Eight months after launching an ambitious rent strike to prevent their own displacement, striking members of Chicago’s Belden Sawyer Tenant Association (BSTA) were displaced from their Logan Square building.
When the once “naturally affordable” building at the corner of Belden and Sawyer avenues was sold in November 2024 to real estate investor Andrew Millard, who planned to turn it into luxury apartments, residents formed BSTA to protest the sale. In February 2025, BSTA authorized a rent strike in an effort to halt the conversion.
In their fight to keep the building as long as possible, the union has undergone a transformative crash course in tenant organizing. While union members didn’t achieve their initial goal, they have built something they refuse to leave behind with their old apartments.
“I feel like I’ve taken whatever the pill is in The Matrix,” union member David Amato says. “It’s hard to think back before this.”
While neighbors didn’t all know one another before they began to organize, Amato says the building became almost like a dorm as residents worked together. Many became friends, grilling together in the courtyard and watching one another’s cats upon request. When the building occupancy dwindled by about half after the new owners declined to renew leases past October 2025, the union gathered weekly in Amato’s apartment. During these meetings, residents made collective decisions, whether about gardening the building’s outdoor space or picketing outside Millard’s offices.
After six months, the rent strike ended in September 2025. To get the resulting eviction cases resolved, including having some of their unpaid rent waived and their eviction records sealed, striking members agreed not to speak publicly about Millard or his businesses. Shelterforce had already been speaking with the tenants before this agreement was made (or even began to be negotiated); however, to minimize potential legal issues for the tenants, we have honored their requests to exclude all statements from our interviews with union members about Millard and his businesses or former businesses, including 33 Realty and Concord Capital.
By the time of the settlement, tenants had already been discussing how the union could survive their displacement and evolve into a power-building body for tenants throughout Chicago. Members call this “phase two.”
“One of the coolest things about starting this organization was participating in a democratic process on a day-to-day basis,” Amato says. “We beat a path so quickly from our building to the alderman’s office and our state senator. We were just suddenly in the conversation politically. I want other people to have that experience.”
‘Dignified Space That’s About to Be Ripped Away’
Residents formed the Belden Sawyer Tenant Association in an effort to stay put in an affordable-but-classic Chicago building in a neighborhood that is rapidly becoming more expensive. In These Times describes the building at 2257 N. Sawyer as “a vintage courtyard building with gleaming oak interiors.”
While the Craftsman-style apartments didn’t have the frills of new luxury rentals, like stone countertops and in-unit laundry, residents told Block Club Chicago that the building was well maintained and affordable, with units renting for $1,200 to $1,500 per month.
Standing in her light-filled dining room over Labor Day weekend, BSTA member Tory deMartelly said her neighbors are part of a lineage of working-class people who have called the building home.
As Amato told Block Club Chicago in January 2025, “I’m a plumber. There’s people in here who are warehouse workers, grocery store workers with young families, old people.”
With its two bay windows, deMartelly’s apartment was her first with enough window space for her plant collection. It also had a clawfoot tub, which deMartelly relished. She says her work as a doula can be hard on her body, and soaking helps her recover. She was unsure whether she’d be able to afford another apartment with such a comfort.
“We love this building and we want to stay,” Amato told Block Club Chicago. “Nobody’s rich, but we all have this dignified space that’s about to be ripped away from us.”
Conversion to Luxury Apartments
The building was sold to Millard under 2257 N Sawyer LLC on Nov. 19, 2024. In media appearances and press releases, however, residents stated they had had no knowledge that the building was even on the market until after the sale closed. According to the union’s first press release, an unsigned letter posted in the building’s lobbies stated that the building had been sold and would be managed by 33 Realty Management. Some longtime residents were “informed by 33 Realty Management that they would need to move out at the expiration of their current leases to make way for interior renovations.”
Millard is the founder of 33 Realty, which offers property management and brokerage services. He sold the company in 2022 to Poplar Homes, which was later acquired by national property management company Evernest. Millard subsequently founded Concord Capital, a real estate investment group focused on middle-market multifamily homes. Millard hired 33 Realty to manage 2257 N. Sawyer, according to Block Club Chicago.
For the past year, Concord Capital’s website has said the company plans to acquire at least 1,350 multifamily rental units in Chicago within the next 18 months, specifically targeting properties in the “middle-market multifamily sector.”
In contrast to this strategy detailed on Concord’s website, Millard told Shelterforce that his experience with BSTA has led him to focus instead on converting office buildings into apartments.
On Christmas Eve 2024, BSTA issued a press release stating that more notices had been sent to tenants informing them that their leases would not be renewed. Millard told Block Club Chicago in January 2025 that he planned to rent renovated units for at least $2,400, nearly double the previous rents.
In a February 2026 interview, Millard told Shelterforce he was “mortified” when 33 Realty sent the nonrenewal notices on Christmas Eve, acknowledging that Chicago requires 90 to 120 days’ notice for lease nonrenewals. He added that he has since brought property management services “in house” for his properties.
Millard also told Shelterforce the updated rents were “market driven.”
“If you put a little nicer countertops in and put in-unit laundry and et cetera, then we go on and we look at what the Logan Square market yields,” Millard says. “And we put it somewhere around what the market yields.”
(Millard told In These Times that he planned to make one garden-level affordable unit “that will rent at $1,116.” Building permits from June 2025 suggest that three accessory dwelling units are planned for that floor.)
Block Club Chicago reported in mid-January 2025 that management had offered to extend residents’ leases after all, but only through October 2025 and with a 25 percent rent increase. That offer was “insulting,” Amato told Block Club Chicago.
“The extension until October may appear as a concession,” Amato said in a January 2025 BSTA press release, “but many landlords make similar offers after purchasing buildings just to line up the lease expirations.”
Millard characterized the extension as a compromise he made based on the request of the 35th Ward Alderman’s office. At the time, the office was held by Carlos Ramirez-Rosa.
Millard told Shelterforce that the 25 percent rent increase was necessary to pay the mortgage but that he extended the leases to “be a good steward of the neighborhood.” He said he made the call “first off because we screwed up and sent [the nonrenewal notices] on Christmas. Second, I don’t want to be known as a bad person.” He said he thought if he could “put some of that money forth and [be] able to have these people have a better timeline,” they might not “feel like they’re ‘getting kicked out.’”
“The investors will absolutely get less because we stalled this 18 months,” Millard says. “We gave away a significant amount of money, but I thought that was palatable in trying to be a good steward.”
By the fall of 2025, 5 units remained occupied by striking BSTA members. When asked why he chose not to concede to the remaining members and upgrade the other 11 apartments, Millard says it would not generate the same returns for investors.
“That would make the deal literally not work,” Millard says. “Or the percentage that I told the investor that they would get is now a quarter of what they would get.”
A Thwarted purchase Attempt
Shortly after learning that their building had been sold, residents formed the Belden Sawyer Tenant Association, hoping to use a new local ordinance to oppose the sale and buy the building as a collective.
On Sept. 18, 2024, the Chicago City Council passed the Northwest Side Preservation Ordinance. The anti-gentrification ordinance applies only to specific areas of Northwest Chicago, with the idea that it will eventually be implemented elsewhere. Notably, it includes Logan Square.
The ordinance features a form of a Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), granting tenants the right to buy their building when it goes up for sale. To do so, according to Block Club Chicago, tenants must form an organization, match existing sale offers, and provide a letter of intent from “a lender or community organization.” Tenants then have up to four months to secure financing and close on the sale.
Although the ordinance was passed in September 2024, it didn’t actually take effect until March 2025—after the sale was completed—making BSTA ineligible to use it.
If the ordinance had gone into effect earlier, Bill Houck, the building’s former owner, would have been required to notify tenants of his intent to sell. Union members told Shelterforce that simply being notified before the sale was finalized would have made a difference to them.
“I think we could have possibly all sat down with him and been like, ‘This is how this is going to affect us,’” Amato said in August.
Houck did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Organizing a Rent Strike
Before the union could send Millard a list of demands, it first needed to do some research to even identify him as the building’s new owner. When members first did a title search, the owner was listed only as 2257 N Sawyer LLC, the building’s address. They had to then uncover who owned that LLC.
“What people don’t know is that you can ask for things. You can track these people down. You can start a communication line,” union member Sarah Rooney said over Labor Day weekend. “We started with, ‘Hey, can we have a conversation with this guy? . . . Can we maybe negotiate a way to stay a little bit longer or stay in the building?’”
When union members found out who owned their building, they tried to make contact. They also found other buildings owned by Millard and reached out to their residents. Through this research, and with support from the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance (ACTA), BSTA members connected with tenants at another one of Millard’s properties in Uptown and helped them unionize under the name Fuerzas Inquilinos de Broadway y Cuyler (FIBC). In These Times reported that Uptown residents were also facing displacement so their apartments can be converted into luxury rentals.
In May 2025, members of FIBC sued the property’s owners and 33 Realty for violating their rights under the Chicago Residential Landlord Tenant Ordinance (RLTO), including claims that the companies failed to provide proper notice of termination of tenants’ leases and that defendants’ attempts to remove tenants from the property amounted to housing discrimination. The lawsuit argues that when Millard purchased the property in January 2025 and enlisted 33 Realty for property management the companies inherited responsibility for existing habitability issues including “pests, mold, crumbling walls and floors, leaking and unreliable plumbing, unreliable heat,” and failed to address those problems.
ACTA organizer Maya Odendahl says that as of February 2026 FIBC members had settled their dispute and—like BSTA members—were bound by confidentiality. Millard declined to comment on the legal dispute.
Members of BSTA also met with elected officials for help brokering a deal with Millard. Anthony Quezada, former Cook County 8th District commissioner and current 35th Ward alderman, wrote to Concord Capital in January expressing “deep concern” over the situation and support for the union’s demands. The union also wrote to the bank that provided the $3.5 million construction mortgage for the building’s purchase, writing, “We believe that we are more responsible stewards of the building than Mr. Millard, and are prepared to negotiate responsibly for the mortgage on this building.”
Ultimately, the union launched the rent strike to build leverage and pressure Millard to come to the negotiating table. Tenants told Shelterforce that every dollar that striking union members would have paid in rent was deposited into a separate bank account. This money would have been paid to Millard if he had reached an agreement with the union.
Odendahl told Shelterforce that a rent strike, while a tactic of last resort, is the ultimate way for tenants to gain leverage over property owners. The tactic has a long history in Chicago, including historic strikes in the 1920s and 1960s.
Under Chicago’s RLTO, it is legal for Chicago tenants to withhold up to 50 percent of their rent to force repairs. But according to Injustice Watch, navigating the conditions and rules under which this right can be exercised is challenging, and landlord retaliation, though illegal, is common. According to ACTA, partially withholding rent means “counting on the landlord to play nice,” because it doesn’t give tenants as much leverage as a full strike. During a full strike, tenants completely “turn off the tap” of revenue for owners, Odendahl says, thereby applying greater pressure.
In BSTA’s case, tenants argued that repairs weren’t needed for the building; they wanted leverage to be able to stay in their homes.
ACTA helped BSTA members plan their rent strike by discussing the risks, setting up a strike fund to cover court fees, and connecting them with free legal representation for negotiations and possible evictions. According to a Feb. 24, 2025, press release, the union authorized the strike to start on March 1, with the stipulation that it would be called off if Millard negotiated in good faith by Feb. 28.
DeMartelly says it was important for the union to model the rent strike as a tool, especially since the striking members in this case were in a relatively privileged position. All members presented as white, spoke English, and had a level of education that made them comfortable speaking to the media.
The union presented four demands:
- Annual one-year lease renewals.
- Reasonable rent to be negotiated with management by the tenant association.
- No renovations.
- Ownership to negotiate in good faith with the Fuerzas Inquilinos de Broadway y Cuyler.
Millard filed eviction notices last spring. (The precise date of the eviction notices could not be confirmed due to sealed records.) The union continued its strike until mid-September 2025, when it reached a settlement with Millard and 33 Realty. The settlement allowed union members to avoid going to trial, waived some back rent, and ensured that the eviction cases would be sealed. Included in the settlement was the agreement that union members would no longer speak publicly about Millard or his related businesses. All BSTA members moved out of the building by the end of October.
Nonetheless, Odendahl says, ACTA considers the BSTA rent strike historic. Since ACTA was founded as the North Spaulding Renters Association in 2020, this is the first strike the collective has seen continue following the first issuance of eviction notices.
Phase Two for BSTA
Amato told Shelterforce that he sees BSTA as having two phases: it first fought the immediate material threat of displacement, and now it will work on building a broader tenant power movement across the city. The union’s first order of business during “phase two” has been standing in solidarity with migrant tenants.
This second phase began during members’ final days in the Belden building. In October 2025, BSTA joined ACTA and other groups in calling for an eviction moratorium across Cook County in response to raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Danny Rosa, an organizer with ACTA, told Block Club Chicago that because immigration enforcement agents are not supposed to enter a private home without a signed judicial warrant, being at home is the safest place for those trying to avoid detention by ICE. As a result, the groups who signed this open letter to Governor J.B. Pritzker supporting the moratorium noted that workers “are afraid to go to work and are therefore struggling to pay rent as a direct result of Donald Trump’s wave of terror in Chicago,” which will soon affect their access to that safety. Odendahl told Shelterforce that BSTA took the lead in penning that letter.
In an October 2025 press release announcing BSTA’s support for the blanket eviction moratorium, deMartelly said that “Chicagoans should not have to live in fear of losing their homes because of Donald Trump.”
More recently, BSTA hosted a “rent party” fundraiser in February 2026 to support people affected by ICE raids through Organized Communities Against Deportations’ rental assistance fund. DeMartelly says the inaugural event raised $5,000.
BSTA members also want to organize to protect, strengthen, and expand tenant opportunity to purchase rights so that other Chicagoans in similar situations might have the chance to purchase their buildings.
Chicago’s Northwest Side Preservation Ordinance, which contains the tenant opportunity to purchase provisions, has faced some backlash. In December 2024, the Chicago City Council not only delayed the implementation of the ordinance to the following March but also announced several amendments. One of these amendments, the alderpeople said, would provide clearer rules for residents seeking to purchase their buildings. According to Block Club Chicago, the Chicago Association of Realtors had “raised concerns that the tenant opportunity program would delay housing transactions, add further documentation and financial constraints to the selling process and create more challenges in the real estate market.”
[RELATED ARTICLE: TOPA Needs Capital to Succeed]
In June 2025, Aldermen Felix Cardona Jr. (31st) and Gilbert Villegas (36th) introduced an amendment to remove their districts from the program. Per Block Club Chicago, the aldermen stated that “some of their residents have faced complications when trying to sell properties and have voiced concerns over the ordinance affecting the real estate market.”
Block Club Chicago also reported that BSTA members and other organizers “made the plea that alders should support the measure that can give families like theirs a chance to own property in the area and stay in the community—even if it takes more time to buy and sell a building—and not bend to pressure from the real estate industry.”
DeMartelly worries that the real estate lobby could kill a path to greater community control over housing, saying that the power of the real estate industry is a strong reason for tenants to get organized. She says that property owners and real estate investors have long been organized into associations, and now tenants are fighting to catch up.
Homeowners are considered viable political actors. Why aren’t tenants?”
David Amato, BSTA member
“Homeowners are considered viable political actors,” Amato says. “Why aren’t tenants?”
To lay a foundation for future campaigns, BSTA adopted a new constitution and bylaws in October 2025, paving the way for broader member recruitment. Members established a democratic process, with a governing body and “building committees.” These committees, composed of individuals who live in the same building or have the same landlord, organize with the support of the larger union. The constitution places these committees under BSTA, ensuring that members have an organization to return to if they’re forced to leave their buildings, as the original BSTA members were.
As of March 2026, deMartelly says the union has 33 members.
While the two organizations may seem similar, Amato says, ACTA and BSTA have different structures and goals. According to its website, ACTA aims “to build durable, rent strike ready, ideological tenant unions across the city of Chicago.” BSTA is already an established union that has recruited members across the city; part of its strategy is to create a tenant union that can’t be dismantled when tenants are evicted or have to move.
“Once [building-level] tenant unions are forced to dissolve by all the forces that we know rob tenants of their agency to begin with, [those tenants are] also evicted from their tenant unions,” deMartelly says. “We wanted this to continue being a place that not only we can organize together but have . . . tenants join this union and become part of a thing that isn’t going to fade with the landlord’s mind changing about where you get to live.”
For Amato, continuing the union in “phase two” is key to maintaining what members have built. He adds that the sense of empowerment he’s discovered through solidarity with his neighbors has been transformative.
“The thought that we could assert any kind of agency was kind of wild because you’re so conditioned to think, ‘You just need to go along to get along. You need to cooperate,’” Amato says. “This has been the first time for me—as someone who rents—that I’ve just been like, ‘Actually, no.’”
BSTA members don’t want a world in which people can be “hustled out of [their] homes,” Amato says. During an interview over Labor Day weekend, members discussed how patterns of displacement create cities that working-class people can’t afford to live in.
“You become part of a community, and then you have to move and start over. And then what if the building that you move into gets bought and you have to move the next year?” Devon Carson, a resident of the Belden Sawyer building for eight years, told Shelterforce. Displacement is “so prevalent right now,” Carson added.
Amato elaborated on his thoughts about the tenant movement via text message: “I think we moved past ‘Housing is a human right’ as a slogan,” he wrote, “and into a material fight to defend this right.”
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