In Gentrifying Bushwick, Residents New and Old Unite to Organize Tenants

Threats of evictions, poor conditions, and rent hikes amid rapid gentrification in Bushwick have catalyzed numerous newly-formed, or newly-reformed, grassroots tenant groups.      

This story was produced as part of a capstone reporting project at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, with editing by Professor Donna Borak.

Stories of displacement haunt Bushwick from end to end. In West Bushwick, scores of newly-built high-rises and trendy bars cast a long shadow over the rows of smaller family dwellings and longtime businesses in the east.  

Youssef, a double amputee who relies on an electric wheelchair to get around, had to call the fire department and get carried up the stairs by eight firefighters because the elevator in his West Bushwick building was broken for about a week. In East Bushwick, a longtime resident and senior citizen was facing eviction after a stroke left her multiple months behind on rent. 

That was nearly two years ago. Both people were able to stay in those apartments, thanks to the efforts of community tenant organizers.

Threats of evictions, poor conditions, and rent hikes amid rapid gentrification in Bushwick have catalyzed numerous newly-formed, or newly-reformed, grassroots tenant organizations. Amy Collado, an artist, small business owner, and longtime tenant advocate, says that collective organizing is a necessary tool to push back against the wave of displacement rippling through the neighborhood.

“Organizing allows people to stay in their home, gives them motivation to not only fight to stay, but also to fight to change,” she said. “Organizing is the number one way we maintain the cultural significance of a community, of a neighborhood, because it keeps them there.”

Over the past two decades, skyrocketing rents have displaced many poorer non-white residents, with the neighborhood’s Hispanic population plummeting. Data from the NYU Furman Center shows that Bushwick’s population changed from 67.8 percent Hispanic in 2000 to only 42.6 percent in 2022, with the white population shooting up from 3.1 percent to 26.1 percent over the same time frame.

Meanwhile, the neighborhood’s median rent increased from $1,720 in 2017 to $2,180 in 2022. This 25.6 percent increase is the third-highest jump of all the city’s community districts behind only nearby Bed-Stuy and Brooklyn Heights/Fort Greene, according to a report from the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD). 

Rising rents have also helped incentivize nearly 1,400 property owners to sell their buildings to new, usually corporate landlords in the past three years, according to ANHD’s Displacement Alert Project (DAP) Portal. Such buildings can be rife with housing code violations, crowding, and dubiously-legal rent destabilizations. And while lawmakers in both city and state government have passed several new tenant protections over the past few years, many renters continue to fall through the cracks due to spotty, often under-resourced enforcement mechanisms. 

Where city programs falter, tenant organizations hope to fill the gaps. Christopher Servidio, director of tenant engagement and special projects at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), said that tenant organizations are uniquely well-positioned to address these issues.

“We [HPD] just don’t necessarily have the manpower and the connections to the community that these community-based organizations really bring to the table at the end of the day,” Servidio said. “They know their communities best.”

Deep roots in tenant organizing 

Tenant advocacy is not new in Bushwick, which has a long, storied history of organizing by neighborhood residents. 

While numerous local and citywide organizations have fought for more affordable housing over the years—including Mi Casa Resiste, El Puente, and Make the Road New York—one group specifically focused on tenant organizing has had a particularly big impact. 

Bushwick Housing Independence Project (BHIP) was founded in the early 2000s by Father John Powis of St. Barbara’s Catholic Church. Under the leadership of Powis and Dominican-American organizer Luz Yolanda Coca, it became well-known in the neighborhood for fighting for tenants in housing court. 

However, following Coca’s untimely passing in December 2016, the group essentially fell off the map. Cynthia Tobar, an activist-scholar documenting the history of housing justice activism in Bushwick through an oral history project, says that the death of Coca, who became a veritable local legend, marked a turning point for the movement as a whole.

“Because she had been such an integral part of BHIP, when she passed away it really took a lot of wind out of the sails of that organizing, which was [at] such a critical point as well because that’s when she was probably needed the most,” Tobar said.

Without BHIP, Tobar said that most of the organizing energy in the neighborhood turned away from tenants directly and towards nonprofits with limited scopes and less strategic activities than Coca’s activism.

A second wind

Collado got her start as an organizer during this period, working for a local nonprofit focused on supporting immigrant tenants. She loved the work, but in the summer of 2023, she actually considered leaving organizing altogether after seven years due to frustrations with the leadership and bureaucracy at her employer, which she said can “really chip away at your spirit.”

That changed, however, when a case came to her attention of a longtime Bushwick resident and senior citizen multiple months behind on rent because of a stroke that left her unable to work. The elderly woman didn’t know that she had a marshal’s notice against her, meaning her landlord could evict her any day. Her displacement, the latest in a long line of residents pushed out of the neighborhood, seemed assured.

Going against her supervisors, who saw it as a lost cause, Collado fought to get the woman representation from Adult Protective Services and negotiations for a renewed lease. After a hard fight, she won, and as of last fall, the woman she worked with still lives in the same apartment.

“How do you give up on someone who’s physically unwell?” Collado said. “That was what solidified for me that I need to stay in this radical work.”

Successfully keeping this woman housed reinvigorated Collado’s spirit, and she jumped ship to take on a new role with what remained of BHIP, where she officially took the reins as lead organizer in January 2024.

Under Collado’s leadership, the group became the most consistently active it had been since Coca’s passing, hosting monthly meetings, canvassing the neighborhood, and holding campaigns. These included protests against proposed rent increases for rent-stabilized units and a collaboration with local organizations and representatives to fight forced moves at one particularly embattled building.

Tenant organizing has changed a lot over BHIP’s eight-year hiatus—Collado said they’re starting from “ground zero.” In particular, she said, many longtime organizers initially had trouble adapting to new online databases, such as JustFix’s “Who Owns What?” website, which tracks landlord portfolios, and the DAP Portal, which have become nigh-essential for effective organizing.

Itzamna Huerta, the DAP portal’s manager and a research and data associate at ANHD, says that the Portal is game-changing for many organizers because it aggregates information—including HPD violations, evictions, recent building sales, and more—from many previously disparate sources.

“Every time we introduce DAP portal to the community, it’s very much, ‘Wow, you guys just saved us so much time from being able to just get a particular data set from a property,’” Huerta said.

Travis Bostick, longtime tenant organizer and former director of policy and research at ANHD, said these new tools made his own work much easier; he’d previously spent much of his time manually obtaining all the necessary data on a building.

“It’s nice to be able to see all this data in one place and visualize it,” Bostick said. “Getting that kind of background information on a property is often very difficult.”

BHIP’s new leadership agrees that the revived group needs to adapt and grow with the times. Part of this, Collado says, is moving towards a more decentralized leadership structure—BHIP’s leadership previously tended to circulate around one or two organizers, which meant it was hit especially hard by the loss of key figures like Coca.

Still, the group’s history, and Coca’s legacy in particular, looms large over their present-day organizing efforts. Coca’s memory still holds power among longtime residents—at an organizing meeting last October, held just 10 minutes away from a street corner named in her honor, the mere mention of Coca’s name caused one older man’s face to light up with a cheery nostalgia, and others around his age shared in the reminiscence. Collado said that she does her best to live up to that legacy, daunting though it may be.

“Building those one-on-one, really important relationships that Yolanda got to foster because of the amount of time that she was doing this work, it’s not easy,” Collado said. “We really try to live up to that mission statement.”

The other side of the tracks

Andy Keith, a chef and new father who moved to Bushwick in 2014, joined a WhatsApp chat in 2023 that would later blossom into a tenant association for his building. His neighbor Youssef, the man struggling with the broken elevator, was far from his only concern. 

Pests, leaks, broken locks—“everything that people experience, we’ve experienced,” Keith said. From 2019-2023, HPD found 107 violations of the Housing Maintenance Code in the building, more than one per apartment, according to the “Who Owns What?” database. As of press time, 78 violations remained open, city records show. 

The newly-formed tenant association got to work pressuring their landlord for repairs with coordinated 311 and HPD complaint blasts. Eventually, the building’s former management company, Cayuga Capital Management (CCM), was replaced by a new company, which Keith says quickly got to work addressing the tenant association’s concerns. While CCM told City Limits that their departure was unrelated to tenant pressure, Keith said he believes it may have had an impact.

“We were filing HPD violations, we were filing 311 violations, [and] one of our members took them to court,” Keith said.

He later joined a coalition of other recently-formed tenant unions creating a new organization called Bushwick Tenant Union (BTU), announced in mid-November. 

BTU organizes events, including a street clean-up in collaboration with DSNY and City Councilmember Jeniffer Gutierrez, in order to build community and demonstrate the value of collective organizing. And it seems to be working—at a clean-up in November, multiple neighbors stopped by to help or just offer encouragement, and some local coffee shop employees even offered the organizers free coffee for their efforts. 

“We wanted to make a distinction about the kind of action that we believe in, which is community-based, people power, everybody in the neighborhood coming together,” Keith said.

The groups have focused on CCM and its co-founder and principal Jacob Sacks, who own or manage many of the buildings where their members live. 

Sacks and CCM are associated with 21 buildings across Bushwick with 597 open HPD violations between them as of press time, an average of 2.5 open violations per unit, more than double the citywide average of 0.8, according to “Who Owns What?” These buildings have previously made the news for poor conditions reported by tenants.

In email responses to questions from City Limits, Sacks and an attorney representing CCM said they’ve resolved and removed more than 1,000 violations at their properties, many of which they say predated their management. A majority of the violations still “open” with HPD are in a small percentage of units where repairs have already been made, they say, but where they’ve been unable to gain access for the city’s inspectors.

“If we could get access to get those inspections completed, on those few units, we would be well below city averages,” Sacks wrote. 

Attorney David Antwork attributed criticism of the company to “a small percentage of tenants,” including those who “have open rent balances and manipulate the system to log complaints and then prevent access in efforts to avoid or excuse their failure to pay rent.”

“CCM strives to maintain the properties in the best possible condition, despite the fact that some of the buildings are well over 100 years old,” Antwork added.

Sacks previously told News 12 Brooklyn that he intended to sue at least one tenant who publicly complained about conditions for defamation.

‘It really falls on the tenant‘

According to a 2022 analysis of property ownership data by JustFix, 89 percent of all units registered with HPD have corporate owners. In Bushwick, several have come under fire for overcharging tenants for unsanitary, crowded rooms. 

According to Tony Bodulovic, data and policy analyst at the Furman Center, Limited Liability Company (LLC) ownership can make it difficult to determine who actually owns a building.

“Most tenants don’t know their landlord’s name,” Bodulovic said. “So when it comes to addressing housing code violations or enforcing those kinds of protections, it’s often very difficult for the average person to understand who’s responsible.”

Good Cause Eviction makes this opacity an even bigger issue. The new tenant protection law, which went into effect in April of last year, protects eligible tenants in non-regulated units from being evicted or refused a lease renewal without “good cause,” as well as allowing them to challenge large rent hikes.

Eligibility for protection under the Good Cause law is determined by portfolio size, or the total number of apartments a tenant’s landlord owns across all their holdings. 

While the law requires landlords to inform tenants of their eligibility in their lease, tenants who don’t understand the requirements or know how to check the size of their landlord’s portfolio likely won’t advocate for their rights. 

For most rights and protections, Bodulovic said, the responsibility falls on the tenants themselves to seek enforcement. This includes filing complaints of housing code violations, or requesting rent history to determine if they’re entitled to rent control protections.  Most importantly, it requires understanding the laws in the first place.

“The enforcement process is very tenant-centric,” he said. “So for rent stabilization, it requires tenants to understand whether their apartment is rent stabilized to begin with, and whether they’re being overcharged for their rent.”

Bushwick, along with neighboring Ridgewood, have some of the highest concentrations of destabilized units in the city. Some destabilizations are legal, but some landlords overcharge their tenants illegally, as Andrew Ramos Choi discovered in 2021. 

Choi, a local activist and community board member, moved into his current apartment during the COVID-19 pandemic at a discounted rent of $1,895. At the end of the year, though, his landlord increased the rent up to $3,000, far more than he could afford. 

Panicking, he reached out to housing justice advocates, who advised him to request his rent history from the New York State Department of Homes and Community Renewal (DHCR). When he received it, he discovered that his apartment was rent-stabilized—something his lease did not mention, and something he never would’ve found out if he hadn’t checked.

Feeling indebted to the organizers who helped him, Choi got involved with tenant organizing himself, which eventually led him to join BHIP through their leadership fellowship.

“I wanted to find a way to be involved in this, to pay forward some of the things that I had learned in the process of negotiating with my own landlord,” Choi said.

Because of these opaque systems, both BHIP and BTU members and groups prioritize education in their organizing. The 618 Bushwick Ave. Tenant Association, for example, includes links on its website where tenants can request their rent history or file 311 complaints, and BHIP hands out printouts with directories and QR Codes leading to tenants’ rights fact sheets and forms on DHCR’s website. 

“Rent stabilization has been around since ‘69 and folks still don’t know it exists, they don’t know what it is, and it takes many training sessions to understand. I would imagine it’s going to be the same for Good Cause,” Collado said. “It really falls on the tenant themselves to have to learn it, understand it, and then have the courage to push back against the landlord who looks like the richer and smarter person in the power dynamic.”

Future and past

BTU has organizing aspirations beyond his immediate neighborhood.  

Keith said they aim to “get every single building in Bushwick organized, and then every single building in Brooklyn, and then every single building in Manhattan and Queens and the Bronx and everywhere in America, until every single person that pays rent is part of a tenants’ association.”

The way to achieve that, he said, is by building coalitions with other groups—including, perhaps unsurprisingly, BHIP.

Collado welcomes the desire for partnership and coalition-building, though she and others at BHIP noted the potential for organizing efforts from newer arrivals to step on more longtime residents’ toes.

“I’m glad to hear our work has been inspiring,” Collado said. “In the fight against gentrification, it’s important for those not from Bushwick long-term, but who have benefited from gentrification, to add to the movement rather than compete with or replicate the work in ways that divide housing efforts in the neighborhood. Together, we’re stronger.”

To their credit, BTU organizers do consider these issues. Zachary Hendrickson, a new tenant organizer who attended a BTU clean-up, said he believes newer residents like himself need to factor their role in the neighborhood’s gentrification into their organizing.

“Folks who come from a similar background to me are coming into neighborhoods where they don’t have community ties—they’re not showing up to church on the weekends, they’re not getting involved in the neighborhood softball league, they’re not volunteering for Big Brothers Big Sisters necessarily,” Hendrickson said. “This kind of organizing and community-building is something that more people, especially transplants, need to be doing.”

Tobar said that this breakdown of community itself drives displacement, sharing a story of an African-American homeowner who left the neighborhood with his family not because he couldn’t afford it, but because “there were no more families that resembled them on the street.”

“Their community had dissolved. They were basically surrounded by gentrifiers. And that’s the toll of emotional displacement,” Tobar said.

Choi, whose mother grew up in Bushwick but who only moved there himself about eight years ago, finds himself somewhat in the middle of this divide between new and old residents. While he hopes to build more bridges across this divide, he was disappointed to see that BTU launched with resources only available in English, especially since more than a quarter of residents in this historically Hispanic neighborhood still have limited English proficiency.

“It breaks my heart,” Choi said. “But also, it comes with time. It’s not like any organizer comes into this space and has all of this figured out. It’s a journey, and we’ll build with anyone.”

While Collado and BHIP value hopes and goals for the future, they clearly also honor their historical roots. 

In a room decked out with Halloween decorations at the El Puente leadership center in Bushwick, Collado opened BHIP’s monthly organizing meeting on Oct. 30 with a bilingual presentation on the history of tenants’ rights in New York City.

About 20 tenants, almost all Latine but diverse in their ages, primary languages, and levels of organizing experience, snacked on pizza and pan de muerto while Collado regaled the area’s history all the way from the indigenous Lenape people, who had no formalized system of land ownership, to the city’s first rent strike in 1904 to Good Cause Eviction. 

Afterwards, attendees split into two smaller groups to talk about which parts of the history spoke to them. One older woman related old fights for cleanliness to her own struggle with a cockroach infestation, and a younger person said they felt inspired by the immigrant women who led the earliest rent strikes.

Tobar, now a board member at BHIP, strongly believes in sharing these stories of past and present, both to honor and celebrate prior generations and to learn and galvanize stronger actions in the future. 

“Let’s use these stories now. It’s not enough to preserve them for history’s sake so that people can look back on us and feel bad about how things took a downturn,” Tobar said. “We want to use these stories so that we can plug that into a system, a strategy to really make those policy initiatives that we need to see happen so that we can have more affordable housing.”

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