Tacoma, Washington is a city of about 222,000 persons, 35 miles southwest of Seattle along Interstate 5. It, and the broader Pierce County of which it is the largest city, are typical of many areas of the United States: majority white but with visible communities of color—including many first generation immigrants—and a largely working class population heavily dependent on low-wage, mostly non-union, service sector employment.

As is the case with the vast majority of Americans, most Tacoma residents are only intermittently interested in politics, concentrating on the day to day struggle of living paycheck to paycheck. Politics in the city is dominated by business interests, with elected representatives running the cliched gamut from tepid centrist progressives to right-wing Republicans.

Recently, the Tacoma chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 367 have successfully mobilized ordinary people to fight for greater housing security, affordability, and pro-worker politics. Several years ago, for example, both organizations launched Tacoma 4 All (T4A), an organization whose activism succeeded in securing from the city’s voters in November 2023 the passage of what has been informally called the Tenants Bill of Rights—its formal legal title is the Landlord Fairness Code (LFC). The main features of the LFC were a $10 cap on late rental fees, a moratorium on rental evictions within the city during winter months, and a limit on rent increases at 5% annually. If landlords chose to raise the rent by more than 5% per year (and the tenant did not accept the rent increase), they were required to provide the tenant with relocation assistance.

T4A’s grassroots power has been on display in recent months during Tacoma City Council meetings as the organization has mobilized Tacoma residents—in what Tacoma’s business-friendly Democratic Mayor Victoria Woodards called "unprecedented" numbers for the December 9 meeting—to speak out during the meetings in support of the LFC. At the meetings, working class person after working class person has arisen to give testimony as to how the measures' regulations—particularly the winter month eviction moratorium—have given them desperately needed breathing space when temporary financial difficulties have made it impossible for them to pay rent. Such grassroots mobilization helped keep most of the LFC intact when the Tacoma City Council voted during the December 9 meeting on Council Member Sarah Rumbaugh’s proposal to make the LFC more landlord friendly.

The situation of ordinary Tacomans is a microcosm of broader economic injustices facing Washington state (and the United States as a whole).

The popular mobilization helped defeat some of Rumbaugh’s worst proposals, but other landlord-friendly revisions made it into the final revised LFC legislation, which the council approved by a 7-2 margin. The winter eviction moratorium was reduced from five months to four months; the $10 late fee cap was replaced by a charge of 1.5% of monthly rent; residents of nonprofit-owned buildings and Tacoma Housing Authority properties were removed from LFC winter eviction........

© Common Dreams