New York City Is Failing Tenants. So They’re Getting Organized

The words "NO GAS" appeared in blood-red paint, "DON’T RENT HERE" in black below; the large cloth banner affixed to the wrought-iron grill outside a second-floor window. Two windows over, the words "NO GAS=NO RENT" were emblazoned on another white sheet taped to the landing of the six-floor building’s fire escape. 

A congregation of about 25 residents stood in an arc on the sidewalk facing the beige brick exterior of the multifamily apartment building in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. From a tree-shaded plot of concrete near the entrance, tenants and organizers spoke into a microphone winding to a small, portable speaker a few feet away. A police car, likely assigned to monitor the rally, was parked down the street from the building on the relatively quiet block by 4th Avenue, across from a public school, P.S. 124. Two officers leaned on their SUV, shooting the shit.  

After leading the crowd in a defiant chant of "No self-evictions today, not now, not ever!" a 24-year-old tenant, Sydney Chu, took the microphone. "Six months with no fucking gas," she said, exasperated. "We’re here to strike for rent. No rent, no gas."  

In May, many of the tenants of 219 13th Street did not know each other’s names. But that month, their landlord turned the building’s gas off with little warning, followed by months of silence. In August, some of the residents formed a tenant association. By September 17, the group was holding this rally attended by a few dozen people to demand repairs, threaten a rent strike, and warn others against renting the apartment’s vacant units. 

The 108-year-old building has a handful of long-time renters, but only a few more recent tenants wished to speak for this article. Some long-standing residents left after 2018, when the complex was purchased by tabloid-mainstay developer Michael Shah, head of New York City real estate private equity firm Delshah Capital. It was Reese Hirota, a 21-year-old tenant and recent transplant from Massachusetts who had been following Brooklyn Eviction Defense (BED) on Instagram and decided to reach out for help. The autonomous collective had been involved in several recent high-profile eviction defense actions, relying on physical blockades (people linking their bodies together) to block illegal evictions—when belongings are tossed, locks are changed, harassment ensues, and tenants are physically barred from entering their homes without a formal eviction order. Along with the Crown Heights Tenant Union, BED helped prevent the eviction of three generations of a Brooklyn family in an alleged case of deed theft earlier this year. 

Tenant association unions like BED are operating as a confluence of local government failures have left tenants more fed up and fertile for organizing than they’ve arguably been in decades.

A few days after Hirota reached out, BED sent an organizer to help strategize with tenants, including setting up meetings and putting them in touch with attorneys for legal advice. Hirota connected with another tenant, Sydney Chu, a 24-year-old who moved to New York from Michigan after college and found her apartment through a Facebook group. During her two years in the rent-stabilized building, Chu had experienced periodic heat shutoffs that could last for a few days at a time. Tenants of the building have filed 56 complaints with the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). The building currently has 108 open HPD violations, including inadequate lighting, a mouse infestation, and the continued lack of gas.

In May, when tenants got an email asking them not to have guests over because of a gas leak next door, Chu began withholding rent. According to a June 1 email from the property manager, a gas line was hit while a television was being removed from the building. The company said a licensed plumber would fix the line, and they would be there that day to "assess and start the repairs." But then there was silence.  

Hirota says when they began door-knocking and setting up meetings with other tenants, they realized that they had all individually been using similar tactics; many had already begun withholding rent and contacting HPD directly. "Everyone was very eager to pitch in," Hirota says. Of the building’s nearly 25 units, Hirota says about 18 or 19 have at least one member in the tenant association.  

While BED has a group chat on standby through the encrypted messaging service Signal in the event of an illegal eviction—organizers say there are about 120 people on call who are likely to respond, and about 60 actively engaged members who attend their weekly and biweekly meetings—members also want to dissuade New Yorkers from believing they are only an emergency response group. They view their mission instead as one of radicalization and coalition building, with the goal of facilitating tenant solidarity, presenting a bulwark against the social arrangements that empower property owners. This means they’ve been putting more energy into helping New York City tenants form tenant associations. The group says they’ve organized 24 since March, as well as three tenant councils, each composed of renters who live in the same landlord’s portfolio, spread across upwards of 50 buildings. Those groups are connected to a larger network of local tenant associations through BED’s network, threaded together in WhatsApp and Signal channels.  

Eviction defense, which is as old as tenancy in New York City and proliferated during the Great Depression, saw a renaissance early in the pandemic. Tenant association unions like BED are operating as a confluence of local government failures have left tenants more fed up and fertile for organizing than they’ve arguably been in decades. Rent is skyrocketing across the country, and nowhere more so than New York City, where median Manhattan rents were above $4,000 in September. New York’s eviction moratorium elapsed. Vacancies available to rent are low while tens of thousands of units are deliberately held off-market. The trend is the same nationally, as the escalating cost of daily necessities compounds untenable spikes in housing costs. And New York City’s threadbare safety net for tenants has been unraveling: The much touted Right To Counsel law, which provides attorneys to people in eviction proceedings, has been overwhelmed by a backlog of eviction filings held over during the pandemic as well as the attrition of its overworked, underpaid attorneys. The city’s Rent Guidelines Board, which sets rents on stabilized units, approved its largest increase in years. Even if landlords of those stabilized units overcharge, tenants could wait years to have their complaints addressed.

Illegal lockouts, where landlords remove a tenant’s possessions from the building without a formal eviction proceeding, are basically the Wild West, as landlords virtually never face arrest. "We’ve filed HPD complaints, there’s open violations, there’s all these things, but there’s no enforcement mechanism to actually force the landlord to do what is right," BED organizer Nicolás Vargas said at the September 17 rally. He suggested that residents organize other tenants in their landlord’s portfolio to gain leverage. "Something that we very much see as a frequent and recurring theme is that if it’s happening to your building, it’s probably happening to other buildings that your landlord owns," he told the crowd. 

BED’s calendar of events is stacked; it includes weekly meetings of its six regular working groups, legal clinics, and sit-downs with tenant associations. But most days do not involve rallies or confrontational standoffs with police, landlords, or hired enforcers. When elected officials and press have faded, BED routinely holds meetings with tenants, who, due to time restraints or skepticism, don’t always show up. On September 12, days before the rally at 219 13th Street, the group held a teach-in scheduled for another nascent tenant association at 213 Union Avenue in Williamsburg. They planned to project slides with tenant rights information on the building’s exterior, though there were questions as to whether the image would be visible given the low brightness of their entry-level projector and the lingering daylight. A small group of BED members formed a circle of plastic folding chairs on the sidewalk near the building’s entrance, waiting for tenants. None showed up, save for one who co-organized the teach-in, a BED member who only goes by the name Meesh.

BED began organizing with 213 Union Avenue after months of neglected repairs and pest infestations. They helped tenants send a letter to the landlord airing out their concerns. The landlord sent a response, only directed to tenants who had signed the letter, accusing Meesh of disrupting what was an otherwise cordial tenant-landlord relationship. (The building’s management has since fulfilled some of the letter’s requests, including fixing an intercom that was busted and bringing an exterminator in more frequently.) It’s moments like these that are why BED members believe it’s important to unite tenants—when a landlord is causing them harm, but not necessarily evicting them. It shifts them away from viewing evictions as one-off events, but rather the inevitable result of landlords profiting from their need for shelter. "The threat of eviction is always ever looming," Vargas says. "Dispossessive conditions are baked into the landlord-tenant relationship, so we need to build permanent structures of power, counter-insurgent institutions, against the courts and against the landlords and against the police in order to keep tenants safe." 

The organization is also drawing a sharper contrast with the formal, nonprofit-led housing justice movement in New York. That movement successfully plugged loopholes plaguing rent-stabilized tenants in 2019, but, some BED organizers believe, fell short last year by focusing narrowly on Good Cause eviction protections, which they failed to win. In a piece for the Brooklyn Rail, BED organizer Holden Taylor argued that the Housing Justice For All coalition had failed to push for an extended eviction moratorium or organize a larger base of tenants. (A request for comment sent to Housing Justice For All was not returned by press time.) It remains to be seen whether the bloom of tenant associations facilitated by BED and other organizers will lead to sweeping improvements to tenant protections, but if a coalition of tenants can delay evictions and improve conditions of buildings, it may be more than what New York City’s current government is achieving for them. 

At the September 17 rally in Park Slope, BED organizers led a scripted "phone zap" in which crowd members took out their cell phones to call Delshah Management, demanding conditions improve at 219 13th Street and letting them know a rent strike would commence on October 1 if the gas was not safely turned on. By this point, NYC Comptroller Brad Lander had stumbled into the rally and began to participate. (By coincidence, he lives on the same street, and a tenant he ran into earlier in the day let him know about the event.) 

No one got through to an actual person at Delshah Management; some got busy signals, some just heard ringing that stopped. Lander was prompted to leave a voicemail. As BED organizers continued the rally, their voices booming over the speaker, Lander stood off to the side, right hand in his pocket, and left his message, stating his name and identifying himself as the city’s comptroller. "I walk by that housing every day, because it’s on my block. So get the gas turned on. Alright, thank you," he said. Over a month later, the gas is still off. 

Top photo by Spencer Platt / Getty Images.

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