Leveraging the collective: Contesting California’s corporate landlords through multibuilding organising

Abstract

The financialisation of US rental real estate has accelerated since 2008, facilitated by state intervention at multiple levels. The corporate consolidation of rental housing and the profit-maximising practices pursued by corporate landlords have exacerbated pressures on tenants in the already hypercommodified housing sector. In response, some tenants have launched ‘multibuilding campaigns’ that exploit emerging oligopolies by harnessing collective power across buildings owned by the same corporate entity to force concessions and legislative change. Drawing on fieldwork carried out over 2022 and 2023, this article explores the potential of multibuilding organising through the Veritas Tenants Association’s rent debt strike against San Francisco’s largest landlord Veritas Investments, Inc., and the K3 Tenant Council’s campaign against K3 Holdings in Los Angeles. These struggles illustrate how the corporate landlord structure enables multibuilding organising – an ‘upward scale shift’ in both organising and tactics that shows potential to increase tenant leverage in the context of rental housing and state financialisation. They also demonstrate that, given the increasing entanglements between the state and financial markets, tenants are more likely to transform the terms and conditions of their housing through multibuilding organising than through reliance on the state as an intermediary. The article sheds light on how different levels of government simultaneously facilitate and internalise financialisation while introducing tactical and organising interventions to the burgeoning literature on corporate landlord contestation that suggest transformative potential.