Above photo: Crown Heights Tenant Union rallies with the tenants at 567 St. Johns Place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who are fighting for renovations, emergency repairs, and legally-mandated leases. Crown Heights Tenant Union.
The housing movement has lost its momentum.
Some organizers believe the missing piece is a powerful, independent tenant union movement.
In the summer of 2022, a few months before her rental lease was set to expire, Lucy Rinzler-Day saw a provocative poster hanging in her apartment building’s elevator.
The poster—which, she would later learn, was made by her neighbor—warned tenants of the 32-unit building in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to be on the lookout for illegal rent increases on their lease renewals.
Their apartment building is rent stabilized, a form of housing regulation that protects tenants from exorbitant rent hikes and gives them the right to renew their leases. Any rent hike over 3.2% that year, as established by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, would be illegal. The poster advised tenants to contest any such hike with their landlord.
Sure enough, when her lease renewal came in the mail, Rinzler-Day found that her landlord was demanding a rent hike of $480—a 15% increase. Rinzler-Day was nervous about confrontation, so she sent a plea for support to the email of Brooklyn Eviction Defense (BED), a borough-wide tenant union, which she learned about from a separate poster on the street in Brooklyn.
A rank-and-file tenant organizer and co-founder of BED, Nicolás Vargas, quickly reached out. They helped Rinzler-Day understand her rights as a rent-stabilized tenant, and to draft a demand letter to her landlord for a lease renewal with a legal rent increase.
When Rinzler-Day received threatening emails from her landlord in response, Vargas encouraged her to stay strong. “I was anxious as fuck,” said Rinzler-Day. “But I just felt better having knowledge and validation of my rights.”
With less than a week before her lease expiration, the landlord acquiesced. Rinzler-Day received a new lease with a legal rent increase. She was ecstatic, and thankful for BED’s support.
“I was like, ‘Thank you so much for helping me! What can I do to help you?’” she remembered.
They replied: “Organize your building.”
In New York, and across the country, such tenant success stories are few and far between. Since New York’s statewide eviction moratorium lapsed in January 2022, evictions have returned in full force. The pandemic-era dip in rent has reversed, with a series of new record-breaking highs. Last year, for the first time, over 100,000 people were housed in New York City’s shelters, while a new “60-day limit” policy by Mayor Eric Adams threatens thousands of recently arrived asylum-seekers and other unhoused New Yorkers with eviction from the system.
The momentum of New York’s housing movement, once a beacon of hope for the country, has slowed since the triumphs of 2019. That year, the statewide coalition Housing Justice for All (HJ4A), composed of over 80 member organizations, mobilized and won a package of groundbreaking tenant protection laws. Since then, specific upstate locales have won some inspiring victories, such as the introduction of rent control in Kingston, Nyack, and, just last December, Newburgh.
But the real estate industry continues to consolidate, dispossess, and evict. Armed with the most powerful lobby in the state, the industry is on the offensive to undo some of those earlier wins in the courts, and block future ones in the legislature. The current big-ticket legislative item of HJ4A, Good Cause, would dramatically reduce evictions across the state, but it has failed to pass through multiple legislative sessions despite a Democrat-controlled state senate.
Organizers, activists, and nonprofit organizations across the housing movement are reconsidering their strategies.
In December, over 300 tenants, unhoused people, and organizers from around the state congregated for the sixth annual HJ4A convention—its first in New York City—at City College in Manhattan. Gathering to share organizing skills and knowledge, to reflect on the state of the housing movement, and to chart its future, the coalition adopted a 2024 strategy to overcome the obstacles of the past three years: an expanded legislative platform, a more focused communications strategy, and, most significantly, a shift from mobilizing pressure campaigns in Albany to base-building at home.
Bussing protesters to Albany and other capitol-focused mobilizations aren’t finding the success they once did, Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator of HJ4A, told me. There is a sense that some of the coalition’s organizations have lost touch with their base. So, they have recommitted to working in their local communities, with a focus on ousting local, pro-real estate incumbents, in preparation for future statewide campaigns.
“We don’t want to give people an excuse to not be organizing anymore,” said Weaver. “In 2024, we’re trying to build, so that in 2025 we can win.”
One segment of the movement is on board with the plan, but believes that one missing component has proved more fatal to the coalition’s strategy than all else: the lack of robust, working-class, truly tenant-led organizations.
In other words: powerful, organized tenant unions.
Tenant unions are structured as place-based member organizations, sometimes composed of tenant associations—’locals’—which are organized collectives of tenants in a single building or apartment complex. Unions may span blocks, neighborhoods, boroughs, cities, and—though not yet achieved at this scale—states and countries.
Tenant unions fight evictions, rent overcharges, disrepair, and landlord harassment. They also may fight for legislation, and for pro-tenant electeds. While labor unions wield the power of the shop floor, the site of production, tenant unions wield the power of the home—the site of social reproduction. In each case, their greatest leverage comes from the threat of strike.
“I think the goal of any tenant unionist is ultimately a citywide, neighborhood-wide, statewide tenant union that has sufficient power to be able to force a lot of landlords to do what we want them to do,” explained Esteban Girón, an organizer with and member of Crown Heights Tenant Union (CHTU). (Disclosure: I am a member of CHTU.)
With the power to withhold rent, tenants wield economic leverage, which can be used to collectively bargain with their landlords. As tenant unions grow to encompass the portfolios of property owners, their power increases.
Some tenant associations are formed by nonprofit organizations, with staff performing much of the organizing work as a service. But a growing contingent of organizers nationwide is pushing for organizational autonomy, with unions and associations being run by and for tenants themselves.
“I actually don’t think that the model of paid staffers organizing in a neighborhood is sustainable,” said Girón. While acknowledging their important work, he sees the nonprofit model as inherently constrained.
“As soon as a foundation grant is gone, or as soon as a different staff organizer is swapped in, that building is not having meetings anymore because they are being run by the nonprofit.”
Further, Weaver of HJ4A explained that some nonprofit organizations are incentivized by funders to focus on specific categories of buildings and tenants who already have some forms of housing protections. As a result, market-rate renters are often excluded from nonprofits’ base of tenants.
“What Good Cause tries to do is expand the universe of people who are covered by housing protections, so the people who would be impacted by it are not naturally in these legacy organizations,” Weaver said. “But they are in BED, and they are in Crown Heights Tenant Union. They are in some of these more flexible, newly radicalized, younger, volunteer-run formations.
“They’re the ones who are going to be able to drive a Good Cause victory, in my opinion.”
In some ways this potential turn toward tenant-led organizing mirrors the recent reckoning in certain sectors of the labor movement.
Bucking the moribund staff-led service model of decades past, unions are returning to democratic, rank-and-file-led organizing. Indeed, last year’s contract victories for the UPS Teamsters and the Big Three Auto Workers were the results of rank-and-file reform movements, years in the making. Similarly, workers themselves, rather than union staff, took the lead on the inspiring organizing campaigns of Starbucks and Amazon workers.
Tenant organizers believe the same logic applies for their organizations—but the push to empower tenants within their own homes is not simply a strategic tactic.
In New York, BED and CHTU are members of the nationwide Autonomous Tenants Unions Network (ATUN), whose political analysis informs their tenant-led structures. Much like how the United Auto Workers’ union has taken up the gauntlet of class struggle, autonomous tenant unions are highlighting the irreconcilable interests of the tenant and landlord classes.
“Tenant unions are building democratic, independent bases of working-class tenant power,” Holden Taylor, a co-founding organizer with BED and a member of CHTU, told me.
BED and other unions are explicitly anti-capitalist, and understand their organizations as working-class institutions fighting more broadly against corporate power. As such, tenants themselves must be the empowered protagonists in the struggle, not passive recipients of charity services.
Indeed, these organizations prefer to describe their fight as the tenants movement, rather than the housing movement, and center the working-class tenant—defined by BED as “anyone who does not have full control over their housing or control over someone else’s housing,” which includes the unhoused.
“Not only can we build a base that can win specific legislation, but also the building blocks of working-class power,” Taylor said.
As it states in BED’s “Points of Unity,” they believe “the horizon of the Union is a world where rents, eviction, and landlordism does not exist.”
During the early days of the pandemic, in the face of an unnavigable crisis, tenants got a taste of that power. As scores of tenants, newly unemployed, were suddenly unable to pay rent and risked eviction, formal and loosely associated tenant unions saw a resurgence. Tenant organizing, protests, and rallies exploded, with rent strikes becoming a default tool of resistance.
The radical—if contested—demand, “Cancel Rent,” soon sprouted from both the new and long-standing tenant unions.
“The Cancel Rent movement was a deeply organic response to a crisis that was articulated by organized tenants,” explained Taylor. “It was a moment of widening political aperture.”
The legitimacy of the tenant–landlord, lessor–lessee relationship suddenly cracked. The pandemic crisis exacerbated an existing rental crisis, and, as for other political arenas, opened the realm of possibility.
But when insufficient rental relief legislation was eventually won in the form of the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, and the eviction moratorium eventually expired, most new organizations vanished as quickly as they formed.
“There wasn’t really a focus on building permanent institutions,” explained Vargas of BED. “It was more just flashpoint protests, kind of reactive to whenever the eviction moratorium was going to expire.”
“The deficit really was in cohering a lot of the movement that was happening—whether it be street protests or different autonomous collectives, tenant unions and affinity groups popping up left and right—into something centralized, like a citywide tenant union.”
To transpose labor scholar Barry Eidlin’s concept of “institutionalizing insurgency,” the problem, in other words, was that tenant groups struggled to bottle the explosive energy of the pandemic era into an organized base, ready to leverage its power for more radical gains.
Vargas’s union, Brooklyn Eviction Defense, was among the few that survived from that time. What began as a core, rapid-response organizing committee—one that mobilized neighbors to physically block evictions in the streets, and advised distressed tenants on rent strikes—transformed into a democratic, member-led union of tenant associations. Since the end of 2022, the union has more than doubled its locals to more than 65 tenant associations, according to Vargas.
The reason for its success, Vargas argued, is because the group situated themselves within the historical and contemporary militancy of New York City’s tenant organizing, which spans more than a century. That includes the formation in 1936 of the City-Wide Tenants Council, a federation of tenant associations, which inspires organizers’ call for a city-wide tenant union today.
“Rent control was only won by tenants in New York City after mass rent striking,” said Vargas. “We get rights through direct action and grassroots organizing—not by depending on politicians to give it to us with their good will.”
According to Vargas, other groups failed because “there wasn’t a transfer of institutional knowledge, so the mistakes that could have been circumvented were just kind of repeated.”
Specifically, BED has benefited from a close connection with unions like CHTU, which was founded in 2013 following the foreclosure crisis of the Great Recession, and with the mission to unite old and new tenants of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights.
CHTU has played an outsized role in the legislative efforts of the housing movement in the past several years. Indeed, Weaver, HJ4A’s campaign coordinator, was a co-founder of the union. But the key to CHTU’s success has been a steady expansion of its tenant base, encouraging rank-and-file tenants to organize their own tenant associations, one building at a time. The union has organized well over 100 buildings, according to Girón, with roughly half that figure active in the union.
BED and CHTU are prioritizing and finding success with this slow, “deep organizing work,” as Vargas describes it. Some tenant unions in upstate New York, however, struggle with the building-by-building approach, according to Katie Sims, co-chair of the Ithaca Tenants Union (ITU).
Using different tactics from its NYC comrades, ITU has been mobilizing with the city legislature to introduce local Good Cause eviction protections, rent control, and an end to the city’s violent clearances of homeless encampments.
“We have really focused more on the breadth approach,” she said, “where we do more broad-based canvassing with our electoral work and other campaigns, so that we’re reaching more tenants.”
Sims explained that because buildings are generally smaller than in New York City, sometimes with only two or three units, and because the turnover of tenants in Ithaca is high, the tenant association structure has been elusive. The bigger problem is that most upstate cities lack lease renewal protections, which means tenants fear retaliation from their landlords when they organize.
“It’s a real barrier to organizing,” Sims said. “You can do a rent strike and even win a case in court, get the repairs you needed, but there’s nothing to stop your landlord two months later from not renewing you.”
Soon after forcing her landlord to limit her rent increase to the legal level, Rinzler-Day got to work organizing her whole building.
With the support of BED members, she canvassed each floor, inviting her neighbors to a building-wide meeting in her apartment. To Rinzler-Day’s surprise, nearly half the building showed up to the first meeting.
“That first meeting was magical,” said Rinzler-Day. “We just all went around and aired collective grievances, like rent overcharges, black mold in air conditioners, the front door not locking—and because of that, the rampant package theft.”
“We all found these common grounding points and were like, ‘Yeah, it’s going down. We’re gonna unionize.’”
Within a few weeks, more than half the building was attending meetings, with 42 of 45 tenants joining the association; an active building-wide WhatsApp group chat had been created; tenants had taken on ‘floor captain’ roles, each responsible for organizing tasks on their respective level; tenants created a spreadsheet to track rent overcharges; and a demand list had been established.
It wasn’t long before the idea of a rent strike was floated by some of the tenants. With the help of BED organizers, tenants inoculated each other about the landlord’s harassment and lies that were likely to come if they went through with it.
In March, tenants were ready. They sent a collective letter to their landlord, Raj Associates, threatening a rent strike if their demands weren’t met by the end of the month. They weren’t, so the strike began on April 1, with 80% of units participating.
Six months and several collective bargaining sessions later, Raj Associates conceded to all the tenants’ demands. Overcharged tenants won new leases and roughly $60,000 total in back rent, according to Rinzler-Day, and the landlord committed to the demanded repairs.
Rinzler-Day joked to me that she can never leave her apartment now—and she doesn’t want to, of course.
She and her fellow tenants gained something that goes beyond the demands they won. “I pick up packages from the hallway for people all the time, people dog sit for each other—things like that,” said Rinzler-Day. “We have a community.”
Rinzler-Day says the building intends to keep the tenant association active, and several tenants have since expressed interest in getting more involved in union-wide organizing.
“That’s what’s so important about tenant associations and broader tenant unions,” said Vargas. “We are the archive of information that keeps people safe. We are the continuity between tenants.”
“My hope is that we can keep up the momentum,” said Rinzler-Day. “We built this infrastructure of social responsibility and accountability across neighbors.
“We built something that will outlast us.”