For three years, the tenants of North Lawn Avenue demanded that the man who owns their homes sit down with them. On Thursday, he finally did.
Yisroel Levovitz flew in from Chicago, sat across a table from the union that represents 94 percent of his tenants, and bargained for two hours in three languages. When he stood up, he had signed nearly everything they demanded.
The agreement, announced by the North Lawn Tenant Union and KC Tenants, covers the buildings on both sides of the street in the Historic Northeast, 135 through 137 and 118 through 148 North Lawn. Every current tenant will receive a new lease, written in their preferred language, by July 1. Every dollar of rent debt is erased.
Rent is frozen at $400 a month for tenants at 135 and 137 and reduced to $700 for tenants across the street. No one can face a rent-related eviction without at least 60 days notice.
And tenants can pay in cash or money order rather than being forced onto a payment app.
The repairs these families reported over and over while their landlord refused to act now come with deadlines. Two window air conditioning units in every apartment within two weeks. All outstanding in-unit issues resolved, comprehensive pest control completed, new dumpsters delivered with regular trash service, and a security plan shared with the union, all within 30 days.
Sewage remediation within 60 days. Working heat by October 1. Levovitz also committed not to issue any new leases until conditions and security issues are resolved, and to provide full relocation support for tenants displaced by property conditions: a comparable unit or hotel room at no cost, moving and storage covered, and a $3,000 lump sum for every household permanently displaced since May 1.
Then there is the concession that could change who owns the block.
Levovitz confirmed that Wiser KC LLC plans to sell the North Lawn buildings, and the signed agreement commits him to entertain a competitive offer from the union itself or a buyer of the union’s choosing. The union will receive at least 60 days notice before any sale to another owner and holds the right of first refusal. The tenants who organized these buildings now hold a signed, documented path toward taking their homes off the speculative market for good.
“Yisroel, our homes are not your investment.” – ARTEMIO BARRERA, NORTH LAWN TENANT UNION
What They Survived to Get Here
If this is the first North Lawn story you are reading, understand what these families have lived through. The hot water was out for weeks at a time. Pests live in the walls. The exterior doors do not lock. In some apartments, the heat has not worked in years. In some buildings, raw sewage backs up into the basement.
A Naing’s father is blind. His mother has cancer and breathing problems. The vent over their stove does not work, so every day when he cooks, his mother cannot breathe and has to leave the apartment. For weeks this spring, he boiled water on that stove so his parents could bathe. “That’s not right,” he told the crowd at the union’s rally in May.
Artemio Barrera, a longtime tenant on dialysis and a leader of the union, has spent more than a thousand dollars of his own money repairing what his landlord refused to fix. He patched the wall where a rodent burrowed through. He fixed what his neighbors needed fixed. “Every time something is wrong, I report it over and over again, and I end up fixing it myself,” he said at that rally, before addressing his landlord directly. “Yisroel, our homes are not your investment. I’ll see you at the bargaining table.”
The families who live on North Lawn are Burmese refugees, Mexican immigrants, and Black working-class Kansas Citians. None of them are the reason their homes were falling apart. Their homes were falling apart because the man who owns them built his business on the rot.
The Money He Took Out of Their Homes
Levovitz purchased the North Lawn properties in 2023 using a $2 million loan. In 2025, he used the tenants’ homes as collateral to complete a cash-out refinance, securing a new $3.7 million loan and walking away with $1.7 million in cash. The tenants saw none of it.
This spring, Levovitz began seeking buyers for all 100 units in his Kansas City portfolio. The plan was the oldest one in the speculative playbook: pass the rot to the next investor and move on. But the union had other plans.
The Organizing That Put Him on a Plane
The first North Lawn victory came in 2023, when eight tenant households organized after the property sold to Wiser and won a historic agreement with their landlord and the City of Kansas City, securing major renovations and $400 rents and making them, by KC Tenants’ account, the most protected tenants in the state of Missouri. Then the conditions rotted anyway.
So last month, the tenants did what organized people do. They grew. In two weeks they more than tripled the size of their union, organizing neighbors in every occupied building under Wiser’s ownership on their block and launching with 94 percent of tenants signed on. On May 14, more than eighty tenants, neighbors, and allies rallied outside the buildings to demand Levovitz come to the table.
That supermajority is what put Levovitz on a plane.
Even this week’s crisis bent toward the union’s power. When a building-wide electrical failure struck on Wednesday, it was the union that moved affected tenants into hotels. Under the new agreement, Levovitz committed urgent attention to those units.
“We’re Not Done Yet”
“We organized, and we won, again,” said Artemio Barrera, a member of the union’s bargaining team. “We love our community. We’re elderly folks, folks with disabilities and chronic illnesses, immigrants and refugees, single moms, and young families who have come together to fight for the homes we deserve. We are optimistic about the outcomes from bargaining, and we’re not done yet.”
The agreement is tentative, pending final negotiations early next week. But the people of North Lawn have already settled the larger question. They were told their homes were an investment. They answered that their homes are their lives, and then they organized until the man holding the deed flew across the country to agree with them in writing.
When tenants organize, tenants win. On North Lawn Avenue, they just won bigger than ever. More soon.
