How Tenants Took On Their Landlord - and Won

When their landlord ignored them, residents of Yantlet turned to ACORN - and proved that collective power can force change.

At Yantlet, an elderly accommodation block in Leigh-on-Sea, residents were paying more than £2,000 a month collectively in service charges. Yet bins overflowed, stairwells were filthy, windows had been left uncleaned, and an abandoned flat had been left to rot for years. The smell was so bad that it was noticeable from the street – and the mould had begun to spread into neighbouring properties.

One of the greatest causes of frustration to Yantlet’s elderly residents was a broken lift. A 96-year-old became trapped and had to be rescued by firefighters. During a heatwave, it failed for over a week and residents collapsed on the stairs. We hear a lot in the news about the loneliness epidemic among older people – and very little about how that loneliness is being exacerbated by the housing crisis.

One tenant summed up what the dispute was about: they just wanted the services they were paying for – and respect. I spoke to Paddy Nolan, an organiser at the ACORN community union, about how they organised residents to fight back against Southend Homes – and restore some dignity to Yantlet’s residents.

Organising to win

The campaign started after residents spent months trying to escalate their complaints using official channels. South Essex Homes, the housing association that owns and runs Yantlet, just ignored them.

“One resident had been sent legal letters in which his complaints were called ‘vexatious’,” Paddy told me. “Eventually, he said ‘I can’t do this by myself anymore.’”

Residents realised they needed help – but they didn’t know where to go for support. There was already a residents’ association, but it wasn’t fit for purpose. ACORN had campaigned in the area several years previously, but they’d never managed to reach a critical mass of members.

Nevertheless, Yantlet’s residents remembered conversations they’d had with ACORN organisers years before and got back in touch. This, Paddy tells me, is a pretty common pattern for the organisation.

“Often our organising pays off years in the future – someone remembers ACORN and comes to us when they hit a wall.”

The first step was building membership density. ACORN generally tries to build a membership of at 10-20% of the residents of a block like Yantlet before gearing up for a big campaign. And they managed to achieve this within a few months through tried and tested organising methods.

“We knocked up the block, got people signed up, held a meeting, and decided to take the campaign on. That gave us the legitimacy and the strength in numbers we needed.”

This kind of organising isn’t really about persuading reluctant people to become enthusiastic organisers. It’s about identifying the people who are already angry but feel powerless to do anything about it. ACORN just needed to find these people and support them to work together to take on the landlord themselves.

The residents - supported by ACORN Southend - took the lead on the campaign, petitioning neighbours, speaking to the press, and confronting the landlord at the civic centre. Meanwhile, South Essex Homes insisted communication channels were open, then left residents waiting in the lobby for forty minutes before refusing to meet them.

“We got residents to confront the landlord directly and show how unwilling they were to communicate. They claimed they always communicate with residents, then refused to send anyone senior down to meet them.”

The tide turned when ACORN managed to get a representative of South Essex Homes to agree to many of the residents demands with a journalist was in the room. They managed to lock in two appearances on BBC Essex radio, including one in which the ACORN Southend secretary went up against an Esssex councillor. Not long after that, a named tenancy officer was appointed and repairs began.

How collective power changes lives

Housing providers rarely ignore tenants because they are unaware of problems. They ignore them because they think residents aren’t organised enough to hold them to account. Collective action changes that calculus – and that’s where ACORN comes in.

“Lots of people have individual problems but struggle to come together around them. We bring people together around confrontational direct actions – it’s the quickest way to win and it shifts power.”

Getting involved with this kind of organising doesn’t just secure meaningful victories for tenants – it empowers people who have spent years feeling powerless. ACORN has seen communities up and down the country transformed by the experience of winning a fight against a dodgy landlord.

“Once people saw the campaign working, suddenly loads started contacting us with problems.”

Campaigns like this also expose the root causes of the housing crisis. The structure of social housing in the UK has been designed in such a way as to minimise accountability. There are so many layers of bureaucracy – from councils, to housing associations, to residents’ associations – that it’s hard to know who to go to when something goes wrong.

Organisations like ACORN have the skills and expertise to guide tenants through all the barriers the state has erected to impede accountability. Which is probably why landlords and councils across the country are so scared of the organisation. In Paddy’s words, ACORN has “put landlords on notice” by showing them that “they can’t mistreat residents without consequences.”

But their mission in the area is far from complete. ACORN uses struggles like those at Yantlet as a way to build a foothold in a city, expanding from one campaign to the next until they have a critical mass of members.

“Winning cases feels good, but it’s pointless unless you build power to change things city-wide. The goal is to go from individual fights, to city-wide fights, and eventually national campaigns.”

Winning victories like this requires residents to move beyond a service relationship with ACORN and start acting as a collective in all their interactions with the housing association and the council.

“We want people to understand: you’re not just getting help from ACORN, you are ACORN.”