Mission

Tenants & Neighbors is a grassroots organization that helps tenants build and effectively wield their power to preserve at-risk affordable housing and strengthen tenants' rights in New York.

Through organizing, education, intensive leadership development, grassroots mobilization, and strategic policy and legislative advocacy, Tenants & Neighbors is building a strong and unified tenant movement that has the knowledge and power to effect real change.

What We Do

Throughout New York State the forces of development and gentrification are displacing low and moderate income people from their homes, changing the face of communities, and eroding tenants’ rights. Tenants & Neighbors is fighting back by building a strong grassroots movement of tenants who are educated, empowered, and are actively working to preserve our affordable housing stock and to defend and expand tenants’ rights.

Tenants & Neighbors works at both the individual building level and at the system level. When we learn that a building that has been subsidized by the government is at risk of being converted to market rate housing, we help the tenants in the building form a tenant association. We then provide the tenant association with the organizing support, leadership development, training, technical assistance, and advocacy they need in order to be able to keep their building affordable. We also educate tenants about the systems that are facilitating the loss of affordable housing, and help them develop policy and legislative campaigns to address the underlying causes of loss of affordability.

The immediate beneficiaries of our work are the tenants who are able to stay in their homes and whose rights as tenants are respected. Because we are helping to preserve the diversity and stability of the neighborhoods in which the buildings are located, we are also benefiting the other people who live in those neighborhoods.

Through organizing, education, intensive leadership development, grassroots mobilization, and strategic policy and legislative advocacy, Tenants & Neighbors is building a strong and unified tenant movement that has the knowledge and power to effect real change.