Movement Blog for the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights

Mayday New Orleans member and public housing community leader Sharon Jasper appeared on GRITtv online this week to speak about the harsh climate for housing organizing in New Orleans. Watch her interview, Skyped in from the Gulf, below and visit the GRITtv website to watch their complete program on New Orleans five years after Katrina, featuring civil rights attorneys and activists Bill Quigley and Tracie Washington: Rebuilding New Orleans: Promises and Pain.

More GRITtv

Yesterday, August 29, marked the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s first landfall in New Orleans. Displaced New Orleanians living in New York and the Tri-State Area organized an all-day event to commemorate the occasion. The day opened with a press conference featuring Johnnie Stevens of the Post Katrina Rita Awareness Walk and Rob Robinson of the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights. A march from Union Square to the Solidarity Center on 17th Street followed. Marchers solemnly chanted: “Remember Katrina. Housing is a right,” as they attracted the attention and respectful applause of onlookers. The crowd made its way to a festive gathering of family, friends, and supporters with music from the Second Line Band, a screening of the documentary “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” which connects the tragedies of Katrina and the BP oil spill, and testimony from displaced New Orleans residents and allies.

One question persisted throughout the day: what can the story of New Orleans teach us about national housing policy? Rob Robinson reflected on what public housing privatization in New Orleans demonstrates to the rest of the country: the power of privatization to catalyze an accelerated process of gentrification and displacement. What happened in New Orleans, Rob said, was the exploitation of a natural disaster to expedite a government agenda to transfer public ownership of housing over to private markets. The latest phase in this process on the national level, he stressed, is the mortgage financing proposed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s PETRA, or Preservation, Enhancement and Transformation of Rental Assistance Initiative. Public housing residents, organizers, and advocates across the country have rallied against PETRA’s proposal to mortgage public housing.

Rob also commented on the case of Sharon Jasper, a displaced New Orleans public housing resident and human rights activist, who faces potential termination of her housing voucher for her participation in a peaceful May 2010 protest. Sharon’s case, Rob said, symbolizes the struggle for human rights that is public housing activism in the United States.

You can listen to Rob’s full remarks here: A brief interview with Rob Robinson

Residents and supporters of Survivors Village in 2007.

Survivors Village New Orleans is organizing a number of upcoming events to fight against the City of New Orleans’s attack on Fight Back Center, a home base for organizing and housing rights movement-building, and commemorate the fifth anniversary of the storm. Please find information from Survivors Village below and mark your calendars!

For the last year, the city of New Orleans has been trying to declare the Fight Back Center blighted and to assess fines and liens in order to seize it. Each time a notice would be given to us, we would correct the problems and avoid the fines and liens. Now we have learned that at a hearing that we did not have notice of, the Fight Back Center has been declared blighted and a huge fine has been assessed. The next step in the process is for the City to place a lien on the property and then attempt a seizure.

We all know that the property at 3820 Alfred St. and the 3800 block of St. Bernard is known around the country as the birthplace of the post-Katrina housing struggle for the poor and landless in the City of New Orleans. It is no accident that there is such an effort to seize the property by the City. We will fight this effort and win!!

But the final solution to this problem is to get the property in tip-top shape so that there is no reason for this harassment in the future. Though there are many people who are willing to help do the work, we must raise funds to buy the supplies and materials.

This week Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights member Picture the Homeless (PTH) launched a participatory online mapping project to help New Yorkers all over the city document vacant buildings and lots in their communities.

A segment of the Vacant NYC map on Wednesday, August 25.

Since 2006, when Picture the Homeless conducted a borough-wide count of vacant buildings in Manhattan and found enough vacant properties to house the whole city’s nightly shelter population, the organization has pushed for the city to conduct an annual census of vacant buildings and lots as the first step in a comprehensive strategy to use these vacant properties to house homeless and low-income people.

The initiative has been on the New York City Council’s agenda since February as Intro 48. In PTH’s words, “Intro 48 is a City Council bill that would empower the city to conduct an annual count of vacant buildings and lots in the five boroughs. Written by homeless people and introduced by Council Member Melissa Mark Viverito, Intro 48 will let us see just how much underutilized housing exists, and allow communities to come up with their own strategies to return them to productive use.”

Let’s not wait for the City to pass Intro 48; let’s show the City Council the power and relevance of counting vacant properties by taking the matter into communities’ own hands. To report a vacant property and place it on the map, visit http://vacantnyc.crowdmap.com/

PTH makes it easy: participants can text, email, tweet, or fill out a form on the webpage.

Download the original 2006 PTH report “Homeless People Count” here.

Join Land of Opportunity director Luisa Dantas, Housing is a Human Right, and the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative for an evening of film, testimony, and discussion at New York’s Brecht Forum Tuesday, August 31. The evening’s program reflects on the meaning of home, community, and the future of our cities from New Orleans to New York and beyond, days after the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Visit the Brecht Forum page for the full event listing.

Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights member Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN) submitted six videos to the Testify Project. With the United Nations to review the U.S.’s human rights record for the first time in November, the U.S. Human Rights Network initiated the Testify Project to collect testimonies of human rights violations by impacted communities. LACAN, a community organization led by homeless and extremely low-income members of LA’s Central City East community, contributed to the project with six videos featuring members speaking on the human right to housing, gentrification, criminalization and racial profiling. Watch two highlights below, and go to LACAN’s complete YouTube channel to watch all their submissions.

Steve Diaz speaks on violations of the human right to housing, including the federal government’s initiative to privatize public housing, and recommends the U.S. to pursue a comprehensive housing strategy. Listen to Steve’s testimony:

Pam J. speaks about the Los Angeles Police Department’s criminalization of poor people. Hear her testimony:

To watch more video testimonies on violations of economic and social rights in the U.S., go to National Economic and Social Rights Initiative’s YouTube channel. NESRI has collected testimonies submitted by members and allies in the four program areas of housing, education, health, and work with dignity.

Join the New York Katrina Rita Survivors Assembly in commemorating the fifth anniversary of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita with a march from Union Square to an event at the Solidarity Center on Sunday, August 29. The program features awards given to solidarity groups and individuals, a Gulf Coast dinner, and a raffle. Full event and contact information can be found on the Assembly’s flier below.

NESRI is thrilled to release Coming Home: The Dry Storm, the award-winning documentary on public housing privatization and community organizing in post-Katrina New Orleans, next month. With Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights member organization May Day New Orleans and the Rada Film Group, NESRI was an executive producer on the film. You can preview the film by watching the brand-new trailer above.

NESRI would like to help you screen Coming Home for your organization, congregation, conference, film festival, or a house party. Here is the growing list of organizations and platforms screening the film in September:

Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference Independent Film Series, September 17, Washington, D.C.

National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, Date TBA, New York City

Los Angeles Community Action Network, September 24, Los Angeles

May Day New Orleans, Date TBA, New Orleans

The New School, Date TBA, New York City

Northeast Pennsylvania Organizing Center, Date TBA, Wilkes-Barre, PA

Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, Date TBA, Chicago

More information on how to host a screening–and how to use the film as an organizing tool–is on the way. In the meantime, if you are interested in screening Coming Home, please contact Darya Marchenkova at darya at nesri dot org.

Big thank you to Ayana Enomoto-Hurst for producing this trailer.

Long-time public housing leader and MayDay New Orleans member Sharon Jasper is facing an assault charge and housing voucher termination for her courage to speak out against New Orleans’s policies of public housing demolition and displacement. After her participation in a May 28 demonstration protesting the private Columbia Parc development that replaced St. Bernard public housing and denied many former residents the right to return, Sharon was slapped with an assault charge on a Columbia Parc rental agent and threatened with eviction.

Sharon’s case is a symbol of the constant threat of eviction faced by all public housing tenants. It’s also part of a disturbing pattern of using eviction to intimidate tenants against exercising their right to expression and organization. A strict set of HUD regulations threatens tenants with eviction or voucher termination for breaking a number of rules around public housing developments, but when it is used to silence resident leaders who choose to organize and speak out, this has a particularly chilling effect on democracy.

From NOLA to New York, Sharon and all public housing residents and leaders need our sustained support.

If you’re in NOLA, come through this Saturday, July 31 to a Survivors Village meeting:

4 pm at the St. Bernard Community Baptist Church, 4000 St. Bernard Ave

Human right to housing movement leaders J.R. Fleming of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights and Endesha Juakali of Survivors Village New Orleans appeared last night on Los Angeles’s KPFK 90.7FM Beautiful Struggle. You can listen to the whole broadcast here.

Among the many hot issues J.R. and Endesha discussed during the broadcast–including reflecting on local struggles in New Orleans and Chicago–J.R. spoke to the imprudence and injustice of the Obama administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s public housing privatization plan PETRA in the face of the national economic and housing crisis:

“We have been engaged with HUD around a conversation around Preserving, Expanding, and Transforming Rental Assistance (PETRA), which is also known as the preservation of public housing. And how do you preserve public housing, they say? By taking it out of the hands of the government and giving it to the banks. The same people who just failed us, who failed middle class America, you now want them to fail poor people.”