When Raquel Gonzalez applied for an apartment at Stony Run in Kingston, New York in 2022, she was a former nurse on disability—her back broken by a prior landlord’s negligence.
She submitted her application in good faith. Aker Companies, the complex’s new owner, rejected her disability income outright, qualified her instead using an old pay stub, and charged her $2,300 per month: more than $400 above the listed price and nearly double what long-term tenants paid for identical units down the hall. For two years, she paid it.
Then a canvasser knocked on her door. “June was telling me what they were there for, and I started telling them my story,” Gonzalez said. “They were like, ‘Oh my God, you should join us.’”
She came to a meeting and discovered that what Aker had done to her was a violation of state housing law. She filed an overcharge claim. The state agreed, reducing her legal rent to $1,605—a figure Aker has refused to acknowledge. This month, the company served her a 14-day eviction notice.
“I’m just waiting for the court date,” she said. “Just take me to court.”
Gonzalez’s experience of systematic overcharging, deliberate neglect, and retaliation against tenants who dare to assert their rights is neither aberration nor accident. It is, organizers say, the business model. And it is precisely what drove tenants across Kingston to formalize, last month, into the Hudson Valley Tenants Union: a regional coalition of tenant associations taking on landlords across the Hudson Valley as a single, consolidated force.
The HVTU emerged from a years-long fight over the Emergency Tenant Protection Act (ETPA), a state law that lets municipalities declare a housing emergency and freeze rents when vacancy rates fall below 5%. Kingston is the only upstate city to have done so.
Since 2022, when it first opted in, landlords have waged a sustained campaign to undo those protections: manipulating vacancy data, striking illegal workforce housing deals, and exploiting a compliant mayor and a hostile judge. Tenants, organized building by building, have fought them to a draw—and are now consolidating.
“Landlords had gotten organized,” said June Nemon, the HVTU’s lead organizer. “And we had to get organized in response.”
Aker Companies did not respond to Courier New York’s request for comment.
The union held its first general assembly last Saturday, where more than 50 members deliberated, voted, and elected a governing tenant council. Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha (D-103), a longtime ally of Kingston’s tenant movement, spoke in solidarity.
The council laid out four priorities: organizing new tenant associations building by building; ensuring tenants file overcharge claims with the state to secure rent reductions they are legally owed; pushing for passage of the REST Act (S4659/A4877), a state bill that would allow municipalities to declare housing emergencies using publicly available data rather than expensive, manipulation-prone vacancy studies; and electing a pro-tenant mayor in Kingston when Mayor Steve Noble’s seat comes up in 2027.
A years-long fight
Kingston first opted into rent stabilization in 2022, when a vacancy study showed a 1.57% vacancy rate—far below the 5% threshold required to declare a housing emergency.
The law froze rents across roughly 1,000 stabilized units, with Stony Run, a 266-unit complex and the largest property covered by ETPA, at the center of the storm.
Aker Companies responded to the rent freeze with what tenants came to call “the blackmail letters,” notices warning that tenants who refused to sign leases at higher rents immediately would face steeper increases down the line.
Inside of the complex, conditions were deteriorating: retirees mopped sewage that backed through their pipes on a regular basis; children fell ill from mold spreading through the HVAC systems; aging infrastructure went unaddressed through the height of COVID, when tenants were home around the clock with nowhere else to go.
Teresa Greene, a tenant leader at Stony Run who has been organizing alongside Nemon since 2022, remembers the meeting that ignited everything: a woman in her building, 74 years old and widowed, who had been sleeping in her kitchen because the mold in her bedroom had become unlivable.
“I just went over and said, ‘Listen. I don’t know who you are, but if there’s any way I can help you, anybody I could write to or call,’” Greene said. “‘That’s crazy.’”
That woman’s story was what tenants brought to Aker’s office in Beacon, where Greene, Nemon, and a small group of organizers showed up unannounced with cameras.
The landlords called it trespassing, while the organizers called it a negotiation.
“They wanted the cameras to stop,” Greene said. “And we said, ‘No. That’s not gonna happen.’”
The pressure worked. Tenants packed Rent Guidelines Board hearings with accounts of the conditions they endured and the illegal rent hikes they absorbed. In November 2022, the board voted to reduce rents by 15%, the first rent reduction ever secured through a rent stabilization process in the United States.
The deal that wasn’t
Winning the reduction was only the beginning. Almost immediately, Aker and Mayor Noble struck a deal to convert Stony Run to so-called “workforce housing,” a designation that ties rents to area median income. The workforce rates started at 80% of the median income—far above what most Kingston renters actually earn. More than half of Kingston renters are already cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing. In practice, the deal would have meant rents as high as $2,733 a month for a three-bedroom apartment.
Tenants and housing attorneys argued from the start that the deal was illegal: under state law, rent stabilization applies to the unit, not the individual tenant, and private municipal agreements cannot override state statute. The city and Aker pushed back. The resolution passed anyway.
Aker then created a nonprofit to manage the property, which they fully owned, and secured what the HVTU says was a $35.8 million Freddie Mac loan. Tenants had been promised the money would fund long-overdue repairs. Greene said it went almost entirely toward refinancing the company’s existing debt.
“They got $35.8 million in a Freddie Mac loan,” Greene said. “Hear me when I tell you this: they didn’t use one penny to help with the maintenance issues here,” Greene said. “Not one dime.”
True to what organizers had warned, every new tenant who moved in after the deal paid workforce rates rather than stabilized ones. By 2025, more than half of Stony Run’s units had turned over, according to the HVTU. Long-term tenants averaged roughly $1,200 a month; newcomers averaged $1,800, or, in Gonzalez’s case, $2,300.
In March 2025, Aker went further, filing to exempt the entire complex from ETPA—not just vacant units, but all 266. Their argument: because a nonprofit managed the building, it qualified as a charitable operation exempt from rent regulation. In July 2025, the state ruled against them, finding Stony Run could not be excluded from ETPA protections. Aker has appealed.
The vacancy study fight
As the Stony Run battle was playing out, another threat was mounting. Kingston’s city charter, amended at Mayor Noble’s urging, required a new vacancy study every three years. In August 2025, that study came back with a reported 7.04% vacancy rate—above the 5% threshold, which would mean the housing emergency had ended and rent stabilization could disappear.
Tenant organizers were skeptical. Nemon began canvassing every building that had reported vacancies, talking to neighbors about the supposedly empty units down the hall.
“I started hearing the same story again and again,” Nemon said. “These units became empty mostly in early 2025. Tenants asked if friends or family could move in, and the landlords said they weren’t available.”
The data bore it out: Dutch Village, an Opus Management property with 140 units, reported just three vacancies in December 2024. By the time the study was conducted, when landlords knew it was imminent, that number had jumped to 15, according to the HVTU. The study also had a response rate of 120%, meaning seven landlords submitted responses despite never receiving a survey. Their buildings showed vacancy rates above 15%.
Tenant leaders like Caitlin Ruppert, a bartender and organizer at Franklin Apartments, began documenting specific units their landlords had claimed were vacant and available but that neighbors knew were nothing of the sort.
“In her building, there were two units the landlords reported as vacant and available but were not listed anywhere,” Nemon said. “They were trying to get their friends to move in. They were like, ‘No, no—these are not available for anybody.’”
Hundreds of tenants showed up to public hearings in November 2025. The Common Council voted unanimously to maintain rent stabilization, citing a citywide vacancy rate of 4.55%. Mayor Noble vetoed the resolution days before Christmas. The Council overrode him in January, with newly sworn-in members casting their first votes within minutes of taking office.
Landlords sued the city in March, and the case is before Judge David Gandin—the same judge who initially struck down the 2022 rent reduction.
In April, Gandin issued a partial restraining order suspending the requirement for landlords to offer new rent-stabilized leases, while rents remain frozen and other tenant protections stay in place. Organizers expect to lose at the trial level and appeal.
Strength in numbers
It was through all of this fighting—the Stony Run battles, the exemption claim, the vacancy study hearings—that the organizing infrastructure for the HVTU took shape. Tenant leaders from different buildings kept showing up in the same rooms, testifying at the same hearings, knocking on doors in buildings that weren’t their own.
The HVTU formally launched last month with support from the Kingston Common Council, state assembly members, and attorneys from the Hudson Valley Justice Center. The union currently counts roughly 250 engaged members and is growing weekly through canvassing, phone banking, and neighbor-to-neighbor outreach. It includes tenant associations at Stony Run, Chestnut Mansion, Dutch Village, Franklin Apartments, and several smaller buildings throughout Kingston, with plans to expand the model to other Hudson Valley municipalities.
For Greene, who has spent four years watching her neighbors cycle through fear, exhaustion, and renewed resolve, the coalition represents something the landlords have always counted on tenants lacking: staying power.
“They can basically dismantle a tenant union by just acting like we don’t exist,” she said. “So with the Hudson Valley Tenants Union being a collective of voices—we’ll show up collectively at rallies. We’ll speak out together. We will put them on blast.”
Gonzalez, for her part, is not backing down. The eviction notice Aker served her this month has no legal standing, organizers say: the state has already affirmed her right to pay the lower rent, and Aker has been accepting her payments while logging them as nonpayment. She is owed more than $54,000 in back overcharges and treble damages.
“I don’t even care about what they owe me,” she said. “I just want to have a home.”
