I was scared. It was 2006 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and our apartment of thirty years was becoming more and more uninhabitable. We had a new landlord who had just bought the building that had already deteriorated after over thirty years of negligence. The new landlord refused to make repairs to our apartment with leaking ceilings and no heat in the winter. We, he told us, needed to pay for the repairs ourselves.

As our apartment felt like it was falling apart, rent was suddenly spiking for many of us. Some tenants in the building had preferential rent, an amount in a rent-stabilized apartment that is lower than the maximum rent a landlord can legally charge but also allows space for the landlord to increase the rent at any time he pleased. (Thankfully, this practice was made illegal in New York’s June 2019 tenants’ rights reforms.) My fellow tenants were at risk of getting priced out, and I could not lose my home of thirty years that I shared with my family.

I came to my first tenants’ meeting because something had to be done. As I stood in the lobby of our thirty-five-unit building with ten of my neighbors, I felt some unease. Who from our group might be working with our landlord? This was our first meeting, and we were still building trust with each other. The organizers and attorneys from Neighbors Helping Neighbors, a Sunset Park–based community organizing group, began to speak to us about how we could fight for better conditions as tenants united. But the organizers were still strangers to all of us.