Portside

When Dani Long and Angel Speed received an eviction notice in 2023, they had been withholding rent for more than a year on what was supposed to be a luxury apartment in Los Angeles. Residents of the complex had been suffering with a variety of problems. Rainwater leaked through the roof. The elevators were perpetually out of service, forcing Speed to carry Long, who often uses a wheelchair due to chronic health issues, up and down three flights of stairs. And there were unexpected junk fees attached to everything, especially their utility bills. They finally stopped payment when they learned that their landlord, the corporate titan Equity Residential, was receiving COVID-era rent assistance checks for their unit—on top of their rent.

The company responded with retaliation. First, the couple was locked out of their mailbox, and then, following the eviction notice, locked out of the apartment itself. After a series of court dates and mounting late fees, Long settled with the landlord and agreed to move out. She and Speed were left with more than $51,000 in debt and an eviction on their record. “I was in disbelief,” Long told me. “They’re a multimillion-dollar corporation, and I’m just some numbers on a piece of paper. After someone treats you that way, you feel powerless.”

Many California tenants racked up rent debt with Equity Residential and other large property owners during the pandemic, often due to the companies’ predatory practices. Now, a group of debtors is going on a new kind of strike. At a virtual event last Wednesday, Long and Speed joined nine of the landlord’s former tenants in announcing their refusal to pay their rent debt.

“Corporate landlords are the driving factor that is destroying the American dream for millions of citizens,” Speed said, speaking to an audience of dozens of elected officials, national housing activists, and fellow debtors. He added that the strikers are “here to fight, not just to cancel the debt that these corporations have already tacked on to us. We’re fighting to stop companies like Equity Residential from doing it in the future.”

The strike, organized by the Debt Collective, a national debtors union known for its work with defrauded student borrowers, relies in part on the landlord’s possible violation of consumer protection laws. The organization has built an online legal tool designed to generate dispute letters that debtors can send to collection agencies, credit bureaus, and regulatory bodies. It will also use the tool to recruit more debtors into the strike.

The campaign’s goals are to win debt cancellation and spur regulatory action to hold corporate landlords accountable, starting with Equity Residential and expanding to other bad actors. “Debtors are at a point where refusal is a really shiny political option, and if they do it en masse we think there’s room for Equity Residential to negotiate with us,” Braxton Brewington, a spokesperson for the Debt Collective, told me. “We have a history of success with that approach.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) joined the call to speak in support of debtors and against abusive corporate landlords. “We can cancel rent debt,” Tlaib said. “You’re showing that when we join together, everyday people have power, and they can push back against corporate greed.”

RENT DEBT EXISTED WELL BEFORE COVID-19. But it exploded during the pandemic, as eviction moratoriums made it possible for financially strapped tenants to amass arrears, while landlords were banned from removing them.

The magnitude of the indebted population today is largely unknown. The National Equity Atlas estimates that five million people owe back rent. But that figure only counts current tenants, not people who have been evicted, so the number is likely far higher. And as the Trump administration strips away social assistance, including housing aid, from poor and working people, many more are likely to fall behind on rent and face eviction.

For Long and Speed, rent debt has rendered them effectively unhouseable. Despite having more than enough income for a new apartment, damage to their credit scores has made it impossible to secure a new lease. For a time, the couple paid some money to stay with friends, but in January those friends lost their homes in the Southern California wildfires. These days, Long and Speed are living out of their car.

Given the gravity of these consequences, organizers said, it’s important to curb the power of corporate actors in housing. A publicly traded real estate investment trust (REIT), Equity Residential has a market value of $25.4 billion, making it the fifth-largest multifamily landlord in the country. It owns some 84,000 units across virtually all major metropolitan areas, where it has accumulated an impressive record of misconduct. A recent study suggests that the company, along with other national REITs, maintained draconian eviction patterns in L.A., disproportionately displacing Black tenants. And public legal filings show that it has misrepresented costs in Washington, D.C., and illegally blown off rent caps in New Jersey.

The campaign’s goals are to win debt cancellation and spur regulatory action to hold corporate landlords accountable.

On Wednesday, current and former tenants alleged that Equity Residential has engaged in everything from falsifying amenities in their apartment complexes to ignoring habitability violations to deceiving them about prices. And then, of course, there are the junk fees. Lawsuits allege that the company has overcharged for background investigations and used unlawful late payment charges.

Particularly galling is Equity Residential’s use of ratio utility billing systems, an opaque method of invoicing that tenants said put rates far above those estimated in the company’s leases. Under the system, some current and former tenants report being charged for services like trash and pest removal, which fall within California’s warrant of habitability and are therefore the responsibility of the landlord. Two Equity Residential buildings in L.A. are currently on utilities strike over its use, and recently the company agreed to return $25,000 to them.

Marty McKenna, a spokesperson for Equity Residential, took exception to the striking debtors’ claims, saying that the company “categorically denies” them. “From our clearly itemized disclosure of rent and related services across our customer-facing platforms … to our continuous upkeep of investment-grade properties that meet or exceed industry standards, to our tireless work under unprecedented local and global conditions with our tenants who faced pandemic-related hardships,” McKenna said, “Equity is proud of our longstanding commitment to serving our residents and our communities.” He also noted that the company’s utility billing system meets government requirements and is disclosed to residents in their leases.

The debt strikers, by contrast, insist that Equity Residential’s business practices have led to massively inflated rent balances and breach of contract, making their debts uncollectible under consumer protection laws. At the federal level, the Federal Trade Commission prohibits unfair or deceptive practices, and states have analogous legal protections. The debtors hope that regulators or attorneys general will see fit to bring legal claims against Equity Residential. In recent years, the FTC has taken action against Invitation Homes, the country’s largest owner of single-family rentals, for similar behavior.

“There’s a fairly wide suite of remedies available both to private and public enforcers,” said Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute. “Especially in cases brought by public enforcers, you’re likely to see some attempt to compensate the victims and then also a separate effort to prevent the company from doing the same practice again.”

Equity Residential is also known to be a client of RealPage, an allegedly anti-competitive pricing software that is currently the subject of an antitrust complaint by the Department of Justice and a major class action lawsuit by consumers who claim that they were overcharged. A judgment that the landlord engaged in price-fixing could create additional grounds for debtors to challenge the validity of their debt. “Considering all the pending lawsuits against RealPage and landlords,” Vaheesan said, “that’s another possible source of leverage.”

One of the points of the strike is that debtors have leverage whether or not the government is willing to act. Their legal strategies are, in part, a wager that applying sufficient heat to the company will convince it to simply eliminate their debts. After all, Equity Residential answers to shareholders, and has strong incentives to avoid attracting scrutiny that could shake investor confidence and hurt its bottom line. At the same time, the campaign’s legal tool will generate disputes with collection agencies, triggering them to investigate debtors’ claims about wrongdoing—a process that could scare them off pursuing the debt at all.

THE DEBT COLLECTIVE, BORN OUT OF the Occupy movement, pioneered the modern-day debt strike. In 2014, the organization began working with a small group of student loan borrowers who refused to pay back debt to the shuttered for-profit education chain Corinthian Colleges, which had lied about the value of their degrees. After seven years of organizing, they won essentially a total victory when the Department of Education agreed to automatically cancel $5.8 billion in student loan debt for 560,000 borrowers. An online legal tool for that campaign attracted tens of thousands more student debtors, ultimately driving a national movement that expanded to other fraudulent institutions.

“There’s something about people refusing to pay back their debts that is such a moral shock that it sends people into action,” Brewington said. “That’s what we’re hoping to replicate.”

To stoke that action, the Debt Collective is doing something unprecedented: organizing evicted tenants alongside current tenants. The campaign brings debt strikers together with utilities strikers, mobilizing people with overlapping experiences of harm by a single landlord. “They want us to feel isolated, like we have this rent debt because we experienced some type of personal failure,” said Richelle Brooks, an educator who organizes with the Debt Collective. But solidarity changes that equation, she explained: “Through telling these stories, we understand that this is a systemic problem, that this corporate landlord is preying on people intentionally.”

Long and Speed started working with the Debt Collective in 2023, when they first faced eviction. Since then, the couple has been meeting with other debtors and planning the strike with organizers. Long told me that the effort has given them, for the first time, a support system and a belief that they can flip the dynamic with their creditor. “The most important thing about everybody getting together is that it’s more than one voice,” she said. “It gives us power.”

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Michael Friedrich is a journalist who writes about the politics of cities and housing.