Pioneering a
Tenants Union
Tenants with Pioneer Investments are forced to live in unsafe conditions. But when they speak out, they are faced with threats of eviction. Despite this, some tenants continue to organize to hold him accountable.
Embedded Files
By Gabriela Venegas-Ramirez
Nicole was at work when she received the text message from her fiancé: the rats had finally torn a hole in the roof. Around the same time, Mary’s basement had flooded once more. Melissa was scrambling to keep her bathroom roof from caving in. And Danielle was being forced to sleep in her living room, because the mold in her bedroom had become unbearable.
These are the stories of the tenants who have lived in properties of Pioneer Investments. And they are the stories of the tenants who, when they have spoken up against their hazardous living conditions, have received one thing - an eviction notice posted on their door.
Over the past few months, real estate firm Pioneer Investments and its owner, Anurag Sureka, have come under increased pressure from tenants and advocates due to the dangerous conditions of its residential properties. The majority of Pioneer’ renters are working families, many of whom have nowhere else to go. But when they speak up, almost all of them have faced the threat of eviction - which can be a matter of life or death for so many families.
This is why Reclaim RI, a social justice organization, is currently focusing on targeting Pioneer and helping the tenants organize to fight for better living conditions. Many of these tenants now hold leadership positions within Reclaim, and the group is now placing emphasis on exerting media pressure against Pioneer, as well as campaigning for legislation to protect tenants’ rights across the state.
I was able to speak with four members of Reclaim - Mary, Danielle, Nicole, and Melissa - who have experienced what it’s like living in a Pioneer property. These are tenants who have had to live in incredibly unsafe conditions, and still in the face of eviction threats, continue to speak out. Here are their stories.
Mary
Mary has lived in a Pioneer apartment since 2021. The first issue came with the mice. Mary reached out to the company’s property manager, Sharon, about the problem. The response took weeks to arrive. And when it did, it came in the form of what Mary describes as “little green pellets” for her to put around her floors and cabinets. But Mary has two kids, who are 1 and 2 years old - the crawling age. “If my kids get a hold of that,” she says, “I’m going straight to the hospital. I can’t have that kind of crap here.”
But as the mice chewed more holes into her apartment’s walls, and Pioneer Investments refused to answer her messages for help, it became clear that Mary would have to handle this entirely on her own. Determined to protect her kids, Mary took it upon herself to buy steel wool to fill in the holes, and even a cat, to hunt down the mice.
Soon after, the flooding started. To this day, every time it rains, Mary’s basement floods without fail. “He’s just not maintaining the property, period. He just doesn't care,” Mary tells me about Anurag Sureka, the owner of Pioneer. The mice continue to be an issue, and Mary routinely continues buying materials and filling in the holes herself. “We don't rely on Pioneer anymore,” she says.
Around December of 2022, Mary got a knock on her door from Reclaim RI. She learned that her neighbors, and tenants in other Pioneer properties, were also facing similar issues. So Mary decided to join, looking to help put an end to the abuses by Pioneer Investments. “This is the same in all his apartments, he doesn't care. He just wants the paycheck,” she says. “And if you say anything, you get evicted out.”
Mary’s eviction notice arrived in February, shortly after she joined Reclaim. By March 1st she was supposed to be out of her apartment. But Mary would not go down without a fight - she was going to court. Because despite the problems she has been facing in the property, finding another affordable home in Rhode Island has become increasingly difficult, as inflation and gentrification drive rental prices up. Moreover, the state has no rent control legislation, and the required fees to simply apply to rent a property can pose a large financial burden for many families. “All I'm trying to do is just stay in my apartment and keep my kids where they are,” Mary says. “It's my kids at the end of the day. They need a house, they need a home, they need food.”
On May 24th, Mary will hear back from the judge about the status of her eviction. “That’s actually when I find out what happens,” she says. For now, Mary is still in the apartment, “in the waiting game,” as she describes it. She traces this sudden threat of eviction to her involvement with Reclaim, for speaking out against Pioneer’s CEO. “He's mad that I'm speaking against him,” she says.
But Mary doesn’t regret raising her voice to denounce the company. She urges other tenants to be brave, to join the union and help hold Pioneer Investments accountable. “I'm trying to put my name out there to get other tenants to hop on board,” she says. “I have kids, too. I get it. But if we don't stop him now, it is going to get worse. We need to put an end to the slum lords, period.”
Danielle
Danielle and Stephen joined Reclaim around April 2022. The couple had moved into the Pioneer apartment only a few months earlier, and their bedroom ceiling had been leaking ever since. The mold and mildew from the leak had become so unbearable, that the couple had been forced to move to the living room. And despite Danielle’s constant requests for Pioneer to address the issue, the company barely acknowledged them. “You would call them and it would take three days to maybe three weeks for an answer,” Danielle says. And just like so many other Pioneer tenants, Danielle was forced to take matters into her own hands. “They didn't clean up the mold, and I had to go buy the bleach spray and everything.”
Danielle and Stephen also faced mice and frequent electricity shut-offs, with no prior notice. “The Pioneer electricians just shut the power off, and didn't give us a notice, not even the day before,” Danielle says. When this would happen, the electricity would be gone for four to eight hours, and the food they kept in the refrigerator would end up spoiling. The couple, and their neighbors in the building, ended up losing hundreds of dollars on food and makeshift repairs - because their landlord would ignore their calls for help.
In February of this year, Danielle and Stephen received an eviction notice - the couple had been late to pay rent by one day. Earlier, Danielle had called the company’s property manager, Sharon, to let her know of the situation beforehand. “I explained to Sharon that we only get paid every two weeks, and Stephen had just switched jobs,” Danielle says. “I told her we were in the process of paying the rent, but it was going to be late by a day because we had to wait for our paycheck.” But the property manager refused to acknowledge the payment. “She said she didn't want to hear it,” Danielle says. Danielle and Stephen paid the $1,200 the very next day - but despite the payment and Danielle’s communications, the couple received a summons to court for a non-payment case. But Reclaim RI, Danielle tells me, provided legal counseling and a lot of support in finding a new home. “If it wasn't for Reclaim, I don't know where we would be. We'd probably be homeless,” Danielle says.
Danielle and Stephen moved into their new home on February 27 2023, in a matter of two days. And they appreciate their new landlord greatly. “They've been communicating very well with me every single time,” Danielle says. “Not a day goes by that they don't communicate with us.”
And although she is no longer a Pioneer tenant, Danielle remains a vocal member of the Reclaim union. “Pioneer Investments evicted us because we were with Reclaim,” Danielle tells me. But, unlike many tenants who have faced retaliatory eviction, she’s not scared. She wants her name, out there, to show other tenants that they don’t have to be scared either. “Put down our names - Danielle Quick and Steven Puglio,” she tells me. “We are fighting this every bit of the way.”
Nicole
Nicole moved to Rhode Island from New Jersey two years ago, with her fiancé and her baby. Her fiancé had recently gotten a job offer, and the couple was excited about the opportunity this move would bring. They quickly landed upon a Pioneer apartment on Mills Street. At first, it didn’t seem too bad. Although there were issues with lighting and some cracks in the wood floors, the apartment was close to both of their jobs, and at a reasonable price.
Nicole and her family had moved into the Pioneer property in June. But come the colder months of fall, they realized the apartment had no heat.“We went through the whole winter without heat,” Nicole tells me. Although she reached out to the real estate company multiple times to let them know, she got no response. And as the danger of freezing temperatures approached, Nicole saw no other option but to buy her own space heaters. And they weren’t exactly cheap, she tells me.
Then the rats came, appearing, it seems, out of nowhere. And they became destructive. “I’m at work and my fiancé texts me, saying a rat scratched a hole through the ceiling,” Nicole says. “My son's snacks had holes in them, they were eaten all over the floor, and the garbage bags had holes in them.” The rats even chewed through the wires of the dishwasher, rendering it fully useless. But just like with the holes in the floors and the lack of heat, Pioneer did not answer Nicole’s complaints. “You think they care?” she says. “I'd be texting them, you have to control these rats, sending them pictures, and no communication from them whatsoever.” Nicole and her fiancé had to find their own solutions, filling the holes with steel wool and laying traps around the house. And this also became a financial burden - not only did they have to pay for the materials, they also had to constantly be replacing the food that the rats were eating. “I couldn't afford to keep shopping for more food,” Nicole says.
The last straw for Nicole came when she started smelling gas. She called an inspector, who informed her she had a gas leak from her stove. Through the inspector, Nicole also found out that the heater that Pioneer had installed had been installed illegally and posed a fire hazard. “He red tagged everything - the heater, which wasn’t even working, and the stove,” Nicole says. And because they weren’t able to use the stove, Nicole and her fiancé had to buy takeout food almost every night. “We spent $800 in that month on food,” Nicole tells me. After a month of her insisting to Pioneer that they address the gas leak, they finally came to fix it. “But a month later we were sick, congested, chest hurting, I think from the gas,” Nicole says.
In February 2023, Nicole and her family received the summons to court - they were late to pay rent. “We had the rent money, but it was difficult to manage everything that was going on,” Nicole says. “At that time we had a gas leak. We were buying food out. We didn't have any heat. We couldn't use the stove.”
And in April, they received the formal eviction letter. Nicole and her family were to vacate the apartment by May 1st, but they left as soon as they could, around mid April. “We left on our own, we just couldn’t take it anymore,” Nicole says.
Although they now live in a safer building, Nicole looks back on the eviction process and sees it as a retaliatory maneuver. “I was pressuring him with the issues I wanted fixed, I was also talking to Reclaim. It definitely was in retaliation,” she says. Nicole is determined to get her story out and to help hold Pioneer accountable, she tells me. “He’s living way better than us, collecting our money, while we’re sitting over here living in filth,” she says. “This isn’t good for our mental health. I've been through it and I don't want anyone else to endure that.”
Melissa
Melissa is a native Rhode Islander, from Pawtucket. In July 2017, Melissa and her two sons moved into a Pioneer apartment. And Pioneer, she tells me,“has been the worst landlord ever in the history of my life.”
Within the first day, Melissa tells me, she found out that they would be living without electricity for two weeks. Her new landlord hadn’t even let the electric company know that a new tenant was moving in. “We had no running hot water, no showers, no fridge, nothing,” Melissa says. “I had to send my children to Florida to live with my mom, just so I could deal with my apartment that I thought was gonna be okay.”
Once this was sorted out and her children were able to move back in, Melissa tells me that there were other little issues, but “nothing too bad.” That is, until May 2018. “I’m sleeping, and all of a sudden I hear a collapse and rushing water in my bathroom,” she says. The roof of her bathroom had caved in, flooding the room with water. Melissa immediately contacted her landlord to report the issue. But the company told her it was a simple leak, that she could patch it up and spray bleach to get rid of the mold this was causing. Pioneer didn’t come to properly address the issue until nearly five years later, in March of this year. “They literally had to replace the whole entire roof,” Melissa says. “There was a hole in the roof, and the whole side of the building had rotted.”
In October 2018, Melissa had her third child, a daughter. And that winter, she found out her heat had stopped working. She reported this to her landlord, to no avail. So Melissa had to go out of her way to buy space heaters, which she had to use until this year, 2023, because for five years the heat did not work. And this also posed significant financial stress, in terms of electric bills. “A normal electric bill back then in 2018 was about $150 to $300,” Melissa says. “But now because we need the space heaters, it’s jacked up to $600 a month. Just to keep my apartment warm in the winter.”
Melissa’s basement was supposed to have a dry storage space, according to Zillow. But since she moved in, it’s been consistently flooding, she tells me. “All my stuff is ruined downstairs,” Melissa says. “And we’ve found drowned rats that you can literally smell coming up through the basement.” Because Melissa also started getting rats. “They ate our food. They chewed a hole through the walls in my closet.”
By 2019, the problems in her house were only accumulating. With an already leaking and molding bathroom, no heat, a flooding basement, and rats, the second bathroom began to have serious plumbing issues. And soon after Melissa began to notice that the paint on her doorways and windows began to chip, posing a serious threat of lead poisoning. Her daughter, 4, is seeing developmental problems, Melissa tells me, and the family has begun to show symptoms of asthma. Melissa attributes all of this to the lead in her home: “There’s exposure for everybody,” Melissa says. “The lead is in the paint, in the dust we’re inhaling, it’s in the water.”
Melissa decided she had had enough. Come 2020, she called for an inspection, to which Pioneer finally agreed to send in repairs. But Melissa tells me that these repairs were minimal, and actually resulted in more safety hazards. “They patched it up enough to shut us up. They don't care about our well being,” Melissa says. “You still smell the mold in the bathroom, all they did was spray some paint over the bathtub and shower.” But that paint has peeled now, she tells me. So now, in addition to still having mold, Melissa is worried about her children’s exposure to the peeling paint. “I can’t even give my daughter a bath, because that paint can go on her body, or get in her mouth,” she says. “I don't know what it’s made of. Pioneer says it's safe, but I think paint being stuck in body parts is not at all safe.”
And through it all, the rent was still increasing. “It was $1,4500 when I first moved in. Now it’s at $1,950,” Melissa says. “And this house keeps falling apart.”
In September 2022, Reclaim knocked on Melissa’s door. After learning about other tenants’ experiences, Melissa decided to step forward to publicly denounce Pioneer. “Reclaim made me feel heard, they made me feel validated,” Melissa says. “Because at first I thought I was going crazy, asking just for basic needs to be fixed. But Reclaim made me realize that these are literally just basic needs. So I started fighting for it, demanding things to get done.” With Reclaim’s help, Melissa started organizing campaigns and talking to reporters, getting her experiences published in the Providence Journal.
At first, Melissa didn’t think Pioneer would retaliate too strongly. She had already been going after Pioneer and Anurag Sureka, fighting to hold them accountable. “I was fighting with him for all those years to get things fixed, called Code Enforcement, reported everything,” she says. “It was already public knowledge. So I thought, if I stand up for others as well, he can’t do anything.”
In January 2023, Melissa and Reclaim had begun a campaign with other tenants to send demand letters to Anurag Sureka’s house. Almost immediately after, Sureka contacted Melissa and gave her three options: she could either keep quiet and stay in her home, move into a smaller Pioneer apartment, or she would just have to get out - and face an eviction.
On April 29, Melissa received the eviction notice. The letter stated that Pioneer was going to sell the property, so they needed her to leave within 30 days. With the support of Reclaim, Melissa quickly turned to a lawyer with the Center for Justice.“I had a lawyer look it over. It's not legal,” Melissa says. “So I did what the lawyer said, I paid my rent, and we're just waiting to see if he's going to actually evict me or just keep taking my rent and let me stay here.”
Melissa and her children were supposed to be out of the house by May 1st, but they are still waiting to hear back from Pioneer’s lawyer. Meanwhile, Melissa has been looking for another place to call home. But it’s not easy. Overall, the situation has become so difficult, Melissa tells me, that it seems her only option is to move out of the state. “I've been a Rhode Islander all my life and now I'm being kicked out of my own state by someone that doesn't even live in our state,” Melissa says.
On one hand, Rhode Island is becoming too expensive. The average monthly rent is now estimated at $2,438. “I don't know where the hell I can move to safely,” Melissa says. “I've been trying, but who has $10,000 to move on a single mom budget, with three children trying to make ends meet?”And moreover, Pioneer’s retaliation didn’t end at the eviction notice. Evictions can stay on renters’ records, which makes it extremely difficult to find a home. “I've had nothing but bad luck since going public. I've had six landlords straight out tell me no, because I may cause some problems. Because Anurag will not remove the eviction from my record,” Melissa says. “So I'm stuck. I'm literally stuck in torturous hell, because I can't get out.”
When I ask Melissa if she regrets speaking out, she says she doesn’t. She tells me she’s fighting for her children, and future generations, to establish fair laws around housing. And she’s fighting for her neighbors, those who have gone through similar experiences. “I need to be able to be the face of it. Who the hell's gonna stand up for the people that can't speak for themselves? It's scary, but I've already done the scary work. The most he's going to do is kick me out,” she says. “And unfortunately, if I have to, I'll leave the state for a little bit. I don't know. We'll figure it out. But I'm not going to let this man hurt anybody else. I refuse.”
The Ocean State’s Housing Crisis
These stories are not unique to Pioneer properties. State-wide, Rhode Island is facing a massive housing crisis. The state lacks affordable housing, has no rent control legislation, and was recently reported to be the fifth most expensive state to live in.
Lawmakers and advocates have been attempting to tackle this issue by pushing for new, more just legislation. Some of the bills that are being proposed include H5691, prohibiting a landlord from increasing the rent more than once annually, and H5580, which prohibits landlords from requiring application fees from prospective tenants. And Senator Tiara Mack (D-Providence) is pushing for a Tenant Bill of Rights, which includes the right to organize, freedom from discrimination, the right to legal counsel, and the right to be free of eviction without good cause.
For now, tenants with Reclaim are continuing the fight for safe housing. There are multiple ways to support their efforts. You can donate to the Pioneer Tenant Support Fund, which is our eviction defense fund to keep tenants in their homes. You can also join the Tenant Union, and help us recruit and support tenants, raise awareness about their experiences, and help us support upcoming tenants rights legislation. Reach out to Reclaim at organize@reclaimri.org, or visit our website for more information.
Gabriela Venegas-Ramirez, a freshman at Brown, is studying Political Science and Economics.
Commentary:
My goal with this article was to highlight the conditions that individual tenants of Pioneer Investments were facing. I feel that oftentimes when we speak of housing crises, or other related topics, we tend to focus on the bigger picture - the legislation, the large advocacy groups, the bipartisan debate - and this means that many times, the very people that are being most affected go overlooked. I myself am an organizer with Reclaim, and have recruited a few tenants to the union. I wanted to provide a platform for some of the tenants to have their voices heard, and although I know it’s just an article for a class, this is still a starting point. I interviewed more than 10 tenants, but I know I couldn’t include them all in such a short article. Overall, the article was quite a challenge to write. Many tenants actually did not want to talk about their experiences. Others were simply very hard to schedule with. Some talked for two hours straight, others talked for 8 minutes. Transcribing the interviews and chronologically structuring their stories from our conversations, was also a big challenge. But I think the hardest thing was really hearing about their experiences, and how unjust our system of housing can be.
Source list:
Interview with Shana Crandell (Reclaim RI organizer leading the tenants union) - May 9
Interview with Mary - May 3
Interview with Danielle - May 2
Interview with Nicole - May 3
Interview with Melissa - May 13
https://upriseri.com/senator-mack-renters-rights-legislation-rally-state-house/
https://upriseri.com/pioneer-tenants-united-rally-safe-housing-legal-rights-for-renters/
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