About the City-Wide Tenant Union of Rochester
The City-Wide Tenant Union is a grassroots housing justice movement organizing to make housing a human right and to secure community control over land. We do this in two ways: 1) building tenant power through organizing tenant unions and 2) expanding the rights of all tenants through winning transformative policies.
We were founded in 2017, starting with just one woman & one bench - Kawanais Smith - who organized her neighbors because her landlord was trying to move benches from the front of the building to the side, to hide mostly black residents from the gentrifying neighborhood. The tenants launched a successful petition to keep the benches in place & built the Southview Towers Tenant Union. They forced major repairs and set the stage for other tenants.
As tenants all over the city came together, the CWTU was born. In 2019, we worked with tenant groups across the state to win 25 statewide tenant protections & statewide opt-in for rent control. We’ve also evicted the worst Rochester slumlords, Peter Hungerford, Ron Zour, who owned 21 buildings. Their tenants ran them out of town & won agreements for multi-million dollar renovations, right to remain, 30 years rent control, & eviction protections. Now we continue to fight to make housing a human right!
Mission: The City-Wide Tenant Union (CWTU) of Rochester is a grassroots housing justice movement to elevate housing to a human right and secure community control over land and housing by building tenant power and expanding the rights of all tenants
Tenant Power: We aim to build power by organizing tenants across the city into into a) building tenant unions and/or tenant unions of all tenants with the same landlord and b) uniting tenants across buildings and landlords into one big union (the CWTU). The CWTU aims to expand tenants rights by exercising the tenants’ economic, political, and public power
Tenants Rights: We aim to expand the rights of all tenants by exercising our tenant power to win and enforce the rights of tenants through
a) collective agreements with our landlords and
b) policy changes that benefit all tenants
Structure
The City-Wide Tenant Union is not only made up of individual members, but also tenant organizational members such as building tenant unions or tenant associations.
Base Unit: Tenant Unions, Tenant Associations, and Resident Councils
Leadership Team: Representatives from different base units
Adopted by the members of the City-Wide Tenant Union on March 7, 2018.
The City-Wide Tenant Union is affiliated with the national Right to the City Alliance and the statewide Upstate-Downstate Housing Alliance.
