Tenant Organizing

Residents and institutions in a North Philadelphia neighborhood wanted to put the power of the land back into the hands of the community. The way we decided to do this was to create the Community Justice Land Trust and ensure neighborhood residents and tenants of CLT homes had seats on its board.

Empowerment is the ultimate response to displacement: perpetual affordability in a process that gives folks a stake in discussions and in an economy from which they are usually shut out.

Helping Cannabis Entrepreneurs of Color | The “Business” of Homelessness | Housing Is a Mental Health Issue | Justice for Wage Theft Victims | 2020 Census Already Off to a Bad Start?

Omnibus Bill is Good for HUD | Barbershops are Good for Black Health | Kushner Tries to Make Rent-Reg Units Disappear | The U.S. is Quicksand for Black Boys | Not a Gap, a Chasm | More…

It was only two and a half years ago that Jake Blumgart opened his article, “In Defense of Rent Control,” by saying: “Rent control is basically dead.” Mind you, there […]

“The string of victories in 2017 are a direct product of renters building power on the ground. Renters, faced with a historic housing crisis, are getting organized to change immediate conditions on the ground and build a movement to transform the way land and housing are treated in the country.”

There have been a number of stories in the papers over the last two months that, from my perspective, are connected. Unfortunately, their common denominator is the demise of affordable housing caused by the malignant neglect of government at all levels.

Every month millions of Black Americans hand over half of our livelihood to the descendants of those who forcefully brought our ancestors here to work for free. Essentially, America is in the business of charging its captives rent.

Gentrification is not the inevitable result of economic development, but the result of fundamentally unjust economic development policies.

I’ve read far too many think pieces, op-eds, and reports that neglect the role of tenant protections as a tool that is vital to solving our local, state, national, and […]

Esperanza Menendez-Jackson is a single working mother who lived with her three children in a government-subsidized apartment building in Newark, New Jersey. Early into the lease, she discovered that the […]

We know a few things about the majority of very low-income renters: They live in private market housing, not tax credit projects or public housing. They receive no housing subsidies. […]