Mona Shadi speaks at a press conference last year. (Photo: Dusty Christensen)
Easthampton Tenants Union is racking up wins
Source: The Shoestring | By Dusty Christensen | March 7th, 2026
At the top of Easthampton City Hall’s salt-crusted stairs, inside a cramped conference room in the back of the building, a rebellion is blooming every Thursday evening.
You wouldn’t know it from the scenery alone. During a meeting in early January, as nearly two dozen attendees waited for the meeting to begin, they sat talking about their neighbors, their hobbies, and their lives. One person was knitting. Another taped a piece of flip-chart paper to the big TV screen at the front of the room.
But listen to their conversations and the reason for their indignation — the reason they’re all gathered in this room — becomes apparent. As the meeting starts, they introduce themselves one-by-one, giving their names, the names of their landlords, and the size of the rent hikes they’ve faced. Mona Shadi, who at the time was facing eviction from her apartment, explains how she started the process of forming a tenants union with her neighbors.
“For a while, I was just the loudmouth chick banging at their door,” she explained to laughter from the room.
Now, though, it’s tenants across Easthampton who are getting organized and banging at the doors of their landlords — sometimes literally. What started as a few separate groups forming tenants associations in their own buildings, like Shadi, has grown into the Easthampton Tenants Union, an umbrella organization of renters across the city who, over the course of only one year, have become a political force that’s hard to ignore.
Easthampton Tenants Union members have successfully defeated rent hikes and won needed fixes to their units. The group has held protests and know-your-rights trainings, campaigned for a statewide ballot question in support of rent control, and is working on developing its own in-house newspaper. And the city’s leadership is paying attention. Four city councilors were at the Jan. 8 meeting — the largest group of councilors that can gather outside a scheduled meeting without violating open-meeting laws — and the City Council now seems to be focusing more heavily on housing concerns.
“It’s pretty wild how things have developed,” said Ilene Roizman, one of the group’s original organizers. She faced a $250 monthly rent increase last year before she and her neighbors pushed back. They ended up winning much smaller increases, a new washer and dryer, and needed work around the building.
Formerly a city known for its mills, Easthampton’s real estate market became more expensive in recent decades as the city’s reputation as a trendy city filled with artists grew. That has meant increasing prices that have forced tenants out of the city in recent years, including artists renting studios in those repurposed mill buildings. More than 40% of residents in the city rent, according to census data. And a City Council subcommittee studying rents in the city found that some 43% of renters are considered “cost burdened” — spending more than 30% of their income on housing.
What the unified tenants have accomplished in Easthampton is rare, according to housing activists. When tenants associations do form, they usually represent just one building or, less often, a landlord’s larger portfolio. Katie Talbot, the organizing director at the grassroots tenants-rights organization Springfield No One Leaves, said she’s unaware of any other citywide tenants union that has formed in western Massachusetts.
“Any time there’s collective power built like that, it’s the dream,” she said.
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Increasingly, in the face of climbing rents and housing shortages, renters across the country have begun to organize cross-building solidarity. And in places like Chicago and Louisville, tenants have banded together to form citywide organizations that have been able to wage bigger battles for housing justice. In neighboring Connecticut, renters have formed a statewide tenants union, which is made up of 17 chapters from 11 different cities and towns including Stamford, New Haven, and Hartford.
“There’s basically an endless list why us having a citywide structure and a citywide power base has made life better for poor and working-class people,” said Tara Raghuveer, one of the founding tenant organizers of one of the most well known citywide tenants unions in the country: KC Tenants.
Since 2019, KC Tenants has been organizing around “safe, accessible, and affordable housing” in Kansas City, Missouri, since 2019. That year, the group wrote and won a tenants bill of rights in the city. Since then, KC Tenants has written and helped pass a law for free attorneys in the city’s eviction court, a proposal for a “People’s Housing Trust Fund” in the city, and more. They’ve also become one of the founding members of the national Tenant Union Federation, where Raghuveer is the director.
Raghuveer said that today, tenants are facing a different kind of landlord than in years past. They’re more consolidated, more powerful, and often operate in the shadows as property managers interact with tenants. She said more and more tenants are organizing across the country — a trend seemingly playing out in the Connecticut River Valley, too — as they draw inspiration from one another.
“The crisis is so bad, something has got to give,” Raghuveer said. “People don’t have more money to pay in rent … The question is not whether tenants will revolt, it’s whether that revolt will be from a place of desperation or from a place of power.”
For some tenants unions, flexing that power has meant organizing rent strikes, banding together to withhold money from their landlord over deferred maintenance, rent hikes, or other conditions.
In Easthampton, the tenants union has protested, held press conferences, and advised tenants of their rights under the law when facing rent hikes, eviction proceedings, or health and safety issues in their homes.
And the city’s elected officials seem to be listening. Last fall, amid the Easthampton Tenants Union’s growing presence in the city, councilors formed a Rent Study Committee. Since then, members have spoken out at public meetings, like in February, when a tenants union member showed up at City Council to support the creation of a separate Housing Crisis Task Force.
“I am a renter of many years throughout the valley, I’ve experienced a lot of instances of fraud, maintenance neglect, intimidation, and abusive behavior from landlords who are never held accountable and I know that I’m not alone,” one member of the union, Natalia Ruiz, said during the meeting’s public comment period. “As a member of the Easthampton Tenants Union, we hear different stories every week. We have a lot of different struggles against various, mostly corporate landlords going on in the area.”
