Michael McKee, an indefatigable tenant organizer who spent 50 years helping to strengthen rent-protection regulations in New York State against challenges by landlords, died on Oct. 21 in his rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan. He was 85.
The cause was brain cancer, his husband, Eric Stenshoel, said.
Mr. McKee was working as a film editor in Manhattan when he became riled by his absentee landlord’s failure to fix a broken window pane in his apartment on West 17th Street in 1969 — the same year the City Council enacted the Rent Stabilization Law that extended rent regulation to about 325,000 apartments built after 1947. Then, in February 1970, the building’s boiler blew and remained busted for months.
Inspired by Jane Benedict, a union and tenant organizer and onetime Communist who founded the Metropolitan Council on Housing, and later by Marie Runyon, another liberal firebrand, Mr. McKee and fellow tenants mounted a successful rent strike. The protest culminated in what was hailed in 1977 as the first known collective bargaining agreement between a landlord and tenants.
The agreement granted the residents effective control over the building, which they later bought and converted into cooperative apartments. Mr. McKee also converted his career, becoming a full-time tenant activist.
He joined the Metropolitan Council on Housing; founded two groups, the New York State Tenants & Neighbors Coalition and the School for Organizers; directed the People’s Housing Network; and served as treasurer of the Tenants Political Action Committee.
Mr. McKee succeeded in extending rent regulation to other parts of the state; protecting seniors and the disabled from onerous rent hikes; limiting landlords from charging market-rate rents when apartments become vacant; requiring property owners to maintain their buildings in a habitable condition; minimizing grounds for eviction; banning brokers from charging prospective tenants fees; and curbing the conversion of individual apartments to short-term hotel suites.
“From the 1970s to today,” the Metropolitan Council on Housing said in a statement, “his brilliance, persistence, and vision shaped every major tenant rights victory in our state.”
Owners of residential buildings have consistently blamed rent regulation for the shortage of affordable housing, arguing that what they collect from tenants every month is often insufficient to maintain their multifamily properties, much less improve them.
In letters to The New York Times, Mr. McKee took exception.
“Private new construction — both in the city and the metropolitan area — is way down because of escalating land and construction costs, changes in zoning laws and major revisions in the Federal tax code,” he wrote in 1988, and “the dearth of the public and publicly aided new construction programs.”
“Rent regulation is the largest, most important affordable housing program in the city and suburban counties,” he declared in 2004.
He was born Jay Edwin McKee, the eldest of three brothers, on Dec. 3, 1939, in Fort Worth. His father, J. Edwin McKee, was an Army officer who retired as a lieutenant colonel. His mother, Georgia (Oliver) McKee, was an accountant.
He lived on or near military bases in five states and Japan, started college at Tulane University, and transferred to Baylor University in Waco, Tex., where he majored in French and minored in theater, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1962. The next year, he received a master’s degree in French from Middlebury College in Vermont. He served for a year in the Oklahoma National Guard.
Mr. McKee moved to France as a military dependent, where he immersed himself in films at the Cinémathèque Française before settling in New York. He soon changed his first name to Michael (apparently to differentiate himself from his father), joined the anti-Vietnam War and gay rights movements, worked for an advertising agency (its clients included the makers of Playtex bras), and performed with a dance company.
In addition to Mr. Stenshoel, a lawyer he married in 2008, Mr. McKee is survived by two brothers, David and Gerald. His partner for more than 15 years, the artist Louis Fulgoni, died in 1989.
After Mr. Fulgoni died, Mr. McKee was about to be evicted from the apartment they shared on West 21st Street, in the Chelsea neighborhood, but was spared when a separate pending case on succession rights to controlled apartments was settled in the tenant’s favor.
The two-bedroom apartment in which Mr. McKee later lived with Mr. Stenshoel — one of only two in the 31-unit building that have not been converted into co-ops — rents for a relatively modest $1,444.68-a-month. A one-bedroom, one-bath apartment in the building sells for about $700,000, which would make monthly mortgage and co-op maintenance charges considerably higher.
A half-century of pitched battles in the New York State Legislature, the New York City Council and in localities around the state did not dim Mr. McKee’s zeal — even those in which he could claim only incremental victories. He continued to issue his weekly manifestoes until last March, when the effects of his brain cancer became incapacitating.
“You can’t do community organizing unless you have an optimistic outlook,” he was quoted as saying in an interview that first appeared in a Tenants PAC journal in 2019. “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.”
“The older I get, the more left I get,” Mr. McKee added. “It’s a matter of intensity, and possibly I’m feeling more urgency.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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