Northampton tenants continue fight against rent hikes
Source: The Shoestring | By Stacey Zhang | Published November 26, 2025
Suzanne Stillinger, a Northampton preschool teacher, says her rent takes up 40% of her yearly income.
Stillinger is one of the tenants living in a Smith College-owned property in the West Street neighborhood who is organizing for a rollback of a June rent hike.
“Nobody is getting raises right now, everything is more expensive. So when they raise my rent, I add another job and another,” Stillinger said. With the summer rent hikes by Smith, Stillinger said she’s donating plasma once or twice a week in Springfield to “make up the difference.”
With an endowment of more than $2.5 billion and around 100 rental units in Northampton, Smith College is the wealthiest landlord in Northampton, according to Smith’s student newspaper The Sophian. Since June, over 20 tenants in the West Street neighborhood have been getting organized alongside other local tenants and community members to pressure the college for better housing practices.
Last week, the West Street Tenants Association held a press conference in front of Smith’s entrance gates. They demanded the college roll back the June rent increases, address all necessary repairs in rental properties within 30 days of being reported, and commit to capping annual rent increases to $25 a month — something they said would be in alignment with the college’s previous agreements with its tenants.
The tenants were referring to agreements they said Smith College made with tenants in a city-run working group during mayor Clare Higgins’ administration. Those agreements reportedly included a $25 monthly cap on annual rent increase and the creation of an affordable housing fund, according to Eliza Menzel, a Smith alumna and an organizer of the Northampton Tenants, a group primarily composed of renters in Northampton.
Neither the tenants association nor the city has been able to locate the written agreements the tenants are referencing, though. Sydney Fahey, the mayoral assistant in Gina-Louise Sciarra’s administration, said that the office “[has] looked extensively for any relevant files, and did not come up with any responsive records.”
Carolyn McDaniel, the senior director of media relations and strategic communications at Smith College, neither confirmed or denied the existence of the rental increase cap agreements, but said that the college “[complies] with the terms of all documented agreements related to its rental properties.”
Menzel alleged that Smith has consistently breached the agreed-upon rent cap, raising monthly rates by as much as 22% for tenants this past summer.
“These increases are destabilizing tenants, forcing many to leave, and burdening those who remain,” Menzel said. “It’s additionally sobering that Smith runs on the hard work of Northampton’s community members, but a growing number of them cannot afford to live in housing owned by their employer.”
