The Upper Valley Tenants Union is a collective of organizers operating at the intersection of housing and class. We recognize that capitalism exists in opposition to the interest of poor and working class people simply trying to live. The UVTU works to address this conflict by empowering tenants to organize against landlords to reclaim the housing for themselves and protect their community against housing insecurity, unsafe living conditions, uncontrolled rent increases, harassing landlords, and profit extraction.

The existing means for tenants to fight back against housing injustice operate on timescales that cannot help those who are getting evicted in 30 days, nor does it address the larger structural dilemma of the subjugation of housing for profit. Capitalism incentivizes investors, speculators, and landowners to treat property as machines to extract your wages rather than places to make homes. Only us renters can build the community necessary to challenge this precedent and reclaim the house as a home instead of an investment opportunity.

We organize against those who profit from precarity and misery as a key part of the interconnected struggle of our current mode of production. We are building power towards a future where housing is constructed according to need — not according to profit.