In Evanston, Illinois, a city-funded organizing effort helped tenants take on a private-equity landlord, Quadrel Realty Group. The landlord had bought a building at 929-935 Michigan Ave and replaced tenants’ keys with a keyless entry system called Latch, now known as DOOR, adding a new $30 monthly fee. Tenant Ebony Joy recalls that the company would not negotiate the fee, saying “We had to do the Latch.”
Tenants Take On Quadrel
The fee was just one of several grievances. Under the previous owner, maintenance requests were handled by an on-site superintendent, but under Quadrel, work orders started disappearing, and rent and fees were climbing. Tenants formed the Quadrel Evanston Tenants Union in March 2025, and after more than a year of organizing, they reached an agreement with Quadrel and its private equity parent company, North Park Ventures.
The deal covered five buildings affecting around 120 units in southeastern Evanston, which is just north of Chicago. The terms include a one-time 5-percent rent decrease for tenants who lived there before the 2022 sale, the option of a two-year lease, fees reset to actual costs, and refunds for months of overcharges, exceeding $1,000 in some cases. Municipal backing for the nonprofit Metropolitan Tenants Organization (MTO) equipped residents with an essential resource in their dispute with the property manager.
MTO’s contract with Evanston offers a baseline of guaranteed funding but also reimburses additional tenant organizing on an as-needed, hourly basis. Tenant Katie MacDonald attributes the group’s persistence during difficult periods to MTO representative Jonah Karsh, stating he gave them “the tenacity we needed to not give up.”
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The union’s roots trace to a tenants rights hotline MTO operates under its city contract. In spring 2025, a call came in from a tenant at the Michigan Avenue building, the smallest of five Evanston properties Quadrel had purchased as a single portfolio in late 2022. That same week, MTO organizer Jonah Karsh met tenants from Michigan Avenue at a separate community event. The tenants had already sent the landlord a letter signed by 15 of them, and Karsh says they had “some really, really talented … people with natural organizing abilities.”
Private Equity Firms Rise
As the union formed, tenants watched their costs rise while building conditions declined, with no clear way to push back. The pattern of a private equity firm buying a portfolio of buildings and quickly raising rents and fees while failing to maintain proper living standards is not unique to Evanston. Private equity firms investing in real estate are on the rise.
Madeline Bankson, a housing researcher at PESP, says private-equity landlords tend to raise rent quickly regardless of what tenants can pay, add fees that didn’t traditionally exist, such as trash fees, pet rent and common-area charges, and cut spending on maintenance and staff. Tenants are paying more money for sometimes even worse levels of service than they’re getting from non-private equity landlords.
In Evanston, the city’s funding of MTO helped tenants access an experienced strategist who could stay with the fight for as long as it took. The city’s Residential Landlord Tenants Ordinance (RLTO) also played a role, with MTO documenting apparent violations and asking the city to act.
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Progress Through Pressure
Joy saw that dynamic lead to an early, partial shift. Once tenants understood the RLTO well enough to invoke it, and once the city and MTO were involved, Quadrel showed willingness to correct illegal fees and dates in individual tenants’ leases rather than ignore complaints outright. “Had we not had the law on our side, I’m confident they would not have dealt with us in general,” she says. It was progress, but not the progress the union actually wanted. Quadrel was trying to handle problems lease by lease, rather than sitting down with the union as a single body. Getting the company to engage with the buildings collectively would take continued pressure over the rest of the year.
Filing complaints with the city was one lever, but Quadrel still wasn’t negotiating with the union collectively. The tenants kept escalating throughout the rest of 2025, with an October 2025 rally outside one of the union buildings drawing city officials, including Mayor Daniel Biss and City Councilmember Shawn Iles.
By early 2026, negotiations for unified talks resumed briefly before Quadrel distributed renewal proposals to tenants previously on flexible agreements. These offers replicated the same rent hikes and additional charges the coalition opposed, with some deadlines expiring before tenants received the documents. In response, the union launched coordinated pressure through public officials and over a dozen residents submitting detailed objections to Quadrel.
