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By: Travis Wayne
ARLINGTON, MA – On Saturday, August 2, 2025, the Hamilton Tenants Association made a bold move: rallying directly and publicly against their landlord right outside their home.
It wasn’t their first option. The tenants at 898 Massachusetts Avenue had made phone call after phone call for everything under the sun, from repairs to cleaning, but Hamilton Company had changed the cleaning service to only come once a month instead of once a week to service the common areas of the apartment building. The conditions had become so atrocious inspectors came.
Tenants took things into their own hands. They faced a landlord presiding over lack of cleanliness, high rent, a paltry number of washing machines, an app that made paying rent harder to pay, and theft of personal belongings making the building even harder to live a dignified life in.
Another Load, Another App, Another Cost Atop Rent
Laundry was mentioned by every tenant who spoke to Working Mass. One of Hamilton Tenants Association member and resident at 898 Massachusetts Avenue, described the laundry crisis as all-encompassing:
We don’t have enough. Two washers and two dryers for a building with over forty people is simply not enough. We have the space for more washers and dryers and we believe our rent money should go towards that. We also have top loaders that are old, the middle part of the machine is known to rip our clothes and the black rubber inside leaves stains and damages clothes.
Laundry is a constant nuisance for tenants at Hamilton Company. Every minute of every day, tenants can be found trading the washer and dryer. Rage flares up between neighbors instead of at the landlord when a tenant leaves their clothes too long, or uses both washers at the same timeAll this does is cause discord in place of solidarity.
Lundry isn’t just a heavy load; it’s an economic burden.
“$3 per load ($3 to wash and $3 to dry) is too much,” reported one union member. The laundry expense can be a steep hurdle for tenants already cost-burdened by high rent and low pay. At the Stop and Shop across the street, entry-level starting salaries sit at around $15 and salaries for cashiers average at $22 an hour. Most tenants quoted a $2200 price figure for a one-bedroom at this address with Hamilton Company, not including tenants with Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV).
To say most pay almost their entire livelihoods to the landlord may, in fact, be an understatement.
Shaking her head, one tenant reported to Working Mass:
And they make it hard to even pay rent. They switched [the rental portal] to LOFT, some property rental management thing – now we call, no one answers the phone.
LOFT bills itself as an app to compile everything renters need into one portal. But a closer look at the LOFT website shows its incorporation: RealPage. Last year, in August 2024, the Justice Department sued RealPage with the attorneys general of eight states in an antitrust lawsuit to illustrate the corporation was decreasing competition among landlords nationwide by setting the price of rent algorithmically and monopolizing the market. LOFT is, in fact, a tool inside one of the many toolboxes used by landlords to not only make rent higher, but harder.
“We Pay Rent, Fix Our Homes” on one of the Hamilton Tenants Association rally signs (Working Mass)
Tenants Organize and Inspectors Come
Another tenant who used to live at a different Hamilton property down the street said that as she grew older, she needed more access: an elevator. She went to the management office and expressed her accessibility requirement. A member of the Hamilton Tenants Association, the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) holder was transferred to the brick building at 898 Massachusetts Avenue. She moved in November 2024.
Problems started immediately. When she tried to use the key that management had given her for the mailbox, the key didn’t work. Not only was it the wrong key; the mailboxes themselves were strewn on the ground.
In February, she asked the office about the mailboxes.
I called them up. But they said they didn’t know. They didn’t know when the mailboxes would get fixed, they said they’d call me back. And then – they didn’t.
On March 1, when rent was due, the tenant walked to the management office and asked again about the mailboxes’ repair. Still no update. The office didn’t seem to have any idea what repair order she referred to when they dismissed her.
Personal belongings are also going missing. Recently, with only a “you have till Friday,” to prepare, the landlord swooped into the common room and stole one personal belonging after another in the name of cleanliness. Tenants’ bicycles that were underneath the stairwell were also removed. One tenant sunbathed outside; they threw her radio and chair in the dumpster. She ordered them to remove her belongings from the trash and clean them before returning them to her.
The storage room was emptied of everything except for equipment that belonged to the landlord on the property. – but the tenants still have access to their individual storage units. While tenants began to organize as the Hamilton Tenants Association, to discuss their conditions and their demands, the Somerville Housing Authority sent an inspector to follow up on the tenant’s requests.
Upon seeing the mailboxes strewn across the front, the inspector ordered rent held till the repairs were done. Finally, the landlord complied and installed new mailboxes.
Tenants were just more furious.
Tenant organizers rallying in the center of Arlington against the landlord (Working Mass)
A Rally Draws Eyes and Questions
Tenants sent letters and raised demands. At every turn, Hamilton Company provided as much silence as when repairs were needed or rent was due on the portal owned by the algorithmic landlord monopoly.
On Saturday, August 2, the Hamilton Tenants Association chose to escalate.
The Greater Boston Tenants Union (GBTU) provided support, helped with strategy, and got the word out to wider community networks. Other tenants started arriving by bus to the windswept stretch of the road around which the city of Arlington was built in the early afternoon. They came from all corners of Boston, from as far as Roxbury and as near as Somerville, to show solidarity with the Hamilton Tenants Association in Arlington.
In reverberating shouts, tenants boomed:
“We pay rent, fix our homes!”
“Hamilton, shame on you, you buy our homes, fix them too!”
The fact that tenants rallied far from a city hall drew the attention of Arlington passersby in substantial numbers. More than three Arlington residents asked tenants about their demands in the space of a five minute period.
One tenant approached the rally and revealed he also lived at 898 Massachusetts Avenue. But he was a lot more disgruntled with his neighbors than the landlord: “every property manager has gotta suck, why rally here?” But his chorus of protests about the rally’s disruptiveness were soon drowned out. And after thirty minutes of conversation with a Greater Boston Tenants Union (GBTU) organizer, the tenant and the organizer shook hands.
As the crowd dispersed, one tenant mentioned an interesting fact: in the mobilization for the rally, another renter had reached out from somewhere outside of Arlington. They weren’t able to make the rally, but they did rent under the Hamilton Company.
They wanted to get involved.
Travis Wayne is the deputy managing editor of Working Mass and a rank-and-file member of the Greater Boston Tenants Union (GBTU).
Image of tenant unionists rallying with the Hamilton Tenants Association (Working Mass)
The post Hamilton Tenants Association Faces Terrible Landlord With Rally in Arlington appeared first on Working Mass.
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