NC Tenants Union director Nick MacLeod on the daunting challenges facing renters in North Carolina

News & Views

NC Tenants Union executive director Nick MacLeod

North Carolina has always been a state in which the law has allotted very few legal rights to residential tenants. Unless the actions of a landlord are truly outrageous – and sometimes even when they are – tenants rarely prevail when they seek to push back against evictions or fight for better rents and treatment. And in the post-pandemic era of high rents and scarce housing of any kind, this situation has gotten significantly worse.

One organization, however, that’s working hard to resist this tide by helping to organize residents of housing complexes across the state is a group based in Durham known as the North Carolina Tenants Union. And recently NC Newsline got a chance to learn more about the group and its work and mission in a special extended conversation with its executive director, Nick MacLeod.

In Part One of our conversation, we learned how this newly formed nonprofit has been working hard in several communities across the state to build a movement dedicated to the idea that tenants should have more of a say about the homes in which they live.

In Part Two of our chat, we learn more about some of the group’s work with local organizers to help groups of tenants speak with one voice and negotiate for better rents and living conditions. We also talked about how state landlord-tenant law makes it virtually impossible for untrained tenants to represent themselves in court – or to even understand proceedings that can put them out on the street – and how providing people facing eviction with access to basic legal representation could make an enormous difference.