Member Statements on PCR06: Make Stomp Out Slumlords a Chapter Priority Campaign for 2026
IN FAVOR by Doug T
Stomp Out Slumlords changes lives. It forces socialists out of the left activist bubble into the homes of the unorganized, propertyless class: the tenant class. This work is absolutely necessary because proletarian disorganization is the main problem of our time. As socialist organizers, our task should be to build this class into a class of itself and for itself. This work is at the core of what SOS aims to get organizers to do.
Mutual aid or legislative or policy advocacy tied to no program of deep, long term organizing is - in form - little different from conventional liberal politics. It’s mobilizing the same left activists to another rally or vote, or simply…charity. There’s other liberal or anarchist groups in the region doing this work (and the NGOs doing this are often even better resourced than us!). I wish them all well because they’re addressing real human needs in this rotten capitalist world, but it’s a lane that’s not best served by DSA.
SOS has changed my life and I’ve seen it change others. I’ve learned through years of tenant organizing that the fear of failure can be debilitating. Taking action requires taking risks, and accepting that you will fail. You will mess up. But you have to get yourself up and keep trying. The bosses and landlords are relentless in their war against, so must we be.
It’s a very challenging moment for the tenants movement right now. Tenants are being swept off the street by fascist stormtroopers. The mayor and her lackeys on the DC Council are taking a sledgehammer to tenants’ legal rights. But abandoning SOS now would be forfeiting so much of the work we’ve done the past 7 years or so. We must keep moving through this dark time, we must not give up. For just over the horizon always hides the dawn of another glorious wave of struggle.
IN FAVOR by Nicole Z
I’m Nicole Z and I’m currently the lead for our work on rent stabilization and tenant organizing in Montgomery County and a member of the Stomp Out Slumlords Coordinating Committee. As I assume my comrades have already covered, SOS does powerful work and has a strong track record of organizing working people against their landlords and winning big concessions and material improvements. I’m asking chapter members to votee for Stomp Out Slumlords as a priority campaign.
One thing I want to hone in on in our priority campaign application is that we’ve included our work to pass rent stabilization in Gaithersburg and Rockville, MD and defending Montgomery County’s 2023 rent stabilization law. All of this work requires money, covering printing, meeting costs and food and more.
Rockville and Gaithersburg are exempt from the county’s rent stabilization law, but we have been successful in building a tenant base and recruiting new DSA members by campaigning for the Rockville City Council to pass rent stabilization. There is also a burgeoning effort to build a similar effort in Gaithersburg, MD. In fall 2025, we built our capacity by running a member and tenant advocate, Omo Willliams, for Gaithersburg City Council.
We expect the rent stabilization law to be under attack in the 2026 elections and beyond, as developers go on a capital strike to prove they need to rent-gouge tenants. The best way to defend rent stabilization is by having an organized base of tenants ready to defend it. We have attracted tenants from around the county through this work and organized tenant associations in rent-stabilized buildings.
AGAINST by Far
I am writing against voting for Stomp Out Slumlords not because the work they do isn’t valuable, but because it does not seem to have been effective enough to earn their perpetual priority status. The needs they have for resources as laid out don’t seem to justify this proposal. They claim they are building up DSA and gaining new members for the org by demonstrating the power they have organized, however I unfortunately do not see a huge amount of tangible gains to our organization from their work over the last few years.
For their Priority Campaign for 2025, they requested the highest share of the priority budget, which they received. Their stated reason and the goal for the year behind this request was to help build up a Washington-Area Tenant’s Union. As I understand it, for many reasons, this goal was abandoned mid-way through the year. I have not seen it articulated anywhere that they made any meaningful headway towards realizing that goal. Further, it is unclear how the amount of priority funding they received was used to actually help realize that goal or help our organization grow.
I was a Stomp Out Slumlords organizer in NoVA for a time, where we organized at a large apartment complex in Alexandria. Learning some basics about organizing conversations in this group was genuinely a formative part of my experience in DSA. I value my time there and still deeply value my comrades and the work they do! However, after spending a lot of time in this deeply marginalized community, SOS decided to abandon the project. I do not hold any of this against our organizers and can see the struggles and nuances behind the decision. The pathway to wins can be hard and long. However, it did illustrate to me that the capacity to win power in places like Virginia does not seem to be achieved purely by the organizing model that SOS employs, and the campaign as it is currently might not be able to address the differing needs of the whole of our chapter.
Also, SOS as a working group within our chapter seems to behave in a way that is mostly disconnected from DSA as an organization. For instance they do not have a consistent presence on our Slack, many of their leaders are not even on the platform, and they are often missing many newcomers asking to get involved. They could be using DSA more consistently to build capacity in their work and also to grow our organization. Their leadership structure is unfortunately not transparent to members, and does not use a democratic structure like the rest of our formations do. Their reasoning for this is nuanced and has some validity, but I raise this as a point to encourage us to think of priority campaigns as integral participants and collaborators in the broader whole of this organization and our values.
So I encourage a NO vote on the Stomp Out Slumlords Priority Campaign at this time, and encourage SOS leaders to better engage and more mindfully collaborate with the rest of our organization and hope to continue working with them closely. While I can’t in good conscience recommend voting for SOS this year, I sincerely hope to be voting for SOS as a priority in coming years!
IN FAVOR by Samuel M
SOS is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen and I am constantly proud to have any connection to it. The strategic initiative and creativity are simply astounding. As an on-ramp for socialist organizing and as a way to directly improve DC residents’ lives its impact is - in my view - unparalleled. Also, SOS’ annual reports are more frank and rigorous than many professional ones, which has allowed to make effective adaptations as context changes and learnings emerge over the years.
IN FAVOR by Julia P
SOS is great. We know them, we love them, they’ve been around longer than most of us have been in the chapter, and they’re probably our most effective long term organizing project. With Aparna running for W1 council and Janeese running for mayor, this upcoming year is going to be a big one for DC tenants, and SOS needs to be a priority campaign so we can collectively rise up, meet the moment, and show the world what tenant power looks like. Please vote YES!
IN FAVOR by Ken B
Tenant organizing is one of the most important tasks before socialists today. In order to build a mass movement of the working class to contest for power, we must meet workers where they live and be present in working class communities. Stomp Out Slumlords has set the standard for this across DSA. Guided by a clear theory of change and firmly rooted in a working class base, Stomp Out Slumlords is an essential campaign that should be renewed for Priority Status in 2026.
2025 has been a difficult year for tenant organizing in DC. Between the fight over the DC budget and the RENTAL act there have been setbacks this year, though there have also major victories: Marbury Plaza tenants won their lawsuit against their former slumlord and were awarded $41,000,000 and we continued to advance the fight for rent stabilization in Montgomery County. While the fights around the budget and the Rental act were tactical defeats, they were also fruitful organizing efforts that engaged working class people in the district and deepened ties with coalition partners such as CFM (now Movimiento Migrantes). This relationship, as well as the broader network of connections between SOS organizers and latine tenants in DC has been pivotal to the success of our Community Defense work.
2026 is looking to be a major year for SoS. There are potentially three electoral campaigns that will highlight tenant issues (Aparna Raj, Izola Shaw, and Janeese Lewis George), and this presents an excellent backdrop against which to engage in new building organizing. SOS can use this politicized environment to win over tenants who might otherwise be wary of radical demands and create an impetus for neighborhood and eventually region wide tenant unions.
I do not believe we can build a mass socialist party in the DMV or the US without being highly engaged in tenant organizing, with a cohesive theory of change like the one used by SoS. For all these reasons, please join me in voting to make SoS a priority campaign!
IN FAVOR by Julian A
Hello comrades,
As a born and raised Washingtonian, my politics have been deeply shaped by the crises of housing and displacement that defined this city throughout my life. After organizing with Stomp Out Slumlords and the tenants of the Buena Vista Apartments—who, after years of struggle, now cooperatively own their buildings as permanently affordable housing—I decided to join DSA.
I had passed through other socialist groups but was frustrated by how disconnected they felt from the world around them. Through SOS, I found a place where I could actually put my politics into practice, in the trenches of class struggle helping tenants come together to fight back against their landlords. SOS’s tenant organizing work is important not just because it helps tenants in one or another building win conditions improvements, or because it trains socialists in class struggle organizing (although both of these are of course great benefits of the work); fundamentally, SOS’s work is important as it builds working class organization and deepens the relationship of our party to organized and fighting sections of the working class. This sort of work qualitatively shifts our political capacity and ability to respond to crises. It was because of the longstanding relationships that SOS had built with organized Latino immigrant tenants that we were able to quickly respond when Trump occupied DC, not only standing up community defense networks that used TA structures to disseminate important safety information, but also collaborating with Ward 1 Mutual Aid to aid the Oaklawn Tenant’s Association in setting up a weekly food distro.
Next year, we look forward to continuing to build organized tenant power through the different crises and political opportunities that we will face. In particular, we will be working to expand on existing ties between organized buildings in Uptown DC to build out a neighborhood-level tenants union, and are particularly interested in using the new capacity that such a structure would bring to coordinate with the Community Defense and Electoral Working Groups, in addition to promoting working-class and immigrant protagonism in these fights. For all these reasons, I ask you to vote YES to adopting Stomp Out Slumlords as a priority campaign.
Solidarity,
Julian (he/him)
IN FAVOR by Rohin G
Dear Comrades,
In 2023, I first chose to get involved in the broader MDC DSA chapter while still part of AU YDSA in large part because I saw the results delivered through the work of Stomp Out Slumlords. Now I serve on the SOS Coordinating Committee and continue to believe that our work is absolutely vital, and it is crucial that SOS retain priority campaign status.
The work SOS does to organize tenants to fight for their homes means we quite literally meet people where they are, regardless of their existing political beliefs or disaffection, and present a viable class struggle alternative to accepting the everyday horrors of racial capitalism. Our organizing reaches far beyond those who are seen by the system as worthy of political consideration and brings these people together across lines of race, language, immigration status, age, or any other division to form a united voice capable of confronting real estate capital in our own homes and in the halls of power.
This year, we mobilized organized DC tenants to speak out against the mayor’s assault on tenants’ rights, the RENTAL Act. Though we were unsuccessful in defeating the legislation entirely, we successfully defeated the most harmful provisions and saved TOPA rights for thousands of DC tenants.
Tenants at Marbury Plaza in Ward 8 also won a $41 million settlement against their former slumlord (with almost $30 million ordered to be paid out to tenants), after over half a decade of struggle and organizing supported by SOS.
As Black and Brown Washingtonians have come under siege with the federal occupation, we have also integrated tenants unions into community defense structures and supported the formation of vital mutual aid programs to keep our neighbors safe and supported through the crisis. We have also supported our tenants’ union leaders in speaking out against abuses by federal forces, enabling them to overcome personal risks and make their voices heard.
This past year, we have also increased our general meeting frequency to almost monthly, creating more space for collaboration and community building. We are also supporting tenants in several different buildings who are newly organizing their neighbors.
In the coming year, we have plans to double down on our work of bringing organized tenants into the political process as a bloc by hosting tenant-specific events with endorsed electoral candidates. We are also working on building out neighborhood-level leadership structures and coordination in areas where we have a high density of organized buildings.
The crucial work SOS is doing to organize working-class tenants to directly confront capital is resource-intensive. We have very significant printing and event space costs, along with other expenses such as food and interpretation. Priority campaign status is crucial to ensuring we can continue to be effective and inclusive.
I am deeply proud of the work SOS is doing to build tenant power in our region and directly confront the most predatory form of capital, the real estate industry. Please join me in voting YES to adopting Stomp Out Slumlords as a priority campaign.
In Solidarity,
Rohin
IN FAVOR by Paul C
MDC DSA should prioritize SOS for the following reasons:
Tenant organizing prefigures a future socialist governmental structure through grassroots democratic groups
A TA provides short- and medium-term benefits like lower rents, preservation of affordable housing, and remediation of adverse building conditions to tenants
Per Jane MacAlevey in her book Raising Expectations and Raising Hell, union contract negotiation is one of the best ways to educate adults on class politics. The contradictions of struggle with a landlord are similarly clarifying class politics for me and I believe they can have similar impact on other tenants
Tenant Organizing often centers self-identified working-class and BIPOC populations who may not encounter formal socialism in their everyday lives, who are natural allies with socialist causes, who naturally understand class conflict, and who DSA has set priorities for outreach
There is high need; the government and non-government organizations in the DMV simply cannot adequately serve tenants in the fight against slumlords, and much more action is required to improve conditions
Impact of fights can be quite concrete and strong; for example, the recent $41M decision at Marbury Plaza/Langston Views
In conclusion, please pass PCR06!
IN FAVOR by Katlyn C
I’m urging folks to vote in favor of SOS as a priority campaign. I’ve been an SOS organizer in Virginia for 5 years, and I’m a member of the Coordinating Committee. During that time, I’ve seen SOS organizers fight alongside tenants across this region against slum conditions and landlord abuse, building really inspiring campaigns that bring all types of working class people into the fight for a better world. We’ve organized rent strikes, mass actions and marches, and Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) sales. From these efforts, we’ve won rent concessions, improved housing conditions, and helped build a limited equity co-op. Most recently, tenants organizing with SOS at Marbury Plaza won the largest tenant victory in DC history - an over $40 million judgement against their former landlord, with $29 million in restitution to tenants over the unlivable conditions they were forced to endure. Through on the ground struggle and deep organizing, we have repeatedly won substantial, material gains for the working class.
This year we are prioritizing building out a neighborhood level tenants union where we have the greatest density of tenant unions, building on efforts from last year where tenant unions in Columbia Heights started collaborating on actions and events, and the efforts of tenant unions in that neighborhood to form ICE patrols. We’ll continue to build out similar cells in other parts of DC and places like Silver Springs and Arlington, with the hope that this model can replicate and scale to build region wide. I’m hopeful this is how we are going to build something that is even more tenant-led, with more connective tissue across buildings, that brings more tenants up as leaders and organizers, so that the tenant movement grows even more and becomes a fearsome thing capable of wielding power for the working class.
IN FAVOR by Joe R
I’m writing a member statement IN FAVOR of making Stomp Out Slumlords’ tenant organizing a priority campaign in 2026.
Housing, like labor, has profound impacts on the working class, and we should prioritize the kinds of arduous, long-term organizing and powerbuilding that SOS has a proven track record of doing. Just last month, after five years of organizing at Marbury Plaza in Ward 8, tenants there won nearly $30 million in restitution – 75% of the rent they paid from 2017 to 2024 – benefitting more than 1,000 households whose slumlord had forced them to endure dangerous and unlawful conditions for years. It is difficult to understate how important and impressive this is, and we have few other examples of such tangible, material victories of this kind. Whether it’s through the lens of class alignment or proletarian disorganization, organizing working class tenants where they live, building a tenant union and learning how to use collective organization as a vehicle for class struggle in opposition to the owning class is a worthy goal in its own right.
But SOS doesn’t limit itself to building-by-building organizing. As a member of the Political Engagement Committee earlier this year, I coordinated two strategy sessions with democratic socialist Councilmember Janeese Lewis George and her then-Chief of Staff about how to fight Mayor Bowser’s destructive RENTAL Act. With the advice of the councilmember, we determined that we would need to try to keep the legislation in the Committee on Housing rather than the Committee on the Whole, and target councilmembers serving on the former. We worked with SOS organizers and tenants to get meetings with all five councilmembers on the Committee on Housing. For example, Councilmember Lewis George identified Ward 3 Councilmember Matt Frumin as the most likely swing vote, and thus, our top priority. Two members who live in a building with a tenant association in Ward 3 knocked the doors of their neighbors to get dozens of signatures, which we sent to the councilmember’s office and ultimately helped us a secure a meeting where SOS members and tenants could defend TOPA and lobby against other key provisions of the RENTAL Act. In the end, we all took a hard loss on the chin, but that’s ultimately because we need an even stronger tenant movement, District- and DMV-wide, to win these fights.
The RENTAL Act and the rapid response required to protect the large numbers of immigrant tenants in SOS buildings from ICE derailed earlier plans to launch a Washington Area Tenants Union, but SOS is now able to take the first steps towards that in the form of neighborhood tenants unions in the areas with the most organized buildings, which have been collaborating more closely out of necessity throughout the year. Moreover, the neighborhoods with the highest density of SOS-organized buildings are in Ward 1, where cadre member and SOS organizer Aparna Raj will be running for District Council! This presents us with a significant opportunity to politicize already organized tenants even further in support of an openly class struggle, socialist political project.
IN FAVOR by Evan S
For over eight years now, Stomp Out Slumlords has worked to organize and establish itself in the DMV. We’re proud of the fact that we’ve organized buildings in DC, Montgomery County, and Alexandria, and even a building out in Fairfax. Through successfully organizing across class and racial boundaries, we’ve managed to win fights every year we’ve existed, including earlier this year with the $41M settlement for Marbury Plaza in Ward 8. Looking to the future, we are planning for another year of critical fights and campaigning as both the real estate industry and the federal government continue their offensive against tenants and neighbors across the District and beyond.
Earlier this year, the DC Council passed the landlord lobby’s RENTAL Act, which stripped away several eviction prevention measures and rolled back parts of the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act. We worked hard over the summer to fight its passage and the worst provisions, canvassing dozens of buildings, bird dogging at public forums, and making hundreds of calls and sending hundreds of letters to councilmembers. While the bill was ultimately passed, we managed to convince members of the council to strip away some of the worst provisions such as means testing TOPA, serving notices to tenants by email, and reducing TOPA building exemptions from 25 years to 15. Without an SOS mobilized base of both tenants, activists, and sympathetic neighbors all over the District, tenants would have even fewer rights. We anticipate more of these fights in the coming months and years as slumlords and developers have repeatedly targeted TOPA and eviction protections and show no signs of stopping.
Unfortunately, the DC council has also made evictions much easier for landlords by stripping away important tenant protections that have been found to dramatically prevent eviction filings. Even before these protections were rolled back, completed DC evictions have been rising and even hit a 10 year high in 2024. Now more than ever, the work of Stomp Out Slumlord’s anti-eviction canvassing program is needed to keep tenants in their homes and combat the reenergized DC eviction machine. This is even more critical in the months and years ahead as nonprofit programs which emulated our canvases have lost funding or scaled back their eviction defense support. These canvases are also important for SOS and the chapter itself, as each month draws in new members and those curious about the DSA which in turns adds members to our rolls who turn out to canvases, actions, and meetings.
Lastly but crucially, both the organizers and base of Stomp Out Slumlords have been critical to resisting the dangerously escalated federal violence aimed at the immigrant community in the District. Many of our organizers have been instrumental in forming the Community Defense Working Group, and the communities we’ve fostered at organized buildings have created networks of support to help keep each other safe. Our tenant leaders continue this work as we increasingly collaborate with the CDWG to prevent and deter the kidnapping of our immigrant neighbors through closer coordination between affected buildings in Columbia Heights.
While SOS strives to organize frugally and primarily depends on building interpersonal relationships to sustain our structure, our operations and actions require material support that our individual contributions of time and money cannot meet alone. These expenses include costs for printing anti-eviction pamphlets to respond to the RENTAL Act when it takes effect, art supplies for direct actions against landlord-backed legislation, supplies and event space for further developing our network of organized buildings in Ward 1, and facilitating more political education events for our tenant base. I believe we have a successful track record of putting priority funds to good use and delivering results for both DSA and tenants across the DMV. With this confidence, I urge you to vote YES for Stomp Out Slumlords as a priority campaign for 2026.
IN FAVOR by Guido V
Comrades, I urge you to vote yes to making Stomp Out Slumlords and priority campaign. Tenant organizing is a twin pillar next to labor organizing. SoS does amazing work and it’s due to their community building that we have developed critical relationships to neighborhoods at risk of police and ICE violence. This is clearly and area that was able to build off of its funds from last year and was able to respond to a serious threat WHILE developing responses to it. We should continuing investing here. Vote yes.
IN FAVOR by Emily N
I am submitting this statement in support of making Stomp Out Slumlords a priority campaign in 2026.
When I moved to DC in 2018, SOS was one of the first groups I encountered doing real tenant organizing in the District. I’ve worked in housing for as long as I’ve lived here, and SOS has been a constant—both a direct challenge to developers who treat tenants as disposable and a necessary thorn in the side of nonprofits that too often settle for moderation. SOS has consistently shown up, thrown down, and helped tenants organize their buildings and fight for their homes.
The last two years have been defined by high-stakes legislative battles over housing. DC could not have held the line – or pushed forward – without SOS’s direct interventions. From organizing with tenants at Marbury Plaza (who recently won $41 million in their case with the Attorney General), to rapidly mobilizing emergency rallies and letter-writing campaigns to defend the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, to supporting the passage and implementation of rent stabilization in Montgomery County, SOS has remained the driving force of the tenant movement in the DMV.
It’s true that this year hasn’t been defined by wins. But the disaster of the RENTAL Act would have been magnitudes worse without years of SOS organizers fighting to mitigate the harm. The only meaningful counterweight the District has to the developer lobby is this working group – and that is not an exaggeration. In a year when so many progressive fights were lost, the RENTAL Act could have been a full-scale catastrophe without this formation’s organizing.
This campaign is essential to the strength of our inside-outside strategy and will only grow more critical as we build our base and expand working-class power in the region. I urge you to vote to ensure SOS continues as a chapter priority in 2026.
IN FAVOR by Brandon W
I am writing in favor of making Stomp Out Slumlords a Chapter priority campaign for 2026. At a time where tenants’ rights are under attack through the repeal of TOPA, now is not the time to let our foot off the gas and not prioritize meaningful tenant organizing. SOS’s work is incredibly meaningful and has produced tangible results — without our chapter & SOS’s organizing, residents at Marbury Plaza in Ward 8 would not have finally received the $41 million in overdue relief for the unsafe conditions they faced. SOS’s work has trained tenant organizers across the District and the region to build solidarity across buildings and allow new tenants to be supported in their organizing work. With the priority campaign, SOS will be able to further its anti-eviction canvassing work (especially with the RENTAL Act’s changes), advocate for rent stabilization efforts in Montgomery County, and build momentum for a DMV wide tenant union through its Uptown neighborhood tenants’ union proposal; simultaneously, SOS’s work will help recruit more working class people to engage in DSA.