EASTHAMPTON — After months of dissent over impending rent hikes, tenants of One Cottage Street now have one week to make a decision: stay in their longtime art studios and small business spaces at a steeply increased rate, or relocate.

Now that leases are being distributed, many tenants are requesting a two-month deadline extension to explore their options. Others are expressing surprise that the lease terms require a three-year commitment, which many say is too long.

Since last week, tenants have been receiving new leases detailing the upcoming $15 per square foot rate along with restrictions and guidelines for future uses of their spaces. In light of the new information and the approaching Aug. 1 decision deadline, tenants have embarked on an email blitz calling on the building’s new management company, NAI Plotkin in Springfield, requesting 60 more days to make their decisions about whether to stay or go.

“I am overwhelmed and devastated by the impending extreme rent increase and the short time we have to review leases or give notice,” wrote George Shaw, a longtime tenant who specializes in sculpture and woodworking. “It’s causing me much distress trying to figure out how to raise the money needed to stay or find a new location. You have given me less than 2 weeks to make a decision that will effect me emotionally and financially. By any standard that is unreasonable and unacceptable.”

Tenants have given Plotkin until Friday to submit a response to their calls for more time, and are exploring the possibility of hosting a community rally in the absence of change.

Andrea Zax, who has operated her business Zaxwear out of a One Cottage Street space for nine years, said that last Thursday she received a “21-page lease with a lot of restrictions” via postal mail. For Zax, the three-year duration of the lease came as a shock, as reading the lease was the first she had heard of that timeframe.

“People are scattering,” she said. “I looked into spaces at Eastworks but there wasn’t anything of comparable size. I operate out of a pretty small space, and their spaces tend to be bigger.”

In their email campaign, other tenants expressed shock and apprehension around the three-year lease period.

“We had pretty much resigned to the fact that we would have to pay the new rental rate but thought we would be able to opt into a month-to-month situation or even a one-year lease,” reads an email from Roger and Christy Patrick, who have been renting their studio for almost 10 years. “Since receiving our lease, it is obvious to us there is no such option and the only real one offered is a three-year lease, which is far too much for us to commit to at present.”

Other tenants expressed concern over whether they would be able to continue hosting open studio days, a twice-yearly staple of the Cottage Street Studios community bringing in buyers from throughout Easthampton and beyond, because of a clause in the new leases barring tenants from hosting fire sales and similar events.

“Can we still have May and December Open Studios as we have had since 1987?” asked Lynn Latimer, a One Cottage Street tenant of 38 years, in an email. “I make a sizable portion of my rent through these two sales.”

Tensions have been brewing between a majority of the roughly 100 tenants at One Cottage Street, most of whom are artists, and their landlords at Riverside Industries, which owns the building, since late April when a blanket increase setting all rates for building space at $15 per square foot was announced. Currently, rents in the building range from $5 to $15 per square foot. For many longtime tenants, some of whom have worked out of the space for over 40 years, the potential for displacement is growing more and more real.

Officials at NAI Plotkin and Riverside Industries did not respond immediately for comment on Wednesday.

Riverside, a nonprofit focused on empowering disabled individuals that was gifted the building roughly five decades ago, initiated the increases as part of a strategic planning process, through which they seek to expand their programming and better address the challenges of the aging building.

Tenants have expressed in letters and public appearances that they understand the need for increased rent, but oppose the speed and scale of the increases, and wish to continue what several tenants have described as a “historically symbiotic” relationship with Riverside.

After several failed attempts by the newly formed Cottage Street Tenants Association to call a meeting with Riverside’s board of directors, the tenants began appealing to the public for support. The tenants of One Cottage Street have received support from the City Council in the form of a unanimously passed resolution for affordable artist work spaces, and from community members who attended a rally earlier this month at CitySpace. They have also received the backing of Art Stays Here — a Boston nonprofit coalition of creatives and advocates that strives to maintain arts communities and encourage affordable artist work spaces.

Thus far, this organizing has not yielded the desired change, and the tenants must still submit a written notice of their decisions by Aug. 1 to either accept the new terms and costs or depart from their spaces. According to Zax, some tenants still have yet to receive their new leases in the mail.

Alexa Lewis can be reached at alewis@gazettenet.com.