After a six-foot deep trench appeared outside her front door, Melissa Potter decided to help organize the Elmwood Tenants Union.
“There’s nothing covering it,” she said in late February. “There’s nothing warning that it’s here.”
The trench, apparently part of ongoing construction on the apartment building in which she lives, was just her latest grievance. About a year ago, a pipe burst above her bedroom, sending water pouring through the fixture for the combined ceiling fan and overhead light. And on Christmas 2022, she said the heat broke.
Potter and nine other Elmwood Realty tenants announced Friday that they had formed a tenants union. Organizers say it’s the first step towards creating a statewide organization of renters that will fight for lower rents, better maintenance, and eviction protections.
In the same way workers negotiate a contract with their employers under the umbrella of a labor union, the tenants want to negotiate a lease agreement with their landlord. Half the residents in her building on Broad Street in Cranston signed up to join.
“People shouldn’t be scared [to want] what we’re paying for, which is a safe place to live,” Potter said.
Tenant organizers Shana Crandell and Cherie Cruz, with the progressive group Reclaim Rhode Island, have supported their efforts. Last December, Crandell and Cruz worked with another group of Elmwood Realty tenants who sued the company and its manager, Jeffrey Butler, alleging illegal retaliation for attempting to organize.
“It really is about getting the things they need to live in safety and dignity,” Cruz said.
Butler did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In an interview last December for a previous story, he called Crandell and Cruz “troublemakers” who were interfering in landlord-tenant matters. He said the various real estate companies he manages own more than 350 units in Rhode Island, and that he rents dozens of those units to people with housing vouchers or other forms of public subsidy.
A growing tenants’ movement
Tenant unions can provide a way for renters to collectively create change, like improving living conditions in a particular building, according to Jamila Michener, a Cornell University professor who studies tenant organizations across the United States.
“The alternative is being on your own,” Michener said. “And for many people, that just means being harmed with very little redress.”
In the past, Rhode Island tenants have organized around poor living conditions and advocated for policy change. In the 1980s, tenant associations at two public housing developments, Hartford Park and Manton Heights, led a 34-month rent strike in an effort to push the Providence Housing Authority to address issues like roaches, rodents, electrical issues, and more. Project BASIC, a now-defunct local community organization focused on housing issues, supported their efforts, while also filing lawsuits related to the demolition of public housing and other fair housing issues.
The group also advocated for legislative changes, like allowing tenants to deduct the cost of repairs from their rent if landlords are slow to fix problems, according to Asata Tigrai, the former director of Project BASIC. Those changes were part of a larger, major revision to landlord-tenant laws at the time.
“There was a big impact with that,” Tigrai said. “That was a big victory.”
Since the 2008 financial crisis, tenant organizing has grown more common across the United States, according to the Urban Institute. In recent years, rising rents and the financial precarity that grew out of the Covid-19 pandemic have thrust many renters to the brink, spurring a wave of organizing efforts.
“There are more and more and more popping up,” Cornell’s Michener said. “And they’re doing more.”
Such groups can coordinate public actions against landlords. They can also initiate rent strikes in which renters withhold monthly payments, often by paying into an escrow account, until certain demands are met.
The Connecticut Tenants Union is working to ban no-fault evictions in the state, which would require landlords to provide a valid reason not to renew a lease. Last year, the group also negotiated with a large-scale landlord in New Haven to collectively bargain a lease.
Organizers with the Elmwood Tenants Union see their work as the first step towards creating a similar, statewide tenant organization in Rhode Island. They plan to create majority support for their efforts by bringing a majority of tenants in individual buildings on board, property by property.
But the Elmwood union numbers remain small. Ten is a fraction of the total tenants that rent from Elmwood Realty, and an even smaller portion of the more than 160,000 renter households in Rhode Island.
If the union can pressure the landlord to make repairs at the building level, that could help build momentum and pull more tenants into the fold, said Shana Crandell, one of the tenant organizers with Reclaim Rhode Island.
“If Cranston goes public, makes demands, and potentially there is movement towards a collectively bargained lease, it’ll go faster in West Warwick,” she said.
The group hopes to collectively bargain a lease with Elmwood Realty, and eventually, other landlords across the state. The union wants tenants to have a say in determining issues like the length of their lease or fixed annual rent increases.
Unlike a labor union, tenant unions aren’t governed by federal law, and there isn’t a federal agency like the National Labor Relations Board that officially certifies such organizations. Rep. David Morales, a Providence Democrat, introduced a bill this year that would create such a function at the state level in Rhode Island. Under the proposed legislation, the Department of Housing would have the power to recognize and regulate tenant unions.
‘I was so afraid to fight this’
All of the tenants who have signed on so far live at 1890 Broad Street in Cranston. In July 2021, the building made headlines when a portion of a second-story balcony caved in. A 41-year-old woman fell partway through the structure, prompting inspections that revealed broader structural issues in the building. The city deemed the property “unfit for human occupancy,” and renters were displaced from 39 units.
In December 2021, Spring Street Realty, a company Butler also manages that is registered at the same address as Elmwood Realty, purchased the building. Work to address the structural deficiencies in the building was already underway. In early January 2022, the structural engineer working on the project declared the first-floor units of the two-story building safe for tenants to move back into.
David Rodio, the director of building inspections in Cranston, said the city cleared the property for partial occupancy before tenants moved back in.
“We’re allowing the first floor to move forward as long as they have enough safety protection to get people out their exits,” he said earlier this month. “It’s tough enough finding rental property, so I didn’t want to take another 10 or 15 units off the market.”
Cranston minimum housing inspector Annamarie Marchetti said she was aware of the trench on the property and that it was “part of permitted work that’s being done.”
“This isn’t a real quick cut and dry situation,” she said. “There are many things that need to be done.”
Eugene Vasquez and Kellee, who asked that her last name not be used for safety reasons, moved into a studio apartment in the Broad Street building earlier this year, excited to move in together into a place they could just afford.
“There were minor issues they said they were going to fix,” Kellee said.
Vasquez said the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth and Families found the apartment for him earlier this year as part of the agency’s Voluntary Extension of Care Program, which helps young people transition out of agency care. Records obtained by The Public’s Radio show the agency has paid Elmwood Realty $10,775 since 2021 for youth in the extension program to live at the 1890 Broad Street property.
“I’m stuck on the street or I live here,” Vasquez said. “Especially somebody in my situation, I have no, no backup plan at all. This apartment is my backup plan. So for DCYF to put me in somewhere like this as a backup plan, it’s like, this is my last, last resort.”
A spokesperson for DCYF said in a statement, “DCYF does not place young adults in apartments. With the support of VEC staff, housing navigation occurs and when a young adult locates an apartment of their choice, we assist with their signing of a lease and understanding their rights as a tenant.”
Vasquez said when he moved in, the kitchen window only opened from the outside of the building, and that said the apartment had a mouse problem. But after settling in, the couple realized their heating system sometimes faltered. In late January, they notified their landlord that their thermostat read 50 degrees. They were provided with a temporary space heater, which their lease explicitly prohibits.
Elmwood Realty also offered to move them into another apartment, or to let them move out without consequences. The couple said the rent in the alternate unit was more than they could afford. The heat was eventually repaired, and other issues, like a front door that didn’t shut properly, have been addressed after they repeatedly pressed the company to make repairs.
Shortly after moving in, the couple reached out to Reclaim Rhode Island after searching online for organizations that could help renters. The young couple didn’t know who to ask for help navigating the challenges in their apartment.
In late February, Kellee, Vasquez, and several of their neighbors said they woke up to frigid apartments: the heat had stopped working again. Though the company solved the problem within a day, Kellee and other tenants say they’re tired of wondering when their heat will work. Forming a union, they hope, will give them more leverage.
“I think we all deserve just a better way to live,” Kellee said.
Melissa Potter decided to join the union and lead the efforts to organize her neighbors in the Broad Street apartment building earlier this year. She moved into the property in March 2022, shortly after the structural engineer deemed the first story safe to live in. At the time, she said her apartment looked out onto a courtyard with a lawn and big trees, which have been torn up amid the ongoing construction.
“We had it all set up,” Potter, the tenant leader, said. “We had a table out here, little chairs. We’d sit out here and talk. Now, everything’s just irritating.”
She said Elmwood Realty warned her that there would be some construction on the property while she lived there. But she never expected her front door would open directly onto a trench, or that she’d deal with burst pipes. (The company did stop the leak and repair the ceiling. While a dehumidifier ran for several days in her bedroom, Potter slept on the couch, waiting for her bed to dry out.)
Now a tenant leader within the budding union, Potter hopes that by working together, she and her neighbors will be able to push the landlord to make repairs more quickly and eventually, negotiate a lease agreement directly with the company. More transparency around the ongoing construction in her building is a priority, too.
“Everybody should be doing this,” she said. “Once people start picking up on the fact that people are fighting back, it’ll spread like wildfire.”
When asked why she hadn’t moved out of the property, Potter rejected the notion that relocating was the appropriate solution.
“This is my neighborhood,” she said. “I’m not leaving. You expect us to uphold our end of the lease. You are just as obligated to hold up to your end of the lease.”
Audrey Gordon, who recently changed her last name, moved the building around the same time as Potter. She and her kids had been living in a homeless shelter in Pawtucket, so she was relieved to have permanent housing. She said the place was infested with mice when she moved in, and she worries the black substance growing in her bathroom is black mold.
“If I don’t spray it with bleach every single day, then it does start to grow again,” Gordon said. “It can be really difficult to keep on top of that, especially when you have four kids at home.”
In January, water started pouring through Gordon’s living room ceiling, according to videos and emails reviewed by The Public’s Radio. She said her infant, who requires a feeding tube, was in the living room at the time. She said she filled buckets of water before the property manager came to turn off the water and stop the flow. A month later, she decided to join the union.
“I think my biggest fear is that because of these living conditions, we’re going to end up losing our home,” Gordon said. “That’s why I was so afraid to fight this at first.”
This story has been updated to include a comment from the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families.
This story has been updated to clarify Asata Tigrai’s position at Project BASIC. She was the organization’s director.