The ones who make Oneonta…

What makes Oneonta a place worth living in?

Maybe it’s the downtown restaurants, shops, and cafes that give life to Main street. Maybe it’s the public parks where people can enjoy themselves with others. Perhaps it’s the schools which give a unique flavor to a small town. Maybe it’s the public events hosted in places like foothills that allow people to connect and express themselves. There are so many possible answers to this question. Every one of us has some reason we stay in Oneonta. What unites all these reasons is that they are the product of collective labor.

The staff who work in the restaurants. The professors, custodians, and students who bring Hartwick and SUNY to life. The staff in the hospitals. The library workers and Foothills staff who help make so many events around town possible. The community groups. The public parks employees. The working class residents who create Oneonta’s culture. These groups, along with so many more invest their time, labor, passions, and energy to make Oneonta. We turn Oneonta from a collection of buildings into a city. Through our efforts as tenants and workers who engage in the day to day life of Oneonta, we create a city worth living in. 

It’s a shame then that we are the victims of the value we create.

And the ones who plunder it

Tenants make and see Oneonta as a place to live in. Landlords see it in an entirely different light. To them, Oneonta is a place to be invested in. That investment is not based on them contributing their own talent, passions, or labor to the city. In many cases, they don’t even live in it. Instead, they invest in it by buying up housing and the land underneath it, employing as little effort as possible. This investment works in two ways. First, they take advantage of the fact that people need housing to live. By hoarding it they can always count on people who need to be in the city to pay whatever we can afford not to live on the street. Second, and crucially, they are the ones who profit off of the value we create.

In real estate, there is a saying: “there are three things that matter in property: location, location, location”. By “location” they mean the proximity to things people want or need. Oneonta real estate is profitable because of all the things mentioned before. People want or need to live near where they work or study, public transport, wonderful parks, the social scene, and all the other things Oneonta has to offer. The more of this value is created, the more landlords can increase the rent. There lies the fundamental irony of a tenant’s life. As tenants make Oneonta a better place to live, landlords make it harder for us to afford. 

When staff at SUNY and Hartwick go to work everyday, they contribute to the city in so many ways. The more capable and engaged they are, the more they make SUNY and Hartwick places people are willing to send their kids to for their education, and the more they make Oneonta a place worth living in. In turn, their landlords see this increased interest or demand, a product of the labor of the workers, and profit off it by increasing the rent. The engaged tenant-professor finds that they now have to pay more to live in their home. This is their reward for contributing to Oneonta. Their landlord, who did nothing to contribute other than speculate on the value of some land however many years ago, rakes in profit for labor they did not perform. This applies to all the worker-tenants in the city. The better the staff in the restaurants on Main Street, the more difficult it will be for them to rent an apartment there. The more we make Oneonta’s day to day life vibrant with festivals and community events, the greater the chance we will be priced out of being able to attend them. The more we create, the more they can extract in the form of rent. Landlords make a profit from our labor without lifting so much as a finger because they are the ones who own Oneonta. Simply put, we collectively make Oneonta, and they privately plunder it.

This is not a unique problem. It’s inherent to the system of rent. In every city where rent exists this same dynamic of public labor and private gain plays out. This system of rent is at the root of today’s “housing crisis”. In reality, this is a crisis of rent, a crisis for tenants. The houses have nothing to worry about. The landlords in Oneonta rake in tens of millions of dollars every year. It’s the tenants, we who are subject to the whims of landlords, who are threatened with losing our homes, who have our own labor weaponized against us, who are facing a crisis. That crisis is the system of rent. Fortunately for us, rent is a system made by human beings, and so it can be challenged by human beings as well.

To stop a thief

Despite how it may appear, tenants are not actually powerless in the face of landlord plunder. We have the power to claw back the value we create and to challenge the rent system. This power can only be accessed through organized, collective action against landlords and their enablers in the government. Tenant unity is tenant power. The deeper and wider this unity, the greater that power is. This is why Reclaim Oneonta calls for the formation of a citywide tenant union. Without that, any call for pro-tenant change in the city is a dream. Tenants will either act collectively to take back some of what landlords have plundered or we will continue to passively watch our own labor be turned against us.

Towards the creation of such a union, we call for the adoption of the ‘Good Cause Eviction Law’ in Oneonta. A law like that, modest and reasonable even by the warped rules of the rent system, will still only come to fruition through united and concerted effort from Oneonta’s tenants. Despite making a lot of sense, landlords who are so used to acting with no restrictions, will see it as an attack on their power. Attempts to pass it without significant pressure coming from tenants  are unlikely to gain any ground. With a tenant union, we could wage an escalating campaign that would give landlords no choice but to relent. That union would then be strong enough to last for the fights to come. In the ongoing struggle with the rent system, small gains won by the tenants are something to take pride in.

Forming a tenant union and fighting the rent system is not only about getting this or that bill passed or changing this or that lease. It’s a declaration that we the tenants should have control over our own communities, and our own destinies. By asserting our collective will with our neighbors, we overcome the ingrained patterns of indifference and obedience so central to American life. We also forge new connections with the people who live closest to us. So, yes, this fight is about money. It’s an attempt to claw back the rent hikes landlords have gotten so accustomed to. It’s also about community. Through collective struggle as tenants, we gain a new understanding about what it means to be neighbors and to have power. Ultimately it’s about dignity. The refusal to live life with our heads bowed in quiet submission as the rich plunder our homes.

So we say: Tenants unite, for a good cause, for community, and for dignity. Build a tenant union and fight for your homes.