Tenant Organizing
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Are NYC’s Rent-Stabilized Buildings Really in Crisis?
A two-year rent freeze, affecting about 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in New York, was just approved. Before the freeze passed, landlords said their buildings wouldn’t survive it. But recent analyses suggest the real culprit behind distressed buildings is predatory equity, not rent stabilization.
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Fighting Predatory Equity
When predatory equity investors take a gamble on multifamily housing, it’s the tenants who suffer — whether from harassment or crumbling buildings. Advocates and tenants in New York have won the fight to get some of these buildings into responsible hands, but many are still in limbo, and some are reentering the cycle of speculation.
The Plague of the Nonprofits
The familiar transformation from volunteer organizing effort to established nonprofit needs an overhaul, or it will keep sucking the life out of truly grass-roots organizing.
The Barney Frank Challenge
Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the house Financial Services Committee, sits down with Shelterforce to discuss consumer protection, the future of Fannie and Freddie, the role of FHA, and rental housing and offers a challenge to advocates looking to effect change on the federal level.
The Purchase of a Lifetime
The bank balked. Neighbors grumbled. But these poor tenants would not be swept away in the real estate boom.
Labor Goes to Bat for Housing: a Community-Labor coalition in San Jose
Organized labor and affordable housing advocates in San Jose and Silicon Valley have formed a coalition to support more low-income housing, inclusionary zoning, and tenants rights.
“No Evictions. We Won’t Move!”
“This land is too valuable to permit poor people to park on it.” —Justin Herman, former executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, 1970 The land Herman was referring […]
Mike McKee on Winning the Rent Control Battle
An interview with Michael McKee, policy director for the New York State Tenants and Neighbors Coalition.
Taking Charge: Public Housing Tenants Organize
The problems affecting the Cooks Bridge complex in Needham, Massachusetts, in 1990 were the kind typically associated with troubled public housing: lack of or poor maintenance and drug-related crime. After […]
The Early Years
It was during 1973 that I first began thinking about a national publication for the housing movement. I was a legal services lawyer helping to build the New Jersey Tenant […]
Organizing the New Tenants Movement
During the past year, the tenants’ movement has suffered major setbacks. Landlords in California and Massachusetts, once strongholds of tenant activism, succeeded in wiping out rent controls. In New York […]
How Cambridge Lost Rent Control
25 years ago tenants organized, formed coalitions, took to the streets, and won rent control in Massachusetts. But, after two and half decades of constant battles against powerful and wealthy […]
ACORN Organizes Public Housing Residents
As the ACORN Tenant Union comes near to completing its first full year of organizing public housing residents, with 150 developments organized representing some 38,000 public housing tenants across the […]