“You may not have a job or food, but you better pay your rent,” one tenant wrote to the other tenants.“I don't think they realize they just gave us an incredible organizing tool by giving us every single resident's email from EVERY SINGLE BUILDING THEY OWN. A single building doing a rent strike is strong — but residents from every single building unionizing and doing a rent strike is godly,” wrote one tenant.
Marks, a law student who lives in a Saturn Management property in West LA and supports herself with a retail job at a Nike store, said she wasn’t sure whether she was going to be able to pay rent this month. The store had started“I could potentially not have a place to live, so why not go ahead and make this organizing tool,” she said.
“The fact is, now our tenants are banding together, using our error against us, vocalizing their grievances,” Mannheim told Curbed. “But we’ve also had tenants reach out to us to express their apologies for the pack mentality and the nasty correspondence this has caused. Even tenants involved in coordinating the possible rent strike, these are people that—in general—I always thought I had a good relationship with, and now I’m part of the fodder.
Rosy Garibay, 28, lives in a house in Washington, D.C., with five other roommates who all have different sources of income. While she and three of her roommates have been able to telecommute, two have lost most if not all of their work.