The Housing Rights Project (HRP) writes in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement, BLSA, and Black communities around the country and the world. We are also writing to express rage and grief at the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade. We demand justice for them and for all people who face or have faced anti-Black violence.
As students committed to the idea that housing is a human right, we acknowledge and condemn the United States’ long history of denying Black people access to housing and land. This practice of denial and expropriation began with slavery, continued through the broken promises of Reconstruction,[1] restrictive covenants,[2] redlining,[3] contract lending,[4] and predatory lending.[5] It persists today through gentrification, the purposeful and reprehensible underfunding of public housing,6 housing discrimination,[6] and the government’s wholly inadequate response to homelessness,[7],[8] all of which disproportionately affect Black people.[9],[10]
Black scholars and activists like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, and Patrisse Cullors urge us to imagine and build towards a world where resources are directed to housing, healthcare, and education instead of police and prisons.[11],[12],[13],[15] Black organizers and leaders in New York’s housing movement have been working for generations to imagine and build towards a city where everyone has access to truly affordable, dignified housing. Just this past year, Black tenant leaders were at the forefront of the campaign to strengthen New York State’s housing laws. They tirelessly organized their buildings, met with elected officials, wrote op-eds, attended long meetings, and marched in the streets. Throughout, they urged their neighbors to dream beyond the limits of what others believed possible. Their vision was an essential part of passing historic tenant protections for New Yorkers, and they continue to fight tirelessly towards a world that houses rather than cages and kills.
The systems of oppression and exploitation that we are committed to opposing and dismantling in our housing work are inextricably linked, in this country and others, to those that allow the police to attack and kill Black and Brown people with impunity. We oppose anti-Black discrimination, racism, and violence in all its forms, and believe unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. To that end, we urge our classmates and faculty to support the Black Lives Matter movement however you are able. If you would like to support organizing against anti-Black state violence and gentrification in New York City, please consider Equality for Flatbush, VOCALNY, Brooklyn Movement Center, and Take Back the Bronx.
In Solidarity,
Housing Rights Project E-Board 2020-2021
Bianca MacPherson
Ethan Chiel
Margaret Lyford
Maura Gingerich
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/21/garden/restrictive-covenants-stubbornly-stay-on-the-books.html
[3] https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/12/4/20953282/racism-housing-discrimination-keeanga-yamahtta-taylor
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
[5] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/08/blacks-really-were-targeted-bogus-loans-during-housing-boom/6559/ 6 https://www.thecity.nyc/housing/2020/2/25/21210492/trump-hud-cuts-target-public-housing-fixes-and-apartmentvouchers
[6] https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/real-estate-agents-investigation/
[7] https://picturethehomeless.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/PtH_White_paper5.pdf
[8] https://incite-national.org/quality-of-life-policing/
[9] https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-homelessness-new-york-city/
[10] https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/HousingSpotlight2-2.pdf
[11] https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/128-ruth-wilson-gilmore-on-covid-19-decarceration-and-abolition
[12] https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Angela-Davis-Are_Prisons_Obsolete.pdf
[13] https://transformharm.org/towards-the-horizon-of-abolition-a-conversation-with-mariame-kaba/
[15]https://www.vogue.com/article/patrisse-cullors-protest-op-ed