Easthampton Tenants Union is racking up wins

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At the top of Easthampton City Hall’s salt-crusted stairs, inside a cramped conference room in the back of the building, a rebellion is blooming every Thursday evening.

You wouldn’t know it from the scenery alone. During a meeting in early January, as nearly two dozen attendees waited for the meeting to begin, they sat talking about their neighbors, their hobbies, and their lives. One person was knitting. Another taped a piece of flip-chart paper to the big TV screen at the front of the room.

But listen to their conversations and the reason for their indignation — the reason they’re all gathered in this room — becomes apparent. As the meeting starts, they introduce themselves one-by-one, giving their names, the names of their landlords, and the size of the rent hikes they’ve faced. Mona Shadi, who at the time was facing eviction from her apartment, explains how she started the process of forming a tenants union with her neighbors.

“For a while, I was just the loudmouth chick banging at their door,” she explained to laughter from the room. 

Now, though, it’s tenants across Easthampton who are getting organized and banging at the doors of their landlords — sometimes literally. What started as a few separate groups forming tenants associations in their own buildings, like Shadi, has grown into the Easthampton Tenants Union, an umbrella organization of renters across the city who, over the course of only one year, have become a political force that’s hard to ignore. 

Easthampton Tenants Union members have successfully defeated rent hikes and won needed fixes to their units. The group has held protests and know-your-rights trainings, campaigned for a statewide ballot question in support of rent control, and is working on developing its own in-house newspaper. And the city’s leadership is paying attention. Four city councilors were at the Jan. 8 meeting — the largest group of councilors that can gather outside a scheduled meeting without violating open-meeting laws — and the City Council now seems to be focusing more heavily on housing concerns.

“It’s pretty wild how things have developed,” said Ilene Roizman, one of the group’s original organizers. She faced a $250 monthly rent increase last year before she and her neighbors pushed back. They ended up winning much smaller increases, a new washer and dryer, and needed work around the building. 

Formerly a city known for its mills, Easthampton’s real estate market became more expensive in recent decades as the city’s reputation as a trendy city filled with artists grew. That has meant increasing prices that have forced tenants out of the city in recent years, including artists renting studios in those repurposed mill buildings. More than 40% of residents in the city rent, according to census data. And a City Council subcommittee studying rents in the city found that some 43% of renters are considered “cost burdened” — spending more than 30% of their income on housing.

What the unified tenants have accomplished in Easthampton is rare, according to housing activists. When tenants associations do form, they usually represent just one building or, less often, a landlord’s larger portfolio. Katie Talbot, the organizing director at the grassroots tenants-rights organization Springfield No One Leaves, said she’s unaware of any other citywide tenants union that has formed in western Massachusetts.

“Any time there’s collective power built like that, it’s the dream,” she said.

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Increasingly, in the face of climbing rents and housing shortages, renters across the country have begun to organize cross-building solidarity. And in places like Chicago and Louisville, tenants have banded together to form citywide organizations that have been able to wage bigger battles for housing justice. In neighboring Connecticut, renters have formed a statewide tenants union, which is made up of 17 chapters from 11 different cities and towns including Stamford, New Haven, and Hartford.

“There’s basically an endless list why us having a citywide structure and a citywide power base has made life better for poor and working-class people,” said Tara Raghuveer, one of the founding tenant organizers of one of the most well known citywide tenants unions in the country: KC Tenants.

Since 2019, KC Tenants has been organizing around “safe, accessible, and affordable housing” in Kansas City, Missouri. That year, the group wrote and won a tenants bill of rights in the city. Since then, KC Tenants has written and helped pass a law for free attorneys in the city’s eviction court, a proposal for a “People’s Housing Trust Fund” in the city, and more. They’ve also become one of the founding members of the national Tenant Union Federation, where Raghuveer is the director.

Raghuveer said that today, tenants are facing a different kind of landlord than in years past. They’re more consolidated, more powerful, and often operate in the shadows as property managers interact with tenants. She said more and more tenants are organizing across the country — a trend seemingly playing out in the Connecticut River Valley, too — as they draw inspiration from one another.

“The crisis is so bad, something has got to give,” Raghuveer said. “People don’t have more money to pay in rent … The question is not whether tenants will revolt, it’s whether that revolt will be from a place of desperation or from a place of power.”

For some tenants unions, flexing that power has meant organizing rent strikes, banding together to withhold money from their landlord over deferred maintenance, rent hikes, or other conditions.

In Easthampton, the tenants union has protested, held press conferences, and advised tenants of their rights under the law when facing rent hikes, eviction proceedings, or health and safety issues in their homes. 

And the city’s elected officials seem to be listening. Last fall, amid the Easthampton Tenants Union’s growing presence in the city, councilors formed a Rent Study Committee. Since then, members have spoken out at public meetings, like in February, when a tenants union member showed up at City Council to support the creation of a separate Housing Crisis Task Force. 

“I am a renter of many years throughout the valley, I’ve experienced a lot of instances of fraud, maintenance neglect, intimidation, and abusive behavior from landlords who are never held accountable and I know that I’m not alone,” one member of the union, Natalia Ruiz, said during the meeting’s public comment period. “As a member of the Easthampton Tenants Union, we hear different stories every week. We have a lot of different struggles against various, mostly corporate landlords going on in the area.”

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Last February, Ilene Roizman and her neighbors wanted their landlord to deal with ice accumulation on their apartment building, and that’s when Roizman noticed something interesting.

“It became apparent that when everyone was included on an email to the landlord, he would respond,” she said. “I thought about collective action, because that’s what that is, really.”

It wasn’t long before she started thinking that tenants in the eight-unit building should organize as a tenants association so they could “actually get the landlord to do things.” That thought proved prescient when, at the end of the same month, her landlord accidentally forwarded tenants an email in which the owners of something called Hurricane Properties were copied — a company whose website describes them as “competitive individuals who want to build generational wealth for our families through real estate.”

The renters guessed, correctly, that Hurricane was about to become the new owners of their building. So they began meeting among themselves preparing for a sale, which happened in April. The next month, Hurricane announced rent hikes that tenants said they couldn’t afford.

But the spirit of protest was in the air in Easthampton. Around that same time, Roizman said, residents in another building in the city, Pleasant View Apartments, had started fighting back against similar increases in their rent. So Roizman and her neighbors got organized, too, and stuck together to keep their new owners from divide-and-conquer tactics. 

From the start, Roizman said that they had the idea of an Easthampton-wide tenants union in mind. The Pleasant View group and tenants from Roizman’s building met consistently, attending one another’s meetings over the summer, together with Springfield No One Leaves. They also staged a rally at City Hall. That got a lot of attention, she said, and by mid-August Hurricane Properties — which to that point hadn’t budged — met with the tenants to talk about a rent adjustment.

Several weeks later, the owners agreed to significantly reduce the rent increases, install a new washer and dryer, and do needed work around the building before finalizing the smaller rent increases they did institute.

Hurricane Properties did not respond to an emailed interview request Friday.

“Once we had that meeting, we all felt a boost of confidence,” she said. “I hate to mix metaphors, but it felt like the training wheels were off and we were driving the train.”

It wasn’t long before the Easthampton Tenants Union held its first meeting, in early fall. And it soon had one of its first real fights on its hands. 

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It was a gray, snow-covered afternoon on Dec. 10 when renters from across Easthampton gathered at City Hall. But despite the bleak weather, the City Council chambers were filled with bright colors. Around a dozen people were gathered around a podium holding freshly painted signs in their hands.

“The rent is wicked high,” one read. Another was shaped like a Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee, with big red and purple letters on the front: “Mass runs on fair rent.”

The Easthampton Tenants Union had gathered to support residents of the local company Pine Valley Realty, whose owners had started to impose big rent increases, some higher than 50%. 

One of them was Mona Shadi, who had been hit with a $300 rent increase. She and another tenant — Roland Descaires, who faced a $350 increase — refused to pay the increased rent and continued to pay the existing price — a tenant’s right in Massachusetts. They requested negotiation and started organizing other tenants, and the company responded by initiating eviction proceedings against them.

So, as they fought those rent hikes and evictions, the Pine Valley Realty tenants began collecting letters to their landlord, ultimately getting more than 600 people to sign them.

“No one here is asking for a handout or a free lunch,” Shadi said at the December press conference, standing in front of boxes of letters to her landlord. “We are working class, we don’t get to make our money through passive income. We have to work more for less.”

The tenants then gathered their boxes, marched down the street to Pine Valley Realty’s offices, and delivered the letters. Two months later, Pine Valley Realty backed down. After two pre-trial mediation sessions with Shadi, Descaires, and housing lawyer Joel Feldman, the company agreed to lower the rent increases to $45 and $50, respectively, and also committed to attending an initial meeting to discuss the possibility of collective bargaining with all of its tenants.

Pine Valley Realty did not respond to an email requesting comment on Friday.

Speaking to The Shoestring, Shadi said that she’s sometimes still surprised how much the Easthampton Tenants Union has been able to accomplish in such a short time. Like Roizman, she could best explain the feeling with a transportation metaphor.

“What I tell people is that we know what a plane is, we know what a plane looks like, and so we built something that looked like a plane but it turns out it actually flies,” she said.

Shadi was previously involved in the local labor movement, having been a union organizer while working at the River Valley Co-op. She said there were a lot of lessons she took from that experience into building solidarity among tenants.

“What I learned with labor organizing is that people are so terrified and so beat down that they are more comfortable accepting being in a really tough position than maybe trying to fight their way out of it,” she said. “You need patience. It’s trauma work. You need to be consistent and you need to show them … You need to sometimes give them little steps.”

While people see the protests and press conferences, organizing is as much about offering to talk on the phone at night with a neighbor who is terrified, for example. It’s about leading going first and illuminating the path for the others behind, she said. The goal is to create a democratic organization that isn’t leaderless but is instead “leaderful.”

“Organizing is a way of living,” Shadi said. People are going to have to become more comfortable making that kind of collective action a part of their everyday lives if they want to make change, she added. “We’re going to have to live differently and we’re going to have to do differently … We’re going to have to know our neighbors.”

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