How Kawanais Smith Won a Full Renovation of her Building

Kawanais got involved with the City Wide Tenants Union over 5 years ago. She lives in Southview Towers in Rochester’s South Wedge Neighborhood. The Southview Towers has over 190 units, many of them suffered from mold, mice, and thick ice frozen on the inside of the windows. The heat was so low many of the tenants used their stoves to help heat their apartments. 

As president of the Southview Towers Tenants Association she was leading the fight against their landlord, who refused to fix the issues the tenants were facing. Through protests, rallies, and speaking to City Council and City Hall they successfully forced the hand of their landlord and had Southview Terrace completely renovated. 

Kawanais told us that her landlord even tried to get her evicted two years later. But she knows her rights, and the power of collective action and successfully kept herself in her home. 

Kawanais left us with these words for other tenants facing hardships like these: “You have to stand up and fight, you can’t sit down, nothings gonna happen that way.”

Organizing a Tenant Union in Your Building

Improving Conditions in Your Building: Many of us are not living in the safe and decent conditions we deserve.  Are you or are people in your building living in poor conditions (rats, roaches, leaks, insufficient heat, etc.)?  Are you tired of the landlord not making repairs?  Are you facing rent increases?  Are you facing eviction? 

Why Organize?  We believe individually it can be very hard to bring about specific changes in our buildings and larger changes in our city.  But we also believe there is strength in numbers.  Tenants have come together in buildings across the city to reclaim our power and have successfully improved our conditions.  

What is a Tenant Union?  A tenant union is an organization of tenants that builds power to improve conditions and win rights. Like a tenant association they often bring together tenants for social activities and/or address issues in a building.  The difference is a tenant union also aims to change the balance of power between tenants and their landlord.   A tenant union aims to address all outstanding tenant issues by collectively giving tenants decision making power in their building or neighborhood they live in through a collective tenant agreement with our landlord or cooperative ownership of our buildings.    

Steps to Improve Conditions 

If a landlord is not responsive to our individual concerns or collective concerns we can use our economic, political, and public power as tenants to bring about collective negotiations, agreements, and changes.  Here’s a summary of certain steps we can take form and exercise our power as a tenant union

1. Assemble/Plan: invite tenants together to identify common issues, educate each other on tenants rights and opportunities for change, and form a common agenda (Goals, strategy, and tactics, and organization) 

2. Outreach/Build Support: to get input and solidify further support for the common agenda, tenants can go door to door to 1) hear tenant concerns, 2) formalize broad support by getting signatures on a petition summarizing the tenants’ demands or on a demand letter, 3) ask tenants to take further action  

3. Demand Letter to Landlord: tenants can bring all their grievances to the landlord by drafting a common set of demands for the tenants of the building addressed to management, indicating what the tenants want, when they want it, and how the desired changes can be recognized in binding agreement between tenants and management 

4. Public Pressure: (if the landlord doesn’t meet the demands within the desired timeline) tenants can apply public pressure through protests that attract media attention and intervention of public officials 

5. Economic Pressure: tenants can exercise their enormous economic power by collectively withholding their rent (aka, rent strike) and when applicable, force public agencies to withhold rent/funding to landlord

6. Tenant Control: many tenant issues can only be addressed permanently from moving from investor control to tenant control (via cooperative ownership or tenant agreements with landlord) 

Combinations of public and economic pressure can force improvements and agreements with a landlord through the landlord directly but also by interventions by the City, public representatives, or the court system. 

For support with organizing, contact us at info@roctenantunion.org or 585-210-0705.

Know Your Rights/Know Your Power: HEAT RIGHTS

You have a right to heat in the state of New York. From October through May, your heat must be at least 68 degrees whenever the temperature outside is below 55 (19NYCRR(1226)§602). Here’s how you can enforce the law if your landlord isn’t providing sufficient heat.

1. Repair and Deduct: Hire someone to repair the heat and keep all receipts. Notify your landlord in writing that you are deducting the cost of repairs from your next month’s rent.

2. Withhold rent: set aside your rent until your landlord fixes the issue.

3. Cite + get emergency repairs

• Call 311 or Neighborhood Service Center and tell them: "I want to file a complaint for an IMMEDIATE HAZARD. I do not have heat (or my heat is too low) and my landlord refuses to fix it."

• Code enforcement is supposed to send out an inspector that same day bc it is an emergency. Inspector will take temperature

• Inspector will cite the violation + usually call your landlord and ask them to fix. 

• If landlord doesn’t fix, call code enforcement AGAIN. Ask for emergency repairs

  • City hires a contractor to fix + bills the landlord.

  • If City won’t due emergency repairs, keep calling and getting the heat violation cited – this will increase fines on the landlord.

  • Keep doing this every day until your landlord fixes your heat OR you get emergency repairs.

What if my landlord has just shut my heat off? It’s not broken, but the landlord just won’t provide heat?

• This is actually an illegal lock-out – landlord interrupting essential services to force you to move.

• Call tenant defense project (585) 504-6195 – tell them your landlord is unlawfully evicting you by shutting off your heat. You will get a free lawyer who will work with you.

• Also call 911 IF YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE  – tell them the same thing. This is actually a class a misdemeanor and should lead to charges for your landlord.

Wanda Cooper's Tenant Success Story

Wanda Cooper is this first issue’s Tenant Success Story. Wanda, originally from Florida, moved to Rochester along with three of her children. She lives in a 4 unit building - 3 of them are occupied by her children, grandchildren and niece. Wanda’s introduction to housing activism came by total surprise when she met a member of the City-Wide Tenant Union who happened to be walking down her street. During this time, her apartment was having a lot of issues that the landlord refused to take care of while still approaching her for rent payments. Through working with the tenant union, she was able to get the City of Rochester to sue her landlord who ultimately sold all of his properties (seven of which went to the City Land Trust!). These experiences have pushed Wanda to double down on advocating for herself, her family and her friends. They’ve even influenced her husband to perform outreach and recruit new members for the tenant union. In the future, she hopes to own her building and open a restaurant in the storefront on the ground floor.