Source: Bloomberg City Lab

Date: 9.22.2025

Link: Tenants Seek to Unionize One Private Equity Firm’s Entire Housing Portfolio

Affordable housing tenants are launching a novel approach towards government oversight and gaining concessions from under-performing landlords: a coordinated union drive. This union drive by tenants of Capital Realty Group, one of the nation’s largest private equity-backed affordable housing owners, is an unprecedented effort to negotiate collective agreements across the company’s entire 22,000-unit portfolio. While framed around basic issues like mold, pests, and repairs, the campaign highlights growing concerns around the impact of private equity and large landlords in shaping the nation’s affordable housing stock. These landlords are typically disincentivized to improve tenant well-being, motivated instead by reducing costs to increase investor returns. Meanwhile, these group’s business portfolio consolidation strategies have resulted in entire affordable housing stocks becoming owned by a single landlord in some communities, leaving tenants facing affordable housing monopolies with few alternatives and minimal state protections. The Tenant Union Federation seeks to leverage bargaining rights borrowed from organized labor to counter the structural power of landlords who receive federal subsidies while controlling significant portions of local housing markets. This strategy reflects rising tenant activism in a landscape where private capital dominates and as concerns increase around government’s reliability in performing its oversight responsibility in the public-private partnerships which support the nation’s affordable housing stock.