Burley Garcia|Alleging landlord neglect, Omaha renters form unions to fight back

As a first-time renter straight out of high school,Burley Garcia Spencer Antrim didn’t know what to expect of his landlord when he signed a lease at Camelot Village Apartments.

The restaurant worker assumed it was normal to have some unresolved maintenance concerns. But over the next two-and-a-half years, the problems piled up.

A leaking AC unit. A chronically broken fridge. A clogged kitchen sink. Black mold under the carpet. A wasp infestation on the balcony. Busted machines in the laundry room.

Antrim and his partner made a half-dozen maintenance requests just this summer, but each time, management marked the request complete or canceled it without fixing the issue. Calls to a tenant hotline went unanswered.

“It makes me sometimes not want to go home, which sucks because it’s the only place that I have,” Antrim said of the central Omaha apartment complex.

In July, the 21-year-old’s frustration led him to Omaha Tenants United, an advocacy group that backs renters in conflicts with property owners.

Days later, Antrim and several OTU volunteers began knocking doors to canvas residents — the first step in a process that recently produced one of Nebraska’s first known tenant unions.

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Tenants at four Omaha-area apartment complexes voted to unionize this summer, and they all share a common landlord: Minnesota-based Elevate Living.

Now renters with a local landlord are preparing to follow their lead.

Though tenant unions have deep roots in cities like New York and Los Angeles, there’s little precedent in Nebraska for the organizations.

Driving the unionization trend in Omaha is a growing feeling among tenants that landlords are charging more in rent but doing less to address issues at their properties, said Seth Cope, a founding organizer with OTU.

By forming unions, tenants can pressure Elevate and other landlords to improve living conditions with a unified voice, limiting fears of retaliation, Cope said.

The unions have submitted lists of demands to Elevate, and tenants have flooded the company’s phone lines. So far, there’s been little response.

“They expect us to hold up our end of the lease, but they don’t hold up theirs,” Antrim said. “There’s this abuse of power where the tenants are afraid to do anything, and that shouldn’t be the case.”

Rodney Dahlquist, an attorney for Elevate, said in an emailed statement that the company provides tenants with multiple means to report maintenance concerns, including an emergency hotline. Residents receive responses to requests in a timely manner, he said.

“Elevate is not aware of any incomplete maintenance repairs, and it encourages all Residents to report new or supplemental maintenance requests immediately,” Dahlquist said.

‘Force them to hear us’

The first battle OTU picked in 2018 was small: a single tenant with a single problem.

The tenant had gone six months without hot water, and the landlord wouldn’t fix it, Cope recalled.

OTU volunteers wrote a letter to the landlord demanding the repair and showed up at his house. The hot water was restored the next day, Cope said.

For the anti-capitalist activists, it revealed the potential of organized tenants, Cope said.

In the country’s biggest cities, renters have been organizing against their landlords for more than a century. Labor union members used the same tactics they learned on the job to improve their living conditions, said Andrea Shapiro, an organizer with the New York-based Met Council on Housing.

Unlike those unions though, tenant organizations have far fewer rights and protections.

“We only really have power in numbers,” Cope said. “It’s really easy for landlords to either ignore or simply bully individual tenants, and the only way we can leverage our power up to take back what we’re owed is by collectively working together.

When Lou Flott and their roommate signed a new lease at Fontenelle Hills Apartments in Bellevue, Elevate initially failed to countersign, temporarily obligating the tenants to pay a more expensive month-to-month rent.

Flott didn’t discover the landlord’s error until a notice on their door said they underpaid rent. After months dealing with neglectful management and unfulfilled maintenance requests, it was the last straw, Flott said.

The 27-year-old posted on Instagram asking if any followers had resources for organizing tenants.

“Do we flood corporate with emails? Do we strike? Do I start knocking on doors? Where do I start in general?” said Flott’s May 29 post.

Flott quickly connected with Cope, and the two made plans to canvas the complex.

They heard common refrains about mold problems, parking lot potholes, difficulties with the online resident portal and lack of responsiveness to maintenance requests.

Organizers compiled the most pressing demands and gathered more than 130 tenants’ signatures on a letter for Elevate. Tenants voted at a July meeting to formally unionize and sent the demand letter to the landlord by certified mail and email.

Residents at other Elevate-owned properties soon caught wind.

Besides Camelot Village, tenants at two adjacent downtown properties — L14 Flats and L15 Lofts — voted to form a single union. Those unions also have submitted demand letters to Elevate.

Dahlquist, the Elevate attorney, did not respond to the Flatwater Free Press’ questions.

Firms controlled by Elevate bought a dozen complexes in the metro area for about $155 million between 2007 and 2016, according to land sale records. The company also owns rental properties in Iowa, Missouri and the Dakotas.

At Fontenelle Hills, Elevate has completed some repairs in the wake of unionization, but Flott said they’re mostly cosmetic “Band-Aid fixes.” The landlord hasn’t responded to the core demands or agreed to negotiate with the union, Flott said.

Union leaders say they will keep trying. Organizers are planning to picket the company’s downtown office next month.

The Fontenelle Hills union has held two phone zaps, where tenants call and email Elevate as much as possible.

It’s all part of an effort to “force them to hear us,” Flott said.

Union brewing in La Vista

News of Nebraska’s first tenants union planted seeds in the minds of dissatisfied renters in other corners of the metro area. TiAndra Wilken was one of them.

She recalls walking into her new apartment at Inwood Village last summer and thinking “it’s like a sauna.”

During her first day at the La Vista complex, Wilken said she noticed fuzzy black mold on her bathroom ceiling.

Staff fixed a leak in the bathroom above her unit, but they didn’t address the mold, she said. After her maintenance request went ignored, Wilken said she began trying to tackle the mold and other issues herself.

Her 8-year-old son Nash experienced severe anxiety while they lived at Inwood Village, Wilken said, noting that his symptoms could have been exacerbated by mold exposure.

Wilken said she reported alleged building code violations to La Vista officials shortly before moving out in August. After that, maintenance staff came to paint over the mold, Wilken alleged.

“It makes me not want to rent again. It makes it very hard to trust a landlord,” Wilken said. “But I also don’t want the people that live there to have to live like that either.”

Since 2022, more than two dozen units at Inwood Village have failed annual city inspections for issues ranging from missing smoke detectors to “organic growth on drywall,” according to an FFP review of city records.

Wilken, now living with a friend, is supporting OTU’s push to organize tenants at her former home.

Organizers have gathered about 35 signatures from residents on a demand letter similar to those submitted to Elevate.

If tenants vote to unionize in the coming weeks, it would be the first to form against a local landlord.

Omaha-based Richdale Apartments owns Inwood Village and eight other nearby properties, plus three dozen complexes scattered throughout the Midwest and Texas. The company is controlled by the Slosburg family, which also operates a prominent commercial real estate business.

The company did not respond to requests for comment.

It remains to be seen whether the new and emerging unions will compel landlords to make changes, but tenants say they have grown much closer through the organizing efforts.

Residents of Fontenelle Hills, Camelot Village and Inwood Village exchange advice for dealing with management through social media and group chats.

A neighbor lent Flott a portable AC unit when theirs went out. Fontenelle Hills residents even held a potluck in August.

Flott felt “very secluded” in their issues before getting to know other tenants. It’s comforting to know others are dealing with the same problems, Flott said.

“When we’re not getting an answer for Elevate, at least we have the community amongst ourselves to help each other out.”

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This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.