[In New York, the real estate industry and the politicians in its
pocket both reign supreme. These tenants have a plan to change that
forever.]
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THE REVOLUTION AGAINST SHADY LANDLORDS HAS BEGUN  
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Molly Crabapple
April 1, 2023
The Nation
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_ In New York, the real estate industry and the politicians in its
pocket both reign supreme. These tenants have a plan to change that
forever. _

, Illustration by Molly Crabapple.

 

Vivian Thomas Smith loved her apartment. For nearly three decades, she
and her husband, Bradley, had lived in a modest one-bedroom at 2420
Morris Avenue, just two blocks from the raucous beauty of the Grand
Concourse in the Bronx. The brick apartment complex was a co-op where
some families, like theirs, still rented. Vivian, 71, was a retired
secretary who had worked for decades at Montefiore Medical Center.
Bradley, 81, had also been employed by Montefiore, doing maintenance
work before his retirement. Vivian watched her neighbors’ kids grow
up. When her own son got sick, her friend down the hall helped nurse
him through the long illness that preceded his death. Vivian may have
worried about the increasing crime in her neighborhood, but when she
walked through her building’s beautifully tiled lobby, she felt
secure that she and Bradley would stay there for the rest of their
lives.

This story was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic
Hardship Reporting Project [[link removed]].

That all changed in November 2020, when the private equity firm
Glacier Equities bought all the rental units in her building. Just
over a year later, on December 1, 2021, the Smiths got a letter
offering them an ultimatum: buy your apartment or leave when the lease
expired on March 31, 2022. “Out of the clear blue sky. No reason,
nothing. For 27 years we were never late on rent, never missed a
month,” Vivian said.

The couple wanted to buy, but bills from their son’s illness had
wrecked their credit. No bank would give them a mortgage. At the same
time, their economic situation made finding a new rental almost
impossible. Because of the small pensions they received in addition to
their Social Security, they made too much money to qualify for
subsidized housing. Yet they made nowhere near enough to rent a new
apartment.

“We spoke to housing lawyers. The first one said ‘cause our
apartment was not rent-stabilized, ‘You don’t have a choice. You
have to leave,’” Vivian said.

Forced out: Vivian Thomas Smith had lived in her Bronx apartment for
27 years when Glacier Equities suddenly told her she had to leave.
Illustration by Molly Crabapple.

Throwing an elderly couple out on the street might be monstrous, but
it’s perfectly legal in New York State. If, like the Smiths, you are
a tenant in one of the state’s 1.6 million market-rate apartments,
your landlord can get rid of you at the end of your lease—no reason
necessary—by means of what’s called a holdover eviction. And
landlords do it all the time. The more than 32,000 holdover eviction
cases brought before New York State housing courts in 2022 represent a
small sliver of the problem; unable to afford the stress and financial
costs of a legal battle, many tenants just pack up and leave.

A bill that had been making its way through the state Legislature for
several years could have been a life raft for the Smiths. Backed by a
coalition of housing organizations, the legislation—dubbed the Good
Cause Eviction bill—required most landlords to offer lease renewals
to tenants like the Smiths, who had paid their rent on time and stuck
by the terms of their leases. It also limited rent increases to
prevent landlords from forcing people out by raising their rent
hundreds of dollars a month.

This bill could have saved the Smiths, and countless other New
Yorkers, from eviction. But despite loud, passionate, and relentless
campaigning by housing activists and tenants—including Vivian Thomas
Smith—lawmakers refused for years to even put Good Cause legislation
up for a vote. The Smiths, and all the other tenants like them, were
on their own.

The story might have ended there, in defeat. But movements are
stubborn creatures. If people fight long enough, they learn that
losses are temporary and that victory can only come through a refusal
to retreat. Last December, just a month after Democrats held their
statewide majority in the midterms, the tenants’ rights group
Housing Justice for All renewed its Good Cause campaign and then went
even bigger, unveiling “Our Homes, Our Power,” a package of five
bills intended to address the worst housing and homelessness crisis in
decades. All of the proposals are important, but Good Cause remains
the most crucial—not only because it has the power to save people
right now, in the present, by slowing the constant stream of
evictions, but also because it’s the only one that fundamentally
reshapes the relationship between landlord and tenant. Housing
activists have until June 8 to persuade state legislators to stand up
to the real estate industry and protect their constituents.

Too damn high: An anonymous correspondent left a stark message about
real estate on a traffic light in Brooklyn. (Andrew Lichtenstein /
Corbis via Getty Images)

New York City is brutal to renters. As of 2017, half of us spent a
third of our income on rent; a third of us spent more than half. The
competition for an affordable place is harrowing, with the vacancy
rate for apartments that rent for under $1,500 a month hovering at
less than 1 percent. Many of us pay nonrefundable application fees
just to get our foot in the door, followed by thousands of dollars to
the landlord’s broker, and often thousands of dollars more in
glorified bribes to the landlords themselves. If we are lucky enough
to score a place, it had better be rent-stabilized (a rare prize when
landlords are pulling tens of thousands of rent-stabilized units out
of circulation every year) if we want to stay. A lease on a
market-rate apartment gets us only 12 months of stability. After that,
we’re vulnerable to whatever unconscionable rent increases the
landlord feels like imposing, or we are back on the apartment
hunt—or, for many low-income people, the street—again.

Ideally, this collective precarity should unite people. As Anh-Thu
Nguyen, a labor and tenant organizer in Brooklyn, told me, “I
don’t care if you’re some bro in the West Village paying $5,000 a
month, or a little old lady in Spanish Harlem in a rent-stabilized
place for 30 years. You represent a class. That class is the
landless…. You want stability, a place you can call home.”

Instead, communities often wind up pitted against each other. One
group is forever being forced out, then pushed into areas where
another group, often poorer, is being forced out too. This
gentrification gets blamed on tenants, even though landlords are the
ones raising the rents. When a landlord evicts an _abuela_ and rents
her apartment to an NYU grad student, politicians point to gentrifiers
or transplants, not the landlord, as the problem. They seldom mention
that there was an actual bill that could have kept the _abuela_ in
her home.

This is not just theoretical. Good Cause Eviction has long been the
law in New Jersey, where cities like Trenton and Jersey City have some
of the lowest eviction rates in the country. It also exists in cities
like Montreal, as well as in Japan.

Good Cause was first proposed in 2018 by a collection of tenant groups
in New York State that was then called the Upstate Downstate Alliance
(it eventually became known as Housing Justice for All). In 2019, it
found a legislative champion when democratic socialist Julia Salazar
came to the state Senate.

One of Salazar’s first acts was to write the Good Cause Eviction
bill. The bill was then folded into a major package of housing
reforms, including legislation that makes it much harder for landlords
to kick out rent-stabilized tenants by renovating buildings in order
to raise rents and prevents them from taking apartments out of
stabilization once the rent reaches a certain threshold. While those
reforms were passed into law, the party leadership refused to bring
Good Cause up for a vote. This was largely due to the resistance of
the real estate lobby, which found Good Cause threatening precisely
because it diminishes some of landlords’ unchecked power.

The next year, Covid hit, and over 330,000 people fled New York
City—mainly from the richest zip codes. Many of them moved upstate
in search of a slice of virus-free paradise, driving up rents and home
prices in those spots as they went. Back in the city, some landlords
panicked in the face of the exodus and offered previously unthinkable
rent reductions to entice tenants to stay. Others, especially if they
owned rent-stabilized apartments, warehoused their empty units and
bided their time.

By April 2020, more than 16 percent of the state’s population was
out of work. For hundreds of thousands of tenants, making rent became
impossible. If they didn’t pay, what then? Would the courts really
send sheriffs to chuck their possessions out onto the sidewalk, then
shuttle them to crowded homeless shelters?

A movement erupted to cancel the unpayable rents—led by both
established tenant groups and young people radicalized in the uprising
that emerged after George Floyd’s murder. Banners were dropped from
bridges. Raucous protests were held outside the homes of recalcitrant
politicians. It made only a modest impression. While the state and
federal governments did act, declaring moratoriums on evictions
starting with the CARES Act in March 2020, they wouldn’t cancel
rents. Bills still came due each month, and the debts metastasized.
Two years later, 595,000 New York City renters were still behind—and
landlords were anxious to get them out.

With the arrival of the Covid vaccine, the bars reopened, restaurants
buzzed, and the rich flooded back to the city like some revanchist
army. For landlords, these returnees were more enticing than those of
us who stayed, whether or not we owed back rent.

The federal moratorium expired in October 2021 and the state
moratorium in January 2022. Immediately, the evictions began.

Fighting back: When Anh Thu’s Brooklyn apartment building got taken
over by a private equity firm, she helped organize a tenants union and
a lawsuit against the company. Every tenant, she says, “wants
stability and a home.” (Illustration by Molly Crabapple)

The pandemic was a bonanza for institutional investors in residential
real estate. The most famous villain is BlackRock, the multinational
investment behemoth, but Glacier Equities has also done a number on
New York City. Glacier is a real estate private equity firm, or REPE.
A REPE raises cash from private investors to buy a property—say, an
apartment building. The REPE then tries to get tenants out, often
neglecting the building or hiking rents. Finally, the REPE sells the
building, gobbling up the profits for its investors and itself. Over
the past two decades, Glacier has flipped—or as it says on its
website, “acquired, developed, and sold”—2,200 condos and co-ops
in and around New York City. During the first year of the pandemic, it
snapped up 255 units in Bronx and Manhattan co-ops. The Smiths’
apartment was one of them.

Glacier’s financing deal required it to evict tenants who could not
afford to buy their units, and the company confirmed that it has
brought eviction suits against residents in roughly 10 percent of the
units in the package of Bronx apartments it bought in 2020. It would
not tell me how many others it asked to leave.

Some of Glacier’s tenants were low-income, elderly, or ill, like Joe
Conzo, a 9/11 first responder who was fighting cancer. Politicians and
activists denounced the private equity firm at rallies. Vivian Thomas
Smith attended a half-dozen pickets. She hung a sign supporting the
Good Cause Eviction bill on her door, she said, but the building’s
management made her take it down. (The management did not return my
request for comment.)

When I visited the Smiths in May 2022, Vivian took out a stack of
binders in which she had meticulously documented her eviction saga.
They told a story familiar to all too many New Yorkers. According to
Vivian, after the Smiths were rejected for a mortgage, a
representative from the company offered to pay one month of their
rent, along with $2,000 for moving expenses and help from a broker. In
August 2021, the company issued a notice to the Smiths terminating
their month-to-month lease and telling them to vacate by December 31.

A lawyer told the Smiths to keep paying rent. By November, they were
advised that they had little chance of staying. Vivian and Bradley
decided to stop paying rent, having heard that other people in the
building were doing so in hopes of getting a buyout. (Glacier said the
Smiths cut off communication at this point.)

In January, Glacier brought a holdover eviction suit against the
Smiths. Once the court case began, the Smiths attempted to pay rent,
but Glacier refused to accept it. (Glacier said it doesn’t accept
rent payments from tenants it’s in active litigation with.) When the
court served them papers for a court date in February, the Smiths
learned that Glacier was also asking for a money judgment of $3,435.
According to Joshua Stephenson, the executive director of West Bronx
Housing, who helped the Smiths with their case, this covered the rent
from November through January, plus interest.

This wasn’t the only problem. In the spring of 2021, while Vivian
was ill with Covid-19 and hooked up to an oxygen tank at home, Glacier
had begun a series of renovations on a neighboring apartment, which,
Vivian said, filled the Smiths’ home with dust. (Glacier confirmed
the construction but denied the dust.) After a gas leak in the
building (which was caused by illegal construction, not by Glacier),
the gas was turned off in the fall of 2021.

A few months later, in March 2022, workers hired by the building’s
management company cut a large hole in the Smiths’ wall. Vermin
crawled in at night, Vivian said, keeping her awake.

Despite numerous complaints and a violation issued by the city’s
Department of Housing Preservation and Development because of the
vermin, the damage wasn’t fixed for months. (Glacier said it
doesn’t receive HPD mailings and that the co-op’s management
didn’t alert it about the hole until August.)

The stress took its toll on Bradley, who is hard of hearing and walks
with difficulty. Vivian eventually took him to the ER. He was having
hallucinations. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, but she
blamed the uncertainty about their future.

In early 2022, Vivian became active in the Good Cause fight, speaking
at rallies and giving quotes to the media.

“Good Cause Eviction is important for me because I do not want
anyone else to go through an illegal eviction…especially someone our
age,” Vivian told me at the time. “You live in a place for 30
years, make it your home, know the people, the neighborhood, and
someone just buys the building and says, ‘OK, we want you to leave
now, because we want other people to come in.’ How is that fair?”

In a series of lengthy e-mail exchanges and sometimes heated phone
conversations, Rachel Brill, an executive at Glacier, confirmed parts
of the Smiths’ story, with a more positive spin.

Brill said that the August 2021 eviction notice was a “formality,”
and that tenants were assured that “no case would start as long as
we were communicating and working towards a solution.”

Brill said that Glacier sued only because the Smiths stopped paying
rent and broke off communication. “All they had to do was continue
discussions with us, and we would have held off all legal
proceedings,” she said. (A holdover eviction suit is not about
nonpayment. “They were going to evict [Smith] whether she paid rent
or not,” Stephenson told me.)

Brill disputed other parts of the Smiths’ story. She said Glacier
hadn’t evicted “a single tenant,” which is true only if one
relies on an extremely narrow definition of the word “evict” and
doesn’t count any tenants who gave up and left after a lengthy legal
battle and a hopeless verdict. (Glacier has brought more than two
dozen eviction cases stemming from the Bronx units it purchased to
court.)

Brill also alleged that Smith, an older Black woman with a disabled
husband, had chosen to fight for her home of nearly 30 years because,
“you have to admit, Miss Smith likes the publicity; she likes the
attention.”

Whatever it takes: Good Cause supporters have blocked roads, flown
banners, tangled with police, and relentlessly lobbied politicians.
(Lev Radin / Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images)

In early 2022, I was in the midst of my own holdover eviction crisis.
My boyfriend and I had lived in a shabby 10-story, nine-unit loft
building on Maiden Lane in Manhattan for 12 years. We loved the place
with our blood and bones. Our parties were legend. How many times did
we meet on our fire escape at 4 am, with cigarettes cadged from war
journalists and porn stars? How many canvases—and protest
banners—did we paint on our apartment’s battered floors? The heat
was dodgy; black mold bloomed on the shower ceiling; rats threw
banquets out front. None of this dimmed our enthusiasm. It was home.

The apartment wasn’t rent-stabilized, and during Covid, our landlord
let everyone’s lease expire. This didn’t worry us at first, since
he had done this before, only to swoop in later with a new contract
and a higher rent. Yet I slowly noticed the telltale signs of a
landlord preparing to sell his building. They were as obvious as a
pigeon starting to molt. The landlord issued furious denials right up
until the eviction moratorium ended. After that, we woke up to flyers
telling us to cut our rent checks to a new LLC called Diamond Lane.
Once those checks were cashed, Diamond Lane hired a process server to
serve every tenant with a 90-day notice to vacate. It also threatened
lawsuits if we did not comply.

I wasn’t the only long-term tenant. One of my neighbors, for
instance, had lived in the building for over two decades. Yet just
like Vivian Thomas Smith, in the eyes of the law, we were merely
holdover tenants. Our leases had expired. We had no right to stay.

My situation was hardly unique in the spring of 2022. I could no
longer keep track of all the people I knew who had gotten a notice to
vacate. A filmmaker from Puerto Rico. My friend’s elderly mother,
who lived on a fixed income upstate. Another friend who had two
well-paid jobs. They came from every income bracket and demographic.
All they had in common was that their landlord wanted them out. By
March, the median rent in Brooklyn was up 24 percent year-over-year;
it was up 29 percent in Manhattan, an all-time high. Landlords smelled
blood, and anyone in a market-rate apartment was at risk.

Between mid-January and March, eviction case filings climbed roughly
40 percent, enough to keep the Evicted NYC Twitter bot busy—and too
many for the city’s free eviction-prevention lawyers to represent
all the low-income tenants fighting eviction in court. Worse, there
were almost no units in the city available to rent for less than
$1,500 a month. Since most landlords want prospective tenants to earn
at least 30 times the monthly rent, $1,500 a month is the highest that
someone who makes $45,000 a year can qualify for.

In this atmosphere, the Good Cause campaign took on a desperate
urgency. The Housing Justice for All coalition seemed to have a
protest every week. In April, tenants marched on the offices of REBNY,
New York’s primary real estate lobby group, and then, days later,
rallied in Albany. They dropped off hundreds of postcards at the
offices of the few New York City politicians who would not endorse
Good Cause. They flew banners from windows and hung them off bridges.

On Mother’s Day weekend, I attended a rally held outside Governor
Kathy Hochul’s Manhattan office. “She ain’t ever here,” a
middle-aged woman told her friends. A few dozen of us stood in the
driving rain. We listened to speech after raw speech from a
multiracial coalition of mothers who begged Hochul to pass the law
that would keep women and children from losing their homes.

On May 17, with just over two weeks to go before the end of the
legislative session, I joined Housing Justice for All for a march on
Albany. Around 1,000 tenants from across the state gathered at the
foot of the Capitol’s steps. Shirley Hawkins was one of them. A
63-year-old volunteer with the Albany housing group United Tenants,
Hawkins had organized her neighbors to fight their abusive
landlord—all while finishing cancer treatment. “I want to have
something for my grandkids, to show them Grandma’s doing it,” she
said.

After a fiery rally on the staircase leading to the Capitol, the
protesters dispersed toward the Senate and Assembly chambers, whose
gold and marble splendor came from an era when America still invested
its institutions with beauty. “This is what democracy looks like!”
they shouted, a chant I first heard during the Iraq War nearly 20
years earlier.

Fifty or so protesters linked arms in front of the entrances to the
Assembly and Senate, keeping everyone from going in or out. Soon
enough, the state troopers came with their zip cuffs. On the bus back,
I heard that only one protester had gotten roughed up.

Hand in hand: New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Assembly Speaker Carl
Heastie have been two of the most powerful forces blocking Good Cause.
(Hans Pennink / AP)

On June 4, 2022, the New York State Legislature closed out its
session. Neither the Senate nor the Assembly had brought Good Cause up
for a vote. Instead, the Legislature passed a bill setting up a
commission to study affordable housing.

After the politicians failed to intervene, landlords brought lawsuits
to successfully overturn Good Cause laws in cities like Newburgh and
Albany that had passed them in recent years. I thought of Shirley
Hawkins, who had seen the statewide law as a potential legacy for her
grandchildren.

Good Cause Eviction had tremendous popular support, but it couldn’t
compete against the power of the real estate lobby. Trade groups like
the Rent Stabilization Association, the Community Housing Improvement
Program, and REBNY employed lobbying firms and dumped millions into
front groups with wholesome names like Homeowners for an Affordable
New York, which presented their members as Mom, Pop, and Grandma, too.
(Board members from these trade groups have an average portfolio size
in the thousands.)

The groups ran an aggressive ad campaign against Good Cause. They said
that “Good Cause Eviction means higher property taxes, fewer quality
homes and impossible burdens on property owners.” They warned that
the legislation would turn “owning and renting property into a
money-losing proposition.” They sent out doom-laden election mailers
portraying progressive candidates who might support Good Cause as
wild-eyed lunatics who would harm the state.

“The main reason Good Cause Eviction didn’t pass [in 2022] was
because Democrats in the state Legislature were paralyzed by the
election and afraid of REBNY spending money to defeat them. They
decided not to rock the boat,” said Cea Weaver, a key organizer in
Housing Justice for All. “They decided inaction and not doing
anything was safer for their electoral chances than doing something
that could actually activate the base.”

Attack ads were the landlords’ stick, but we also need to talk about
the carrot. Landlords spoil their favored politicians as if they were
prize piglets competing at the state fair. Sometimes this spoiling
gets the law involved. Former lieutenant governor Brian Benjamin was
arrested for soliciting bribes from developers (though a judge later
dropped the charges), and real-estate-related bribes landed former
Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver in jail.

These are extreme cases, but a more polite sort of corruption
underpins the entire American system of PACs and lobbyists. Between
October 2021 and July 2022, landlord groups poured at least $6 million
into Kathy Hochul’s campaign account.

Meanwhile, one of the state’s biggest real estate lobbyists, Patrick
Jenkins, is a close friend and former roommate of Assembly Speaker
Carl Heastie—one of the state’s three most powerful leaders and,
according to Housing Justice for All, one of the major roadblocks to
Good Cause passing the Legislature in 2022. Between 2012 and 2019,
real estate contributed $1.2 million to the Democratic Assembly Action
Committee, through which Heastie distributes campaign funds to other
Democratic members. (Heastie’s office didn’t return calls when I
asked for comment.)

According to Weaver, ideology is as important as cash in understanding
why politicians oppose Good Cause. “It’s a deep, embedded classism
where people believe that property owners vote and renters don’t,”
she told me.

Politicians, even self-described progressive ones, simply don’t see
the renters, who are most of their constituents. One state senator
told Weaver that no tenants had contacted his office; the Web forms
her group used showed that he had, in fact, received 75 e-mails.
“For every one landlord who lobbies an elected official, we have to
have 15 tenant constituents tell their story,” Weaver said.

NOT GOING ANYWHERE: TENANT ACTIVIST DORCA REYNOSO IS PART OF THE
MOVEMENT PUSHING TO GET GOOD CAUSE LEGISLATION PASSED. (ILLUSTRATION
BY MOLLY CRABAPPLE)

These politicians offered various excuses for maintaining the status
quo. Conservative suburban Democrat James Skoufis called Good Cause
“a de facto taking of private property.” In New York City,
Assemblywoman Stefani Zinerman, an opponent of Good Cause, invoked the
most cynical form of identity politics, citing the need to protect
small landlords of color as a justification for policies that hurt
Black mothers most of all. When tenants—many of them Black
women—protested outside an event where Zinerman was speaking, her
staff allegedly called the police. As tenant activist Dorca Reynoso
told me, these politicians are “just playing to the people who give
them campaign donations and fucking the rest of us.”

Meanwhile, the Smiths had reached their limit. Stephenson of West
Bronx Housing helped them get a small buyout that cleared their rental
debt, but beyond that, there was nothing more to be done.

When I texted Vivian in October, she was in the hospital. Once she was
discharged, she said, she and Bradley would pack up what they could
from the last few decades of their lives and head to North Carolina,
where her sister owned land. They would live in a trailer on her
property. This was not how they imagined they would spend their old
age. Their loss is also New York’s loss. A city is nothing without
its people.

In November 2022, a few weeks before Housing Justice for All
relaunched its Good Cause campaign as part of an even broader housing
rights push, I called Cea Weaver. I wanted to know what lessons she
took from Good Cause’s defeat. She told me that they hadn’t fought
big enough. In 2019, she said, “we were extraordinarily successful
because we were leading with this bold, uncompromising vision.”
Their tenants’ rights package—minus Good Cause—had passed in
defiance of the landlords, with Good Cause as the only part left
behind. In 2022, they’d campaigned for Good Cause alone. That had
been a mistake.

This is why, she explained, the group is now pushing for Good Cause
“alongside rental assistance, expanded social housing, and
strengthening tenant power.” She told me about the Tenant
Opportunity to Purchase Act, which lets tenants buy their buildings by
giving them a right of first refusal for rental buildings that are
going up for sale; about reforms to the Rent Guidelines Board, which
sets the rents for rent-stabilized apartments in New York City; and
about a Housing Access Voucher program that would open up rental
assistance to the undocumented and people with felony convictions,
among others.

The strategy might be working. Albany is a more leftist place, with
half a dozen socialists having followed Salazar into the Legislature,
and the overturning of local Good Cause laws has given the campaign
for a statewide bill a new urgency. In March, the state Senate put
provisions that it said aligned with “the core principles of Good
Cause Eviction”into its annual budget resolution. The Assembly’s
resolution contained measures that Heastie claimed represented the
“essence” of Good Cause, though it didn’t include the words
“Good Cause” themselves.

Even if the two chambers hammer out a deal, it still has to get past
Hochul. One of the people trying to make sure of that is Genesis
Aquino, a Dominican American tenant activist from Sunset Park in
Brooklyn, who starred in a video that lit up Twitter over the Martin
Luther King Jr. Day weekend. That Sunday, Hochul had come to a Latino
church hoping to drum up support for Hector LaSalle, the conservative
judge she had nominated to lead the state’s highest court. As Hochul
rattled off hollow phrases invoking King’s legacy, Aquino stood up.

“I pray that you listen to tenants, and I pray that you withdraw
LaSalle and stand with working-class New Yorkers,” she said. “We
need Good Cause Evictions, governor—I pray for you.” Aquino kept
speaking even as police escorted her out. As her words reverberated
through the church, they served to remind Hochul, and all the other
Good Cause opponents, that like the tenants themselves, this fight is
here to stay.

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_MOLLY CRABAPPLE is an artist and writer for outlets including The
New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The New York
Review of Books. She is the author of Drawing Blood and National
Book Award–nominated Brothers of the Gun, with Marwan Hisham. Her
work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art._

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