Tenants Shut Down Brooklyn Bridge to Protest Predatory Landlords

As the housing crisis gets worse, driven by a shortage of affordable housing and exacerbated by the real estate lobby, including megalandlords and private equity, tenants are organizing to advocate for their rights. On Saturday morning, over a thousand tenants from across New York City, including advocates from nearly every tenant organization in the five boroughs and some from upstate New York, rallied in Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn. They marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in the rain for an hour and ended the march with another rally in Foley Square, a few blocks from City Hall in Manhattan. 

The coalition—consisting of tenant unions, labor unions, and co-organized by the umbrella group Housing Justice For All—formed one of the largest tenant marches in the past few years and had representation from most of the major housing organizations in the city. The marching tenants included older people and children in strollers; hundreds of people in translucent ponchos cloaked under countless umbrellas as rain poured down on them throughout the march. Chants were in English and Spanish and included occasional chants of “Fuck Eric Adams,” the mayor of New York City.

With signs that read, “Tenants Demand Rent Control,” “Cap the Rents,” and of course, “The Rent is Too Damn High,” tenants were protesting the state legislature and the governor’s inaction on passing a “Good Cause” eviction law that would have banned evictions except for lease violations or and allowed tenants to contest rent hikes above a certain threshold. 

And they were protesting rent increases on rent stabilized tenants by the Rent Guidelines Board, which this month made a preliminary vote to hike rents between two and five percent for one year leases and between four and seven percent on two-year leases. 

Organizations from across the city were represented, including Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, Met Council on Housing, Ridgewood Tenants Union, Churches United for Fair Housing, Make The Road New York, Desis Rising Up and Moving, and CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. Tenant unions from Rochestor and Syracuse also showed up.

Advocates also called on the legislature to pass the Housing Access Voucher Program, a voucher for people on the brink of homelessness that had broad support from tenants and landlords but was nonetheless scuttled, although that bill is likely not to be on the table again until 2024.

In a press release following the march, Housing Justice For All said, “While the state legislature included support for Good Cause and HAVP in their budget resolutions, Albany leaders have walked back their commitments after negotiations on the budget fell apart. This week, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said that Good Cause in its current form was off the table this year. Gov. Hochul has also said a housing package could wait until next year.” 

Tenants protesting included Dorca Reynoso, 49, who lives in a 1 bedroom apartment in Inwood with her 25-year-old son. Reynoso has lived in the same apartment for 26 years; the building was purchased in the early 2000’s by David Israel, a landlord who was sued in 2022 for allegedly failing to correct hazards in a Harlem building prior to a fatal fire. She says her rent was doubled when her lease was renewed in 2014. She’s currently paying $1250, the limit of what she’s able to afford, and is without a lease.

Reynoso said that she’s been on rent strike for 3 years because the landlord has failed to correct conditions in her building. She said the lock on the front door is broken and that she feels unsafe given recent attacks in her neighborhood. Two-thirds of the building has been vacant for years, she said. The owner is now finally renovating those units and getting ready to rent them out, she said. While in theory it’s a good thing that the units will finally be occupied, as she sees boxes piling up in her building, Reynoso fears that without a Good Cause law, she will have no protections against exorbitant rent hikes. 

“We don't have the Good Cause bill, we have no tenant protections within the next few months,” she told Motherboard. While her unit is not rent-regulated, she’s also disappointed about the Rent Guidelines Board’s recent vote to raise rents. “There should be rent rollbacks,” she said.

Reynoso said low-income tenants have to juggle lots of intersecting issues—including stress and mental health—and losing an apartment would be too much. She said she sympathized with Jordan Neely, a man experiencing homelessness who was killed on the New York City subway a few weeks ago.

“It makes you tired… it's exhausting to have to be fighting just to be able to exist. People shouldn't have to fight so hard just to have a home and exist,” she said. Reynoso said she frequently sees negative mental health impacts and self-harm in her community as a result of housing insecurity. “People get desperate, it affects your mental health and the way you're reacting to yourself or others,” she said. 

She has gone up to Albany along with the Met Council on Housing to advocate for Good Cause and is disappointed that elected officials failed to get it passed.

“It’s very disappointing, the elected officials claim they're on board and they're going to fight for it,” she said.

Other advocates were equally angry about failed budget negotiations. “Tenants are sick and tired of broken promises from our government. Doing nothing this year is not an option. Failing to pass any tenant protections this year would cause needless suffering for millions in New York,” Cynthia Norris, an organizer with New York Communities for Change said in a statement circulated by Housing Justice for All.

Tenants have plenty to be pissed off about, including a flailing program meant to provide people lawyers in housing court amid an increased pace of eviction filings. Average rents in Manhattan have surpassed all-time highs. But the march was mostly a reaction to the state budget process and a Hail Mary pass meant to build political momentum for policies that were dropped at the last minute. Governor Kathy Hochul, who had never fully committed to Good Cause eviction protections, finally dropped the law from the budget after her other budget priorities also fell through. 

Hochul’s signature housing plan was to address supply through housing mandates that she hoped would add 800,000 units over the course of ten years. But it faced pushback from suburban lawmakers who didn’t want more density in their neighborhoods; it also faced a lack of enthusiasm from advocates in the housing justice movement who were concerned that the plan was not focused on affordability. In the end, neither the housing mandates nor the Good Cause law was included in the state’s budget. 

Large proposals like Good Cause fare better during budget negotiations than the rest of the legislative session, but advocates are hoping that legislators can build on their promises to get something passed this year. They are also hoping to mobilize tenants to speak up against rent hikes at the next few Rent Guidelines Board meetings. The next one will be on Thursday.

While the governor has yet to say she’ll return to the table to negotiate on a Good Cause law in the next legislative session, rally speakers and tenants wanted to make sure that legislators would face electoral repercussions for not following through. 

 “I want to hold politicians accountable for their responsibility, for the harm that they're causing to our communities, to black and brown people,” Reynoso said. “We need tenant protections, we need to make sure people have what they need so this society can be a safe place.”