“I’m going to war with my landlord,” proclaims comedian Caleb Hearon on the podcast The Downside. “These fucking evil freaks continue to ask for more, and we just accept it.” The 2025 clip has since gone viral on social media, speaking to the growing boldface ire renters have for their landlords. Finding stability as a tenant comes at a cost that goes up year after year, and renters are increasingly becoming a vocal force for recourse, coming together to fight against rent increases and bad maintenance practices. Hearon calls for town halls between landlords and their tenants, which in today’s political climate have served as a means for the public to come together and yell at powerful folks like elected representatives. (They’ve been so effective that news about congressional reps dodging or the GOP outright barring the public meetings have made the news). His inclination to “go to war” is a shared one, like a biblical blood feud between ancestral land owners and their serfs; locate the enemy, put them in the stocks, and shame them.

In Cleveland, renter-roommates Julia Kim and Cameron Celebuski found themselves in an unusual conflict with their landlord and took their fight to a whole new level: They made a music video. As seen on the Instagram account “I’m From Cleveland,” the duo wrote a yacht-rock-esque ballad called “Don’t Rent From Cindy” and produced a five-and-a-half minute video to accompany it under the duo’s name, Kimbuski. The video features some incredible outfits—matching tracksuits, clown costumes, wigs—as well as flute solos, choreography, and screenshots and voicemail messages from their landlord, Cindy. It’s symbolic of what it might mean for tenants to go to war, and the lengths some will go to to hold bad landlords accountable.

This latest dispute between Kim, Celebuski, and their landlord hinges on their four-bedroom house. In the ballad they detail how their two other roommates had moved out, and that Kim was contemplating also moving depending on a job change. Per their singsong narrative, their landlord assured them that they could stay in the house and would bring in two new tenants to live in the vacant rooms; however, she went ahead and rented out Celebuski’s room, too. “You gave [Kim] ’til the end of the month to decide but then you rented out my room to a stranger without even telling me,” he sings. “That’s when you texted us out of the blue that one of us would have to leave.”

As they recount these events, screenshots of the text messages from their landlord scroll onto the screen; she threatens them with fines—$100 for every day they stayed past their previous lease, plus a $100/month increase in rent “due to the economy.” She also texts that “most landlords would have taken more extreme action,” maybe a reference to Ohio’s loose tenant protections, which allow landlords to pursue nonpayment evictions on three-day notice. (Some states have laws that require notice upward of 60 days; others, like Indiana, require 10 days, while Texas also requires three.) As a voicemail plays over the instrumental bridge, we hear the landlord say, “I have the right to rent this house to anywhere [sic].”

Her messages display how bad landlords often get away with neglecting maintenance or charging junk fees—by relying on tenants not knowing or being able to navigate the complex state and local laws that enforce rights and responsibilities. But Kimbuski did legal research to understand what they’re entitled to. Last year, Cleveland launched a three-year pilot program that is designed to help educate renters about their rights and “organize to fight neglectful landlords and tap into services to pay rent and avoid evictions.” Kimbuski consulted with an attorney (also a right under local law) who said that her text messages giving them time to decide whether to stay or move are legally binding; they also found that the homes owned by the landlord’s company are unregistered, which violates Cleveland’s 2024 Residents First law that requires all landlords to register each of their rental units with the city. “It would be a shame if everyone reported you / ’cause you didn’t keep your promises it turned out the whole time / by renting out your house to us you committed a crime allegedly,” they sing.

One hopes that Kimbuski’s music video might serve as a warning to other tenants of this particular landlord, who hasn’t issued any type of public rebuttal as of this writing. The internet is built upon the voyeuristic parts of us, reveling as we watch someone publicly put someone else on blast in such an artful way. But it also points to the ways that the tenant/landlord dynamic appears to be worsening, at least publicly, and as tenants become more vocal, some politicians have responded by attending to their specific woes: In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made news over recent months with his Rental Ripoff hearings that led to proposing an array of pro-tenant policies; in Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson introduced the Protect Renters Ordinance, which would, like Cleveland, require landlords to register their units with the city.

Tenants have also been organizing among themselves, forming tenant unions and associations to pressure landlords to make critical repairs or cease evictions. The National Apartment Association reported this year that these unions are on the rise, and state and local governments are increasingly passing or adopting legislation that provide protections for those organizing their fellow renters. In New York, among Mamdani’s many pro-tenant proposals, he included a Talking to Tenants campaign that will distribute tenant organizing resources to those who live in buildings with repeated violations. The rise in renter unions and associations, and the rights afforded to them, speak to the ways that “going to war” with one’s landlord is no longer a mano a mano fight but a chorus.

Still, among the movements for solidarity and accountability there will be landlord scofflaws—enforcement and regulation are often difficult, and tenants acting alone or with costly legal representation might find themselves in a losing battle. After all, even in Cleveland’s relatively progressive pro-tenant system, Kimbuski still felt compelled to to make a music video to call out their landlord’s actions. Truly, the war between tenants and landlords is biblical—an eye for an eye, one absurd action reaps another.

Top image courtesy Kimbuski

Will Mamdani’s “Rental Ripoff” Hearings Help Tenants, or Be More Venting Into the Void?