I grew up in Austin, Texas, as it was rapidly gentrifying. As I saw that develop through high school and college, I became much more aware of the decisions that are being made and how they impact working people without their input. It is so often unclear where that power is held and where it comes from. That inspired me to study urban planning in grad school as an attempt to find the answer to that, which ultimately felt a little dissatisfying. I ended up feeling frustrated by the neoliberal constraints around what you can do as an urban planner: prioritizing low taxes and incentivizing big business development.
I grew interested in the history of community organizing and tenant organizing that has opened up opportunities for alternative ownership models. I moved to New York to work with limited equity housing co-ops. These are co-ops that have, for the most part, been around since the 1970s and ’80s. They were landlord-abandoned buildings, and tenants organized in them, started running them, and eventually gained formal ownership and maintained them as permanently affordable housing co-ops. In my role, I helped them make budgets, hold elections, make changes to their bylaws — all the technical things that come up when you’re running your own housing.
Technical expertise is useful, but only when paired with real grassroots organizing power.
This was around 2014 or 2015, during a period of intense gentrification and displacement in Central Brooklyn, where I was living at the time. I wanted to get more involved in the fight to prevent displacement and keep tenants in their homes. I began working with the Crown Heights Tenant Union. Later I cofounded a tenant group in Brownsville called Housing Organizers for People Empowerment. Both of these groups support tenants in organizing their own buildings, but also bring tenants together across neighborhoods to strategize together, support one another, and wield political collective power.
There’s…
Auteur: Samantha Kattan
