Vincia Barber, a leader of her building’s tenant association at 1616 President St. in Brooklyn, New York, has helped organize tenants in the 24-unit complex since the COVID-19 pandemic. Barber and her neighbors have been in a four-yearlong fight to get significant repairs completed in her apartment, starting with years’ worth of black mold growing in her bathroom. 

The complex’s residents went on a rent strike during the pandemic, withholding their rent until their landlord, Jason Korn, fixed the significant issues aggravating residents. They knew the road ahead was difficult. They were going against Korn, who had been named New York City’s worst landlord in 2019 and 2020 by the public advocate’s office. Korn’s 55 apartment buildings were cited by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development with thousands of building code violations each year, accumulating fines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

At the end of 2024, after more than four years of the rent strike, residents defeated eviction efforts by their new landlords, Gillman Management, who took over the building in 2022. Members of the tenant association and their legal representation used a defense of “rent-impairing violations” to ask for rent deferment for as long as the building continues to have severe breaches of the building conservation code.

A judge on Dec. 13 sided with the renters, finding that repairs in the building were necessary and waiving rental arrears from January 2020 to May 2022, which added up to $250,000. The period coincided with Korn’s tenure as the owner of the building.

Tenants, supported by city-wide organizations such as the Tenant Rights Coalition at Legal Services NYC and Housing Organizers for People Empowerment (HOPE), celebrated other victories along the way. When Gillman took over the building, tenants negotiated with the landlords on a comprehensive repair plan, which included inspections involving tenants.

For Barber, that meant a plan to get rid of the black mold. But after what she called surface-level repairs, she is now fighting leaks, piles of trash outside her window, and an infestation of cockroaches that accompanies the mounds of refuse. 

“A repair hadn’t been done in over 20 years in this unit, so they had to do a proper repair, which they did. I have to give them credit. But it was a [surface-level] repair,” said Barber, who excused herself during a phone interview to kill a cockroach. “After four years of fighting, I’m still fighting.”

The stories of tenants like Barber and her neighbors at 1616 President St. are becoming increasingly common and ushering in a new wave of tenants organizing across the country to have a say in their living conditions. 

Last August, several tenant unions that had risen to prominence in the public eye came together to create the Tenant Union Federation (TUF), a home for large-scale, nationwide tenant organizing.

Tara Raghuveer, one of the federation’s founders and an organizer with KC Tenants in Kansas City, Missouri, said that the organization is finding its footing, figuring out how to organize tenants as a class and harness their collective power.

“We provide the underpinnings of this market,” Raghuveer said. “What we’re trying to figure out, maybe more than anything, is how to wield the tenants’ ultimate power, which is our rent, and how to wield it effectively and, potentially, as disruptively as we need to in order to win what we need.”

Part of that power building is through forming tenant unions across the country and helping tenants understand how to consolidate and exercise power. 

“We want to sharpen our understanding of what the union needs to be,” Raghuveer said.

Raghuveer said that in its first few months, TUF got to work on preparing unions for strikes. TUF tenants went on rent strikes at two federally financed buildings in Kansas City in the fall.

“I think the organizing principle that I feel we relate to the most is using power builds power,” Raghuveer said. “When you take tenants on strike, when you take workers on strike, you actually build power through escalation, through action.”

Part of TUF’s strategy is to build supermajority strikes, where a significant number of tenants are ready to withhold their rent. Raghuveer referenced 65% of buildings’ renters as a target, but noted that those numbers are subject to the unions’ understanding of landlords’ financing. 

“The most powerful expression is when the greatest number of tenants can get together and collectively withhold their rent,” she said. “We have to understand those numbers in relation to the landlord’s finances.”

Raghuveer said market conditions will not change on their own and that tenant power will be expressed in revolt. 

Half of all U.S. renters are cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on rent, according to a 2024 Harvard University report. In New York City, research showed that a median-income household would have to spend 69% of their income to rent an average apartment.

“The rent is too damn high for everyone in every part of this country,” Raghuveer said. “So to me, it’s not a question of whether tenants revolt. It’s a question of whether that revolt is from a place of desperation or from a place of power, and we are organizing to ensure the latter.”

For Barber, who attended a TUF call in November, the federation is as much a glimmer of hope as it is an indictment of the precarious housing situation for millions of tenants in America.

“You go to fight a landlord by yourself, he will eat you up. He will eat you up cold. He has more money than you,” Barber said. “We have to understand we are stronger together.”