DETROIT—In a packed room at the General Baker Institute, working-class Detroiters gathered here on Tuesday, June 29, to draw a line in the sand against corporate landlords and political stagnation. The event was organized by the Detroit Tenants Union (DTU) in concert with the Michigan Home Rule Project and marked a critical escalation in the grassroots struggle to pass Detroit’s proposed “Right to Renew” ordinance with comprehensive “Good Cause” eviction protections.
To illustrate the bleak situation facing tenants in Detroit, organizers pointed to the harrowing story of local renter Princess Brown. She moved into her home in the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood in 2024 and immediately noticed problems: a broken washing machine, leaking pipes causing mold growth, detached cabinets, and a basement that often flooded with sewage.
In line with her legal rights, she started putting her rent payments in escrow rather than giving them to the Georgia-based landlord who owns her house, First Chiquis LLC. Rather than fix the problems, the company filed to have her evicted for non-payment of rent.
After a grueling battle in housing court, a judge ultimately ruled that the landlord actually owed Brown $187. But justice under a system dictated by property relations is fleeting. Upon returning home from court, Brown found a fresh eviction notice taped to her door.
When she confronted her landlord’s attorney about this blatant act of retaliation, his cold response epitomized the mechanical cruelty of the rental system in Detroit: “I’m just doing what my client tells me to do,” he said.
Brown’s struggle resonated deeply with the crowd. “I’ve been fighting my landlord for two years, and I’ve been having a lot of the same problems as Brown,” stated a tenant in attendance.
The room hummed with collective outrage as attendees highlighted that city council members, lawyers, housing courts, corporate landlords, and the mayor’s office are well aware that an estimated 85% of rental units across Detroit are completely out of compliance with basic codes.
Yet, enforcement remains non-existent while the eviction process still moves at breakneck speed.
“Money talks, bullshit walks,” said an attendee.
Smashing corporate preemption through Home Rule
“The housing crisis plaguing Detroit is structural,” said Jasmine Kaltenbach of the Home Rule Project—a campaign fighting preemption laws, heavily supported by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) across Michigan and Virginia. She explained how state-level “pre-emption” laws are systematically used as a weapon by the billionaire class.
In Michigan, billionaire families like the Meijers, Penskes, Gilberts, DeVoses, and Ilitches use their immense wealth and capital to lobby state legislators to pass laws that explicitly block municipalities from enacting pro-worker or pro-tenant policies, such as rent control and higher local minimum wage laws. The state thus pre-empts, or overrules in advance, any progressive moves by city governments.
“Pre-emption enforces corporate and monopoly billionaire rule over our communities,” explained Steve Rimmer, a veteran organizer with the Detroit Tenants Union. He traced the systemic roots of pre-emption back to the dark legacies of slavocracy and Jim Crow, noting that the ruling class historically “took away home rule and instituted corporate rule” to suppress Black and working-class political autonomy.
The Home Rule Project aims to flip this script, shifting power away from Lansing’s corporate-bought state capitol back to the municipalities and the working people who know their neighborhoods best.
“People want peace, safety, good jobs, and a say in what our government does,” Rimmer emphasized. “It’s time to replace corporate rule with home rule.”
This campaign transcends housing alone and links up directly with trade union fights over prevailing wage laws and poverty wages paid to stadium workers, to name a few examples. While the capitalist class secures massive public handouts—such as the over $400 million in public subsidies funneled into the Ilitch family’s Little Caesars Arena—working people are left to work multiple jobs just to get by.
DTU members at the event plan to pressure Detroit leaders to stop hiding behind legal excuses, follow the example of the Ann Arbor Tenants Union, and pass the tenant-backed Right to Renew Ordinance. Tenant organizers in that city successfully pressured council to ignore conservative arguments regarding “implied pre-emption” and pass a Right to Renew ordinance directly.
The measure requires landlords to offer current tenants the first right to renew their lease unless specific conditions are met. To date, Ann Arbor’s ordinance hasn’t faced a single legal challenge, one of the AATU members in attendance reported.
Despite the immense popular support for these protections, the political establishment has dug its heels in. Activists point specifically to Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield, who sat on the Right to Renew ordinance for two years before drafting a toothless, watered-down version and has consistently antagonized the DTU ever since. This political maneuvering comes as her young mayorship already faces severe public backlash over widespread public safety concerns and soaring rental prices.
Speaking with People’s World, DTU organizer Shamica Joseph laid out the trajectory of the campaign.
“The Right to Renew initiative has actually been a two-year process,” Joseph said. “We had been working hard to get this ordinance passed by collaborating closely with the city council. At one point, prior to Sheffield’s election, we even met with her office. By last summer, those meetings made us feel like we were getting closer to a breakthrough.”
But instead of progress, she said, the campaign met roadblocks from both the mayor’s office and the powerful real estate lobby.
“Mayor Sheffield’s legal team reviewed the ordinance and flagged issues regarding state pre-emption,” Joseph explained. “To make a long story short, they didn’t agree with our language.”
But the city’s legal justification fell flat under independent scrutiny, Joseph said. “We had our legal team take a look at the ordinance, and we reached out to other legal clinics and lots of lawyers to take a look at it,” she noted. “And they were pretty much in agreement with us. And we were like, nope, this is good the way it is.”
Looking forward, Joseph sees a potential for a new breakthrough with some members of the newly-elected city council, despite the ongoing stonewalling from the mayor’s office.
“There is definitely still potential to get this done with the new council. We have spoken with other council members, some who were previously on city council prior to the elections, as well as reaching out to some new council members. We’re still willing to work with them if they’re willing to work with us.”
In the coming weeks, the DTU and its allies are prepared to mobilize and directly confront the city council to get the ordinance passed, they agreed at the event, including at the next council meeting on July 7.
“Black, white, man, woman,” one attendee got up and said, “they’re gonna see all of us at council, and they’re gonna be like, what the?!”
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