Tenant organizing in the five boroughs of New York has a complex history. Now, the Mamdani administration is poised to change the movement. This discussion will provide background and history of tenant movements in New York, and will explore the contradictions of a coalition between city government, the nonprofit sector, and the autonomous tenant movement.
Tenant organizing is highly place-based—what works in one neighborhood may not work in another. The context, history, and relationships of neighborhood matter greatly to organizers and movement participants. This discussion examines what has worked in New York City neighborhoods over the past years, and what lessons learned can be applied to the present moment.
holden taylor is a tenant unionist, an adjunct professor at Baruch College, a Ph.D. candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center writing on tenancy and housing financialization, an organizer with the Marxist Unity Group, and on the coordinating committee for the Citywide Tenant Assembly. They write mostly about the self-organization of working-class tenants and the political economy from which such organization is born, both historical and contemporary. This is an interest in the political potency of working-class people at the site of their homes, with their neighbors, in their community, and in opposition to the dispossessory auspices of real estate, landlords, and their capital enmeshments. They are a founder of the Brooklyn Eviction Defense Tenant Union, a borough-wide, independent organization of tenants cultivating class power building by building and block by block.