Doreen Mohammed and James Carr, Astoria Tenant Union organizers. (Photo:@astoriatenantunion on Instagram)
And what the Astoria Tenant Union can teach us about actually using it.
Nicolas Stergiou
Social Media Manager, Labor, Organizer, and Unnofficial “Astoria Street Spectator”
I have been renting apartments for more than 20 years, most of that time in Astoria. That means I have accumulated a respectable collection of landlord stories: massive holes in the ceiling, repairs that never happened, heating problems that somehow became my responsibility to fix, and the annual ritual of opening a lease renewal and discovering that the exact same apartment had apparently become more valuable while I was sleeping, despite its poor condition.
In one case, when a new owner bought my building, the new supposed building manager sent me a letter increasing my rent by $1,250 — otherwise I’d have to move out in 60 days. I negotiated it down to a $1,000 increase. Not much changed besides a new stove and dishwasher. Apparently that was supposed to soften the blow and probably their tax burden as well.
The building manager later ran for State Senate, prompting what may have been my most politically engaged local primary. I suddenly discovered a deep commitment to voter turnout. He lost by a wide margin.
In a strange way, I’m grateful: without that experience, I might never have become as active in local politics—or understood why tenant unions matter more than ever in a city where housing has become increasingly unaffordable.
For most of my renting years, I dealt with these things the same way a lot of New Yorkers do. I complained. What I almost never did was knock on my neighbor’s door and ask whether they were dealing with the same thing.
That is why the Astoria Tenant Union interests me. The organization, which began organizing in 2023, describes itself as a tenant-created and tenant-led union where renters help other renters organize their buildings. Their idea of an “organized building” is not complicated: tenants know each other, understand the problems affecting their apartments and act together to address them.
But what interests me is something slightly different: the word union itself.
I belong to a labor union through my work in film production, and being involved in organizing has fundamentally changed the way I understand what a union actually is. One of the most frustrating things I still hear from coworkers is some variation of, “The union doesn’t do anything for us.” Sometimes the person saying this rarely attends a meeting, reads an update or participates in anything the union has asked members to participate in.
My instinct is always the same: Who exactly do you think “the union” is?
Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned while organizing is that a union is not a third-party customer-service organization that members hire to periodically deliver better wages and working conditions. There are elected leaders, staff and structures that absolutely need to be accountable, but the union itself is the workers. If everybody decides somebody else will attend the meeting, somebody else will organize the workplace and somebody else will fight the fight, until eventually there isn’t much of a union left.
That lesson translates almost perfectly to housing.
Renting trains us to think individually. It is my lease, my rent increase, my broken radiator and my landlord. I’ve lived in buildings where I knew the bartender three blocks away but never knew the person whose ceiling was my floor…
The landlord, meanwhile, has information about all of us — and usually considerably more resources at their disposal.
Perhaps that is one of the most important things tenant organizers are trying to change. ATU’s resources include guides on researching your building, forming tenant associations, canvassing neighbors and developing collective demands. The goal isn’t to create another organization that tenants can call and ask, “What are you going to do for me?” It is to get tenants asking each other, “What are we going to do?”
This distinction is important, especially as tenant unions become a larger part of New York’s housing conversation. A proposed Tenant Power Act in Albany would go much further, requiring landlords to negotiate with tenant unions and creating a statewide tenant association supported by public funding. The bill has not advanced through the Legislature, and property owners have raised objections about costs and how collective negotiations would work across different leases. Whatever ultimately happens with that legislation, the fact that “tenant union” and “collective bargaining” are increasingly being discussed together tells us something about where the housing debate may be heading.
Doreen Mohammed and James Carr, two organizers with ATU, have both emphasized the importance of tenants organizing together rather than facing housing problems in isolation. What I appreciate about ATU’s approach is that tenants are not presented as passive recipients waiting for someone to rescue them.
There is also a demanding part of that message: organizing requires participation.
Government matters. Elections matter. Rent stabilization matters. A rent freeze can make an enormous difference to somebody struggling to stay in their home. But even a favorable policy does not mean the work is finished. Administrations change, buildings get sold and new problems emerge.
Labor organizing taught me there is no final boss battle where you win a contract. Gains have to be enforced and defended. Tenant organizing is no different. It can be exhausting, but that is the price of having a say in your workplace — or, in this case, your living situation.
Tenant apathy does not cause high rents, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons people may find it difficult to participate: work, family obligations, fear of retaliation or simply not knowing where to begin. But when tenants remain disconnected from one another, it benefits whoever already holds more power.
Many landlords, developers and real-estate interests are pretty organized. They have lawyers, trade groups, political relationships and financial resources. Renters have numbers, but numbers only become power when people are able and willing to act together. If renters do not have the same financial resources to organize, then what we do have is each other: our neighbors, our numbers and our willingness to act collectively.
Astoria has no shortage of renters willing to complain about the rent. I’ve been doing it for two decades. But complaining is easy. Organizing is the part that requires something from you.
It doesn’t have to start with some huge action. Go to a meeting. Talk to the people in your building. Find out whether the problem you’ve been complaining about is only happening to you.
At some point, “this sucks” has to turn into “what are we going to do about it?”
