Hot Topics in Housing Justice: Eviction Resistance and Community Control

Catalog description

NYC tenants have built incredible power over the last few years and won unprecedented victories like right to counsel and rent strikes, and helped to win statewide victories around rent regulations and an eviction moratorium. But in the wake of COVID 19, these wins are being rolled back and evictions are resuming. How are tenants fighting back? The first half of this course explores the history of eviction resistance and the different strategies tenant groups are using--direct action, mass mobilization, legislative and administrative strategies, and more. The second half of the course asks, more broadly, what does it mean to stay and control the resources we need in local communities? What are the promises and limits of a vision of "community control," and what are the common contradictions and problems--cultural and ideological, economic and fiscal, and legal--that activists face in practice, and how do they meet these challenges?