Kansas City’s Tara Raghuveer Has a ‘North Star’ and It’s True Social Housing

Kansas City may not top anyone’s list of prospective hot spots for housing reform. In the heart of the Bible Belt, with a painful legacy of racial segregation and destructive urban-renewal projects, the mid-size prairie metropolis straddling the Missouri and Kansas state lines would hardly seem a natural fit for a burgeoning tenants-rights movement. Yet in recent years, the area has seen a groundswell of organizing and agitation in favor of better and more affordable homes for working people. Helping to lead the charge has been Tara Raghuveer, a native Kansan who left home for Harvard, spent five years working in Chicago, and then returned in 2019 to help start KC Tenants, an advocacy group that’s bringing local renters together to demand better treatment from landlords and better protections from municipal government. 

It’s been an upward climb: the group has had to work essentially from scratch, fighting for members’ rights in a developer-dominated environment with few regulations, still less enforcement, and almost no actual programs to create and preserve low-cost housing. Despite the long odds, Raghuveer has stayed the course, staging rallies and giving speeches and keeping pressure on lawmakers, all while pursuing a broader mission as director of the Homes Guarantee campaign, a program of the national social justice NGO People’s Action Institute that seeks to influence housing policy at the national level. Dwell checked in with the activist and changemaker for a quick dispatch from the affordability front.

How did you find your way into housing work? 

I studied evictions for my senior thesis in college and just became obsessed with the subject, especially with the power imbalance between landlords and tenants and the structural violence of the evictions system. I was still doing research in the field 2017 when I gained access to eviction records for Jackson County, on the Kansas side where I grew up; I was combing through the data and found all these horrifying things, in particular the hugely disparate impact of eviction on Black families as opposed to white ones, even ones with comparable income. Basically what I was seeing was the evidence for what I had already anecdotally known to be true, which was that the system was just rubber-stamping inequality. So I started this group with three other women who had been deeply impacted by housing injustice—I definitely can’t take sole credit for what we’ve become!—and today we have 500 tenant leaders, close to 4,000 members, and we just launched a campaign to increase that number to 10,000. At the same time, I still do my national tenant organizing work, which is aimed at a straightforward but obviously pretty ambitious goal: transforming housing from a commodity to a guaranteed right. 

What is the overarching aim of KC Tenants, the alternative vision of how housing could work? 

Our north star is true social housing—something that doesn’t exist in the U.S. currently, and never really has—meaning a way of delivering housing outside the scope of the private market, not available for profit or speculation. I think in particular of the Vienna model, where two-thirds of city residents live in publicly owned and maintained homes, which are beautiful and sustainable and which stay affordable from one generation to the next. In Vienna, you find social housing even in expensive parts of the city, not hidden under highways, and architects fight for those contracts—they want to design social housing. That’s the way you ensure true and deep levels of affordability. What I want to see is Kansas City becoming the first in the country to win municipal social housing. KC Tenants is about putting us on that path. 

Kansas City definitely seems a long way from Vienna, in more ways than one. What kind of concrete steps, policy-wise, are you presently taking to get it closer? 

One of our biggest accomplishments to date is writing the Kansas City, MO tenant’s bill of rights, which was passed by the city council in December of 2019 and includes a whole host of new protections. Landlords are now obligated to give notice before entering a property; there has to be disclosure around actual utility costs charged to tenants; and maybe most important, tenants here now have the legal right to organize. That one has been especially useful to us, since landlords used to call the cops and claim we were trespassing any time we’d show up for membership drives or protests. With that as a base, we’ve been able to check off some other major agenda items as well: we fought for and won an eviction moratorium during the Covid pandemic, and just last year we won tenants the right to counsel, guaranteeing they have lawyers in eviction court. With increasing membership, we’re in a better position to get more done, and when elected leaders don’t do what we want, we shut it down—we’ve shut down a whole floor of City Hall before. You have to keep educating, keep pushing, because city government here is just so focused on developers. Kansas City, MO recently created a citywide Office of Tenant Advocate, but they’ve failed to do anything with it. There’s two people who work there now, and all they do when people call is to give them our phone number. A government agency, sending people to a volunteer-staffed hotline!

That attitude hardly seems particular to Kansas City—looking at the national scene, it sometimes feels like the affordable-housing boulder gets pushed uphill only to roll back down again.

The most frustrating thing locally and nationally is the reliance of policy makers in the private market to solve problems the private market has created. If you’re designing policy around profit-making first and people’s homes second, you’re not going to be successful. Unfortunately we’ve sort of been taken hostage by that private housing model, to the point where it becomes almost impossible to imagine anything else. My optimism comes from organizing, which really is a practice of hope. Lot of times in our meetings, we say it can feel inevitable that our city will be bought and sold by developers, that it will become a place of $5 coffee and no homes, in which Black people will be run out or faced with living in horrible conditions for way too much money. But none of these things are inevitable if we organize. And I have evidence, lots and lots of it, that if people work together—acting from a place of collective self-interest, invested in their identity as tenants—that can bring about change.  

Top photo by Sundiata Moon.

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