Tenants & Neighbors Home

About Tenants & Neighbors

Tenants & Neighbors is a grassroots organization that helps tenants build and effectively wield their power to preserve at-risk affordable housing and strengthen tenants' rights in New York.

Through organizing, education, intensive leadership development, grassroots mobilization, and strategic policy and legislative advocacy, Tenants & Neighbors is building a strong and unified tenant movement that has the knowledge and power to effect real change.

Tenants & Neighbors is comprised of two affiliate organizations, New York State Tenants & Neighbors Information Service, which does organizing, education, and leadership development and New York State Tenants & Neighbors Coalition, a membership organization that spearheads legislative system change campaigns.

New York State Tenants & Neighbors
Coalition

Send a Postcard to Governor Cuomo

T&N Members: Please send a postcard to Governor Cuomo asking him where the rules and regulations regarding the enforcement of the rent laws that were required by last year's rent law are. It's been almost a year since the law was passed, and still no rules or regulations have been promulgated. You should have received a postcard in your most recent letter from Tenants & Neighbors; you can also click here for a PDF of the postcard.

It's Time to Change the Narrative about
the RGB Process- and Reform the Board
Maggie Russell-Ciardi, Executive Director, May 1, 2012

From the perspective of many tenants, the process by which the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) determines rent adjustments for the city's one million rent stabilized tenants is opaque, seems to be significantly biased in the favor of landlords, and almost inevitably results in rent increases that cannot easily be justified by the data produced by the RGB staff and that result in the city becoming increasingly unaffordable to low and moderate income New Yorkers.

Yet this is not the story that you are likely to read about in the mainstream media coverage of the RGB process. Many media outlets tend to gloss over the objections that tenants have to the RGB process or address it in only the most perfunctory of ways, and instead choose to characterize tenants' participation in the process as a "circus" and treat with an attitude of wry bemusement the incredible amount of desperation, frustration, and very legitimate anger that tenants who are struggling to stay in their homes typically bring to RGB meetings.

This dismissive attitude can already be seen in the early coverage that has appeared so far this year. This morning, one media outlet reported that "Tenants and building owners will once again be squabbling (emphasis ours) over annual rent hikes for the city's rent-regulated apartments as the Rent Guidelines Board holds a preliminary vote this evening at Cooper Union."

The definition of a squabble is "a noisy quarrel, usually about a trivial matter." In our view, whether or not the Public Members that the Mayor appoints to the RGB truly represent public interests is not a trivial matter. Whether or not the RGB actually bases its increase on the data the staff produces about the state of the housing market and economy is not a trivial matter. Whether or not the RGB listens to the tenants who testify at the public hearings and takes their situation into consideration when determining how much to adjust rents is not a trivial matter. And whether or not the RGB approves increases that will result in low and moderate income folks being pushed out of their homes and communities is not a trivial matter.

Tenants & Neighbors has tried to work within the RGB process- to attend the public meetings, review the reports produced by the staff, encourage and help prepare tenants to testify at public hearings, and offer input about what increases would be reasonable for our membership. And all of this has ended up feeling in many ways like an exercise in futility.

So this year we are not planning to use all of our limited time and resources calling for this to be the year that the RGB finally hears tenants. We're generally an optimistic organization - but we're not irrationally optimistic.

But either are we going to limit ourselves to "squabbling." Instead, we're focusing on getting the state legislature to reform the Rent Guidelines Board. We're working to pass A6397/S741 (Kavanagh/Squadron), which has already been reported out of the Assembly Housing Committee, and A7234/S5603 (Rosenthal/Espaillat).

T&N's 2012 State Level Legislative Priorities

Tenants & Neighbors has identified our state level legislative priorities for the 2012 session. For a PDF of our legislative platform, click here. If you are a tenant member of Tenants & Neighbors and would like to join our Rent Stabilization or Rent Control Leadership Committees, which provide input into what our state level legislative priorties should be and spearhead our campaigns to achieve our legislative goals, please contact us. Rent controlled tenants should email kgoldstein@tandn.org and rent stabilized tenants should email sstein@tandn.org.

Get Informed and Involved!

Become a Member
The work of the New York State Tenants & Neighbors Coalition is made possible by our dues-paying members. If you value our work, please become an individual or organizational member today! Click here for a PDF of our 2012 membership brochure. You can pay your dues online or send a check in the mail to our office. Please note that membership dues support legislative organizing and lobbying and so are not tax deductible.

Keep up to Date with T&N's Activities
There are several ways you can stay on top of the work of the New York State Tenants & Neighbors Coalition and the New York State Tenants & Neighbors Information Service. You can join our Facebook group, follow us on Twitter at @tenantneighbor, and sign up to receive the e-update, below:

For Email Newsletters you can trust

New York State Tenants & Neighbors Information Service

Tenants & Neighbors Receives Grant to Expand its Mitchell-Lama Program

We are pleased to announce that the New York State Tenants & Neighbors Information Service has received a grant from the New York Community Trust to build on the successes of our groundbreaking Mitchell-Lama preservation program. The focus of the new grant will be to:

Build Leadership Committees: Build a citywide tenant leadership committee of current Mitchell-Lama tenants and expand the membership of the Mitchell-Lama P.I.E Campaign;
Keep Buildings in Mitchell-Lama: Help tenants living in rental buildings that are at risk of leaving the Mitchell-Lama program organize campaigns to keep their buildings in the program;
Prevent Unaffordable Rent Increases: Work with tenants to identify and implement solutions to the problem of high rent increases in buildings that are still in the Mitchell-Lama program;
Address Problem of Expiring LAP Agreements: Work with tenants in buildings that have already left the Mitchell-Lama program and remain affordable only because of Landlord Assistance Program (LAP) agreements to identify and implement solutions to ensure the building remains affordable after the expiration of the LAP;
Recapture Developments: Identify and articulate a programmatic approach for recapturing certain buildings that have already been taken out of the Mitchell-Lama program and placing them back under a regulatory framework, and encourage policy makers to take steps towards implementing such a program; and
Re-Envision the Mitchell-Lama Program: Create and build consensus around a vision - based on our work identifying solutions to preserving affordability in current and former Mitchell-lama buildings - for a new and improved Mitchell-Lama program for the twenty-first century that takes into consideration the realities of the housing market in New York City as well as other areas of the state where there are still Mitchell-Lama developments.

This new program is being launched this spring.

HCR ENFORCE Campaign Update- New Deputy Commissioner Appointed to Oversee Expansion of Rent Law Enforcement

In spring of 2011, Tenants & Neighbors launched an administrative campaign, in conjunction with allied organizations, to get New York State Homes and Community Renewal (HCR) to do more proactive and targeted enforcement of the rent laws. This campaign gained significant momentum in summer of 2011 when the legislature passed a bill to renew and strengthen the rent laws that included language requiring the HCR to promulgate rules and regulations regarding the enforcement of those laws.

We had another important victory on February 17, 2012, when Governor Cuomo announced the appointment of Deputy Commissioner Richard R. White to lead a new Tenant Protection Unit (TPU) at the HCR. Governor Cuomo's Budget and Reform Plan for 2012-13 dedicates $4.8 million to the Tenant Protection Unit which, according to the Governor, will proactively enforce landlord obligations to tenants and impose strict penalties for failure to comply with HCR orders and New York's rent laws.

We want to extend our thanks to the tenant leaders who have been involved in the HCR campaign to date. Our next step will be to endeavor to work with Commissioner Towns and Deputy Commissioner White to make the TPU as effective as possible, and also to continue to push for the HCR to promulgate the rules and regulations regarding the enforcement of the rent laws, which are still outstanding.

If you are interested in getting involved in this campaign, please email Sam Stein at sstein@tandn.org.