When tenants form unions, they can use collective power to force change in their buildings.
On March 30, 2022, nearly a century's worth of fecal matter exploded through my bathroom ceiling. Judging from the reactions I've heard, this story is hardly unique in New York.
It started as an ominous wet patch in the corner of our bathroom. When the plumber hacked into the ceiling, a pipe burst into a literal shitstorm, covering the walls, mirrors and floors of my cosmetic sanctuary.
The culprit? A corroded pipe from 1935, the same year our building was constructed. Our super informed us that cleaning up the feces was not his job. Overwhelmed, I fled to my office, leaving my kind husband with a sponge and a promise to take him out to dinner.
That evening I came home to a two-foot hole in the ceiling with a cloud of flies buzzing around it. I stood on the toilet and peered inside to see rotted wood, more fecal matter and more insects. "No one closed the hole?!" I exclaimed. My husband shook his head, weary from cleaning and dizzy from the chemicals. I called the super and asked him to repair the ceiling. He nonchalantly informed me, "That's not my job; it's the plumbers'. "
What happened next -- a cascade of administrative failures and rampant neglect -- is a familiar tale to any tenant in a city dominated by landlord power. The super disappeared, unreachable. Trash began to pile up. At some point, the super's 79-year-old father stepped in to help, but by then my collapsed bathroom ceiling was just one problem amid a growing litany of hazardous violations in our building.
Frustrated, I began to knock on my neighbors' doors. Our Sunnyside, Queens, building of 95 units houses around 270 tenants. I learned many of them were also dealing with leaks, rodents, roaches and structural damage. One tenant suffered an injury when the ceiling caved in on her head. Some tenants experienced leaks every time it rained. A colony of rats in the basement had grown to a building-wide infestation. Management's attempt to address the rat infestation was to destroy our surrounding hedges and trees, and replace them with concrete pavement. The gorgeous fir tree that grew from a sapling was ripped up and thrown into dumpsters along with the belongings of the many recently evicted families. It was from this despair and destruction that our tenant union was born.
The Bronstein Tenant Union held our first meeting outside our building later that year on a cool fall evening, with Bangla and Spanish translators present to ensure accessibility for all our neighbors. We began working with Queens community organizers and held a holiday potluck. We hosted an unsuccessful yard sale, laughing at our junk and trading with each other. We filed 311 complaints and rent-reduction applications and carried packages to each other's doorways.
What our tenant union is experiencing is not unique. Bronstein Properties, our millionaire landlords who became infamous for evicting hundreds of families at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, have been skimping on repairs in order to pad their pockets -- at the expense of tenants' health and safety. Like landlords across New York, they reap the benefits of a system that prioritizes landlord profit over tenants' rights to housing. When landlord behavior goes unchecked, the result is dangerous living conditions, illegal harassment and skyrocketing evictions.
To hold landlords like ours accountable, we urgently need strong and enforceable tenant protections. With tenants from other Bronstein buildings (there are an estimated 13,000-17,000 of us total) and the Right to Counsel Coalition, we recently organized a rally to demand building repairs. We called on the state to pass Clean Hands, legislation that would prohibit landlords from suing tenants for eviction when they have open housing-code violations, and statewide Right to Counsel, which would ensure all tenants facing eviction have legal representation.
New York City's Right To Counsel law is not being properly enforced, in part because the court system is run by New York State. We need statewide Right To Counsel to enforce New York City's law and expand this right to all tenants, especially the poorest ones.
Without these protections, landlords will continue to make millions of dollars while we continue to live with the fear of eviction and as our apartments literally crumble around us.
If you are a New York tenant being exploited by your landlord, I implore you to talk to your neighbors. I guarantee they are facing similar struggles, and working together will get results. Our tenant union is powerful. Already, our union is repairing our building the same way it was constructed nearly a century ago -- one brick at a time. But we cannot do this work alone. We need the state to pass Statewide Right to Counsel and Clean Hands legislation to protect our right to live securely in safe and healthy homes.