Have Private Equity Landlords Met Their Match?

“This is the first example in recent history of tenants engaging in collective bargaining with a shared landlord, across state lines,” TUF said in a press release. As of Sept. 9, tenant unions from four states — Freeman’s 72-unit Park Ridge complex in New Haven; the 122-unit River Pointe Tower complex in Detroit, Mich.; the 214-unit American Village complex in Louisville, Ky.; and three buildings comprising nearly 500 units in Kansas City, Mo. — have all joined the campaign against Capital Realty, forming a united front of hundreds of renters in just over a month who all send their rent to the same place.

“[Eichler] is a businessman, and as a businessperson, he’s concerned about his bottom line,” says Freeman. But the campaign ​“is going state by state now,” she continues, ​“and I think he’s concerned.”

After Capital Realty purchased Park Ridge in 2016, Freeman says she was the very first tenant to move in, and she paints a grim picture of what it’s been like watching the property deteriorate since then. Five years ago, the boiler began malfunctioning, producing a steady banging so loud ​“you can hear it on the ninth floor,” Freeman says. The banging hasn’t stopped since. Tenants say they have begged Capital Realty to replace the boiler, to no avail, and they worry that it will soon give out completely and leave them without hot water for the winter. This past spring, Freeman says, multiple units flooded thanks to a plumbing issue, and tenants have also complained to management about fire safety, minimal maintenance staff and building security issues, among other problems, with minimal response.

Capital Realty did not respond to a request for comment via email, and the company’s general counsel declined to comment when reached by phone.

In November 2024, Freeman reached out to organizers with the Connecticut Tenants Union (CTTU), a statewide union of renters and one of TUF’s founding chapters, in the hopes of getting in touch with an attorney. Yet she quickly found herself becoming an organizer too. By July, a majority of the complex’s elderly and disabled tenants had signed tenant union cards, and the group quickly made plans to go public.

“It’s really amazing that we’ve been able to come together against the kind of hindrances we’ve had — three different languages [among the building’s tenants] and someone in the middle trying to keep us from joining forces,” Freeman said in her speech at the union’s launch on the front patio of her building, on August 6. ​“We want to meet face-to-face with [Capital Realty] and come up with an agreement that we’re all happy with.”

Freeman and CTTU quickly discovered how hard it would be to make that meeting happen. After the union launch, Freeman and a delegation of other Park Ridge union leaders piled into two vans and a truck for the roughly two-hour trip to Capital Realty’s headquarters in Spring Valley, N.Y. When they arrived, Freeman and CTTU President Hannah Srajer say they found a dark office and a note taped to the door saying the company’s actual office was located just across the nearby border with New Jersey. The group piled back into the vans to head to the new address, only to discover what they described as a seemingly empty building. When they made it back to the Spring Valley office, the lights were miraculously back on, and they could see people peering at them from the windows. But when they knocked, nobody answered or came out to receive their letter.

In fact, after they had slid the letter under the door, Freeman and Srajer say that tow trucks arrived to remove their vehicles unless they left immediately.

“It was really disappointing and absurd,” Srajer says. ​“We’re here to have a conversation with the landlord that’s responsible for the condition of the property, and if they don’t want to have that conversation, we’re going to continue to do what we need to do to come up with a fair and equitable resolution.”

CTTU is no stranger to landlords meeting bargaining requests with intense resistance. In 2023, the group’s first local union had to overcome more than a dozen retaliatory eviction filings before that landlord — facing legal action and substantial public pressure as a result of CTTU’s organizing — finally agreed to enter negotiations, leading to the first collectively-bargained lease — in which all the members of the union negotiate the terms of their tenancy into a universal contract — in Connecticut’s history.

But Capital Realty is a different beast, representing the type of landlord that has become the white whale of the tenant movement — a massive private equity firm whose rental portfolio is largely out-of-state and which, given the minimal consequences landlords face for allowing buildings to fall into disrepair, has little incentive to pay attention to tenants’ complaints. In recent years, local news has covered neglected tenants at Capital Realty buildings in Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Cleveland and Atlanta, among others. Last fall, In These Times published a major investigation into another Capital Realty building in New Haven where more than a dozen tenants developed severe respiratory conditions thanks to untreated mold.

But after CTTU became a founding chapter of TUF in August 2024, this new national infrastructure opened the door to an evolution in tenant union strategy: What would happen if tenants could campaign for leases with the same landlord across state lines?

Less than two weeks after the Park Ridge launch, another Capital Realty union joined the fray: River Pointe Tower, another senior complex, in Detroit. According to Teresa McCormick, one of that union’s leaders, River Pointe has been ​“overrun with roaches and bedbugs” since she moved in last year. As in Park Ridge, McCormick says requests for maintenance go largely ignored; the doorbell has been broken since McCormick moved in, for example. McCormick says tenants are also fed up with the property’s unnecessarily strict regulations, such as no visitors after 10 p.m. and no decorating the hallways for Christmas.

“We just want things fixed and done in a timely manner,” says McCormick, who at 77 years old proudly dubbed herself the ​“ring leader” of the union effort. ​“We shouldn’t have to live like this in our senior years.”

But after CTTU became a founding chapter of TUF in August 2024, this new national infrastructure opened the door to an evolution in tenant union strategy: What would happen if tenants could campaign for leases with the same landlord across state lines?

Less than two weeks after the Park Ridge launch, another Capital Realty union joined the fray: River Pointe Tower, another senior complex, in Detroit. According to Teresa McCormick, one of that union’s leaders, River Pointe has been ​“overrun with roaches and bedbugs” since she moved in last year. As in Park Ridge, McCormick says requests for maintenance go largely ignored; the doorbell has been broken since McCormick moved in, for example. McCormick says tenants are also fed up with the property’s unnecessarily strict regulations, such as no visitors after 10 p.m. and no decorating the hallways for Christmas.

“We just want things fixed and done in a timely manner,” says McCormick, who at 77 years old proudly dubbed herself the ​“ring leader” of the union effort. ​“We shouldn’t have to live like this in our senior years.”

But unlike Park Ridge, after the River Pointe launch, the union saw immediate movement from their building’s management. According to Steven Rimmer, a co-founder of the Detroit Tenants Union who helped organize the River Pointe tenants, the building’s staff passed out flyers inviting residents to a meeting the day after the union launched. But when it became clear that the building managers envisioned the meeting as simply a space to air grievances, and not to bargain, the tenants walked out.

However, before the tenants had even left the lobby — and despite Detroit being more than 600 miles from Capital Realty’s headquarters in New York — Rimmer says Eichler himself then entered the property, finding Rimmer and bringing him into the management office. By the time Eichler left, they had an initial bargaining meeting on the books. And later, after coordinating with the Park Ridge union, Rimmer let Capital Realty know that their friends in Connecticut would be joining the bargaining session as well.

“I definitely think that if [Park Ridge] hadn’t launched before us, we probably would have gotten the same response they got,” Rimmer says. Srajer agrees, saying that ​“unity among the members, across the chapters and across the United States is what’s going to make this campaign successful. What got [Eichler] to the table was understanding that the members are serious.”

The first bargaining meeting was held on August 27, and leaders from both unions felt it was productive; McCormick says she ​“got a good feeling” from Eichler. A TUF press release following the meeting affirmed that the unions had already made significant headway: Not only did Capital Realty verbally commit ​“to recognize and meet in good fatih with any tenant unions within the Capital portfolio,” they also committed to honor TUF’s organizing efforts by signing a ​“non-retaliation notice.” (They also promised to put both commitments in writing.)

The non-retaliation clause was especially important for both unions, since organizers report that intimidation and thinly-veiled eviction threats are common at both complexes, and management held building-wide meetings in both, after organizing first began, to warn tenants against engaging with union leaders. And while the Park Ridge tenants have additional legal protection thanks to a local New Haven ordinance that protects tenants from retaliation, the Detroit tenants do not.

The day after the unions’ first bargaining meeting, in a show of strength that seemed aimed at dissuading Capital Realty from potentially going back on their word, a third union launched at a Capital Realty building in Louisville on August 28.

Laquita Holiday, who in late August was elected vice president of the newly formed union at American Village apartments, now a branch of the Louisville Tenants Union (another founding chapter of TUF), says the fact that it took just four days for a majority of her building, exclusively for seniors and disabled tenants, to sign union cards is a testament to the dire conditions they face. Over her 13 years in the building, Holiday says she’s seen things get ​“worse and worse”: mice and bedbugs run rampant, and the elevator routinely breaks down, which in a senior complex is nothing short of a life or death crisis. To top it off, many residents of American Village are on fixed incomes, and Holiday says Capital Realty routinely raises rents after tenants receive increases to their Social Security payments, meaning tenants never actually see their financial strain lessen.

For Holiday, the union launches at Park Ridge and River Pointe have created a burst of momentum.

“[Capital Realty] is targeting senior citizens,” says Holiday, who at 69 just earned her Bachelor’s degree this May. ​“But you are not going to treat me any kind of way and think I’m going to take it… [Eichler] needs to be scared that these buildings are launching against him. He needs to be scared that we may form a rent strike.”

With the joint campaign now in full swing, the unions have been making preparations for their next meeting with Capital Realty, scheduled for this Thursday, Sept. 11. Srajer, in a nod to the fact that tenant unions by and large share none of the same legal guarantees that labor unions do when it comes to collective bargaining, acknowledged that it’s possible Capital Realty could at any point decide to pull out of the negotiations.

To that end, when reached by phone on Sept. 5, Petya Vassilev, Capital Realty’s general counsel, declined to comment for this story and would not confirm whether the bargaining meeting on Thursday will take place as scheduled.

“We are going to be there on the 11^th,” Srajer said. ​“They made commitments and we are going to hold them to those commitments. We’re reasonable people and we’re hoping to get a resolution.”

But no matter Capital Realty’s next move, Freeman said she’s been fortified by becoming part of a campaign that has so quickly grown to become national in scope, as well as by the solidarity she’s found in seeing building after building follow Park Ridge into the struggle. When River Pointe and American Village launched their unions, she says, she and her neighbors held pizza parties in the building to watch.

And on Tuesday, Sept. 9, as she continued to help Park Ridge prepare for the upcoming bargaining meeting, the community celebrated again, as TUF announced the launch of three new unions at Capital Realty buildings in Kansas City. Although they’re nearly 1,300 miles apart, as of this week, a majority of the tenants across 476 units in the Parker Square Apartments, Paraclete Manor Apartments and Sage Crossing Apartments are now linked to Freeman through their shared campaign, and will be seeking to hold Capital Realty to their commitment to meet with any new unions in their portfolio.

With Capital Realty properties spread throughout 28 states, TUF organizers are confident this campaign is still just beginning.

“There’s still so much progress to be made, but the fact that [the campaign] has grown so quickly, for me, is surreal,” says Freeman. ​“I’m cautiously optimistic.”