A group of 20 tenants, organizers and local supporters holding signs reading “Somervillain” and “LaCourt Lies” marched from the Davis Square T stop to the office of Mouhab Rizkallah, owner of LaCourt Realty and The Braces Place in Somerville, on Feb. 3. The protesters, organized by the LaCourt Tenants Union, Read more…
After another day of attending online graduate classes from her one-bedroom apartment in the summer of 2020, Mary Stathos rose from her desk to heat up what felt like her millionth can of soup for dinner that week. As she padded around her kitchen, she avoided the spots where the Read more…
Greater Boston Tenants’ Union is an anti-capitalist and police abolitionist organization which seeks to build a “world without landlords”—that is to say, a society ruled by the working class. On June 14, Nick Watter of GBTU joined The Gavel’s Albar Shahnoor for an interview (upon which this article is based) Read more…
It’s August 1, 2019, my first night in my overpriced apartment and I am crying while someone plays “Rock and Roll All Nite” down at the gas station below me. I am unpacking my clothes and placing them into a closet that is still lined with contact paper that must Read more…
At the end of June, the federal moratorium on evictions will expire, putting thousands of families in Massachusetts at risk for eviction. Andrea Park is a housing and homelessness staff attorney with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. She says the federal moratorium doesn’t protect all tenants and the ones receiving Read more…
Rumors circulated that the landlord wanted everyone out. But Giuliana Perez could not contemplate leaving her two-bedroom apartment, where light pours into the living room, in the middle of a pandemic. What would she do with her elderly mother? How would she pay first and last month’s rent at a Read more…
Nearly 80 renters and community members turned out last Saturday at the Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston for a one-time matinee. Instead of perusing the museum’s collections, these tenants staged their own gallery exhibit outside with artistic renderings of the shoddy living conditions within the buildings owned by landlord Gerald Fineberg. Read more…
On Saturday, March 20, tenants of art collector and real estate investor Gerald Fineberg staged a pop-up exhibit and rally at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA)/Boston to protest squalid conditions and evictions in properties owned and managed by the ICA board member’s firm. Head over to Hyperallergic to read Read more…
MEDFORD, MA — The issues Mary Stathos describes are straight from every renter’s nightmare: cockroaches, rodents, mold, broken amenities, safety hazards. Her kitchen floor peeled up, exposing rot underneath. Pieces of her neighbor’s ceiling were falling off when she was over for dinner. Head over to Patch to read more!
Busted appliances, broken floors, no hot water. Mary Stathos and many of her neighbors in Medford are frustrated with their landlord, Alpha Management Corporation, so they’re forming a tenants union and demanding improvements. “I went four months without a refrigerator and the linoleum in my kitchen was rotted away, exposing Read more…