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RENT DEBTORS STRIKE AGAINST ABUSIVE CORPORATE LANDLORD  
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Michael Friedrich
October 6, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ The Debt Collective is leading the charge against the real estate
behemoth Equity Residential. _

, Piotr Swat/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP

 

When Dani Long and Angel Speed received an eviction notice in 2023,
they had been withholding rent for more than a year on what was
supposed to be a luxury apartment in Los Angeles. Residents of the
complex had been suffering with a variety of problems. Rainwater
leaked through the roof. The elevators were perpetually out of
service, forcing Speed to carry Long, who often uses a wheelchair due
to chronic health issues, up and down three flights of stairs. And
there were unexpected junk fees attached to everything, especially
their utility bills. They finally stopped payment when they learned
that their landlord, the corporate titan Equity Residential, was
receiving COVID-era rent assistance checks for their unit—on top of
their rent.

The company responded with retaliation. First, the couple was locked
out of their mailbox, and then, following the eviction notice, locked
out of the apartment itself. After a series of court dates and
mounting late fees, Long settled with the landlord and agreed to move
out. She and Speed were left with more than $51,000 in debt and an
eviction on their record. “I was in disbelief,” Long told me.
“They’re a multimillion-dollar corporation, and I’m just some
numbers on a piece of paper. After someone treats you that way, you
feel powerless.”

Many California tenants racked up rent debt with Equity Residential
and other large property owners during the pandemic, often due to the
companies’ predatory practices. Now, a group of debtors is going on
a new kind of strike. At a virtual event
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last Wednesday, Long and Speed joined nine of the landlord’s former
tenants in announcing their refusal to pay their rent debt.

“Corporate landlords are the driving factor that is destroying the
American dream for millions of citizens,” Speed said, speaking to an
audience of dozens of elected officials, national housing activists,
and fellow debtors. He added that the strikers are “here to fight,
not just to cancel the debt that these corporations have already
tacked on to us. We’re fighting to stop companies like Equity
Residential from doing it in the future.”

The strike, organized by the Debt Collective, a national debtors union
known for its work with defrauded student borrowers, relies in part on
the landlord’s possible violation of consumer protection laws. The
organization has built an online legal tool
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designed to generate dispute letters that debtors can send to
collection agencies, credit bureaus, and regulatory bodies. It will
also use the tool to recruit more debtors into the strike.

The campaign’s goals are to win debt cancellation and spur
regulatory action to hold corporate landlords accountable, starting
with Equity Residential and expanding to other bad actors. “Debtors
are at a point where refusal is a really shiny political option, and
if they do it en masse we think there’s room for Equity Residential
to negotiate with us,” Braxton Brewington, a spokesperson for the
Debt Collective, told me. “We have a history of success with that
approach.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) joined the call to speak in support of
debtors and against abusive corporate landlords. “We can cancel rent
debt,” Tlaib said. “You’re showing that when we join together,
everyday people have power, and they can push back against corporate
greed.”

RENT DEBT EXISTED WELL BEFORE COVID-19. But it exploded during the
pandemic, as eviction moratoriums made it possible for financially
strapped tenants to amass arrears, while landlords were banned from
removing them.

The magnitude of the indebted population today is largely unknown. The
National Equity Atlas estimates that five million people
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figure only counts current tenants, not people who have been evicted,
so the number is likely far higher. And as the Trump administration
strips away social assistance, including housing aid
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from poor and working people, many more are likely to fall behind on
rent and face eviction.

For Long and Speed, rent debt has rendered them effectively
unhouseable. Despite having more than enough income for a new
apartment, damage to their credit scores has made it impossible to
secure a new lease. For a time, the couple paid some money to stay
with friends, but in January those friends lost their homes in the
Southern California wildfires. These days, Long and Speed are living
out of their car.

Given the gravity of these consequences, organizers said, it’s
important to curb the power of corporate actors in housing. A publicly
traded real estate investment trust (REIT), Equity Residential has a
market value
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$25.4 billion, making it the fifth-largest
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multifamily landlord in the country. It owns some 84,000 units across
virtually all major metropolitan areas, where it has accumulated an
impressive record of misconduct. A recent study
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suggests that the company, along with other national REITs, maintained
draconian eviction patterns in L.A., disproportionately displacing
Black tenants. And public legal filings show that it has
misrepresented costs
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in Washington, D.C., and illegally blown off rent caps
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in New Jersey.

The campaign’s goals are to win debt cancellation and spur
regulatory action to hold corporate landlords accountable.

On Wednesday, current and former tenants alleged that Equity
Residential has engaged in everything from falsifying amenities in
their apartment complexes to ignoring habitability violations to
deceiving them about prices. And then, of course, there are the junk
fees. Lawsuits allege that the company has overcharged for background
investigations
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and used unlawful late payment charges
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Particularly galling is Equity Residential’s use of ratio utility
billing systems, an opaque method of invoicing that tenants said put
rates far above those estimated in the company’s leases. Under the
system, some current and former tenants report being charged for
services like trash and pest removal, which fall within California’s
warrant of habitability and are therefore the responsibility of the
landlord. Two Equity Residential buildings in L.A. are currently on
utilities strike
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its use, and recently the company agreed
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to return $25,000 to them.

Marty McKenna, a spokesperson for Equity Residential, took exception
to the striking debtors’ claims, saying that the company
“categorically denies” them. “From our clearly itemized
disclosure of rent and related services across our customer-facing
platforms … to our continuous upkeep of investment-grade properties
that meet or exceed industry standards, to our tireless work under
unprecedented local and global conditions with our tenants who faced
pandemic-related hardships,” McKenna said, “Equity is proud of our
longstanding commitment to serving our residents and our
communities.” He also noted that the company’s utility billing
system meets government requirements and is disclosed to residents in
their leases.

The debt strikers, by contrast, insist that Equity Residential’s
business practices have led to massively inflated rent balances and
breach of contract, making their debts uncollectible under consumer
protection laws. At the federal level, the Federal Trade Commission
prohibits unfair or deceptive practices, and states have analogous
legal protections. The debtors hope that regulators or attorneys
general will see fit to bring legal claims against Equity Residential.
In recent years, the FTC has taken action
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against Invitation Homes, the country’s largest owner of
single-family rentals, for similar behavior.

“There’s a fairly wide suite of remedies available both to private
and public enforcers,” said Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the
Open Markets Institute. “Especially in cases brought by public
enforcers, you’re likely to see some attempt to compensate the
victims and then also a separate effort to prevent the company from
doing the same practice again.”

Equity Residential is also known to be a client of RealPage, an
allegedly anti-competitive pricing software
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that is currently the subject of an antitrust complaint by the
Department of Justice and a major class action lawsuit by consumers
who claim that they were overcharged. A judgment that the landlord
engaged in price-fixing could create additional grounds for debtors to
challenge the validity of their debt. “Considering all the pending
lawsuits against RealPage and landlords,” Vaheesan said, “that’s
another possible source of leverage.”

One of the points of the strike is that debtors have leverage whether
or not the government is willing to act. Their legal strategies are,
in part, a wager that applying sufficient heat to the company will
convince it to simply eliminate their debts. After all, Equity
Residential answers to shareholders, and has strong incentives to
avoid attracting scrutiny that could shake investor confidence and
hurt its bottom line. At the same time, the campaign’s legal tool
will generate disputes with collection agencies, triggering them to
investigate debtors’ claims about wrongdoing—a process that could
scare them off pursuing the debt at all.

THE DEBT COLLECTIVE, BORN OUT OF the Occupy movement, pioneered the
modern-day debt strike. In 2014, the organization began working with a
small group of student loan borrowers who refused to pay back debt to
the shuttered for-profit education chain Corinthian Colleges, which
had lied about the value of their degrees. After seven years of
organizing, they won essentially a total victory
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when the Department of Education agreed to automatically cancel $5.8
billion in student loan debt for 560,000 borrowers. An online legal
tool for that campaign attracted tens of thousands more student
debtors, ultimately driving a national movement that expanded to other
fraudulent institutions.

“There’s something about people refusing to pay back their debts
that is such a moral shock that it sends people into action,”
Brewington said. “That’s what we’re hoping to replicate.”

To stoke that action, the Debt Collective is doing something
unprecedented: organizing evicted tenants alongside current tenants.
The campaign brings debt strikers together with utilities strikers,
mobilizing people with overlapping experiences of harm by a single
landlord. “They want us to feel isolated, like we have this rent
debt because we experienced some type of personal failure,” said
Richelle Brooks, an educator who organizes with the Debt Collective.
But solidarity changes that equation, she explained: “Through
telling these stories, we understand that this is a systemic problem,
that this corporate landlord is preying on people intentionally.”

Long and Speed started working with the Debt Collective in 2023, when
they first faced eviction. Since then, the couple has been meeting
with other debtors and planning the strike with organizers. Long told
me that the effort has given them, for the first time, a support
system and a belief that they can flip the dynamic with their
creditor. “The most important thing about everybody getting together
is that it’s more than one voice,” she said. “It gives us
power.”

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Michael Friedrich is a journalist who writes about the politics of
cities and housing.

* Tenants Rights; Rent Debt; Equity Residential; Housing;
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