The Tenant Organizer Choosing Between Denver and the Fight

Birdie Kowalski is not a real person, though the tenant organizing dynamics she describes are drawn from real cases in Branford, Connecticut and Asheville, North Carolina. We're meeting in a coffee shop three blocks from her apartment in the Shaw neighborhood of St. Louis, where she's lived for four years in a converted 1920s building that floods whenever the city gets more than two inches of rain. She's 32, works as an educator at the Contemporary Art Museum, and has been attending tenant organizing meetings for three months while her partner, Jake, interviews for engineering positions in Denver. She orders an iced coffee despite the November chill, then laughs when I point this out.

You said on the phone you're facing a decision deadline. What's the timeline?

Jake got a job offer yesterday. They want an answer by next Friday, and if he takes it, we'd need to be out there by January.

So I have eight days to decide if I'm going or staying. Which sounds like it should be about the relationship, and it partly is, but it's also about whether I believe this tenant organizing thing can actually work. Or if I'm just performing solidarity while my apartment slowly becomes uninhabitable.

Tell me about the apartment situation.

It's this beautiful old building—twelve units, high ceilings, original woodwork, the whole aesthetic thing that made me fall in love with St. Louis. But the landlord hasn't touched the infrastructure since probably 1985.

We have window AC units that can barely handle the heat anymore. The basement floods every time we get heavy rain, which is increasingly often. Last summer during that July heat wave, my unit hit 94 degrees inside. I slept at Jake's place for a week.

The organizing started after the September flooding. Three inches of rain in two hours, basement flooded, took out the building's electrical panel. We were without power for five days. No refrigeration, no fans, no way to charge phones.

The landlord's response was basically "not my problem, file insurance claims."

That's when Maria—she's in 2B—started knocking on doors.

What's the organizing group trying to accomplish?

The immediate goal is forcing the landlord to do real climate upgrades. Heat pumps, better insulation, electrical system that can handle extreme weather, actual drainage infrastructure.

But it's bigger than that. There's this coalition forming across multiple buildings in the neighborhood, trying to get the city to pass a "green retrofit without displacement" ordinance. Basically, landlords would get tax incentives for climate upgrades but couldn't use renovations as an excuse to jack up rent or push people out.

Maria's the true believer. She's lived in this building for eleven years, raised her kids here, knows everyone. She sees this as the fight of her life. She's talking about rent strikes, legal action, media campaigns.

And honestly? When I'm in those meetings, I'm all in. It feels like the only response that makes sense. We're not just accepting that landlords can let buildings slowly become unlivable while extracting rent until they decide to flip them.

But you're not sure it'll work.

She stares at her coffee for a long moment.

I want to believe it. The research is actually on our side—there's this whole body of work now about how collective action is the only thing that actually helps with climate anxiety, how individual actions just make you feel more helpless.¹ And I've felt that. Being in those meetings, planning strategy, feeling like we're fighting back instead of just enduring it. That's real.

But then I go home to my apartment that hit 94 degrees, and I think about another summer like that, and another, and I wonder if I'm romanticizing solidarity because it makes me feel better about staying in a situation that's genuinely getting worse.

Jake thinks I'm using the organizing as an excuse to avoid making a hard decision about us.

Is he wrong?

She laughs.

I mean, partially? The relationship stuff is definitely tangled up in this. Jake sees Denver as solving multiple problems at once—better job for him, better climate situation for us, getting out of a rental situation that's clearly deteriorating. He thinks I'm being stubborn about staying in St. Louis for work I could do anywhere.

And he's not entirely wrong about that either.

But here's what he doesn't get: if I leave, I'm proving that the only rational response to climate vulnerability as a renter is individual exit. That the landlord wins by just waiting us out until everyone with options leaves and he can do whatever he wants with the building.

And then what happens to Maria? To the older tenants on fixed incomes who can't just move to Denver?

You're making it sound like a moral test.

That's how it feels! Which is probably unfair to myself, but that's where I am.

Like, I work at an art museum. I spend my days helping people think about how art reflects social movements and historical moments. I literally gave a tour last month about 1960s protest art. And now I'm facing my own version of "do you actually believe in collective action or just the aesthetic of it?"

“

The thing that keeps me up at night is that I'm not sure my staying or leaving actually matters to the outcome.

If I stay and the organizing fails—which it might, because landlords have way more resources and the city might not care—then I've sacrificed my relationship and another year of my life to heat waves and flooding for nothing.

If I leave and the organizing somehow succeeds, then I missed being part of something that actually worked, and I'll always wonder if I bailed at the crucial moment.

What would success even look like?

She shifts in her seat.

That's the question, right?

Short-term success is forcing our landlord to make the upgrades. Medium-term is getting that city ordinance passed so this becomes the standard. Long-term is... I don't know, fundamentally changing the power dynamic between tenants and landlords around climate adaptation?

Maria talks about this building becoming permanently affordable housing, community-controlled. She's in touch with these groups in New York and Seattle that are pushing for "green social housing" policies.² It sounds amazing and also completely unrealistic given St. Louis politics.

But here's what's weird—the Asheville tenants actually won. After Hurricane Helene, the public housing tenants organized and got their rent cancelled and an eviction freeze.³ It worked. So it's not impossible.

You said Jake thinks you're avoiding a decision about the relationship. Are you?

Long pause.

We've been together six years. We've talked about marriage, kids, the whole thing. But we've never actually confronted the fact that we have fundamentally different approaches to climate risk.

He sees it as a problem you solve by making smart individual choices—move somewhere safer, get a stable job, build financial security so you can weather disruptions. Very engineer brain.

I think that approach only works if you have resources and mobility. And even then, it's just passing the risk down to people with fewer options.

Which maybe makes me self-righteous, I don't know. But I can't shake the feeling that his version of "solving" climate risk is actually just participating in a system that makes it worse for everyone else.

Has he said he'd stay if you asked?

He's said he'd consider it. But I can tell he thinks I'm being irrational.

And maybe I am! Maybe the smart thing is to take the Denver job and the better housing situation and build our life somewhere that isn't actively flooding. Maybe me staying in St. Louis to fight a tenant organizing battle that might fail is just climate anxiety cosplaying as activism.

But then I think about the Yale study—the one that found collective action was the only thing that actually helped young people with climate depression, that individual actions just made them feel more helpless.¹

What if leaving is choosing the path that makes me more depressed in the long run? What if I need this fight to feel like I'm actually doing something?

You have eight days. What happens if you can't decide?

She laughs, but it sounds hollow.

Then I guess Jake goes to Denver and I stay here and we figure out if we can survive long distance, which we both know means we probably break up.

Or I go with him and quit the organizing group and spend the next decade wondering if I abandoned something important at the moment it mattered most.

Or—and this is the option I keep circling back to at 3am—I stay for six months, really commit to the organizing, and if it's clearly failing by spring, I join him in Denver then. But that feels like trying to have it both ways. Also like a guaranteed breakup with extra steps.

“

The thing nobody tells you about climate decisions is that they're all impossible in slightly different ways. There's no choice that doesn't involve losing something important.

And I think that's what I'm really struggling with. Not which choice is right, but accepting that there is no right choice. Just different versions of loss and different gambles about what matters most.

What are you leaning toward?

She's quiet for almost a full minute.

I don't know. Ask me tomorrow and I might give you a different answer.

Today I'm leaning toward staying, but that might just be because I have an organizing meeting tonight and those always make me feel like we can win. Tomorrow morning when I wake up in my apartment that's probably going to flood again next spring, I might feel completely different.

What I do know is that I'm tired of pretending this is just about real estate or just about my relationship. It's about what kind of person I want to be in a world that's falling apart in slow motion.

Do I want to be someone who fights even when the odds are bad? Or someone who makes pragmatic choices and builds a stable life somewhere safer?

And the fucked up thing is, I genuinely don't know which of those I respect more.