2026 marks 10 years of sustained tenant organizing in Sacramento. The fight for tenant rights in our city crystallized at a time when tenant unions and tenant organizing were experiencing a rise across the country and when our city was experiencing a moment of acute crisis, with the ignoble distinction of topping lists of cities with the fastest rising rents in the country in 2017 and 2018. In the 2020s, Sacramento has continued to routinely make lists of major cities with the fastest growing rent in the country.

Launch of the Sacramento Tenants Union

In 2017, recognizing the conditions people in Sacramento were facing, founding SVTU members began to meet and explore the possibility of forming a tenant’s union to fight back against rising rents. They researched other tenant unions and held consciousness-raising public meetings to connect with other people who were concerned about the plight of tenants in the city, frequently deploying the slogan “The Rent is Too Damn High!”. The union saw interest from many segments of Sacramento, notably the elderly, the disabled, and others on fixed incomes. In 2018, STU turned its focus on the City of Sacramento’s actions as it related to housing and land use, and to Prop 10, a statewide ballot measure that would have allowed cities to pass rent control. Prop 10 ultimately failed, garnering only 40% of the statewide vote.

Early STU meeting at Organize Sacramento – Summer 2017

During this time, members from STU also connected with Tenants Together, a statewide organization advocating for tenant rights and also directly supporting tenants in crisis through a hotline where folks facing issues could call and get peer support from a network of trained, volunteer tenant counselors. STU members attended a series of trainings to learn about our rights as renters and bolster our ability to support one another in Sacramento in asserting what limited legal rights we had. We launched our own hotline and were founding members of Tenants Together’s translocal counseling network, collaborating with other unions around the state who had their own hotlines to learn together as laws changed and support one another with particularly complex cases.

At the time the hotline started, there were virtually no tenant rights for tenants outside of certain cities in the Bay Area and Los Angeles: a landlord could evict a month-to-month tenant for any reason or no reason at all with 60 day’s notice, and there was no limit to how much landlords could raise rent. That changed in 2019 with the passage of AB1482, also known as the California Tenant Protection Act, which instated just cause eviction protections and some level of rent control for tenants in many apartment buildings across the state. However, the passage of the law also exposed the greed of Sacramento landlords and the utter lack of political will in our own community to protect tenants.

At the end of 2019, after AB 1482 had been passed by before it went into effect, STU began receiving phone calls from tenants in the Arden neighborhood in several apartment complexes who had all received eviction notices expiring right at the end of the year. It didn’t take long to piece together what was happening: Landlords had realized that one AB 1482 was in effect, they would be unable to raise rents on their tenants as high as they wanted. Their solution? Hand out mass eviction notices to tenants in their buildings, many of whom were recent immigrants, elderly, and/or disabled. STU members began connecting with tenants facing evictions and held an emergency meeting with tenants of one building.

Through Tenants Together, we learned that cities in many other parts of the state were passing temporary eviction moratoriums to prevent exactly the situation unfolding in Arden. County Supervisor Phil Serna introduced language to pass a temporary eviction moratorium for the County, however, due to the rushed timeline of the measure the proposal would require a ⅘ vote to pass. Residents from multiple complexes in Arden Arcade took the day off of work to provide testimony at the Board of Supervisors meeting where the vote was set to take place. In the end, the efforts failed as supervisors Sue Frost and Susan Peters, whose districts encompassed the buildings facing mass evictions, voted against the measure. For many of us in the tenants union, this was an eye-opening moment that began to expose the limits of government and electoral organizing as a strategy.

COVID-19 and the Sacramento Eviction Defense Network

The COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact on tenants everywhere and Sacramento was no exception. In the early days of the pandemic, fears grew about a predicted “eviction tsunami” as people who had lost income due to the pandemic were unable to pay rent, and also about the potential for an increase in “self help” evictions – landlords taking the law into their own hands to lock tenants out. Around the country, members of the Autonomous Tenant Union Network were experimenting with eviction defense rapid response networks. STU members along with people from groups like Decarcerate Sacramento decided to launch a Sacramento Eviction Defense Network with the aim of emulating the rapid response strategies we saw being successfully used in places like Los Angeles.