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Neighbors in Bensonhurst formed a tenant union to address unsafe conditions and alleged negligence, making use of a city program that pays organizers to help renters in bad buildings.
“People just got tired of it,” said Kevin Paxtor, 18, of the broken floors, splitting stairs, leaks, and pests at his apartment building on Bay 16th Street in Bensonhurst.
“I just thought this was normal for us because maybe we don’t have that much money,” said Kevin’s older brother David, 21. “But then I started to realize, oh, these are issues that our landlord should be fixing.”
Kevin and David, along with their older brother, their parents, and their neighbors, just formed a tenant union. Officials from the city’s housing agency and Mayor Zohran Mamdani say it’s the best way to improve conditions in their building—and officials are pushing tenants across the city to do the same.
“What you are showing is not just to the tenants of your own building the possibility to fight for what you deserve, but frankly, the tenants across New York City what it can look like when you face landlord harassment or intimidation,” said Mayor Mamdani to the tenants at an event at the Bensonhurst library Tuesday evening.
The tenants, mostly Urdu-speaking Brooklynites, had help in forming their union from a city-funded organizer from the Fifth Avenue Committee, provided through a program called Partners in Preservation.
“They sent a letter of their demands,” said Colette Goggin, the tenant organizer who works with the Fifth Avenue Committee, a longtime Brooklyn nonprofit. After initially ignoring it, now “[the landlord] is going to do a walkthrough with a contractor, and she’s already started to make a few repairs in apartments,” Goggin said.
The building, which has 32 units, currently has 113 open housing code violations. The landlord did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
City officials said the Partners in Preservation program has organized 100 tenant unions since 2024, a milestone officials, tenants, and the mayor celebrated with dinner and kulfi Tuesday night.
“Both building by building, but also portfolio-level organizing, we’re connecting tenant associations to tenant associations and they’re becoming tenant unions, and those tenant unions are really dealing with some of the more corporate landlords that have come into the city over the past couple decades,” said Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Dina Levy.
It’s the administration’s latest effort to rehabilitate buildings and maintain affordable housing, having previously taken on preservation of large Pinnacle and Emerald Equity portfolios that were in bankruptcy and foreclosure, respectively.
But the government’s direct support for tenant organizing has rubbed some landlord groups the wrong way. Those owners feel as though the administration has unfairly picked sides in landlord-tenant issues, and painted property owners as scapegoats.
Landlord groups have also been critical of the recently passed rent freeze, which they say caps the money owners can put back into repairs in rent-stabilized buildings like this.
Levy said tenant unions help identify problematic landlords and can engage residents about how to fix their buildings, or even identify the right preservation solution.
“If you’re a good landlord, you have no fear of organized tenants,” said Levy.
The administration recently announced plans to officially recognize tenant unions, similarly to how labor unions gain formal recognition from employers and the government. Tenant unions, and the Partners in Preservation program, also play a key role in the mayor’s housing plan, which vows to overhaul how the city responds to housing quality issues.
Officials partnering with tenant groups, and doing proactive enforcement like walk-throughs, has worked in other cities like San Francisco, according to Peter Estes, author of a new report from the Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development.
“Rather than dropping in on a problem, they’re engaged in an ongoing conversation, and they’re not always just dealing with the person in crisis. They’re dealing with a team of people who are working to resolve the problem, and they can prioritize the problems that really need their enforcement,” said Estes.
“It just shows how we all came together to solve these problems and look for solutions and also now there’s this organization to respond,” said David Paxtor.
Here’s what else happened in housing this week—
ICYMI, from City Limits:
- A group of Bronx tenants who’ve accused their landlord of neglect and harassment are asking the court to appoint someone else to run the building. The rarely used legal maneuver—known as a 7a proceeding—is one the Mamdani administration has embraced as a tool to crack down on owners who fail to maintain their properties.
- City Hall led a double-decker bus tour of publicly owned land it wants to develop into affordable housing.
- “New York City currently operates without a comprehensive plan to guide its growth and development—making it an outlier among major American cities, which routinely use such frameworks to balance citywide needs with local ones,” write Jocelyne Chait and Eve Baron, members of the Collective for Community, Culture and Environment.
ICYMI, from other local newsrooms:
- What’s a pied-à-terre tax and why do people care? City and State has the deets on the new tax on pricey second homes, and City Hall’s chaotic recent rollout of the policy.
- Meanwhile, residents at an affordable housing complex in the East Village where the water system tested positive for Legionella bacteria haven’t been able to shower in their homes since May, The City Reporter reports.
- Residents at Tracey Towers, a Mitchell Lama building in the Bronx, are pushing back against another proposed rent hike, according to the Norwood News.
- The Legionnaires’ disease outbreak on the Upper East Side that’s killed seven New Yorkers is over, Health Department officials declared Friday, according to Gothamist.
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