They are part of Louisville’s burgeoning tenants union, which mobilizes the residents of low-income apartment complexes, rural trailer parks and gentrifying neighborhoods to challenge the corporate landlords that they say have devastated affordable housing. Midsize cities like Louisville contain many of the fault lines that created America’s housing crisis: gentrification, federal development schemes and redlining. If this country’s affordable housing crisis can be solved here, it could establish a template for helping the nation’s poor and marginalized find stability. Josh Poe, 47, and Jessica Bellamy, 36, founded the Louisville Tenants Union in 2022 because they believe that organizing is the answer to the nation’s housing woes. “Tenant organizing,” Poe told me with pastoral conviction, “will be to the 21st century what labor organizing was to the 20th century.”

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Persons: Donna Goldsmith, Goldsmith, ”, “, Josh Poe, Jessica Bellamy, ” Poe Organizations: Kentucky Derby, Louisville, Louisville Tenants Union Locations: Louisville, Ky, Southern