On the Home Front

The Hoboken Fair Housing Association (HFHA), a nominee for the 2025 Organizing Awards, is recognized for its work to defeat a landlord-backed referendum that would have rolled back rent control in the city. Hoboken Fair Housing Association (HFHA), a long-established tenants’ rights organization and affiliate of New Jersey Tenants Organization (NJTO), joined forces with Hoboken United Tenants (HUT), an emerging group of tenants and their allies, to defend the city’s rent control protections. 

The city of Hoboken has a long history of gentrification. Since the 1980s, there have been multiple attempts to weaken rent control, misadministration of the law, and a general unwillingness among elected officials to protect renters’ interests. Large corporate developers have sought every opportunity to replace rent-controlled units with new luxury properties and to squeeze out as much profit as possible from tenants. 

In spring 2024, the Mile Square Taxpayers Association (MSTA) – a lobbying association of corporate and portfolio landlords, real estate developers, and investors – launched a signature-gathering campaign to place a referendum on the November 2024 ballot that would allow for vacancy decontrol of rent-controlled properties – meaning that landlords could raise the rent without limit when a tenant moves out. The Hoboken City Council, seeking to avoid a referendum, negotiated a potential compromise with MSTA. “The city council didn’t know how strong the tenant force had become in Hoboken, so they were trying to get a compromise, but the compromise involved vacancy decontrol – something I could never support,” reflected Cheryl Fallick, an organizer with the HFHA.  

When a sizable number of tenants and rent control supporters showed up to the meeting where the MSTA/city council compromise was up for a vote, the city council unanimously rejected the compromise proposal and MTSA’s referendum moved forward. The intergenerational campaign against the MTSA referendum was, in part, born out of the Hoboken City Council meeting about the compromise proposal. Recognizing the potential of their collective power, the leaders who testified at the hearing organized a group dinner, where they discussed their plans to launch an official campaign against the rent control referendum. 

With two months before Election Day, organizers formed the “Hoboken United Tenants” (HUT) PAC and launched an eight-week sprint to victory at the ballot box. Close collaboration between longtime HFHA leaders, most of whom were older Hoboken residents, and younger HUT leaders maximized the campaign’s reach across demographic groups. The NJTO President provided guidance, valuable expertise and support throughout the campaign. HFHA educated its constituency through email and Facebook outreach, while HUT reached voters through Instagram and WhatsApp. 

The loss of local news sources like the Hoboken Reporter left both the pro- and anti-referendum campaigns more reliant on social media to spread their respective messages. Organizers took every opportunity to create meaningful content and spread the word on social media. They also combatted rampant online misinformation from the landlord lobby.  

Organizers knew, however, that they could not rely on social media alone. Their strategy, as Cheryl described, was to “fire on all cylinders.” The campaign organized a highly strategic door-knocking effort, using the voter rolls to prioritize mail-in and early voters to ensure they learned about the referendum before they cast their ballots. With dedicated campaign outreach reminding people to turn their ballot over, the undervote (share of voters who left the question blank) was minimal.  

In previous campaigns, elected officials were hesitant to publicly support rent control, even if they would express their support behind the scenes. This time, local leaders became a vocal part of the campaign against the referendum. Despite aggressive lobbying from landlord groups, the widespread impact of the housing affordability crisis and corporate/portfolio landlords’ bad behavior made it politically palatable for elected officials to side with tenants in this election. 

The intergenerational coalition between HFHA and HUT contributed to the campaign’s landslide victory against the referendum. In a small city like Hoboken, with just one square mile in area and a population of 60,000, elections can be won by just a handful of votes. Although tenant organizers could feel the momentum in their favor, they could not take any votes for granted: Cheryl always reminded her fellow organizers to “run like you’re losing.” This work ethic paid off for HFHA and HUT. In Hoboken’s first anti-rent control referendum brought forward by MSTA in 2012 tenants won by 52 votes: this time, they won by more than 10,000. By a 46-point margin, Hoboken voters resoundingly rejected the landlord-backed referendum.  

While Hoboken renters are still fighting the forces of displacement and corporate abuse, voters in this majority-renter city made their voices heard in unequivocal support of strong tenant protections – a decisive victory that should ward off future landlord-led attempts to roll back rent control and give momentum to ongoing tenant organizing. Join NLIHC in congratulating HFHA and their allies on a major organizing win! 

About the NLIHC Organizing Awards 

NLIHC’s annual Organizing Awards recognize outstanding achievements in statewide, regional, citywide, neighborhood, or resident organizing that further NLIHC’s mission of ensuring that people with the lowest incomes have quality homes that are accessible and affordable in communities of their choice. On the Home Front will highlight the victories of organizing award nominees throughout February and March. The winners will be announced the week prior to NLIHC’s 2025 Housing Policy Forum, where they will participate in a plenary discussion.