Bowen Tower residents and their supporters protest against the condition of their apartment complex in Raytown, Missouri, on October 17. Photo / Caroline O'Donovan, The Washington Post
In the two years she has lived at Bowen Tower, Cynthia Barlow’s apartment has flooded, been plagued by mould and been infested with cockroaches.
The building’s heat stopped working. When the lifts broke over the summer, emergency workers carried a sick neighbour down 10 flights of stairs.
Barlow’s rent for the two-bedroom unit increased from US$993 ($1714) per month to US$1213.
Growing frustrated, she hung flyers in the lifts and hosted potlucks, persuading a majority of tenants in the 90-unit building to join the Bowen Tower Tenant Union and stop paying rent until conditions improved.
So far, they’ve won a meeting with the landlord, and a judge has knocked thousands of dollars off the rent debt of one resident facing eviction.
“I got tired of being treated the way I was treated,” Barlow said.
The rent strike is part of a strategy that housing activists have started to replicate in midsize cities across the United States.
Tenant organising is more common in liberal coastal cities like Los Angeles and New York – which recently elected Zohran Mamdani, a former tenant organiser, as its new mayor.
Rent strikes have been almost unheard of in places like Kansas City, Missouri, where according to Zillow the median rent increased by 4.4% in the last year, twice the rate of the national average.
Now, tenants in at least three buildings around the city have formed unions. Similar groups have popped up in Bozeman, Montana; Louisville; and New Haven, Connecticut.
The country’s renters are at a “total breaking point”, said Tara Raghuveer, founding director of the Kansas City Tenants Union, also known as KC Tenants, an activist group.
“When you get displaced from Chicago as a tenant, you might end up in a place like Kansas City. When you get displaced from Kansas City, you might end up in a Raytown, Missouri. When you get displaced in Raytown, Missouri, I do not know where … you’re supposed to go.”
Raghuveer said her group, which started in 2019, has recently honed its focus on using tenants’ economic leverage – their rent cheques – to extract broad improvements and protections, not just for individual buildings but on a wide scale.
“If we are only organising block by block, we are going to lose,” she said.
“We can’t let ourselves be wholly consumed by getting the [lift] fixed or even by getting a collectively bargained lease agreement – as important as those things are to the material realities of the tenants that we’re organising. We have to be focused … on much larger-scale economic disruption.”
But there are risks. In Missouri – and most of the US – renters lack legal protections, and tenants like Barlow face eviction and homelessness if their strategy fails.
California-based real estate company Alta/CGHS, which owns Bowen Tower, has sent eviction notices to 28 tenants since the rent strike started and is refusing to renew some leases.
If tenants don’t pay their rent, eviction is inevitable, said Greg Salyers, a minority partner in the firm. Without rent cheques “you can’t pay your mortgage, you can’t pay a staff to fix things,” he said. “It’s a business.”
Salyers acknowledged the building’s maintenance issues, including with its heating and cooling systems, lifts, mould, plumbing, and pests.
He said the owners have spent more than US$1 million making repairs since 2024, including US$250,000 on plumbing.
About five units did not have working heat as of mid-December, but residents were told they could be placed in a hotel or compensated while they waited for window units to be installed, he said.
They received a similar offer when the lifts stopped working for five days over the summer.
“We want this to be a well-run building with tenants who are happy,” Salyers said.
Salyers said the company is eager to work with tenants individually, but the company refuses to acknowledge the Bowen Tower Tenant Union.
And he described KC Tenants, which has been working with the group, as an “unethical” third party that is “muddying” the company’s communication with tenants and spreading falsehoods to “smear” the owners.
He also accused tenants of delaying repairs by intentionally concealing issues in their units from building management so they could be photographed and shared on social media to encourage the rent strike effort.
Barlow, 59, said that when she moved to Bowen Tower, it was advertised as a quiet place for people 55 and older on the border of Kansas City. She found the red brick building, which stands out as the lone high rise in an otherwise flat, suburban landscape, to be home to children and recently homeless families. Promised perks, including free internet and a shuttle service, never materialised, Barlow said.
Many tenants spend 60% of their income on rent, according to an analysis by KC Tenants.
Salyers said that he has been to the building several times and that some young children may live there, but he wasn’t aware of it. Those types of issues are handled by the property management company, Lynd Living, he said. Lynd Living did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Late last year, Barlow said, she came home to find her apartment floor wet. A pipe in the wall was leaking, she said, and the walls and carpet were damp. Days later, as she waited for the building manager to make repairs, she said, she learned that one neighbour’s leak was so bad, they had an overflowing barrel of water.
“I don’t care if you are homeless,” she said. “You don’t put nobody in no conditions like that – period.”
Around that time, Barlow said, she watched a news report about tenants at an apartment building in nearby Independence who refused to pay rent for eight months because of dangerous living conditions.
That strike, which KC Tenants helped organise, ended after tenants secured a new contract that froze rent levels and prohibited the building from being sold without tenant approval.
Sitting on the couch she would later throw away because of mould, Barlow watched and rewatched news clips about the nearby rent strike.
“It kind of inspired me,” she said.
She started talking to other residents about the building’s problems. At first, many were reluctant to confront the landlord and afraid of being evicted, she said.
Then the heat in the building went out. To warm his apartment, one of Barlow’s neighbours, who is partially blind, turned on his oven and left its door open. After that, Barlow said, “people started speaking out”.
Herbert Kelley, a Bowen Tower resident, was among them. “I had mould, mildew, water coming in from between the walls, soaking in the carpet,” Kelley said. When “a water pipe busted on the side of my kitchen and water ran all out the wall,” he did the repairs himself.
So when he heard about the tenants union, Kelley said he thought, “It’s worth a try.”
As enthusiasm mounted, Barlow contacted KC Tenants, which went door to door talking to residents about the building’s maintenance issues.
A few months later, a majority of Bowen Tower residents voted to form a tenants’ union and secured a meeting with one of the building’s managers. Unsatisfied with the progress, they declared a rent strike.
Within weeks, some residents began receiving eviction notices – a swift reaction that had prompted other tenant groups in town to back down and worried veteran KC Tenants organisers.
At a mid-October rally in a Raytown parking lot, Bowen Tower residents voted to stay the course. “Right now, I’m seeing everybody thumbs-up,” KC Tenants organiser Justin Stein said. “Hell yeah.”
In early November, Yolanda Washington, 69, appeared at the county courthouse, packed with KC Tenants members wearing matching yellow T-shirts, to face trial for non-payment of rent.
Washington, who has lived in the building for six years, owed US$12,000 and should be evicted, lawyers representing building management told the judge.
She stopped paying rent because the property manager didn’t fix her leaking, mouldy sink, Washington told the judge, and she had been feeling sick for months.
“I need my health to take care of me and my husband. … I’m almost 70, and he’s 74. We can’t do this,” she said on the steps of the courthouse after the trial.
A few weeks later, the judge ruled that the landlord had “violated the warranty of habitability by failing to address” maintenance issues “in a timely manner”.
Washington’s apartment was worth only US$500 a month, not the US$1058 the building had charged, according to the ruling, which ordered her to pay just US$5000 in back rent.
The building is now refusing to renew Washington’s lease. “I’m not going to get put out,” Washington said. “The Lord is not going to allow that to happen.”
A judge reduced a second Bowen Tower resident’s back rent in late December; five more tenants are awaiting rulings, with another three scheduled to appear in court in January.
Barlow is scheduled for eviction court in January, and Bowen Tower management hasn’t renewed her lease.
She hopes to move to Virginia someday to be near the beach and her grandchildren. But for now, “am I giving up?” Barlow said, sitting in her living room, where a piece of unfinished plywood covers a vent where drywall was removed to fix a leak.
“Nope.”
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