10 Years From Now and 30 Years Ago: the Past and the Future Meet
Photo by Mike Dennis©
By Andrea Shapiro
Met Council on Housing
Today we spent the day thinking about 10 years from today, what will the housing justice movement look like. What will we win.
As an assembly we dreamed big about the future. We have to dream big and think about the 10 years out, not just next year or even 5 years out because the real estate industry, hedge funds that are buying up our buildings are thinking 10 years if not 20 years out. In 10 years we want to claim the narrative and change around tenants rights and housing justice.
We dreamed of Rent Control for All! We dreamed about reclaiming land and having community control! What could our movement be if we had a million tenants actively involved. No elected official would be able to ignore us.
One of the big changes we need is how we think about housing — to stop thinking about housing as a commodity, no longer use housing as a way to grow wealth or an investment but what it is, our homes!
Half way through the day, I was stopped in the hallway by an another attendee. She wanted to let me know that my organization, Met Council, had organized her building in the 1980s when she still lived in NYC. Met Council has been fighting for safe, decent, and affordable housing since 1959. Being stopped by someone we helped both a long ago and last week is pretty common and a heart warming experience.
At the end of the day many of the groups from New York City came together for a shared meal and to talk about our campaigns. We were inspired by the large demands from this morning. Could we have a statewide rent control. How can we fix our rent laws. What lessons can we teach the rest of the groups from our limited equity and community owned co-ops.
As we were thinking about the future, we also thought about our cities history. NYC’s first rent laws were in response to neighborhood and citywide rent strikes. How do we build back to a time when every building has its own tenant associations? How can we reclaim our radical past?
Our group of about two dozen are excited to bring back these dreams to our communities and the NY tenants movement.
