What is KC Tenants up to next? Thursday’s Town Hall is your chance to learn
You may have seen someone in a yellow KC Tenants shirt or a flyer with a bull logo on it around town. Maybe you’ve heard about the group that has been pushing City Hall to make housing more affordable in Kansas City, or not. Or, maybe, you’ve been participating in it.
KC Tenants has been active in the community since its inception in 2019. The citywide tenant union describes its goal as making sure everyone has safe, accessible and affordable places to live in Kansas City.
The group recently rallied outside the mayor’s office to protest the housing trust fund proposal, which is the city’s plan to revitalize neighborhoods, develop housing and start preservation projects, and the plan was altered after the protest.
KC Tenants plans to share more of its goals on Thursday at its House the People Town Hall.
As part of our new Service Journalism Team’s goal to make it easier to navigate local challenges and participate in your community, we talked to Jenay Manley about the coming event. She helped organize it and told us everything to know if you want to show up, learn more and maybe get involved in KC Tenants’ work.
What is KC tenants?
It is a citywide tenant union led by a “multigenerational, multiracial, anti-racist base of poor and working class tenants in Kansas City.” The group gathers tenants and organizes events and actions to work toward its goal of making housing safer and more affordable in Kansas City. They worked to stop evictions in the city during the pandemic.
What is the House the People Town Hall?
The town hall is an educational event for people to learn more about KC Tenants and the next things they’ll be working on.
There will be a panel including housing experts and KC Tenant leaders Javon Swopes, Sabrina Davis, Brandon Henderson, Brian Hullaby and Jenay Manley. Mayor Quinton Lucas is also scheduled to make an appearance.
The panelists are going to discuss their vision for what they’d like to see as the future of affordable housing in Kansas City.
“Kansas City historically has continued to treat housing as if it’s a commodity,” Manley said. “Our communities are actively being gentrified and evicted and the only way that that changes is if we take a fundamental shift on how we treat housing here.”
To push back against rising rents, as well as against people losing their homes through eviction, Manley said KC Tenants wants there to be more ways for tenants and residents to have a say in how housing is created and maintained in the city. She said the group is looking at different laws and programs to keep housing affordable for long into the future.
They’re going to talk about some of those ideas at the town hall and will also take questions from the audience.
“The big thing we want to talk about is social housing and what that means for Kansas City,” Manley said. “We have a vision for how housing can be actually treated as a human right and not as a commodity, and we want to share that vision with the rest of Kansas City.”
What’s social housing?
Manley told The Star that when KC Tenants uses the term “social housing,” the group is talking about housing that is not on the private market. It’s housing that stays affordable because it is managed and regulated by something other than a private developer, landlord or business, such as by the local government, a co-op board of community members or tenants themselves, and will have rules that won’t let prices balloon with the housing market.
“We do not mean affordability for 20 years, and we do not mean putting money into developer’s pockets,” Manley said. “What we mean is investing in our communities where they are so that people can choose how and where they live.”
Who can attend?
The town hall is open to the public and anyone with an interest in what KC Tenants is doing in the Kansas City area is welcome.
When and where is the town hall?
The town hall is on Thursday, Nov. 18, from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at Manual Career Technical Center, 1215 E. Truman Rd.
If you can’t go, how else can you learn about KC Tenants’ work?
If you’re unable to attend and are interested to learn more, you can visit KC Tenants’ Facebook page, where they’ll be streaming the town hall.
Do you have questions about your tenant rights, about housing in Kansas City or about another group doing work in the city that you want to know how to plug into? You can ask our Service Journalism team to look into what you want to know at kcq@kcstar.com, or with the form below.