize, and that many of these demands come from low-income tenants of color and immigrant families.
“The inquiries that we’re getting about organizing have increased exponentially,” said Regan Reeck, managing organizer at Home Line which also provides training to tenants on how to form a union. She added that tenant unions also offer collective protection to tenants who are particularly vulnerable, like immigrants, LGBTQ renters and elders.
Minnesota has had a persistent home ownership gap along racial lines. A 2025 state report reveals gains for some groups, including Dakota and Asian households. But Black, Native and Latino rates of homeownships are still about 20 points behind white households, meaning Minnesotans of color are more likely to be renters.
“These are people that are more susceptible to exploitation, and that don’t have as many resources to access a lawyer to fight their rights being violated,” said Taylor. “People that don’t have as many choices in their housing situations are going to be the people that turn to organizing.”
Tenants and housing rights advocates say that absentee landlords are often difficult to reach, slow to respond to maintenance issues, and unfamiliar with the conditions their tenants are living in.
A growing number of out-of-state property owners investing in the Twin Cities has only added to that. At the Blaisdell Apartments in south Minneapolis, for example, tenants say a lack of engagement from ownership has left them with uninhabitable living conditions for months.
Residents at 2119 Pillsbury Ave., one of the buildings in the complex, which is owned by the Investment Property Group, voted to form a tenants union in August.
The vote came just weeks after the Utah-based property management group settled a $5 million lawsuit with the state over excessive utility fees. Earlier in March, Blaisdell tenants had protested pre-eviction notices from the company.
The tenants delivered a set of demands to property managers in August immediately after the vote, calling for the company to resolve outstanding maintenance issues and immediately freeze rent.
Yasmin Isse, a long-term resident of the building, told Sahan Journal at the time that she hoped the united front of the union would not only secure the current demands but also give them the agency to have a say in building maintenance and ownership in the future. “Because we have a union, we have hope,” she said.
Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis shows that in 2022, 10% of single-unit family rentals in the Twin Cities are owned by large investors, and over 81% of them are from out of the state.
Taylor said that in the face of “unchecked power by landlords” more tenants in market-rate housing have been pushed to form unions “to get some more public visibility around their issues.” These efforts have now led to policy change in Minnesota ensuring protections against retaliation for renters who join unions.
Earlier this year, a new law called the Tenant’s Right to Organize went into effect. Sponsored by State Rep. Esther Agbaje and Sen. Zaynab Mohamed, the law encourages tenants to form unions, and even penalizes landlords who retaliate by increasing the rent, evicting tenants, or reporting immigrant tenants to law enforcement.
Agbaje told Sahan Journal that this legislation aims to “level the playing field by explicitly making these retaliatory actions illegal, giving tenants a clear legal recourse to defend themselves.”
“I hope more renters and renter coalitions across our state feel empowered to voice their concerns about inadequate or potentially dangerous living conditions that affect their health or the well-being of their families,” she added.
