From the Frontlines: Tenant Organizing w/ Josh Poe and Tara Raghuveer
Upstream
Upstream
4.9 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2025
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, part of our ongoing From the Frontlines series, Tara Raghuveer and Josh Poe join us for a conversation about tenant organizing. Tara Raghuveer is a tenant organizer with KC Tenants based in Kansas City, Missouri and with the Tenant Union Federation. Josh Poe is the organizing director with the Kentucky Tenant Union, formerly known as the Louisville Tenant Union and organizes with the Tenant Union Federation along with Tara.
Our conversation opens with a introduction to tenants unions before diving into the specific work that is being done by our guests. We discuss some of the ongoing fights being waged against private equity and corporate landlords by the Kentucky Tenants Union across the state of Kentucky and by the Tenant Union Federation across the country. We explore the root causes of skyrocketing rents and the housing crisis, the idealogical and legal barriers to organizing in the south, and some of the false and real solutions. Finally, we explore what a logical and humane housing system could look like.
Further resources:
- Kentucky Tenants Union
- Donate to Kentucky Tenants Union
- The Tenant Union Federation
- Kansas City Tenants
- Connecticut Tenants Union
- Southside Together
- Bozeman Tenants United
Related episodes:
- Listen to our ongoing From the Frontlines series
Intermission music: "Forest Floor" by Witchdream Mansion
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The rent is too damn high. |
| 0:22.3 | There are more people sleeping outside and in their cars in the richest country in the history |
| 0:28.3 | of the world now than ever before. |
| 0:31.0 | And things are only getting worse. |
| 0:33.3 | People are paying more money to live in worse conditions than they've ever endured. |
| 0:38.4 | The thing that I think many of us keep thinking about recently is that it just can't go on like this. |
| 0:45.4 | Something has got to give. |
| 0:47.3 | And the question is not whether tenants revolt. |
| 0:50.7 | The question is whether that revolt is from a place of desperation or from a place of power. |
| 0:56.6 | You're listening to Upstream. |
| 0:58.6 | Upstream. |
| 0:59.7 | Upstream. |
| 1:00.6 | Upstream. |
| 1:01.5 | A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. |
| 1:09.5 | I'm Della Duncan. |
| 1:10.8 | And I'm Robert Raymond. |
| 1:12.5 | The cost of a home has doubled since 2009, and the average age of a home buyer in the United |
| 1:18.7 | States is now 56 years old. |
| 1:21.5 | And you don't have to look at other countries like China, where 90% of people own their |
| 1:26.1 | home and the average age of a home buyer is 29, to know |
| 1:30.0 | it doesn't have to be like this. You just have to go back to 1981 before this stage of neoliberal |
| 1:37.3 | capitalism really kicked in, and when the average home buyer was 31 years old, to know that the state of housing in this |
... |
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