LOUISVILLE CPUSA

The Louisville Tenants Union’s recent legal victory against OSPM LLC, in the form of a ruling that enforces a ban on retaliatory evictions and harassment, is not simply a major courtroom decision. To properly understand the significance of this development, we must situate and examine it within the broader political economy of Louisville’s housing crisis, the country’s emerging tenant movement, and racialized urban accumulation. 

Louisville’s housing crisis shows itself in stark numerical terms. According to the Kentucky Housing Corporation, a quasi-governmental “affordable housing” public corporation administratively attached to the Finance and Administration Cabinet, Louisville has a “shortage” of 18,504 homes for sale and 21,575 apartments for rent. Bourgeois commentators like the Building Industry Association of Louisville frame this crisis as a technical problem of “underbuilding,” labor shortages, and simple supply and demand, however, these claims are ideological cover for capital’s refusal to meet human needs when profits are inadequate. Their explanation, that the 2008 crisis directly resulted in a permanent and inherent construction slowdown due the previously mentioned causes, ignores how monopoly capitalism deliberately constrains housing supply to maintain this profitability. The 60% decline in building permits since 2005 cited by KHC does not reflect an inability or incapacity to build, but rather capital’s strategic divestment from working-class housing opportunity. Developers have shifted to constructing luxury units, which account for 58% of new construction since 2020, precisely because these deliver higher rates of return, while also extracting maximum rents and fees from decaying substandard units. (1)

This is not a “shortage” in the conventional, “natural” sense of the word. It is artificial, manufactured scarcity which is a necessary function of monopoly capitalism. These lamentations of “labor shortages” obscure how developer profits have soared nonetheless and how finance capital in the construction industry prefers to exploit migrant labor at poverty wages while attempting to diminish the influence of unionized construction work and fighting against the rise of industrial unionism in the construction industry. Similarly, complaints about material costs ignore how resource industry monopolies artificially inflate prices while associations, like the BIA, lobby against public alternatives. Even more can be learned from cases such as the Collegiate School’s purchase and demolition of Yorktown Apartments, where units were sacrificed to create a parking lot for a private institution with ties to the Brown-Forman liquor dynasty. Human need is consistently yielded to the logic of capital accumulation, structured as a public subsidy to private profit.

The complicity of the bourgeois state in maintaining this regime of landlordism becomes clear when examining the state’s housing policies. The Metro Council recently passed the new city budget last June. Included in the budget was a $2.5 million cut in funding for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and this was hailed as a “step in the right direction.” Even seemingly progressive projects, like the conversion of the Fiscal Court Building and similar downtown revitalization projects, show only one-third of units designated as “affordable” while the developer, Weyland Ventures, receives $3 million in public subsidies. (2)(3)

Within this context, the LTU’s exposure of retaliatory tactics by landlords like OSPM lays bare the naked coercion required to maintain the current housing regime. The restraining order against OSPM’s retaliation is a crack in the ideological facade that presents housing deprivation as the norm. This, also, must be viewed within the context of the Uniform Residential Landlord-Tenant Act which the ruling is based from. The URLTA framework creates a contradictory legal terrain where tenant protections attempt to exist in permanent tension with the sanctity of private property rights. The URLTA is applied selectively across the state and is only legally effective when it’s been adopted by a local government. As of 2024, 19 local governments in Kentucky have adopted the URLTA. (4)

The significance of this most recent LTU victory lies in its dialectical inversion of bourgeois property law and successfully weaponizing bourgeois legality against itself. The very same legal structures that uphold landlordism contain contradictions which an organized tenant movement can exploit. This ruling creates a precedent and gives breathing room for tenant organizing, but it also proves that militant tenant associations can wrest concessions from capital. 

The ruling has, in our view, an even larger significance. What appears as passive “market shortage” actively functions as a disciplinary mechanism against the working class – a retaliatory measure. This artificial, manufactured scarcity is not merely an economic accident but a strategic weapon wielded through three specific, interconnected mechanisms of class warfare. 

First, the scarcity itself operates as collective punishment. When developers like those behind the Fiscal Court conversion deliberately constrict low-income supply while receiving massive public subsidies, they create the conditions where tenants such as those at Regency Park must tolerate their landlords’ mistreatment and substandard conditions or face homelessness. This manufactured desperation molds the threat of eviction, now temporarily restrained in certain localities by this ruling, into a constant background terror that stifles any movement before it begins. 

Second, the ruling exposes how this scarcity enables retaliatory financialization. OSPM’s ability to extract 74% of tenant rents for mortgage payments depends entirely on the artificial housing deficit, a deficit maintained by the same associations and monopolies that cry “labor shortage” while fighting against union wages. The court’s recognition confirms Marx’s identification that housing scarcity doesn’t precede exploitation, it’s actively produced by it. 

Third, and most insidiously, the state-enforced scarcity turns tenants and workers against one another. Funding cuts, neighborhood displacements, gentrification, demolition of housing, redevelopment of residential areas into commercial areas, all of these intensify competition among already desperate renters and workers. Tactics now reigned in by this ruling, such as inspections, utility shutoffs, evictions, etc., were never solely about punishing individuals but about enforcing an artificial war of all against all. 

The largest significance lies in momentarily suspending this cycle. By legally disrupting the ability to weaponize scarcity through individual retaliation, if only partially, the ruling creates opportunities for tenant organizations that have not existed before. However, as the long-time situation in Smoketown shows, these legal victories remain fragile without confronting the root cause of this scarcity – the commodification of housing and private property itself. The manufactured scarcity that enabled OSPM’s retaliation can only be fully defeated when tenants organize not just against their individual landlords, but against the systems which enable their exploitation. Tenants unions must expand at Regency Park and beyond to the entire Commonwealth. Most crucially, the movement must seek to escalate its demands from individual protections to collective ownership. 

1. (https://www.wlky.com/article/wlky-investigates-louisville-affordable-housing-shortage/62058440)
2. (https://www.wlky.com/article/wlky-investigates-louisville-affordable-housing-shortage/62058440)
3. (https://www.wlky.com/article/louisville-leaders-budget-housing-funds/65227625)
4. (https://www.steadily.com/blog/kentucky-landlord-tenant-laws-a-comprehensive-guide)