Meet the Tenant Organizers Taking On NYC’s Landlords and Cops

New York City is in the midst of a full-blown housing crisis, with cops and real estate owners reaping the benefits.

Between January 2021 and January of this year, average rents in New York City went up by roughly a third. That same month, the COVID-induced city eviction moratorium ended, meaning that landlords were once again legally permitted to kick vulnerable residents out of their homes.

Nobody expects Mayor Eric Adams to do much about this worsening situation, and indeed, the former police officer has already announced policies designed to target and criminalize the city’s houseless people. Since around the beginning of the pandemic, the Brooklyn Eviction Defense organization has pushed back on such efforts, with major victories, and fought to protect the rights of tenants, who they define “as anyone who does not have control over their housing.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you briefly introduce Brooklyn Eviction Defense?

Brooklyn Eviction Defense is a revolutionary, autonomous organization of tenants fighting dispossession and building tenant power. We emerged out of a coalition of tenant unions in the late summer of 2020, as the prospect of an avalanche of evictions (which is now violently happening) was taking shape.

Since dispossession and eviction assume many forms, so does our work. We understand evictions to include legal, court-ordered and marshal-executed evictions, as well as illegal evictions, harassment, violent negligence, outrageous rent hikes, landlord retaliation, refused lease renewals, as well as the systematic and conditional pressures placed upon tenants.

What are your tactics to keep people in their homes?

We organize tenant associations and do outreach in communities that are particularly vulnerable to dispossession, as we know an organized neighborhood is the best form of eviction defense. We host political education workshops and know-your-rights trainings. We engage in the wider political tenant struggle, build coalitions and agitate for changes – non-reformist reforms! – that attend to tenants’ needs without sacrificing our main goal: creating the conditions in order for tenancy to cease to exist.

We also struggle daily alongside tenants facing active attempts at eviction. This means carrying out direct actions, such as blockades and stoop-watches, as well as creating public campaigns against scheming landlords. We sometimes conduct what we call guerilla repairs, wherein our handiest organizers attend to improving negligent conditions that would otherwise make tenants’ homes unlivable. In the past this has included doing plumbing and woodwork, and even installing a toilet, sink and stove in a tenant’s home after a slumlord broke in and removed all of his appliances. Lastly, we also help tenants within the legal system, though we are not a legal service and we view housing court as basically an eviction mill.

Can you describe the sweeps of homeless encampments in lower Manhattan that began at the end of March?

The sweeps are really just awful. Three different municipal departments – the New York Police Department, the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) and Department of Sanitation – combined their fascist and bureaucratic energies to relentlessly harass and displace their most marginalized neighbors. In one instance, our organizers joined other activists and members of the press at East 9th Street and Avenue B for what turned into a 10-hour standoff with more than 50 city officers. Behind the scenes, their bosses were busy deliberating over how best to evict four houseless folks from their tents.

That same day, members of the Tompkins Homeless Collective also refused to be removed; their leaders were arrested, as were organizers standing (or sitting) in solidarity. All of their belongings were thrown in the trash. This kind of behavior is characteristic of the DHS, which regularly tries to coerce, manipulate and pressure unhoused people into shelter systems wherein their safety and health are neglected or outright sacrificed.

How do you think Mayor Eric Adams’ policies will affect poor and working-class people?

There’s good reason to view Adams as waging active war on working-class New Yorkers. This is evident in his moves to ratchet up sweeps of homeless encampments, to increase the number of subway cops, to allocate more money for police than housing, to push safe-haven beds over actual housing for homeless people, and to abandon all city COVID precautions. It’s also apparent in his refusal to reckon with the lapsed eviction moratorium or skyrocketing rents.

The eviction moratorium expired in January. What have you seen on the ground since then?

We’ve seen evictions happening everywhere on an everyday basis, and this has compelled us to rethink how we operate. We only have about 50 core organizers, so we cannot react to every instance of violence. This has meant our work has become more consciously politicized, and we’re now less focused on individual instances of dispossession than on and on turning atomized struggles into a collective fight.

Another trend we are organizing around right now are massive year-over-year rent hikes, which are being justified by landlords, politicians and the media as a market correction for the cheap(er) leases that many tenants signed during the first two years of COVID-19. This is, of course, a fallacy: Median rents are above their pre-pandemic levels and still rising. These rent hikes will force many tenants out of their homes if something isn’t done. At the same time, they are also a potential wedge issue that could mobilize tenants into organizing their buildings into radical tenant associations. Only tenant-associations (TAs) can force landlords to the collective bargaining table and generate a feedback loop of tenant power, as living on a block or in a building with an organized TA makes evictions in these communities less likely.

So what happens next? It did seem that during the first two years of the pandemic rent was becoming more politicized (look at the vibrant #CancelRent movement) and more clearly recognized as a means of extracting working-class wealth. How this war continues to unfold – whether it will be circumscribed from the start by nonprofits, or whether it will assume a truly revolutionary form – will be determined by the tenant movement. As we like to say, it is the tenants who hold up the sky.

How are the sweeps of homeless encampments part of this political strategy?

For the past five decades, the mayors of New York have done everything they could to turn our city into a playground for the rich, which necessarily means pushing poor and working-class people further toward the periphery and into dangerous living conditions. The recent sweeps are just another violent expression of this pattern.

The day we held out for 10 hours, dozens and dozens of mainstream reporters documented the violence of the situation – this was a glimmer of the sort of situation and political crisis we need to create in order to materially support houseless folks.

How do you understand the connections between the crises of eviction and police violence?

In New York City it is marshals – not agents of the state, but freelancers; mercenaries! – who execute court-ordered evictions. Marshals make tons of money doing this: sometimes even up to seven figures. When a marshal shows up to execute an eviction they often bring a locksmith with them to change the locks, and if there is any sort of resistance the marshal will step back and call the police. The other day in east New York, we confronted a marshal as she was attempting an eviction. Once our three organizers made their intentions clear, the marshal called the cops and soon enough 25 police officers arrived to enforce the dispossession.

There are nearly 40,000 police employed in New York City, and $750 million was spent on police overtime last year alone. The extent to which police and real estate work hand in hand to run this city is terrifying and largely uncontested by liberals, who are happy to enjoy the spoils of empire (brunch).

When the average working-class person sees the violence that houseless folks face, and the omnipresence of police, the message is quite clear: Keep working, or you will end up like them – especially since your rent is also going up. This is why we recognize the struggles of houseless people and the precarity of housed tenants as symptoms of the same broken system.