ORGANIZING After Crisis
AUGUST 2023 UPDATE
We have always believed that the impetus for major reforms comes from the spontaneous disruptive protest of millions of ordinary people. Now we have seen that process play out with our own eyes, not just in a history book.
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NO JOB,
NO RENT
10 months of organizing the tenant struggle
FEBRUARY 2021 REPORT
The future of democracy and the future of the planet depends on our willingness to rise up and raise hell, not on registering people to vote or reforming the Democratic Party. Right now, right outside your door, masses of people are willing to fight back. Are you going to push them to do it?
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The SOS Blog
Our updates get a little long. Here’s our new blog.
No Trabajo, No Renta: Diez meses de organizar la lucha de inquilinxs
Traducción al español: Comité de Justicia de Lenguaje del Sindicato de Inquilinxs de Los Ángeles Abril 2021 Una Nueva Generación de Organizadorxs Durante los últimos diez meses, la pandemia del[…]
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A year of pandemic organizing at Marbury Plaza
The one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdown is in many ways a sad occasion, but it’s also a good time to evaluate the successes and failures in tenant organizing during[…]
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DC Tenants Call on Susan Rice to Cancel the Rent
On Jan. 23nd, 2021, over 200 DC tenants and activists marched on the house of Susan Rice, head of the Domestic Policy Council, to demand that the federal government cancel[…]
Read moreThoughts on Organizing in a Crisis
MARCH 20 SORT-OF-UPDATE
We are just beginning to feel the economic impact of coronavirus in the US. Millions will be unable to pay April rent and while some cities (including D.C.) have placed a moratorium on evictions, most have not. This crisis has inspired sudden talk of mass strikes and rent strikes. We’re thrilled at all this new interest in housing organizing—specifically a nationwide rent strike—but “organizing” for that in these times looks nothing like the kind of organizing we’ve done before. We’ve got some ideas about how to respond now, how we might prepare for local consequences down the line, and if you’re totally new to housing organizing, how you might start given that meeting face-to-face is largely off the table.
Bridging Buildings,
Building Bridges
DECEMBER 2019 UPDATE
Since our last update, we’ve worked with leaders in a half-dozen complexes around the city to organize their own buildings while continuing our anti-eviction work. As a program for building power, SOS has been a success. But the maturity of our project now forces us to confront problems we’d once been able to defer: demographic limitations on our work, our relationship to DSA, and how to connect struggles across the city. In this update, we’ll talk about the best way we’ve found to deal with these contradictions: by taking an active role in creating and supporting a new DC Tenants Union. But first, we’ll outline the state of the project and the other, smaller-scale lessons we’ve learned by working in different buildings, each of which has brought new challenges and opportunities.
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Getting Past the Door
How we moved from canvassing to organizing buildings
FEBRUARY 2019 UPDATE
For the past 18 months, volunteers from the Stomp Out Slumlords project have crisscrossed the District of Columbia, finding tenants facing eviction and talking to them about how they can defend themselves. We’ve knocked the doors of nearly 8,000 tenants being sued for eviction, we’ve spent hundreds of person-hours talking to tenants at landlord-tenant court, we’ve gotten to know militant tenants and worked alongside them to organize in their buildings. In the course of this work, we’ve learned a great deal about the dynamics of eviction and tenant struggle, and we’ve been forced to reevaluate core tenets of our project’s original strategy.
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Hype
People have said some pretty nice things about us
