The Debt Collective is perhaps best known for the ripple effects of the small student loan repayment strike the group organized against a defunct for-profit college in 2015. The strike grew into a nationwide movement demanding justice for millions of people facing overwhelming student debt. By 2025, the Biden administration had approved $188.8 billion in student debt relief for more than 5 million people.
With the affordability crisis forcing even people with jobs to live in their cars, the Debt Collective is now building a movement of tenants to take on corporate landlords that cashed in on pandemic subsidies and rising housing prices but have continued squeezing working families with…
The Debt Collective is perhaps best known for the ripple effects of the small student loan repayment strike the group organized against a defunct for-profit college in 2015. The strike grew into a nationwide movement demanding justice for millions of people facing overwhelming student debt. By 2025, the Biden administration had approved $188.8 billion in student debt relief for more than 5 million people.
With the affordability crisis forcing even people with jobs to live in their cars, the Debt Collective is now building a movement of tenants to take on corporate landlords that cashed in on pandemic subsidies and rising housing prices but have continued squeezing working families with threats of eviction, junk fees, and price gouging schemes.
On October 1, nine former tenants announced their joint refusal to pay back what the Debt Collective calls “immoral sums” of “illegally held” back rent demanded by Equity Residential, the fifth-largest landlord in the United States. The Debt Collective says it’s the nation’s first back-rent strike, and the collective action is poised to grow as renters organize with neighbors and across the nation.
The Debt Collective also launched a new web tool to help Equity Residential tenants and anyone else indebted to a landlord to report abuses and assemble documents for disputing the debt.
“The pain of being forced out of our secure home, living in our car for months, and facing the unrelenting burden of debt humiliation and credit damage for a lifetime of trauma due to one missed rent payment I can’t explain,” said Tai’Leah Paige, a former Equity Residential tenant in Los Angeles, California, during a press conference last week. “And we were one of the lucky ones.”
Known as the “EQR 9” after the Equity Residential’s stock ticker, many of the debt strikers lost jobs during COVID-19 shutdowns and fell behind on rent before being evicted from apartments owned by Equity Residential in southern California when pandemic housing protections were lifted. Others owe junk fees over lease disputes that have since gone to collections. Former tenants’ debts to Equity Residential ballooned with interest as they struggled to find a new place to live, trashing credit scores and limiting options for new housing.
“Today, they … are struggling to find housing, now carrying tens of thousands of dollars in back rent debt,” said Hannah Appel, co-founder of the Debt Collective, in a statement. “In the meantime, Equity Residential continues to rake in cash and pay its CEO billions all while raising rents and using profits to fight against tenants’ rights.”
Paige and her sister lost jobs in Los Angeles during the 2023 strike by writers and actors that shut down TV and film production, and they missed the second month’s rent for their North Hollywood apartment. The City awarded them six months of rent relief due to the strike, but Paige said Equity Residential refused to accept the payments, apparently preferring to find new tenants.
“When you are dealing with a landlord that is a corporate business, you lose out on any empathy or love,” said Paige, who pointed to research showing that Equity Residential and other Los Angeles landlords disproportionately evict Black tenants.
Equity Residential did not respond to multiple requests for comment by the time this story was published.
The rent-debt strike is part of the broader groundswell of tenant activism targeting large corporate landlords that exploded during the pandemic and continues under President Donald Trump, who is slashing affordable housing programs even as most Americans cite housing and inflation as top financial concerns.
Due to housing precarity, a record number of people experienced homelessness in 2024, with the number of people in need of shelter increasing by 18 percent over the prior year. The increasingly visible humanitarian crisis generated political backlash easily weaponized by demagogues, resulting in a rash of anti-homeless policies that fall hardest on people with disabilities.
The Debt Collective is allied with the Tenant Union Federation, a national union of tenant unions that announced in September that majorities of tenants in seven apartment buildings across five states had voted to unionize in order to gain leverage over Capital Realty Group, their corporate landlord. The federation says it’s the nation’s first large-scale, multi-state effort by tenants to negotiate collectively with a single corporate landlord.
Activists say such private equity “mega-corporations” gobbled up properties nationwide in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and are notorious for raising rents, adding junk fees, and skimping on maintenance while tenants struggle to make ends meet. When a single private equity firm controls tens of thousands of housing units — Equity Residential owns more than 86,000 —tenants must come together not only within individual buildings, but at a similar national scale, according to Appel of the Debt Collective.
“That is the scale at which we need to organize against these profit-hungry real estate investment trusts that claim to prioritize housing and instead prioritize wealth building for themselves and their investors,” Appel said during the press conference.
Qamar Omer, a Capital Realty Group tenant and president of the Kentucky Tenant Union who joined the Debt Collective at the press conference, said the Tenant Union Federation is expanding into multiple states as tenants in different cities seek negotiations with the same corporate landlords. Omer said legal protections for renters vary widely between blue states and more conservative states in the South, where evictions are notoriously easy for landlords to obtain.
“It’s going to take unified power for us to win what we want to win, and we are not letting up,” Omer said. “We are escalating.”
Appel said landlords know that most individual tenants are not legal experts and face huge amounts of stress when a faceless private company demands more money after a lease termination or eviction. If offered legal support and solidarity with other debtors, Appel said more tenants — like the Corinthian 15 student debt strikers who launched a movement by challenging the defunct Corinthian College in 2015 — are bound to join the EQR rent debt strikers in refusing to pay what they don’t owe or can’t afford.
“There are legal arguments we can make for debt cancellation and hold these corporate landlords accountable … in other words, the law is on our side,” Appel said.
Appel said the Rent Debt Tool launched by the Debt Collective is a crucial part of the process. The tool allows current and former tenants to document landlord abuses and produce documents that can be used dispute stolen deposits and unfair debts. The tool also allows organizers to examine the strategies corporate landlords use to drain cash from anxious tenants.
“There will always be the courageous ones who lead … and their courage will embolden others to strike, but not all can strike, so we have the legal tool,” Appel said.
A similar tool launched in the Los Angeles area as evictions skyrocketed after pandemic protections lifted led Debt Collective organizers to a local Equity Residential-owned building where tenants reported paying hundreds of dollars in utility fees. Paige Gresty, a former resident and organizer with the building’s tenant union, said tenants have refused to pay utility bills for five months now, which forced Equity Residential to acknowledge water leaks and offer credits to those who overpaid. The “utility strike” is now a model for other tenant unions.
After she moved out, Gresty said Equity Residential kept her entire deposit and claimed she owed an additional $195. That $195 has since been sent to collections, but Gresty joined the EQR 9 in refusing to pay.
“It’s hard to believe that a company making $2 billion in profit is sending me to collections over $195, but that is exactly what Equity Residential is doing, and to me that is just one example of their predatory practices,” said Gresty.
Gresty said she lived in the building with a tarp over her window for months to keep out rain, and like other tenants, she wanted the elevators to work and utility bills to remain affordable.
“Equity Residential doesn’t care about that — they would rather ruin my credit than admit that their profits come from running their buildings like slumlords and their business like a debt factory,” Gresty said.
In 2023, Gresty and other tenants began organizing a tenant union to find strength in numbers.
“I am no longer scared of what they can do to me, and that is why I am debt striking, because there are more of us than Equity Residential,” Gresty said.
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