T. Sinclair sat down with Bradley Davis, steering member of the Portland Tenants’ Union, which has recently helped win a case where it was ruled $34,000 in illegal rent violations must be paid back to tenants.
TS: Thanks for making time for us today. To start, there’s been some confusion in the local media as to how the Portland Tenants Union (PTU) was established. Some people have said it comes from former Mayor Ethan Strimling’s efforts with the Trelawny Tenants Union. Others have said that you were the founder. And so can you clarify it, how did the PTU get started?
That’s a good question. PTU started last year following my own personal landlord retaliation experience. There were a lot of things that we learned about how the city handles tenant complaints and who has the authority to allege a complaint for somebody else. And something that we were told by the city multiple times is that an individual cannot allege a violation for another individual. So, hypothetically, if I’m living in a building and the building is unregistered and I’m being charged illegal rent and I have all the proof for it and I go to the city and complain about it, I cannot loop in my upstairs neighbor on that complaint.
They would require that person to stick their neck out and go against their landlord and put themselves at risk to even look into the situation. It’s a very anti-tenant perspective. So, we needed to create an organization that can have the legal standing to represent an entire group, we needed to create a citywide tenants union. At the time, I was working with the Portland Local Campaign Committee, an arm of Maine DSA, and all of these issues with tenants’ rights, rent control, and enforcement from the city were stuff that we were all really passionate about. And so we decided to grow it.
TS: Now that it’s established, how does the union operate internally?
We want there to be elected representatives of tenants. We want decision making to be shared with everybody who is a member. In order to make that happen, we currently have a steering committee. I would say there’s roughly a dozen people that have been administering meetings, a large email list, and social media posts reaching over ten thousand. We’re just trying to grow our membership and let people know that the organization exists and that there are people who are fighting for their rights.
Right now, we have three areas of focus for the tenants union. We have a “complaints & research” group, which has been fielding communications that we get from tenants. An “events and membership” group, which is focusing on growing our membership engagement. And finally, a “communications and education” group. This handles a lot of our social media and extends education about tenants rights in Portland.
Our recent win in getting landlords to pay back $34,000 to tenants in rent violations has really helped showcase what we can do when we come together, and right now we’re just hoping to get more people involved.
TS: City Councilor Wes Pelletier recently lamented that it’s been too incumbent upon tenants to challenge rental offenses, and he wants the city to be more proactive. Why do you think a tenants’ union is necessary right now, and in what ways has the City of Portland not been proactive?
The Portland Tenants Union needs to exist right now because there’s been a severe lack of enforcement of rent control and rental registration from the City of Portland in the past five years that rent control has existed. They only hired a dedicated rent control inspector, I believe, in December 2023, which was years after rent control was actually in place. Up until that point, it was 100% on tenants to have to bring forward any sort of rent control violation, and they were sticking their necks out without a union.
Before then, it is very clear that the city was not actively verifying any data points from landlord registration forms. Not only that, they weren’t even doing the math on the forms to see if rent increases were legal. We’ve seen cases where the numbers in the city’s own data are illegal, but the city doesn’t catch it, because they’re waiting on tenants to call them out for it. So, finally this past year, they have started to audit buildings and look at data proactively. I believe they said as of late they’ve gotten through 18% of units, which is far too low for the fact that we are potentially sitting on four plus years of unverified data.
The tenants union needs to hold the city accountable to enforce the laws that its citizens passed. Whether landlords like it or not, rent control passed, was expanded, and was defended in three separate elections, and it is here to stay, it is the will of the people of Portland. We get the sense that the City is not very happy with the rent control laws, that they think they’re too ambiguous, and it seems like they really don’t want to have to go to court to fine a landlord for breaking rent control laws. But at the end of the day that is the city’s obligation, to enforce the laws that its people have put into place. And so our job and our role as we see it is to push the City to be more proactive in their enforcement of rent control.
TS: What are some more serious issues or loopholes you have seen landlords try to exploit? For context: you folks just won $34,000 in back-owed rent for tenants on St. George Street because the landlords were charging illegal fees.
So, additional fees on top of rent are something that we have seen historically over the past few years. And the city has set the record straight on the legality of those fees, but still landlords think they can charge them to get around rent control. They’ll say, “Okay, fine. Your rent is going up the allowable amount, but your parking fee just got raised $300 or now your pet fee is $400 a month.” To some extent there isn’t a lot of clear language on some of those fees.
Pet fees in particular are one thing that we are very interested in. And, we have people reaching out to us even this past week saying that their building just got bought by new owners who are saying to get the units up to market rate they’re gonna be increasing the fees for storage and the driveway and pet fees. And if you opt out of the driveway and storage, then they’re just gonna hike the pet fee anyway, to get to market rates. So it is clear what they’re trying to do.
They are trying to get more profit from their tenants than is allowable by rent control, but at that point it’s on the city to bring down the hammer and say, no, you can’t take advantage of tenants like that.
There’s also hundreds of units in the city with $0 registered rents. Another loophole that we see a lot is the claiming of owner occupied status in order to get exempt from rent control. For example, some will claim a building is owner occupied if a family member lives in the building, which is not considered legally owner-occupied, it has to actually be the owner’s primary residence.
TS: Since the tenant movement has taken off in Portland, we’ve seen tenant movements start to pick up in other places. For example, in Brunswick there’s the Brunswick Renters Organization (BRO), and just recently in Saco there’s been a group starting to organize tenants. For these new burgeoning movements, what advice would you give?
Yeah. I mean, to be fair, I don’t know how qualified we are to give advice since I know BRO is technically older than we are. What I will say in terms of tenant organizing as someone who is not experienced in organizing prior to being thrust into it, unwillingly, I think that it’s important to get people on board with fighting back against the isolation and individualism that living in this capitalist housing system has forced upon us.
The system is designed to keep landlords in charge, to keep tenants alone and having to fight for themselves and thinking that they are in the minority and have no power. And what we and other tenant organizers historically have realized is once we get together and say, “hey, we live here, we are this community, we want our needs to be met,” there is power in that and there is democracy to be had in that. And the more people that you can get on board and the larger coalition you can build, the more power that you get.
Other cities across the country have shown that they are more willing to fight for tenants than the City of Portland. There was a story out of Las Vegas, someone was operating an unregistered AirBnB for multiple years, got multiple violations, and the city council went to court to try and fine him almost a hundred thousand dollars. And because of how the court proceedings went, that fine went through. That is the city council of Las Vegas that went to bat for tenants across the city and put a hundred thousand dollar fine on just one guy operating an unregistered unit.
There’s also talk in New York City right now of utilizing their structures in place to repossess buildings that are not up to code and put them in the hands of the city and tenants. They are willing to go to bat against landlords that are violating the law, And I would love to see Portland, Maine fight for its community members in even half of that capacity.
TS: Thank you for your time, Bradley, feel free to say whatever you want here to wrap it up and let folks know where to find you.
Folks can follow us on Instagram, @portlandtenantsunion. Come join us for a meeting. We have general meetings on the first Wednesday of every month. People can go to our website, portlandtenantsunion.org, to learn more about their rights as well as sign up to become members of the union. And we are just trying to bring as many people in as we can, to fight for everything that we’ve been talking about.
I think to close it off, and I don’t know if this is gonna be a very good closing statement, but another thing that I’ve been thinking about after reading Abolish Rent, I think that the only path forward for true tenant emancipation is to decouple profitability from housing ownership. For as long as it is profitable to just own a building, tenants will always lose. The only way that tenants win is if housing returns to what it was initially meant to be, a place to live for you and your family to live in community. And as long as the profit motive exists for owning a building, tenants will lose at the end of the day. And we’ve talked about plenty of ways to fight back against that, whether that’s in enforcing rent control, whether that is looking into social housing, which the City of Portland is now starting to do, finding ways to return housing to just a place where people live and not an infinite money glitch because you got lucky in being born with the wealth that you have. That is the end goal.
