Who we are
Neighbors, not bystanders.
Flint Hills Tenants United is a tenant-led union of renters in Manhattan and across the Flint Hills of Kansas. We organize so that every person has a safe, affordable, and dignified place to call home — and so that the people who live in our homes have real power over them.
Our story
We started with a conversation
We began the way most tenant unions do: a handful of neighbors comparing notes and realizing their problems weren’t personal failures but shared conditions. What one renter faces alone, a building can face together — and what a building wins, a whole town can learn from. We’re growing block by block, and there’s a place in this for you.
What we stand for
The principles behind the work
Tenant-led
Decisions are made by renters, not for them. The people closest to the problem set the direction.
Solidarity, not charity
We don’t hand out favors. We build mutual support so no neighbor stands alone against a landlord.
Democratic and independent
We answer to our members — not to landlords, developers, or political patrons.
Housing justice
A different housing future is possible
Winning better repairs and fairer leases matters — and so does imagining beyond the landlord-tenant relationship itself. Around the world and around the country, communities are proving that housing can be organized for people instead of profit.
Social housing
Permanently affordable, publicly or collectively owned homes taken off the speculative market for good. Vienna has housed most of its city this way for a century. Closer to home, Montgomery County, Maryland now acts as its own developer, building mixed-income housing the public keeps a controlling stake in.
Community land trusts
The community owns the land and homeowners own the buildings, so the homes stay affordable for one generation after the next instead of being bid up and flipped.
Housing cooperatives
Buildings owned and run by the people who live in them, turning renters into decision-makers. Manhattan already has one: Prairie Glen, right here in town.
Housing First
Give people a permanent home before asking them to fix anything else. Finland is the only country in Europe where homelessness keeps falling, and this is why.
Self-governed villages
In Sacramento, unhoused people who built their own tent city in 2008 organized into Safe Ground and won city-funded tiny home sites that residents govern themselves — housing run by the people living in it, not managed over their heads.
Taking rent off the market
Rent regulation, right-to-counsel in eviction court, and social ownership all do the same job: they break the link between where you live and what the market thinks it can extract from you.
How we learned this work
Trained by the organizers who wrote the playbook
Tenant organizing is a craft, and we went and learned it from the people doing it best. In 2025 our organizers came up through two of the most respected training programs in the country — taught not by consultants, but by tenants who have run real campaigns and real rent strikes.
What we brought home is a method: how to research a landlord, map a building, have an organizing conversation, find the leaders already in your hallway, and build toward a union that can actually hold a line.
- DSA Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee — the Housing Justice Commission’s tenant-to-tenant program for building militant tenant unions, taught by organizers who have done it.
- Tenant Union Federation Union School — an intensive on the path to a supermajority, strike-ready tenant union: landlord research, scouting, leadership assessment, demands, bargaining, and strikes.
We’re not alone in this
Part of a growing movement
Tenant unions are organizing in every major city in the country and around the world, and in 2024 the strongest of them founded the first national federation of tenant unions. Kansas has its own: our neighbors in Lawrence. We learn from all of them.
Build it with us
Whether you want to organize your building, learn your rights, or help imagine what comes next, there’s a role for you in this union.