Five tenant unions from across the country met Tuesday to announce the formation of a new national organization to challenge the power of multi-state real estate capital. The Tenant Union Federation is the first major national initiative to organize tenants in forty years.

“Every tenant deserves a union – everyone deserves to move with the power that I found here,” Donna Goldsmith, organizer with the Louisville Tenants Union (one of the association’s founding members), told a virtual audience of tenants from across the country.

After the murder of her daughter and two grandchildren more than a decade ago, Goldsmith moved to a senior living facility in Louisville to make a fresh start. When her apartment was regularly flooded, she joined the Louisville Tenants Association. She was skeptical at first, but by building an ongoing campaign for better conditions, ​“I found other people like me,” she said. ​“Now all I think about is the Tenants Association.”

The association calls itself a ​“union of unions” and is building a movement with the hope of turning tenants into a political force that cannot be ignored.

At the local level, the group’s five founding unions already have an impressive record of success, spanning a wide range of organizing tactics.

Last year, the Louisville Tenants Union passed sweeping restrictions on public funds, contributing to gentrification in Louisville. KC Tenants blocked a billionaire-funded stadium tax in Kansas City. Bozeman Tenants United banned new short-term rentals and elected one of them mayor of Montana’s tourism hotspot. The Connecticut Tenants Union negotiated a collective bargaining agreement with one of New Haven’s largest landlords, and Chicago’s Not Me We won referendums in support of a landmark anti-displacement ordinance in the area surrounding the new Obama Presidential Center.

But at a time of increasing housing consolidation, these groups say there’s only so much they can do by organizing within city limits, because their landlords’ power and portfolios extend much further.

The new association aims to train and support other young tenants’ organizations, test fee-based membership models, establish contacts with unions and assess members’ willingness to take coordinated actions such as rent strikes.

The renters’ movement just scored a major message victory when President Joe Biden announced a plan to curb rent increases. It also continues to campaign on a plan that links government funding for housing with strong renter protections. Last week, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris echoed Biden’s support for rent caps at her first major campaign rally in Atlanta. A new poll of likely voters in swing states commissioned by Bernie Sanders shows that 63 percent of voters would be more likely to support a candidate who supports such policies.

It’s not the first time renters have tried to launch a national movement – but it’s the first major attempt of its kind in nearly four decades.

In 1979, when an earlier era of rampant inflation was roiling the housing market, fifty tenant organizations met in Newark, New Jersey, to launch a campaign for tenants’ rights. In these times An article this year noted that the groups shared common local policy goals, such as capping rents and enforcing building codes, and shared a common enemy in the form of a newly formed national lobby group for landlords.

The National Tenants Union, which was formed soon after, successfully fended off attempts by the real estate industry to pass legislation that would cut federal housing subsidies to cities that had adopted rent controls. But tenants had a hard time finding a counterweight to the landlord lobby in the form of their own national campaign, recalls Woody Widrow, an organizer of the group in the 1980s.

“We couldn’t get a national focus,” says Widrow, who later led the nonprofit Raise Texas. While the national tenants union acted as a clearinghouse for local efforts, most of the successes came in the form of new state and local rent control laws. Real estate forces regrouped and began passing a wave of state preemption laws in the 1980s that slowed the movement’s momentum. The National Tenants Union fizzled out within a few years — but Widrow says he’s encouraged to see a new generation taking the lead and setting their sights on common goals.

That tenants will prevail is “not a given,” says Tara Raghuveer, director of the tenants’ association and founder and director of KC Tenants. “But tenants are turning rent increases, moldy bathrooms and eviction nightmares into power, and tenants are starting to win.”