After 7 years of making power squirm, KC Tenants turns to a new leader | Opinion
Saturday afternoon at KC Tenants’ offices in Hyde Park, the framed artifacts covering the walls told most of the story.
There was a banner reading “The People Have Closed Court Today” — a souvenir from October 2020, when members of the tenants-rights group chained themselves to the Jackson County Courthouse doors to disrupt eviction proceedings amid the pandemic.
There was a framed New York Times article from October 2022 headlined “The Rent Revolution Is Coming” — a story that opened with KC Tenants members unfurling a banner and interrupting a Starlight Theatre production of “Sister Act” that Mayor Quinton Lucas had planned to appear in.
And there were hundreds of photos of members in the yellow shirts that have become a familiar sight at City Hall and outside apartment towers — a uniform that has become something like a signal announcing that KC Tenants has arrived at a place and intends to make the situation a little bit uncomfortable for some people there.
Seven years of organized confrontation, mounted and hung.
The occasion was an anniversary party for KC Tenants. It was also the moment for a leadership handoff: Founder Tara Raghuveer is transitioning out of the top role at the organization she launched in 2019 to focus on her role as director of the Tenant Union Federation, a new alliance of tenant unions across the country.
“I’ve never believed in anything more in my life,” Raghuveer told the crowd, “than I believe in the power that we’ve built at KC Tenants with all of you.”
New director: Jenay Manley
If the mayor still holds a grudge about the group spoiling his theater debut, he’s swallowed it. He was on hand Saturday, along with Councilwoman Andrea Bough, who introduced the right-to-counsel ordinance drafted by KC Tenants and passed in 2021, guaranteeing renters free legal representation.
Neither spoke, but Councilman Johnathan Duncan did. He at times sounded less like an elected official than the KC Tenants organizer many in the room first knew him as.
“I feel kicked, I feel powerless, and I know all of you do too,” Duncan told the room. “This organization was the first organization that told me, ‘Yeah, and then what?’ We build anyway, we organize anyway.”
Duncan was one of several City Council candidates backed by KC Tenants Power, the organization’s political arm created to run and support candidates, in 2023. He won his race. The other KC Tenants organizer on that slate was Jenay Manley.
Manley lost narrowly; Lindsay French occupies that Northland seat. But three years later, Manley is stepping into arguably a more interesting job. She’s the one taking over for Raghuveer as director of KC Tenants.
Manley has been a leader within KC Tenants since almost the beginning. In 2019, she said Saturday, she was working an overnight shift at a gas station and donating plasma as a single mother when someone invited her to a KC Tenants meeting at SEIU Local 1’s union hall. Tenants there were talking about the housing system and the impossible choices it forced on them.
“For the first time in my life,” she said, “I heard people say to each other: That ain’t right.”
Soon she was working on the campaign that led to the Tenants Bill of Rights — the first of several victories for KC Tenants.
KC Tenants and the city
Manley’s story is the kind KC Tenants often tells about itself: ordinary renters deciding the system isn’t working and organizing to change it.
But the group Raghuveer and her comrades built did not operate the way Kansas City’s advocacy groups traditionally had.
For years, social justice organizations here worked mostly within the system, mostly politely. They did some good. But they did not build a movement. KC Tenants has.
The group has been aggressive, occasionally belligerent and largely unbound by the traditional rules of engagement. Did KC Tenants go overboard by taking its eviction protests to the homes of Jackson County judges in 2021? I could argue both sides of that one. But one practical upshot of the group’s appetite for confrontation is that the developers and lawyers and politicos and Mission Hills Monopoly men who run this town now have to factor into their plans the possibility that KC Tenants might show up and light a blaze of some kind.
Usually, of course, the big money still wins. But not always. KC Tenants’ victories in recent years include securing Kansas City’s right-to-counsel program, electing tenant-aligned candidates like Duncan to City Hall, organizing unions in apartment buildings across the city and pulling off a rent strike that forced repairs and concessions from landlords. I’ll be keen to hear from Manley soon about what to expect from the next phase.
Saturday’s event did produce one other bit of news. KC Tenants has launched a capital campaign to buy a permanent building in Kansas City. Raghuveer said the group already has a $1 million commitment and is aiming to raise $2 million more. After seven years of fighting landlords, they have decided they do not want one anymore.
