Requiem for Michael

Michael McKee: 1939-2025: Celebrating a life devoted to tenants’ rights. Updated on December 3, 2025.

The fight started over a broken window, as fights sometimes do. The year was 1969. The window was in Michael McKee’s apartment on West 17th Street. And the fight? That was with predatory landlordism, and it lasted for the rest of his life.

By no means, of course, was it Michael’s fight alone. As he adamantly asserted at every opportunity, his efforts were always part of a much bigger struggle for decent, affordable housing as a basic human right. In New York City, that struggle dates back at least as far as the first large rent strikes on the Lower East Side in the early 1900s. Michael’s involvement commenced as the tenant movement picked up steam in the late 1960s’ cauldron of protests for civil rights and gay liberation, and against the war in Vietnam. From then on, until his death in October of this year, he played a singular role in battling well-resourced forces of greed and corruption.

More on that long fight to come – but first, back to the broken window.

It was only a nuisance initially, just a missing pane in Michael’s first apartment in New York. But as time passed and his repeated calls for repairs went unanswered, he was frustrated by his absentee landlord’s malign neglect. The situation escalated dramatically when the building’s boiler blew one February day and remained blown for seven frigid weeks.

Michael sought help from tenant counselors at the Metropolitan Council on Housing, who advised the West 17th Street tenants to counter the owner’s recalcitrance with a rent strike. A group of building residents coalesced, and the strike began in the summer of 1970. The landlord unsuccessfully sued Michael and two other tenants for nonpayment of rent, then disappeared entirely, traveling to Europe and staying away for nearly a year. After a few months, out of sheer necessity, the tenants started using their pooled rent money to pay for building maintenance and urgent repairs.

When the landlord finally returned, the tenants confronted him with a lawsuit. The settlement they ultimately negotiated was a collective bargaining agreement giving the residents effective control of the building. It was likely the first – and possibly the only – collective bargaining agreement signed by a landlord and tenants in New York State.

The tenants later bought the building in a foreclosure auction when the owner defaulted on three mortgages. The apartments were eventually converted to affordable co-ops with assistance from the City of New York. But Michael had left by then. In 1977, he moved into an apartment on West 21st Street with Louis Fulgoni, whom he had met three years earlier and who would remain his partner until Louis’s death from complications of AIDS in 1989.

“Louis and I couldn’t afford to pay two rents any longer, and he had the bigger apartment,” Michael recalled during a 2019 interview on the eve of his eightieth birthday. (The rest of his reflections quoted here are from that conversation, unless otherwise specified.)

Although Michael left West 17th Street – the site of his first skirmish in the landlord-tenant wars – when he moved in with Louis, he did not leave the movement. Far from it. Instead, he realized he had found his life’s calling as a full-time tenant organizer, agitator and advocate.

Michael and his husband Eric Stenshoel at the New York City Women’s March, January 2017.

The awakening of an Army brat
When Michael first joined the fight for tenants’ rights, he was still relatively new to the city that would become his adopted hometown. Born in Texas in 1939 and raised in a military family, he had already lived in five states, as well as Japan, by the time he finished high school. In 1963 – after graduating from Baylor University in Texas with a degree in French and minors in history and theatre, and earning a master’s degree in French from Middlebury College in Vermont – Michael moved to France. His father had been stationed with the U.S. military on the outskirts of Paris, so he was still living with his family. But he also struck out on his own in the City of Light.

Michael arrived in Paris on November 21, the day before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The wild ride of the 1960s was under way. He had hoped to find work in film production, but gigs were scarce and work permits elusive. In his copious downtime, he explored the city with his French boyfriend and watched classic films at the Cinémathèque Française. “That was where I got my education in cinema,” he recalled.

In 1965, Michael decided his prospects would be brighter in New York, and he was right. After arriving here from Paris, he found work at an advertising agency and then landed a job as an apprentice editor at a film production company. However, it took him nine months – even then – to score an affordable apartment in the city’s tight rental housing market.

“I always went to Sheridan Square on Tuesday nights to get an advance copy of the Village Voice,” Michael recalled, adding that he would check the classified ads and hunt for apartments the next day. “But at eight o’clock on Wednesday morning, I would be the thirtieth person showing up to look at a place.”

Michael’s introduction to the lot of tenancy in New York opened his eyes to the inequities of the market. Previously, he had not been very politically engaged. But grappling with his sexuality as he grew up in the closeted 1950s fed his skepticism about mainstream American values. And as a student at schools in the South that were just beginning to integrate at that time, he felt a visceral disgust at the blunt racism of some of his white classmates. At that point, though, there was no outlet for political engagement in his world.

By the late 1960s, Michael was joining some of the mass protests that had become ubiquitous. But his early experiences with activism were a mixed bag.

He remembered meetings in which firebrands bent on ending the Vietnam War and advancing gay and lesbian rights had engaged in angry debates that “amounted to proving who was more politically correct than thou.” The firebrands seemed to lose sight of the bigger picture, sabotaging alliances that could have proven powerful. It was an early lesson in the necessity of building coalitions.

As a co-founder of the Chelsea Gay Association in the 1970s, he would later put that lesson to work. At Michael’s urging, besides sponsoring social events and organizing to improve public safety for the queer community, CGA reached out to find common ground with other neighbors and community groups in Chelsea. This outreach eventually paid off when these new allies publicly backed LGBTQ rights, including support for a trailblazing gay rights bill in the City Council.

The citywide rent strike that wasn’t
By this time, Michael was becoming increasingly committed to helping tenants resist the caprices of their landlords. His education in direct action began in earnest in 1970, when he became a volunteer organizer at the Metropolitan Council on Housing and found himself in the orbit of Jane Benedict, the organization’s co-founder and charismatic driving force. Although she and Michael would part ways before long, Benedict was one of his first mentors in the movement. She was also a mentor to many of Michael’s fellow “young people” – as the old guard referred, perhaps a bit condescendingly, to a cohort of New Left upstarts who had become active in Met Council.

Soon, however, condescension morphed into confrontation. By 1972, Michael was caught in a version of the political infighting he disdained.

On one side, the old guard had decided that Met Council would focus on organizing a citywide rent strike to build political leverage for stronger rent laws and tenant protections. On the other side, Michael and the rest of the upstarts advocated a different approach: working in coalition with renters’ organizations across New York State to lobby directly for pro-tenant legislation in Albany. After an extended, often bitter debate, the old guard prevailed. Michael and his fellow supporters of a broad-based, statewide coalition found themselves out of Met Council – and temporarily, at least, out in the cold.

Over time, the rift has healed. In recent years, Michael once more sat on Met Council’s board of directors. “Everything seems to have come full circle,” he said in 2019. But at a politically charged and consequential moment for the tenants of New York, the schism was a raw wound.

A statewide movement is born
While Michael cut his teeth as a tenant activist, developments on the legislative front were moving quickly. In 1969, New York City responded to skyrocketing prices in its tight rental market by enacting the Rent Stabilization Law, which established a flawed but important system of regulation and protection for tenants living in post-war apartment buildings. Tenants in multiple dwellings built before 1947 were already covered by the city’s existing rent control system.

Despite its limitations, the Rent Stabilization Law of 1969 extended the universe of regulated housing in the city. It must have been too much for the real estate lobby to bear. Just two years later, under pressure from then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the New York State Legislature dealt tenants a devastating setback. The legislature passed, and Rockefeller signed, a set of laws deregulating both rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments when they became vacant. Passed by a narrow margin, the laws represented not only a kick in the gut to cash-strapped tenants but also a tempting incentive for landlords to harass and illegally evict them.

Vacancy decontrol exposed the tenant movement’s failure to wield influence in Albany when it counted most. For Michael, it was a bitter vindication of the need to build a broad-based, statewide movement that could get the attention and win the support of key legislators. Almost immediately, he joined forces with like-minded activists to do just that.

After a false start in early 1972, Michael and other tenant organizers from New York City convened a weekend meeting that summer with some of their counterparts from upstate localities. Gathered at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, about twenty attendees stayed in empty dorm rooms for five dollars a night and met in the campus cafeteria. They agreed, in principle, to form a federation of local tenant groups with a primary focus on lobbying the state legislature. The first order of business was outreach to groups across the state. That outreach proceeded apace, and in December 1974, the New York State Tenants Coalition was formally chartered at a meeting of forty delegates from local organizations in Albany, Schenectady, Utica, Nassau and Westchester Counties, and New York City.

It didn’t happen a moment too soon. In fact, the statewide movement won its first victories even before the Coalition had time to adopt its founding bylaws.

Early wins in Albany
During the 1974 session of the state legislature, the nascent movement backed four bills that significantly expanded tenant protections. All four passed both houses of the legislature and were signed into law. The new laws gave public housing tenants greater representation in local decision-making and blocked developers from demolishing sound buildings simply to deplete the supply of rent-controlled apartments. The laws also curbed co-op and condo conversions and protected low-income elderly tenants and homeowners from burdensome rents and property taxes.

The Coalition was sharpening its game. Michael was spending more of his time in Albany, along with other fair-housing lobbyists and advocates. They had begun to establish working relationships with senior legislators and their staffs. The results were impressive.

In hindsight, perhaps the most far-reaching housing law enacted in New York State in 1974 was initially derided by the Coalition as a watered-down compromise. The law, dubbed the Emergency Tenant Protection Act, was a step forward nevertheless. Among other changes, it repealed vacancy decontrol and extended rent stabilization to Nassau, Rockland and Westchester Counties.

Whether the movement liked it or not, the ETPA would form the foundation of rent stabilization in New York for decades to come.

In 1975, tenants scored an even greater victory with the Warranty of Habitability. “Enactment of the Warranty was absolutely historic,” Michael said. The law conditions landlords’ right to collect rent on maintaining their buildings in a habitable condition, free of hazards to life, health or safety. With a lift from this success and the gains of 1974, the fledgling Coalition was taking flight.

“Sunset” battles
One of the weaknesses of the ETPA – nominally adopted as an emergency response to rock-bottom vacancy rates in rental housing – was that its provisions would “sunset” perennially and had to be renewed by the state legislature. The story of the statewide tenant movement since 1974 is largely the story of every battle between landlords and tenants over renewing the rent laws.

It has been a winding and often torturous road. For most of the past half-century, the two houses of the state legislature were divided, with Democrats controlling the Assembly and Republicans in charge of the Senate. Thus, every effort to renew the ETPA required bipartisan wrangling.

In 1976, tenants successfully pressed the legislature to renew the rent laws despite Republican opposition. They lobbied by mail, by phone, in legislators’ home districts and on strategically timed bus trips to Albany. The statewide organization changed its name to the New York State Tenant and Neighborhood Coalition, later abridged to Tenants & Neighbors. But as Michael would recall decades afterward, its central purpose remained the same: to secure lasting relief for tenants besieged by rising rents on one hand and substandard, even dangerous housing conditions on the other.

When the ETPA came up for renewal yet again in 1977, the Coalition and its allies fought off severely weakening amendments and won an unprecedented four-year extension of the rent laws. For once, tenants had a sliver of breathing room.

They took advantage of that space to hone their organizing skills. In 1977, Michael joined Roger Hayes to become co-executive directors of the People’s Housing Network, which operated a school for organizers across New York State. From 1978 to 1980, Michael also served as a member of the Temporary State Commission on Rental Housing. The Speaker of the Assembly appointed him as the tenant representative on the advisory panel, to recommend reforms for a more permanent, equitable system of rent regulation.

This was a noble goal, but it was not yet to be. Between 1981 and 1991, tenants had to mobilize for six more “sunset” battles, fending off assaults from the real estate industry and its minions in Albany. Each time, they managed to get the law renewed without any major weakening provisions.

In 1993, however, the legislative dam burst. Tenants were inundated with rent hikes after legislators renewed the ETPA but included measures deregulating apartments that cost $2,000 a month or more – hardly a luxury rent in a supercharged market. “It was a disaster,” Michael said. Even worse amendments were enacted in 1997.

Despite the movement’s best efforts to block decontrol, these provisions remained intact for more than two decades. Over time, hundreds of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments in New York City and its suburban counties were converted to market-rate units. And as the hemorrhaging continued, affordable housing drifted even further out of reach.

Political action hits the mark
The debacle of 1997 occurred in the political context of a Republican-controlled state Senate that was dead set on wiping out rent regulation completely. Looking back, Michael said the lesson of 1997 was clear. As skilled as the statewide movement had become at lobbying legislators to support pro-tenant bills, lobbying was not enough. To hold back landlord power and realize their own aspirations, tenants had to get much more actively engaged in the electoral process.

With Michael as one of its guiding hands, the Tenants Political Action Committee was born out of that necessity. Tenants PAC’s stated mission was to build a stronger public voice for tenants as a viable electoral force. It was time to target New York’s politicians in their most vulnerable nether region: the ballot box.

Starting with a special election in 1997, Tenants PAC volunteers steadily extended their capacity to aid progressive candidates and obstruct landlord allies. Through door knocking, phone banks, get-out-the-vote efforts and campaign contributions in critical races, the committee began making headway. It made lasting gains in 2006 and 2010, respectively, with the election of pro-tenant candidates to the State Senate: Andrea Stewart-Cousins in Westchester and Gustavo Rivera in the Bronx. Momentum was building.

But even when Democrats finally won a majority in the Senate – thus ostensibly controlling both houses of the legislature – the tenant agenda was thwarted. By effectively handing control back across the aisle, a breakaway group of centrist Senate Democrats calling themselves the Independent Democratic Caucus blocked further progress. After even more effort and frustration, this obstacle was finally cleared away at the polls. In 2018, tenants played a central role in defeating six of the eight members of the IDC and helping the Democrats secure a sixteen-seat Senate majority. “I’m very proud of that,” Michael said in hindsight.

At last, with majorities sympathetic to tenants’ rights in both the Assembly and the Senate, the stage was set for a landmark legislative session in 2019.

Having laid the electoral groundwork, the movement found a majority in both houses receptive to a bill that rolled back decontrol and – at long last – established a permanent rent law covering the roughly 1 million stabilized apartments that remained in New York City, Nassau, Rockland and Westchester. Among an array of other reforms, the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 went one step further, allowing any city or town in the state to opt in to rent stabilization.

“Now people are organizing for rent regulation in upstate New York,” Michael said with some astonishment after the legislation passed. “We can really be proud of that, too.”

A mentor’s mentor 
In conversation about the long haul that led to the tenant victories of 2019, Michael’s thoughts turned to Marie Runyon, his greatest influence as an organizer.

Runyon, the eminent campaigner for tenants’ rights on the Upper West Side, died in 2018 at the age of 103. Michael met her in 1968, when she was raising funds for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign and he showed up to volunteer. Michael was twenty-eight and Runyon was fifty-two. He was instantly smitten with the North Carolina-born activist’s elegant fierceness, which remained intact – as did their friendship – for the next five decades.

Michael credited this late and much-lamented teacher and compatriot with inspiring his ability to persist over the years. On the verge of turning eighty himself in 2019, he recalled interviewing Runyon just before her eightieth birthday in 1995, when she spoke about the roots of her passion for racial, social and economic justice.

As a child of the South, Runyon told him, “I had been brought up on Jesus’s teachings.” Political activism, she said, “fit right in with what I had been taught…. I believed in it and I still believe in it.”

For his part, Michael said, religion was not what kept him going through the long, good fight for housing justice in New York. “I’m somewhere between an agnostic and an atheist,” he noted, although he was an active member of Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in midtown Manhattan with his husband, Eric Stenshoel, who introduced him to the congregation. “Saint Peter’s is an amazing community engaged in all sorts of progressive fights, including the sanctuary movement,” Michael said.

Asked what had kept him going, Michael responded with a precis of his own brand of faith. “You can’t do community organizing unless you have an optimistic outlook,” he said. “It’s too hard. There are more defeats than victories, which is why a lot of people drop out. But I do fundamentally believe that things have gotten better and will get better still. You have to take the long view.”

He was quick to point out that taking the long view does not equal proceeding slowly. If anything, Michael in his eighties felt more determined than ever to fight for a radical transformation in both the economics and the politics of housing in New York.

“The older I get, the more left I get,” he said. “It’s a matter of intensity, and possibly I’m feeling more urgency.”

Protecting renters upstate
Far from resting on the laurels of tenants’ historic achievements in 2019, Michael redoubled his efforts to help tenants build on them. The one “transformational” change brought by the 2019 rent law, he often pointed out, was that for the first time it enabled localities in all the state’s sixty-two counties to opt into the Emergency Tenant Protection Act. In the wake of that change, Housing Justice for All, Citizen Action of New York, For the Many and other grassroots groups embarked on campaigns with upstate tenants to get their local governments to opt into ETPA.

Not surprisingly, Michael took an active role. Starting in the summer of 2022, he collaborated with tenant leaders and organizers in Kingston, New York, to enact the ETPA there. This effort has since succeeded in making Kingston the first upstate municipality to opt into rent stabilization. But it has not been smooth sailing.

In the spring of 2022, the City of Kingston conducted a study that found its rental vacancy rate well below the 5 percent threshold for a housing emergency – a legal prerequisite for triggering the ETPA. On that basis, the city’s Common Council voted to opt into rent stabilization effective August 1, 2022.

It was a milestone vote. However, as Michael later wrote, “mass confusion broke out” in its aftermath. Neither state nor local authorities were prepared to implement the law, while landlords flouted it and many tenants remained in the dark about their rights. “Everyone was playing catch-up,” Michael recalled in a Tenants PAC web story about lessons learned from Kingston. “Organizers went door-to-door to educate tenants and recruit them into the fight. I was writing fact sheets explaining different aspects of ETPA implementation, which we immediately realized should have been ready and available long before August 1.”

Michael warned tenants in other municipalities considering an ETPA vote to avoid this mistake. “Start public education efforts before the vote to opt in,” he advised.

And the drama in Kingston didn’t end there. After the city’s new Rent Guidelines Board voted for a 15 percent reduction in rent for stabilized tenants in November 2022 (following years of exorbitant rent hikes), the real estate lobby’s lawyers swooped in. They alleged that Kingston’s vacancy survey was invalid and the RGB vote was illegal. The case made its way through the courts until June of this year, when the state Court of Appeals ultimately ruled in favor of Kingston, upholding the RGB vote and the city’s right to enact rent regulation.

Meanwhile, well-financed landlords have managed to block local campaigns for rent stabilization in Newburgh, Poughkeepsie and other cities and towns upstate. Although tenants in these localities have been stymied for now, the statewide movement is advancing new legislation that would make the process of opting into the ETPA less expensive and onerous.

“It is virtually guaranteed that any municipality that opts into ETPA will be sued by landlords,” Michael said in his Kingston recap. But as he asserted in a separate message, “if history tells us anything, it’s that tenants who organize, push, and refuse to back down can win.”

Tenants Not Tourists
Michael clearly had no intention of backing down from another recent fight: the one over Local Law 18, which sets restrictions on short-term rentals in New York City, including the many thousands listed over the years by online platforms such as Airbnb. Among other provisions, the law requires hosts to register with the Mayor’s Office for Special Enforcement to legally rent their properties for fewer than thirty days.

Signed into law in January 2022, the restrictions were enacted because – as Michael and other advocates persuasively argued – short-term rentals for tourists and other visitors were depleting the supply of affordable housing for working New Yorkers. Short-term rentals were already subject to legal constraints, and evidence showed that well over half of Airbnb’s revenue in the city came from illegal listings. Local Law 18 provided a much-needed enforcement mechanism.

True to landlord form, the hosting platforms soon filed suit to block the law. Airbnb called the legislation a “de facto ban” on most of its rentals. But the courts were unconvinced. The legal challenges were dismissed, and the law took effect in September 2023. Since then, short-term rentals in the city have plummeted by as much as 90 percent, making vitally needed space for regular tenants.

Despite its proven effectiveness, Local Law 18 now faces yet another challenge from what Michael called a “stealth campaign” conducted in the name of homeowners but funded by the hosting giants. That campaign is backing Intros 1107A and 948A, City Council bills that would exempt one- and two-family homes from short-term rental requirements and open the door to the conversion of tens of thousands of housing units into short-term rentals. In response, Tenants PAC, Churches United for Fair Housing, the Westside Neighborhood Alliance and other allies have launched the Tenants Not Tourists campaign to defend Local Law 18.

“It’s a bad bill,” Michael told Politico in December 2024, after the exemption was first proposed, “and we’re going to fight it tooth and nail.” As usual, he did not mince words.

Indeed, his outspokenness sometimes came at a price, given how litigious the opposition could be. In 2018, he personally became the target of a $40 million defamation lawsuit by the landlord organization then known as the Rent Stabilization Association, after he accused the RSA of “buying off” legislators. The New York Supreme Court dismissed the nuisance suit out of hand in March 2024, and the Appellate Division unanimously upheld that dismissal this past March.

A vision of housing justice
Until the effects of brain cancer finally forced him to bow out earlier this year, Michael not only kept fighting battles for tenants’ rights in real time; he also maintained a long-term vision of housing justice. In 2022, he traveled with a group of tenant activists and state legislators on a field visit to Vienna, where about two-thirds of the population lives in affordable, well-run social housing – that is, public or publicly subsidized units built with high functional and aesthetic standards. The group brought its findings back to New York as a model for the future of housing here.

At a February 2024 legislative hearing in Albany, Michael cited the Vienna model in testimony supporting the establishment of a Social Housing Development Authority for the state. “It’s not pie in the sky,” he told legislators. “Think big.”

Michael never stopped thinking big. But he was also hyper-aware of the challenges facing tenants. “There’s always a danger of complacency,” he warned after the victories of 2019. And yet, as he wrote more recently: “Every time landlords say rent regulation is doomed, it somehow survives.”

The movement to which Michael devoted his life will survive as well, poorer for his absence but stronger for his enormous contributions. His dedication and vigilance remain as an inspiration for the tenant activists of today and tomorrow. Right now, one of those future activists may be out there somewhere, growing more exasperated with a broken window, a blown boiler or an outrageous rent bill – and a landlord who didn’t get the memo about the right to decent, affordable housing for all in the Empire State.

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This remembrance was updated from an earlier profile and published in the journal of the Tenants PAC event celebrating the life of Michael McKee on December 3, 2025, which would have been his eighty-sixth birthday, at Saint Peter’s Church in Manhattan. Michael died on October 21. You can support TenantsPAC here.