Giving Compass' Take:
- Alex Burness explores the rise of tenant-led movements in Bozeman, Montana, focusing on efforts to reform local government to address housing affordability.
- What can donors and funders do to best support tenant-led movements and address housing affordability?
- Learn more about key issues in homelessness and housing and how you can help.
- Search our Guide to Good for nonprofits focused on homelessness in your area.
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Joey Morrison, a city commissioner in Bozeman, Montana, and also the city’s next mayor, has lived in 13 different places since moving to town 10 years ago. He knows what it’s like to skip meals to save money, and he spent one summer living out of his car. At 29 years old, as far as anyone around here can recall, he’ll be the first Bozeman mayor who rents, not owns, their home, positioning him to support tenant-led movements.
His election victory last year was a landmark win for a burgeoning organizing movement known as Bozeman Tenants United, which emerged from protests in the summer of 2020, as thousands spilled into the streets of this lily-white, affluent, outdoor sports-obsessed college town, following the murder of George Floyd.
“Me and a few other organizers thought, OK, there’s a lot of energy—how do we get names and phone numbers and turn this into something that lasts?” Emily LaShelle, Tenants United’s organizing director, told me in July from the group’s church-basement headquarters.
Though protests provoked by police violence may not at first seem obvious venues for discussion of housing policy and a catalyst for tenant-led movements, LaShelle and colleagues found residents kept bringing up the city’s increasing unaffordability.
In conversations with neighbors during and after the protests, the organizers of this tenant-led movement posed a simple question: What does public safety mean to you? “Was it having a third of the city budget being spent on the police force? Was it the military tank that Bozeman police has?” LaShelle said. “Time and time again, regardless of what people felt about the police, people said they couldn’t afford to live here, and that was making them less safe. It was resounding.”
Morrison, a co-founder of Tenants United, became an early test of the viability of this new progressive tenant-led movement when he ran for the city commission in 2021 on a platform of economic justice. He lost by 24 percentage points. But then he ran again two years later, this time for mayor. In this city of roughly 60,000 residents, a campaign team of more than 100 volunteers knocked on some 15,000 doors, and Morrison wound up unseating a 13-year incumbent, nearly doubling her vote share.
Read the full article about tenant-led movements in Bozeman by Alex Burness at Bolts.