“The Pinnacle Pod” host, Maurice Watson, speaks with 2021 Pinnacle Prize winner Tara Raghuveer, founding director of KC Tenants.

Starting with eviction work in college to building a tenant union network of 10,000+ members in Kansas City, Tara talks about the importance of grassroots organizing, calling for federal intervention on housing protections and putting those experiencing housing insecurity at the center of determining their own solutions.

Transcript:

Maurice Watson: Hi, I am Maurice Watson, and this is “The Pinnacle Pod,” a monthly podcast where we dive into the stories behind Kansas City’s most dynamic emerging leaders. Each episode celebrates the spirit of The Pinnacle Prize, an award that recognizes young visionaries sparking positive change in our community, from subtle ripples to citywide movements. Join us to listen, learn, and be inspired. Today the guest is Tara Raghuveer, a 2021 Pinnacle Prize recipient and the founding director of KC Tenants, the citywide tenant union in Kansas City. KC Tenants is led by a multi-generational, multi-racial, anti-racist base of poor and working-class tenants organizing to ensure that everyone in Kansas City has a safe, accessible, and truly affordable home. KC Tenants includes over 550 leaders and a membership of over 10,000 tenants in Kansas City. Tara guides KC Tenant’s strategy and supports a powerful team of organizers to implement the vision that comes from the organization’s leaders. Tara has studied evictions in Kansas City since 2013, leading the Kansas City Eviction Project. In addition to local tenant organizing, Tara is the Homes Guarantee Campaign Director at People’s Action, a national network of grassroots organizations. Previously, she organized in the immigrant rights movement. Tara is an Australian born Indian American immigrant who was raised in the Kansas City area on the Kansas side of the state line. Tara, welcome to The Pinnacle Pod. 

Tara Raghuveer: Thank you. 

Maurice Watson: Let’s start here. Tell us about you. What’s influenced your perspective on the world and how’d you get involved in the world of housing justice? 

Tara Raghuveer: I started becoming interested in housing when I was in college. I worked for the then mayor of New York City with his economic development team, and I went around the city with some of the people on that team, mostly focused on public housing. And I started to think about the ways that housing was such an interesting meeting point of social and economic factors. And then I looked back at my classmates at school and a lot of them were studying social issues like education and healthcare, but few of them were looking into this issue of housing. So, I sort of made it my business for the rest of my time at school to study housing, but honestly, found the literature on housing to be pretty boring and I didn’t really have the language for it at the time. It was talking about the failure of public programs, and a lot of the literature was old and felt kind of dusty and irrelevant to the dynamics of the day. And then I read what was at the time Matthew Desmond’s dissertation on eviction in Milwaukee. And in that dissertation, he explores the role of the private market because the public system has been so disinvested from over years. And in reading that, I saw a lot of my hometown in his writings about Milwaukee—of course, they share a very similar history and contemporary reality. So, I came back home to do thesis research my senior year on evictions in Kansas City. And to tell you the truth, I’m not actually someone who learns very well by reading or by taking classes—I learn mostly in conversation with people. So, coming back home that winter and talking with people who had experienced eviction or were about to, I finally started to understand this issue that would then become my obsession for the next 10 years. I met a couple named Chuck and Ivy at the McDonald’s on Rainbow and they were telling me about how they’d worked hard their whole lives and done all the right things, and yet here they were in their seventies and behind on rent because they couldn’t keep up and were about to be evicted in the winter with no place to go. And I remember drawing little graphics in my notebook, these cycles, like you get evicted because you’re behind on rent, but you can’t afford the rent so of course you fall behind, so of course you get evicted. And like I said, I sort of became obsessed with the system that created this kind of violence that impacts so many people. 

Maurice Watson: That’s great context to understand what motivates and drives you. What’s the Kansas City Eviction Project and how is Kansas City unique or perhaps eerily similar to other cities as it relates to eviction and housing justice? 

Tara Raghuveer: The KC Eviction Project was kind of the outgrowth of that thesis research. So, I turned in my thesis and it wasn’t very good, but afterwards remained sort of consumed by the questions that I had been asking and that led me to continue pestering the people at the Jackson County courts for any of the data that I hadn’t been able to access. And then finally, in about 2017, so years later, I got access to the data set that I’d been looking for—200,000 eviction records spanning 20 years, all at the address level. So, we started to map and analyze that data that brought me back to Kansas City. And actually, what we found in the data is that Kansas City is not unique at all. And I say this a lot, but Kansas City is not exceptional. And in that, it is such a fascinating place to study and to organize. What we found was a bright line in Kansas City and that line was Troost. Evictions were concentrated east of Troost. Even when we controlled for things like income, Black families were evicted a lot more. We found that the average person who was evicted in Kansas City was a 48-year-old Black woman. A lot of these things are things that are known to be true if you talk to anyone in the community, and the research that we did was able to finally put numbers, maps, data behind this kind of community knowledge. And unfortunately, I think it’s those maps and data points that decision makers listen to oftentimes more than they listen to everyday people. 

Maurice Watson: Tell us about the work and missions of KC Tenants and KC Tenants Power. 

Tara Raghuveer: So, KC Tenants was also an outgrowth of all of those inquiries that had lasted many years. I started coming back to Kansas City in about 2017 and met members of the community both in the decision maker capacity, and I met people who themselves had been impacted by housing insecurity, homelessness, eviction, et cetera. And some of those people—including Tiana Caldwell and Diane Charity, Brandy Granados—they said to me, “We don’t know that Kansas City is gonna be a place where we can live anymore if we don’t do something about this. What are we gonna do?” Tiana sat me down for coffee one morning in 2018 and said, “What are we gonna do? I’m actually the luckiest out of anyone I know.” And she said that, having been evicted twice in one year after a cancer diagnosis. So, she knew that we had to do something, Diane knew we had to do something, Brandy knew we had to do something. And I had been an organizer working on immigration for years and then was working on housing in a national capacity. But that was, sort of, the moment that my organizer brain and researcher brain ran into each other, and I decided to move back in early 2019 to start KC Tenants with those three women. And the purpose from the beginning was that we wanted to build an organization that put the people who were experiencing the pain at the center of determining their own solutions, at the center of their own liberation. So, almost five years later, we’ve built one of the most powerful tenant unions in the country. We have 10,000 members in the city, and we’ve defined with some additional clarity what it means to be a tenant union. We organize tenants at the building level, at the neighborhood level, and citywide at the building level. It’s usually conditions-level fights—trying to get the AC back on or the elevators fixed. At the neighborhood level, we’re really fighting the forces of capital that shape our neighborhoods—big developers who get huge tax breaks, for example. And then at the city level, we are organizing for writing and passing policy that changes the structure of the world that our people get to live in. 

Maurice Watson: You clearly believe in the efficacy of grassroots organizing. What is it about grassroots collective action that makes it such an impactful tactic to achieve social change?  

Tara Raghuveer: I think we’ve created a case study of this in Kansas City in the last five years. Tiana, in the spring of 2019, stood up at town halls about the election. And those town halls prior to us showing up had been about trash and potholes, and it was the same 15 people who were showing up at all of these events. Tiana then started showing up and putting a sign in the air that said, “I’m homeless. What are you going to do for me?” And her story, her experience, and the stories and experiences of the people in our base are undeniable. You know, you can agree or disagree on the details of our policy prescriptions, but no one can deny the experience of someone who’s speaking with their own voice. So that’s some of the power of organizing. And then further, I think our conviction has grown about the power of collective action. Individuals can only do so much when they’re acting alone or speaking with one voice. This is as true in a building context where an individual tenant can lobby their landlord for X, Y, Z and the landlord can just tell them to f-off, right? It’s equally true there as it is citywide. Any one of us could put on a kind of activist hat and rail about this issue or that issue. What we’ve seen over time is that when we organize together and when we actually speak with a collective voice, we’re stronger together than we are as individuals. And that’s the kind of basic premise of the union. 

Maurice Watson: The People’s Action’s Homes Guarantee has been a strong voice on a national scale around the White House’s Tenants Bill of Rights and rent control. Tell us a bit more about this work and what today’s efforts mean for the future of housing justice. 

Tara Raghuveer: I believe, and I think we all in KC Tenants believe, that if the people have a chance against today’s odds—the odds being organized real estate capital and a bunch of punishing and punitive systems that impact our people’s lives—that chance lives in the tenant union. And we talk about this a lot, but the vehicle to organize poor and working-class people in the 21st century is the tenant union. In many ways, the tenant union needs to be for that group of people what the labor union was in the 20th century at its peak. And KC Tenants is writing a playbook that a lot of organizations across the country are now borrowing from and innovating even further. So, we’re part of this national movement for a homes guarantee—50 plus tenant unions and community organizations across the country that are calling for federal intervention. And the reason federal intervention is so important is that more often than not now, our landlords are not regulatable at the local level or at the state level. Their businesses actually span beyond state lines and even internationally. So, the federal government has a role to play. Not only that, but the federal government is also in business with many of the biggest landlords, and that typically comes in the form of federally backed loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So, one of the main things that we’re working on right now is lobbying the federal government to attach conditions to those loans, including, but not limited to tenant protections like rent regulations. If you’re borrowing from the federal government on very lucrative terms, you need to be on the hook for a certain set of protections that keeps tenants stable in their homes.  

Maurice Watson: What kind of pushback or cooperation and support are you getting? 

 Tara Raghuveer: We’ve made more progress in the last couple years than I ever could have predicted, and I think in large part that’s due not only to the growth of the grassroots organization around this, but also the clarity that COVID provided around the precarity of tenants in this country. And the last three years we’ve seen a growth in attention and focus on this issue that I never could have predicted five, 10 years ago when I started working on it. So, we’ve actually been pretty well received by this administration. The White House issued a directive to the Federal Housing Finance Agency to pursue these types of regulations that would protect tenants. And FHFA is now investigating what they can do to limit egregious rent hikes. It’s not gonna be easy to cross the finish line on this at all, but we’ve also garnered a bunch of support from members of congress who even a couple years ago wouldn’t have touched this issue. They would’ve seen it as a third rail, and now they’re hearing from their constituents that this is the pain point. The rent is the biggest bill that most poor working-class people pay every month. So even in the context of inflation where other goods and services are going up by X percent or y percent, the scale of impact that an increase in rent has on someone’s life is immense. A 6% increase in the rent can decide for a poor family whether or not they get groceries that month. 

Maurice Watson: Tara, you are undeniably a vibrant force in this community, amplifying the voices of those who need our support the most. What’s your why? What motivates you to do this important work? 

Tara Raghuveer: I think to be a good organizer, you have to love people. And I love all of our people—the joyful, the grieving, the messy, the weird—there’s so much beauty in the tenant union that we’ve built that does cut across all of these lines that the other side uses to divide us. Something that we say a lot in KC Tenants is that we’re building something that none of us has experienced, but all of us deserve. And that thing is actually kind of ephemeral, but it’s home, right? I think I, like so many people, have been seeking a home for my whole life, and the home that I found is in this community that’s beyond my wildest dreams at KC Tenants, and then with this tenant movement across the country.  

Maurice Watson: What advice do you have for other change-makers? 

Tara Raghuveer: I think the most important thing to share with other change-makers is you have to be clear about power. I’m power hungry. I’m not scared of power. I want power because I know our people deserve power. And the clearer we are about power—who holds it today and who needs it—the clearer we can be in our strategic steps. And sometimes that requires risk, and a lot of times that requires pissing people off. But I think without clarity around power, there’s very little we can do to make change.  

Maurice Watson: What’s next for you?

Tara Raghuveer: What’s next is what’s now. I love what I’m doing. It’s my dream. Eventually there’ll be a world where the current role that I play at KC Tenants is one that should be held by other people. And still, I see myself as an organizer. As organizer, I’m pretty committed to this work for life. 

Maurice Watson: Finally, how can our listeners connect with you? 

Tara Raghuveer: They can go to kctenants.org/member and become members of the citywide tenant union, one of the fiercest in the country. They can reach out to me on Twitter if they feel like it. My email is tara@kctenants.org. Also, if there’s a tenant experiencing a housing emergency, we have a tenant hotline that serves the city and the metro area. And that’s 816-533-5435. 

Maurice Watson: Thanks Tara. Your story is an exciting one. You really are committed to your work and our community is thrilled to have your kind of leadership and passion. Thanks for listening and be sure to sign up for our newsletter at pinnacleprizekc.org to continue to listen, learn and be inspired by dynamic emerging leaders in our community. 

Hosted By Maurice Watson

Maurice is a recognized community leader and has more than thirty years of experience working in law, social and public policy and board governance as a lawyer, advisor, and board member. He is the co-founder and principal of Credo Philanthropy Advisors.