Tenant Union News: A Look Inside the Movement

Letter From Our Team

Welcome to our newsletter, where we share the stories of the CT Tenants Union and the renters behind the movement. Although landlords, investors, and politicians treat our homes like gambling chips, we know that their power and their money depends on us—so that when we get organized, we have the power to fight back. Tenants across Connecticut are transforming our living conditions and the landscape of housing investment in our state. 

In this inaugural issue, we showcase the depth of our movement with a few different write-ups:

• Tenants Take On the Capitol: the Fight for Just Cause Legislation

• The Deep Dive: Concord Hills Tenant Union's Anti-Displacement Campaign

• Building a Better World: Organizing Our Way To Social Housing

When we organize together, we don’t just resist displacement, we create the conditions under which alternative systems can be built.

We hope that you will find your own home in the tenant movement somewhere in these pages. 

In solidarity,

CTTU Editorial Team

But First…Upcoming Events

Before we get into it, here’s the info you need to know about our upcoming events. 

Interested in becoming a tenant union member? Come meet with your fellow tenants and share your story at one of our upcoming orientations. You can participate in person or online to learn how our union works and who it works for: you!

Our orientations in July will be:

• Thursday, July 10th in Waterbury / Online, 6:30-7:30pm

• Thursday, June 17th in Middletown / Online, 6:30-7:30pm

• Thursday, July 31st in East Hartford / Online, Time TBD (but either 6:30 or 7pm)

Sign up at bit.ly/CTTU-at-large-RSVP

CTTU chapters are bringing landlords to the bargaining table and winning fair rent, repairs, and respect. This is the training to attend if you want to do the same in your own building or complex, or if you’re ready to support organizing efforts in your area. Our next training will be on Saturday, July 19th, 10am-5pm (location is TBD, though most likely in New Haven). 

Sign up at bit.ly/training4tenantpower 

Tenants Take On the Capitol

CTTU’s top priority in Connecticut’s legislative session this year was Just Cause—a policy that requires landlords to provide a valid justification before evicting a tenant. We chose to focus on this policy because of the many ways landlords use “no fault” evictions, or evictions that happen without a legitimate reason, to wield unilateral power over tenants. It’s common practice for landlords to use no fault evictions when they want to displace existing communities and bring in higher paying tenants or to retaliate against tenants who are being too vocal about maintenance issues. 

Especially for tenants seeking to unionize, Just Cause is also about the right for tenants to organize—when renters don’t have to fear eviction without cause, tenants can form unions and engage in collective bargaining efforts with less risk and more leverage. 

Just Cause coalition leaders rally at the Capitol to advocate for pro-tenant legislation.

After hundreds of hours of calling, emailing, rallying, and organizing, we gained substantial support within the General Assembly. Based on hundreds of direct conversations with legislators, we believed we had the votes needed for our bill to pass. However, House leadership ultimately refused to call our bill to the floor for a vote. One factor is the outsized political influence of the CT Apartment Association and other landlord lobbying groups, who are favored over tenants by many legislators. Another factor is that nearly 1 in 5 legislators in the State of Connecticut are landlords themselves. Meanwhile, Just Cause is highly popular among CT residents (check out this recent polling report, page 6)

One of our strategies going forward will be to shine a light on these conflicts of interest within the political system. We believe that tenants should be represented by people who genuinely serve our interests. The fight for tenant power is a matter of democracy.

The Deep Dive

This month’s deep dive is a story about the Concord Hills Tenants Union. Concord Hills is a 120-unit apartment building located in Hartford and now owned by the NYC-based investment firm, Greyhill Group. For years, the complex had been plagued by landlord negligence, creating unsafe conditions for tenants that went ignored by multiple owners. In August 2024, a fire caused by a faulty electrical socket damaged much of the building, displacing over 50 households from their homes.

CTTU had a list of phone numbers that enabled us to call a meeting of the displaced tenants soon after the fire. At that meeting, a supermajority of the displaced tenants took a vote to unionize—to fight for their needs as a collective and to coordinate strategically to get the best possible outcome for everyone. Everyone in that room felt both clear-eyed about the difficulty of the fight ahead and convinced that much more was possible together than alone.

Tenants received some relocation assistance from the City of Hartford, as required by state law, but also experienced the severe shortcomings of Hartford’s tenant protection policies. By exerting pressure through both public protests and internal pressure, the newly unionized tenants won relocation to improved temporary housing with fridges, stovetop burners, and more sanitary facilities.

According to the City and the landlord during this time, the construction work needed to restore the apartment building would only take a couple of weeks. This led tenants to believe they would be able to move back into their homes before the holidays. However, one union leader with decades of experience in construction warned the City about the true scope of the work required. He was finally proven right just before Thanksgiving, when the fire marshal finally inspected the property and extended the timeline from weeks to months. 

Facing a deadline on their temporary housing and a severe shortage of safe apartments with affordable rents within Hartford, the displaced tenants continued to organize against both the City and the landlord. Mayor Arulampalam eventually agreed to extend the temporary housing from early December to early January. Greyhill Group, despite claiming “we’re not negotiating with the tenant union,” likewise responded to the tenant union’s pressure (including a picket in front of their midtown Manhattan office) by offering a version of the union’s negotiation proposal to union members individually. 

Union leaders and organizers worked with every union member to prepare for those phone calls and hold a unified line in the negotiations. Some tenants secured 2-year leases for renovated Concord Hills units at the same rents they were paying before; others secured equivalent rents for units in other Greyhill-owned buildings in the area; and others secured leases with new landlords at rent prices negotiated for them by Greyhill. 

After five months of displacement, uncertainty, and housing anxiety—and in the face of imminent homelessness—the Concord Hills Tenant Union ran a campaign of steadily increasing escalation against two targets (the City and Greyhill). They won improved and extended temporary housing during their displacement and they secured replacement housing for dozens of households through direct negotiations with the investor-landlords. 

Strategic collective action, unrelenting pressure, militant negotiating, strength through unity—that’s TENANT UNION POWER!

Building A Better World

While we didn’t secure Just Cause eviction protections in this year’s legislative session, we’re not waiting on political leadership to deliver the change we need. Our members are already constructing an alternative to our broken private rental system: social housing that puts people over profit. 

The current housing system is flawed because it treats shelter as a commodity instead of a basic human need. Since people require housing to survive, we have no choice but to pay whatever landlords charge. In a different world, we might build our own homes on common land using our own labor and public resources. But under today’s financial markets, zoning laws, and regulatory red tape, we cannot. Instead, those with enough capital buy up swaths of housing, while the rest of us are forced to rent from them to meet our survival needs if we cannot buy one of the increasingly rare available units. We pay whatever they demand until we can’t afford to pay any more, at which point we face displacement. This is extortion. 

This profit-driven system incentivizes landlords to cut costs while raising rents, leaving tenants to pay more for less. Our hard-earned income flows out as rent payments which in turn pay down our landlords’ mortgage debt, enabling their ownership of our homes while we’re left holding the bag as conditions deteriorate and costs skyrocket.

But what if housing put people over profit? What if we cultivated homes where we can thrive in our communities? What if our neighborhoods became sites of local power and collective decision-making? What if our rent wasn’t extracted for someone else’s profit, but reinvested into our buildings to ensure they remain safe, dignified, comfortable, affordable, and resilient in the face of climate volatility? Together, these ideals make up our vision for social housing.  

And CTTU members are already making this vision a reality—and they’re doing so creatively. The Parkside Village II Tenant Union took over their Housing Authority Board in Branford and now co-run their own complex. The Blake Street Tenant Union is moving towards a collective property acquisition. We’re working to create efficient, flexible, progressive funding and operating models to make these efforts possible at scale. 

In the coming months, we'll share our vision for a broader social housing strategy in Connecticut. We hope you'll come along with us as we imagine a different world and work to bring it to life.