Our Mission
The Ridgewood Tenants Union is building power with our neighbors to fight displacement – join us in the struggle for our housing rights!
We are an all-volunteer, tenant-led, and autonomous anti-gentrification group whose mission is to grow the power of working class tenants in Ridgewood to collectively fight displacement. We work towards our mission by door-knocking to inform tenants about their rights, holding tenant assemblies, organizing tenant associations, holding know-your-rights trainings, creating neighborhood-wide campaigns and projects that address the impacts of gentrification on our community.
About RTU
We are an all-volunteer and tenant-led anti-gentrification group working together to grow the power of working-class tenants and unhoused people in Ridgewood, Maspeth, Glendale, and Middle Village. Demanding safe and stable housing for all, we organize together to fight displacement.
Since our founding in 2014, we have engaged in projects that address the impacts of gentrification, which we define as the displacement of poor and working-class people, often of color, and their replacement by middle- and upper-class people, often white, in order to generate profits for landlords and developers.
Organizing for Change
The Ridgewood Tenants Union is an anti-gentrification, independent, and tenant-led housing rights group led by volunteers. We formed in 2014 with the mission of building tenant power and fighting displacement in a neighborhood historically controlled by homeowners and the politicians that have advocated solely for their interests.
Even though tenants are a majority in the neighborhoods the group organizes in, prior to the founding of our tenants union, there was no organized tenant voice advocating for our right to safe, truly affordable, and stable housing, especially for working class tenants of color, those that are undocumented, and our homeless neighbors.
The Ridgewood Tenants Union has been organizing to fill a long overdue void that has weakened our voices as working class tenants. This has been changing since we started organizing our neighbors and will continue to change as we grow our power. We recruit and rely on our members to help us grow our capacity to expand our base.
Why Queens?
Speculators have long seen Queens as the “new frontier.” In 2016, when the Ridgewood Tenants Union was organizing with fellow Queens organizers under the coalition called Queens Is Not For Sale, Cushman and Wakefield had sold a 49-unit rent-stabilized building in Jackson Heights that had been valued at $3.1 million for $13 million.
“Queens is doing great,” company head of sales Robert Knakal said to attendees at a real estate conference we crashed—putting them on pace for earning nearly $5 billion in sales that year.
As people from all over travel to Queens to visit our cultural institutions and ride in on the 7 train to experience our diverse array of food and explore our borough, market forces are pushing prices beyond what our working class neighbors can afford, and predatory equity and developers want to exploit that and profit from our “diverse landscape.”
Neighborhoods such as Rockaway and Jamaica, which have had some of the highest rates of families going into the city’s homeless-shelter system, are being pumped with millions of dollars for revitalization. That makes them vulnerable to development that will price out current residents and small businesses without strong protections to prevent their displacement.
In the last 15 years, organizers in Queens have been building up their responses to the forces of gentrification and we are proud to be a part of that struggle to fight for our working class neighborhoods. Queens is building a stronger culture of tenant resistance throughout the borough. Tenants have long been fighting harassment, bad conditions, and mistreatment. We are learning to scale up our movement to grow our power as working class tenants. We hope you join the fight.