(April 26, 2025) It started around a kitchen table in early 2019, when a handful of renters fed up with slumlords and looming evictions came together to share their stories. Under Tara Raghuveer’s leadership, that small, multiracial gathering transformed into KC Tenants, a tenant-led force demanding safe, accessible homes for nearly half of Kansas City’s residents. In 2024, TIME named Raghuveer to its TIME100 Next list for turning local frustration into a blueprint for national action — and this year she launched the Tenant Union Federation, uniting tenant organisations from coast to coast. Her work is redefining how America thinks about housing as a human right.
At 33, Raghuveer is both a hometown organizer and a national housing justice advocate. In Kansas City, she’s made renters’ rights a central issue. In Washington D.C., lawmakers are even talking about a federal renters’ bill of rights and stronger protections because of her work. She says housing is a human right and that those most affected should lead the fight.
Tara Raghuveer
Early Life: An Immigrant Upbringing Shaping Justice
Tara’s drive for justice has roots in her own journey. She was born in Australia to Indian parents and immigrated to the United States as a child in 1995. Growing up in the Kansas City area, she straddled cultures – an Indian American kid in the Midwestern suburbs – which gave her an early awareness of belonging and equity. Her family settled on the Kansas side of the city, in a comfortable community where her school was predominantly white. Yet, as an immigrant and a person of colour in the Midwest, Raghuveer understood from an early age what it felt like to be an outsider. This sense of identity sharpened her moral compass. She has said that returning to work in Kansas City years later felt “like coming home in a certain sense, but also [like] returning to a place that wasn’t anything like where I had grown up”. It made her see the wide racial and economic gaps in her hometown.
Tara excelled in school and went on to study social studies at Harvard, where she “became obsessed with housing” and started tying her classroom work to real-world problems. In 2013, for her senior thesis, she headed back to Kansas City to dig into local eviction data. What she uncovered was shocking: families pushed out of their homes in court with almost no support. Through interviews with tenants and careful review of court records, she exposed a wave of evictions sweeping through the city’s low-income neighbourhoods. Her research was so thorough that sociologist Matthew Desmond later cited it in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted, bringing national attention to her findings. But for Raghuveer, the work went beyond academic recognition. Sitting through eviction hearings, she realised, “Nothing was ever going to change unless the people who are the most impacted by these issues were organized to the table, to flip the table over, [and] to determine their own liberation” —and that real change had to start with those directly affected.
That moment changed everything for Raghuveer. “I got clear on what kind of risks I wanted to take,” she says. “I was rapidly politicized by my eviction research in Kansas City. I moved to Chicago to become a community organiser.” After graduating from Harvard in 2014, she spent several years in Chicago honing her skills in immigrant-rights advocacy. By 2017, she was co-leading People’s Action’s national Homes Guarantee campaign, pushing for housing to be treated as a public good. Those years sharpened her organizing tactics and deepened her commitment. But Kansas City—the place whose struggles she had documented—never left her mind. In 2019, she returned to Missouri and, alongside local tenant leaders, founded KC Tenants to transform housing in her hometown.
Building KC Tenants: Power in Community
KC Tenants began in early 2019 with just a few renters around a kitchen table — and soon became a multiracial, tenant-led group fighting for safe, affordable homes for nearly half of Kansas City’s residents. In a city long dominated by landlords and developers, Raghuveer and her co-founders knocked on doors, hosted meetings in living rooms and church basements, and invited tenants to share their experiences with slumlords, evictions, and poor living conditions. As Tara says, it was a “complicated but beautiful project” that brought people together across race and class.
Their work moved fast. Within months, they convinced the city council to pass Kansas City’s first-ever Tenants’ Bill of Rights in December 2019, creating basic renter protections and a new Tenant Advocate office. “Today Kansas City made history,” Raghuveer said. They didn’t stop there—KC Tenants won free legal counsel for low-income tenants facing eviction and secured a $50 million affordable housing fund. In just a few years, they forced eviction, habitability, and renters’ rights onto the political agenda.
Raghuveer combines direct action with community building. In October 2020, KC Tenants members chained themselves to the Jackson County Courthouse doors, stopping eviction hearings for the day. Raghuveer calls evictions “an act of violence” and refuses to back down when people’s homes are at stake. But she also believes in hope: “Organizing is a project of hope… if you can imagine it, you can organise to win it”. Importantly, she empowers tenants to lead: “The tenant union is the vehicle for power,” she says, as members share stories, learn tactics, and build strength together. Today, KC Tenants has grown from a small group to over 10,000 members in the Kansas City area.
From City Hall to a National Movement
As KC Tenants scored one victory after another, tenant groups from around the country began calling for help to build their own organizing power. Tara Raghuveer, who’d already worked on national housing issues through the Homes Guarantee campaign, saw this grassroots demand firsthand. In August 2024, she helped launch the Tenant Union Federation (TUF)—the first national tenants’ coalition in over 40 years—uniting KC Tenants with unions from Illinois, Connecticut, Kentucky, and Montana. Now serving as TUF’s director, Raghuveer’s goal is clear: turn local wins into a nationwide tenants’ movement by linking city-based groups into a united front for renters’ rights.
The Tenant Union Federation helps local groups share strategies, run joint campaigns, and press for federal action. One of its first goals was a national Renters’ Bill of Rights and stronger tenant protections. In January 2023, the White House released its Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights—the first federal framework aimed at protecting renters—after sustained pressure from tenant coalitions like KC Tenants. Suddenly, policies once dismissed—rent control, just-cause eviction laws, and major public investment in social housing—are on the national agenda. Raghuveer’s federation has given renters a real seat at the table in Washington. As TIME noted, it’s “helping others across the country build power,” forging a movement that could redefine housing as a right, not a commodity.
Leadership in Practice
Tara Raghuveer balances high-profile rallies with small-group strategy sessions, insisting that true power lies with tenants themselves. “Everything I know about organizing, I owe to my team,” she told A Real Nice Lady in March 2024 . She often invokes James Baldwin’s words—“Hope is invented every day”—to keep momentum during setbacks. Rather than centralize decision-making, Raghuveer trains tenant leaders to run mutual-aid efforts, eviction-defense workshops, and policy campaigns. That decentralized model has helped KC Tenants grow to over 10,000 members across the metro area, ensuring the movement remains strong even when she’s on the road.
As Raghuveer looks ahead, she sees a path that remains both local and national. In Kansas City, tenant meetings and eviction defenses continue side by side with federal advocacy for a Renters’ Bill of Rights. Her model—grounded in community power, shared leadership, and practical support—has already reshaped housing politics from city hall to Capitol Hill. For Raghuveer, the work is far from over: she’s focused on expanding tenant unions, deepening policy wins, and ensuring that the fight for safe, affordable homes stays led by the people who need them most. Housing justice, she believes, is not a one-time victory but an ongoing movement—and KC Tenants is just getting started.
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