The birth of an organizer

Anna Nemetz had only been living in her Crown Heights apart­ment for a few weeks when she invited a group of friends over to check it out. She was proud of her light-filled one-bedroom, the first apart­ment she’d ever lived in without room­mates. It was in a great loca­tion, too; just a block from the hip Franklin Avenue commer­cial corridor, and an easy walk to an express stop on the subway. 

But the apart­ment had an invis­ible defect. 

When Nemetz’s friends arrived that winter evening in 2023, no one took off their coats. The place was an icebox. Nemetz mentioned that the heat was, tech­ni­cally, turned on. ​“Just turn it off,” her friends told her. ​“It doesn’t make any sort of difference.”

This was one of many indig­ni­ties Nemetz, now 30 and working in human resources, faced with her heating situ­a­tion. Her Stiebel Eltron fan-forced heaters barely worked. And when she turned them on, they left her with an elec­tric bill she couldn’t afford: $376 after just two weeks.

That winter, Nemetz tried to use her building-provided heaters as little as possible. Instead, she used a small, oil-based space heater in her bedroom that was rela­tively econom­ical at warming the space when she kept the door closed.

But her kitchen and living room were still cold. ​“I would just be running back and forth from my room to the kitchen,” she said. ​“I liter­ally am paying rent to live in an apart­ment, but I can only live in the bedroom itself,” Nemetz thought to herself. ​“I might as well have a roommate.” 

Nemetz quickly real­ized she was not suffering alone. Other tenants had been complaining about inad­e­quate heat for years, and had mounted various forms of protest in response. But in the winter of 2023, Nemetz and a core group of tenants decided to redouble their efforts. 

“I never thought that I would ever be someone who’s involved in orga­nizing,” she said. But circum­stances forced her into that role. She refused to be ​“content with some­thing that you know in your heart is not fair and not just.” 

After being looped in by another tenant, Nemetz sprung into action as an orga­nizer. She pasted signs in hall­ways displaying QR codes for tenants to join a Whatsapp group, and canvassed the building. She inter­faced with the land­lord as well as outside tenant advo­cacy groups. She also made an effort to sustain momentum from one winter to the next, as enthu­siasm among other tenants inevitably waned. 

There were moments of ​“imposter syndrome,” Nemetz recalled. ​“I don’t really know what I’m talking about,” Nemetz would think to herself, or ​“I don’t want to bug people.” A fellow tenant told her to banish those doubts from her brain. ​“What are you talking about?” her neighbor told her. ​“You liter­ally started this, you’re one of the founders.” 

Ultimately, for Nemetz, the outcome of all this work was more than just better heating and cooling. Building rela­tion­ships with a huge diver­sity of people in her rent-stabi­lized Brooklyn apart­ment was eye opening. It also strength­ened her sense of community. 

“It’s taught me a lot about how to lead and manage different people’s person­al­i­ties and the ways that different people commu­ni­cate,” she said. ​“I was never really close with my neigh­bors at other build­ings and now I just feel a lot of soli­darity with the people in my building. It made me feel more comfort­able, and like I have more of a place in my neigh­bor­hood, too.”