When organizers announced the formation of the Atlantic Mills Tenants Union (AMTU) on Dec. 21, the Mills’ snow-capped towers at their backs, they made history as the first commercial tenants union in Rhode Island, and one of the first such unions in the country.
“We are demanding stability and dignity, not just in our homes, but in our community spaces,” Cindy Miranda, union vice president and board chair of the Olneyville Neighborhood Association, told the crowd of over 100 supporters who showed up to rally for the union’s official launch.
Miranda also announced that members of AMTU had voted to join the Rhode Island Tenants Union, a fledgling statewide union with only one other chapter.
Rhode Island has lagged behind other progressive states like New York and Connecticut in building and consolidating tenant power — despite median residential rent in the Ocean State increasing at one of the highest rates in the country over the last two years. The Providence metro area has seen a particularly large increase in median asking rent.
“In America, there’s no uniform landlord-tenant law,” Liv, an organizer from the Providence Organization of Workers and Renters, said. (Liv declined to share her last name with PPS out of fear of retaliation from landlords.) The organization guides people seeking to form a tenants union and provides mutual aid among tenants and workers. “Unlike labor law… there’s no official way to become a tenant union.”
Tenant unions appear in the Rhode Island Constitution just once, under the 1986 Residential Landlord-Tenant Act in Section 46. That provision prohibits “retaliatory conduct,” which includes evicting a renter for joining a tenants union. R.I. House Bill 7962, proposed in March 2024, would have been the first statewide legislation to define what constitutes a tenants union and outline processes for tenant unions to submit complaints about their landlords to the State. However, that bill was held for consideration when it was proposed, and has not since been revisited.
So why has Rhode Island fallen behind some of its New England neighbors? How did we get here, and what is the future of tenant organizing in the state?
‘Feudal’ property rights under fire: The Civil Rights Movement and Tenant Affairs Boards
The story of tenant organizing in Rhode Island actually starts halfway across the country, in the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago.
In the mid-1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared war on the “slums” of Chicago’s West Side. When he seized a six-unit building at 1321 South Homan Avenue in February of 1966, he described the takeover as “supralegal”: “The moral question is far more important than the legal one,” he told reporters. The Black tenants of the greystone apartments lived without proper heat or light — one of Dr. King’s aides recalled seeing babies wrapped in newspapers for warmth. The units were rife with rodents, plaster fell from the ceilings, and the building was full of dirt and debris.
Concerned about the health of the residents, including nearly two dozen children, Dr. King intercepted the tenants’ rent and put it towards repairing the building himself.
His radical “trusteeship” of the property resulted in pest extermination and code violations against the landlord. It was also an instrumental part of his accelerated call for decent, fair housing practices nationally. Though the property owner at 1321 South Homan eventually won a court battle over the property against Dr. King, the next several months of the civil rights leader’s campaign in Chicago centered around organizing Black tenants in the city’s slums: forming unions, staging rent strikes, and holding nonviolence workshops for the youth.
At the time, The Providence Journal published an op-ed on Dr. King’s activism in the midwest. “The entire concept of a landlord’s rights over the property he rents — an idea which has persisted without a basic radical change from ancient times — is being systematically attacked in Chicago by tenants unions, community groups, civil rights organizations, and a university law school,” reads the opening paragraph to J. D. R. Bruckner’s story on the topic from May 1966.
Throughout Rhode Island, and especially in Providence’s public housing developments, rentals were rapidly deteriorating in the mid-1960s. Still, formal tenant organizing remained scant. After all, only a few years beforehand, the American public learned of the “deplorable conditions” on the First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson’s rental properties in Alabama, almost entirely occupied by Black families. The Providence Journal reported on her code violations in 1964 somewhat flippantly; they chose to lead with the headline, “‘Deplorable Conditions’ Cited, but First Lady’s Tenants Happy.”
It wasn’t until Dr. King was assassinated in 1968 that his teachings on tenants’ rights seemed to break through to Rhode Island. The week he died, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed what was often referred to as “the Lippitt bill,” for the legislator who sponsored it — Republican Rep. Frederick Lippitt of Providence. News of the bill’s passage was sandwiched between the announcements from countless businesses that they would be closed in observance of Dr. King’s death.
The bill mandated the creation of “tenant affairs boards,” or TABs, in all municipalities statewide with public housing projects. These boards would hear complaints from tenants and review regulations on tenant obligations and selection — with the right of veto. The Providence Journal reported that the Lippitt bill was “dead in committee until the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. revived it.”
Another law passed in 1970 increased the number of officials on the Providence Housing Authority board from five to nine, and required that at least three of the members be public housing tenants. That law — which initially appeared to face “certain defeat” according to The Providence Journal — was passed thanks to vigilant tenants circulating petitions and picketing City Hall and the State House. After the law was passed, Providence became the only municipality in the country to mandate that tenants serve on the housing authority board.
However, the implementation of new tenant protections faced several roadblocks in the months after their passage, from legal challenges to non-compliant towns. From the very beginning, tenants’ rights in Rhode Island have been subject to this game of push and pull — each victory for renters has often been met with resistance, and sometimes, defeat. The first iteration of the Rhode Island Tenants Union was officially convened in late 1970 to unite public housing tenants unions and force municipalities to create the legally required TABs.
They also continued to fight for additional tenant protections and advocated for the same mandates passed in Providence to be enacted statewide. However, despite their efforts, by 1972, the Rhode Island Supreme Court scaled back certain provisions in the Lippitt bill; TABs no longer had the right to a veto on tenant selection and eviction hearings. “From now on, tenants affairs boards will be just a rubber stamp for the housing authority,” one TAB consultant lamented in an April 1972 Providence Journal article.
The Lippitt bill setback serves as an important reminder of where the power of a tenants union comes from — that is, from the collective, not the law. It may be easy enough to evict and replace one troublesome tenant seeking better living conditions, but to evict half the tenants in a building would result in significant financial hardship for the landlord. So while the legal authority bestowed upon TABs in the initial 1968 law was a welcome tool, its elimination was not the final nail in the coffin for public housing tenant organizing. In fact, some of the most intense years of organizing were just on the horizon.
‘Some union falls apart every week’: Organizing Private Housing Tenants
Alongside public housing tenants in the early 1970s, some of the first private housing tenant unions in the state were taking shape. These unions, almost always smaller than their public counterparts, were sometimes impactful but often short-lived; the rocky nature of private rental tenant unions demonstrates the difficulty of organizing what can be a transient population.
In October 1973, The Providence Journal covered the dissolution of the West Warwick Tenants Union — a group formed less than a year beforehand. The tenants had been spread across five different roach- and rat-infested, violation-riddled houses on Junior Street, owned by two different landlords. After the union gave housing inspectors tours of their apartments, the landlords were issued fines.
At the time, with the uptick in tenant organizing sparked by Dr. King, legislators across the country were trying to establish a clear-cut process for renter unionization. In 1972, the Uniform Law Commission, a non-profit group of lawyers, offered a legal solution to be implemented at the federal level: The 1972 Uniform Landlord-Tenant Act. It was not adopted by Congress, but it became the basis for several state laws across the country. In 1973, when the West Warwick union formed, Rhode Island had not adopted it — and wouldn’t for another decade. There was nothing in place to protect the tenants of Junior Street.
Instead of making an honest effort to address the tenants’ concerns, the landlords of Junior Street opted to make the minimum repairs required to their properties and sell what they could. In the apartments that didn’t sell, they replaced unionized tenants with immigrants who did not speak English, and were therefore less likely to organize themselves, according to the union organizers then. The Providence Journal article about the short life of the West Warwick Tenants Union opened with the president and vice president of the group packing up their belongings and moving away.
The West Warwick Tenants Union had initially come together with the help of the now-defunct United Tenant Organization, which considered its brief stint on Junior Street “an interesting experiment.” The United Tenant Organization is just one of the many groups of professional “outside agitators” — as landlords would call them — that have formed and dissolved over the last 70 years. Modern-day equivalents include the Tenant Union Federation and Reclaim RI, which helped organize the Atlantic Mills Tenants Union.
“Unlike block associations, people in [the] tenant associations we deal with have no real sense of home turf, no real stake in the neighborhood because they move so often,” one United Tenants Organization coordinator reflected after the West Warwick Tenants Union dissolved in 1973. He said that the experience tainted his conceptions about the viability of tenant unions. “We can only go so far.”
‘Hot-tempered, stubborn, demanding, controversial, decisive, articulate, and a born leader’: Tenant Advocate Maria Lopes
By the mid-1970s, attitudes around public housing leadership were changing. As more and more states introduced TAB legislation, federal housing administrators were beginning to see real value in tenant participation — though the local administrators who coordinated the Providence projects remained skeptical. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was funding programs in other cities, including Boston, that created building management teams staffed entirely by tenants. Meanwhile, Rhode Island was scaling back some protections, with some city officials seeking to delegitimize the power of TABs at every turn.
Providence public housing was a site of particular soreness for the federal government. Hartford Park had been a public marvel when it was built in the 1950s as the first public apartment high-rise with an elevator in the country. By the 1970s, it was deteriorating, along with many other public housing developments in the city, including Manton Heights (1966) and the Chad Brown Apartments (1942). Residents of Admiral Terrace (1951), Codding Court (1951), and Sunset Village (1960) also had a litany of complaints about their situation to offer to the Authority.
The conditions inside some of the Providence projects were so horrific that many units were perpetually vacant, cutting the Authority’s income and further exacerbating their annual budget deficit. It was a vicious cycle: The Authority didn’t have enough money to repair the projects, so no one wanted to live there, further reducing rental income. For years, the Providence Housing Authority languished on HUD’s list of the most financially troubled agencies in the country.
This was the state of public housing in Providence when Maria Lopes got involved in the TAB. Lopes and her family were residents of the Valley View Homes in Providence’s North End, which set her apart from most other project tenants. Valley View was the only City-owned public housing development at the time for moderate-income tenants, and received no federal funding. It was generally considered a model for public housing nationwide: In 1977, a Washington Post columnist prominently featured the development as one of the successes in the otherwise “unmitigated disaster” of public housing. (The op-ed was also flatly racist and full of discriminatory proposals for public housing, including racial quotas and limiting the number of “fatherless black welfare families,” to avoid “driv[ing] out all whites.” The same article put forth Chad Brown as one of “the most dangerous spots on this continent.”)
To soothe at least some of their financial woes in the early 1970s, the City moved to sell Valley View Homes to a private developer who would then be free to erase the development’s existing income restrictions. As a result, Lopes rallied 35 tenants of the 265-unit apartment complex to protest the sale at City Hall with the support of the United Tenants Organization and the City’s General Assembly. She had recently become chairwoman of the citywide Tenant Affairs Board — not because she had run for the position, but because the previous chairwoman resigned. During her campaign against the sale of Valley View, she proved herself to be a spirited advocate for public housing tenants — in a 1975 profile, The Providence Journal described her as “no shrinking violet.” Under her leadership, the Providence TAB worked with the Providence Housing Authority to establish a series of controlled rent hikes in Valley View that prevented the City from selling the development. Soon, TAB meetings grew from a mere eight participants to more than 50, including multiple representatives from each development.
In line with changing attitudes across the country, HUD decided to sponsor a paid “tenant advocate” position in Providence. The hope was that increased tenant participation would make residents feel more invested in their units, working to keep them clean and safe. In 1978, Lopes won an election to be the inaugural tenant advocate.
During her time as leader of the TAB and tenant advocate, Lopes’s advocacy touched on nearly every development. In 1975, she organized a “non-rent strike” in Kilmartin Plaza, during which nearly half of the project’s elderly tenants told the PHA they were “unable” to pay their rent. Lopes explicitly said they were not striking — she instead insinuated that the leaky, overly humid building might have been causing “health problem[s] the tenants have to pay for before they pay their rent.” In 1978, she fought for a “special cleanup” of the over 728-family Hartford Park housing project, and loudly blasted the PHA for a “shoddy” $4 million renovation project at Chad Brown. In 1980, she helped coordinate over 300 protesters in a march on City Hall, demanding improved conditions in the projects citywide and more tenant representation on the PHA’s board of commissioners. Hours into the protest, then-Mayor Buddy Cianci emerged from City Hall in the pouring rain to promise the tenants he’d address their needs. (Lopes later accused him of making empty promises.)
She also continued her fight against the sale of Valley View, which came up time and time again as a solution to the Authority’s dire financial situation. In addition to the Providence TAB’s first victory against the PHA in 1973, another proposed sale was struck down in 1979. Lopes understood the Authority’s situation and suggested a variety of solutions that would ease pressure on its wallet without driving up costs for tenants, including additional controlled rent hikes and the opportunity for some tenants to opt out of certain updates and appliances. But it was inevitable: In 1981, the City voted for a final time to sell Valley View. After nearly 10 years of organizing, Lopes and her neighbors were going to lose their homes.
In the couple of years leading up to Valley View’s sale, some cracks had appeared in the Providence TAB, and they only continued to grow wider as Lopes remained leader. While she and her family had been living in subsidized housing, her husband went to graduate school, eventually earning a master’s degree from Brown University and getting a job as a supervisor for a city program. Some critics of Lopes suggested that she and other middle-income tenants at Valley View were taking advantage of the low rents. Additionally, some fellow tenants felt that her style of advocacy — which sometimes involved screaming matches with opponents, according to several Providence Journal articles — was too aggressive. Elderly residents in particular had tried to organize their own TAB, feeling that the existing TAB led by Lopes was disproportionately focused on the needs of families, and that her style created more conflict than it solved.
This factionalism eventually culminated in questions about Lopes tenure: She was only elected chairwoman to the TAB once and she had only been elected tenant advocate once, despite both positions requiring regular elections. Lopes argued that as the years passed, some of the tenant representatives stopped attending meetings, and elections for individual developments were sparsely attended, if conducted at all. Without adequate representation from each project, a citywide chairman couldn’t be decided.
Following the sale of Valley View Homes, Lopes’ time on the TAB was drawing to a close. She eventually moved back to East Providence, where she had spent most of her adolescence. Before she left, she worked with Mayor Cianci to mandate that 25% of the Valley View apartments be Section 8 housing after the sale. She went on to be a successful politician, becoming the first Black woman elected to the Rhode Island General Assembly in 1988.
‘They completely ignore it’: PHA Tenants Strike for 34 Months
When the Rhode Island Residential Landlord-Tenant Act was passed in 1986, Lopes was gone, the Providence TAB had all but faded out of existence, and the Rhode Island Tenants Union had forfeited its charter. Public housing tenants were once again protesting the unlivable conditions in the Providence projects, specifically in Manton Heights and the Hartford Park towers. That year, HUD released a scathing report on the Providence Housing Authority, alleging that they found deteriorating buildings and a pattern of racial segregation in the projects. Some structures, they wrote, “exhibit serious signs of continuing deterioration. Severe maintenance problems range from almost nonexistent grounds maintenance, through chronic roach and rodent infestation, to major code violations in living units.”
In July 1986, over 200 tenants in Hartford Park and Manton Heights began a rent strike to force the Authority to improve conditions in the buildings. The tenants placed their monthly payments in an escrow account for several years while a handful of lawsuits related to the situation worked their way through the courts.
“We’ve had robberies. We’ve had assaults. We’re infested with drugs. And nothing is happening with the Housing Authority to help us out with these problems,” Ruth Durrett, a tenant organizer in Manton Heights, told The Providence Journal in January 1988. At that point, the strike was entering its 19th month. Durrett was a longtime project resident and advocate — in the ’70s, she had actually been one of the tenants to challenge Maria Lopes’ unelected leadership. She and other organizers of the ’80s were wary of the theatrics that had characterized formal tenant affairs boards, and steered clear of them.
“Not once have [the Authority] said let’s sit down and discuss our mutual problems,” Hartford Park organizer Rose Veiga said at the time. “You don’t do a rent strike off the top of your head on a whim. We’re very serious.”
A judge approved the agreement between the Providence Housing Authority and the tenant groups in July 1990, bringing the arduous 34-month-long rent strike to an end. Per the conditions of the agreement, over $600,000 of withheld rent payments were released to the Authority — a value equal to about $1.5 million today. According to The Providence Journal, the 29-page agreement “detail[ed] improvements to be made by the Authority, including replacing electrical systems, removing asbestos, repairing exterior lighting, and installing new bathroom and kitchen features.”
Veiga also said that the agreement forbade the Authority from demolishing certain buildings — in particular, the Hartford Park tower at 22 Whelan Street that she had been living in for nearly 15 years. However, only a few months after the court upheld the agreement, another judge ruled that two of the towers at Hartford Park could be demolished, including Veiga’s home.
After the public housing legal battles wrapped up in Providence, local organizers found themselves on the other side of a national movement. Tenant organizations across the country were fizzling out, and had been since former President Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1985 and the continued rise of suburban living. Just as the peak of organizing here in Rhode Island had lagged behind national trends, so too did the decline, though it came all the same. Like many other anti-poverty adjacent movements of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, tenant organizing went largely dormant for decades.
‘We all just deserve a better place to live’: Elmwood Tenant Union and Tenant Organizing Today
In early 2024, the residents at 1890 Broad Street in Cranston had a lot of complaints about their living situation: the heat was unreliable, many of the units had pest problems, and the entire courtyard was under construction. According to one tenant, Melissa Potter, the last straw was when she opened her door one morning to find a six-foot trench directly outside her unit.
“There’s nothing covering it,” she told The Public’s Radio back in February of that year. “There’s nothing warning that it’s here.”
At the time, only the first floor of the building was occupied; the entire structure had been vacated in 2021 when one of the balconies collapsed and a woman fell partway through the floor. After a few months of structural repairs, the first floor was once again deemed habitable, and tenants moved back in January 2022. The second floor remained off the market.
Despite the work done on the building, tenants found it was still in rough shape. The ongoing construction made their living situation even more unsafe, as exemplified by the aforementioned six-foot trench outside Potter’s doorstep. At the same time, some tenants’ rent increased: One woman told reporters that her rent was increased from $900 to $950 in one month for her one-bedroom apartment, despite unreliable heat and frequent flooding in the building.
Across the U.S., progressive movements had been steadily gaining momentum since the 2008 financial crash, from Occupy Wall Street in the immediate wake of the recession to the more recent Black Lives Matter movement. Renters’ rights became a focal point for progressive activists during the COVID-19 pandemic as millions of Americans lost their jobs. In 2020, the Centers for Disease Control implemented a national eviction moratorium to limit the spread of the coronavirus. That moratorium would eventually be discontinued by the Supreme Court in August 2021, but the action nonetheless demonstrated to the renters of today that they could organize around certain demands. Regionally, the Connecticut Tenants Union (CTTU) was also making major gains for renters; in 2023, the statewide union forced one of the biggest landlords in New Haven from eviction court to the bargaining table, and in January 2024, CTTU added its 15th chapter.
All of these factors contributed to the revival of the tenant rights movement in Rhode Island. The excitement of the ’70s and ’80s had so faded from public memory that when the Elmwood Realty Tenants Union formed, they mistakenly believed they were the first private housing tenants union in the state.
Residents at 1890 Broad Street said that their landlord — Elmwood Realty, LLC, managed by Jeffrey Butler — threatened to end the tenancy of anyone working with the nonprofit organizing group Reclaim RI. As a result, the Rhode Island ACLU and the Rhode Island Center for Justice sued the company in December 2023 for allegedly violating the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1986. An interim settlement in February 2024 reiterated the tenants’ rights to unionize without retaliation, and Elmwood Realty deferred two of the tenants’ evictions. Two other tenants withdrew from the suit before the settlement was reached.
“We’re not asking for anything crazy,” Potter told reporters in late March 2024. “I’m asking for windows. I’m not asking for a hot tub in the moat.”
In April 2024, three of the union members at 1890 Broad Street filed temporary restraining orders (TROs) in District Court against Butler and Elmwood Realty, LLC. TROs are one method of legally compelling a landlord to address a potentially life-threatening living situation, including exposed wires and broken utilities. The three members of the Elmwood Tenants Union filed TROs in order to get Butler and Elmwood Realty to fix their heating systems, which had been unreliable for years, according to Shana Crandell, a Reclaim RI organizer.
“The judge was not sympathetic to the tenants,” Crandell said. The union members’ cases were continued by the District Court judge “about five times,” according to Crandell.
In June 2024, Butler and Elmwood Realty still had not agreed to negotiate with the tenants union at 1890 Broad Street. As a result, the union picketed outside Butler’s other business, Dear Hearts Ice Cream in Cranston, to bring more visibility to their grievances. The union members were joined by Reclaim RI organizers and State Rep. Cherie Cruz, who had been a persistent advocate on their behalf since they first organized in March. The picketers — stationed in front of Dear Hearts on Gaspee Days — offered free ice cream to passersby and informed them of their grievances with Butler’s property management.
The union’s public appeals and TROs pressured Elmwood Realty to address some of the tenants’ complaints. Crandell said that at least one of the tenants who filed a TRO was able to get her broken windows fixed after months of unanswered requests. But for the most part, the tenants’ concerns were never adequately addressed, with another tenant again facing an alleged retaliatory eviction. According to Crandell, all of the other former union members opted to leave the building after months of stonewalling from management. Despite these setbacks, “the leader of that union is continuing to consider their options,” Crandell said.
She also reflected on the private rental market as an industry that necessitates evictions: The more housing-insecure tenants are, the less likely they are to see their rental unit as a home and fight to defend it. “The slumlord business model relies on grinding people through the eviction machine,” Crandell said. In rental complexes with high turnover, “it’s much harder to organize because there’s less pre-existing social fabric in the building.” (Sociologist Matthew Desmond discusses this phenomenon in his 2016 book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.)
The Elmwood Tenants Union constituted the inaugural chapter of the present-day iteration of the Rhode Island Tenants Union; it was joined by the second chapter, the Atlantic Mills Tenants Union (AMTU), in December 2024. Jeffrey Butler did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
‘Demanding stability and dignity’: The Atlantic Mills Tenants Union
The Atlantic Mills Tenants Union stands out from any other in Rhode Island’s history for being a commercial — not residential — tenants union. In fact, it stands out from most other tenants unions in American history for this reason. It’s so unique that AMTU’s defenders and opposition have struggled with exactly what it means for a group of commercial tenants to organize a supermajority in the same building.
When asked if she had come across any other commercial tenants unions to look to as a precedent, Shana Crandell (who is also working with AMTU) flipped the question back to PPS.
“I’d actually be curious to hear from you if you’ve found other examples of this,” Crandell said. “I have not heard of it, but I’m sure they exist somewhere.”
If there is little legal guidance on residential tenant unions, there’s practically no guidance on commercial tenant unions. The existing Residential Landlord-Tenant Act is designed for residential properties.
But the lack of precedent has not stopped AMTU from mobilizing. Upon formation in December 2024, the union demanded a meeting with the current and future owners of the Atlantic Mills. Their demands include formal recognition as a negotiating body, “a 99-year lease term that includes immediate rent stabilization,” and an eviction moratorium until a formal agreement is reached. Future owners Eric Edelman and Bob Berle have stated that they would like to work with all tenants “in good standing” on a case-by-case basis.
“Every tenant situation is different,” Edelman said in December when the union formed. “We’re committed to keeping the building as commercial space focused on small business. We want to keep all tenants in good standing.”
Edelman and Berle met with the union twice in February. At these meetings, AMTU organizers said they made the buyers aware of their demands, and Edelman stated that he and Berle shared their plans to repair the building and work with tenants in good standing. Neither meeting was a formal union negotiation.
The union has openly doubted Edelman and Berle’s plans to keep the building commercial, suggesting that the future owners plan to turn the nearly 350,000-square-foot building into housing. In March, members and supporters of the group rallied outside of the Rhode Island State House to protest proposed House Bill 5688 — a multi-part update to the state’s 8-Law bill, which includes a decreased tax rate for developers of affordable housing. HB 5688 also specifically encourages the adaptive reuse of commercial buildings into residential spaces.
“If the developer is able to get an 8% tax rate, plus whatever other incentives, environmental incentives — it’s such a sweet deal for them,” Linsey Wallace, an AMTU organizer, told PPS in March.
In response to AMTU’s stance against 8-Law, Edelman reiterated that “at this time, we have no plans to convert Atlantic Mills to residential.”
HB 5688 also would have outlined a clear minimum number of units for affordable housing and an income threshold for those units — notable gaps in the original version of 8-Law. In the proposed legislation, developers already benefiting from 8-Law, whether they meet the newly defined standards for affordability or not, will continue to receive tax subsidies until their agreement expires, which is 30 years after first enrolling in the program. HB 5688 was held for further study in early March and has not yet been revisited.
“It feels good that we were able to mobilize a group in a pretty short period of time,” Wallace said after HB 5688 failed to pass. “It’s not just AMTU that has been advocating for this. I’ve had conversations all over the city with people who have concerns about the bill and are concerned that the city would just be totally sold out to development with no accountability to the existing communities here.”
Tenant organizing in Rhode Island has not always been the most successful endeavor. With very few tenant protections enshrined in state law, losses have played out time and time again, like the sale of Maria Lopes’s Valley View Homes, and the demolition of Rose Veiga’s tower in Hartford Park. In some ways, it’s surprising that one of the country’s first commercial tenant unions would emerge from this backdrop of defeat after defeat — but then again, maybe not. Because Atlantic Mills is also the source of a rich history of labor strikes and unions, going all the way back to 1890, in a neighborhood that’s been teetering on the edge of radical economic and social change for the last several years.
AMTU faces an uphill battle in the coming months, and it’s unlikely that battle will be without casualties. Already, a small number of Atlantic Mills tenants are facing eviction from their spaces. However, AMTU and the Elmwood Realty Tenants Union have both pushed the state to an interesting moment for grassroots organizing. What happens next could change the direction of tenant organizing in the state for years to come.
By Keating Zelenke / Mary A. Gowdey Special Projects Fellow / kzelenke@ppsri.org
Katy Pickens contributed reporting.