Workers Strike Back Stands in Solidarity with NYCHA Tenants!
STOP all demolition and privatization at NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA)!
TAX THE RICH to:
Fully fund repairs and renovation of ALL existing NYCHA buildings
Massively expand publicly-owned, rent-controlled affordable housing
We demand that Mayor Mamdani and the New York City Council:
Public housing in the United States, including NYCHA, was established in the 1930s through public funding as part of the New Deal, which was won by the militant union movement which carried out general strikes and shut down large parts of the auto industry. This titanic revolt in the 1930s by the American working class, built on solidarity across racial and ethnic divisions, led to both the biggest expansion of unionized jobs in U.S. history and major concessions by the capitalist class, including the New Deal. The victories included Medicare, Medicaid, parks and public infrastructure, public housing, public education, and social services.
But ever since workers won these historic victories, Republican and Democratic parties — both of which represent the billionaires and multimillionaires — have tried to snatch them away from us. Politicians from both parties have systematically starved public housing and other services of trillions of dollars of funds. Deliberate underfunding by Democrats and Republicans has meant that between 8,000 and 15,000 units of public housing are being lost annually due to the sheer lack of regular upkeep and maintenance. This is then used as the justification to privatize public housing, which results in further loss of affordable homes and increased homelessness.
Both parties make dire pronouncements that public housing buildings are uninhabitable and urgently need to be torn down and rebuilt. But what this actually means is that public land, public funds, and the rents paid by working and poor families are handed on a platter as huge profits to a handful of wealthy people who own Wall Street banks, private equity firms, and real estate corporations like Essence and Related.
NYCHA tenants who are being pushed out in the name of “temporary relocation” are being promised the right to return through a one-for-one replacement. But these are likely false promises for the most part. Over a quarter of a million public housing units have been lost, in total, nationally in the last thirty years. Only a small share of the demolished and privatized public housing apartments have been replaced with new public housing. Underfunding, demolition, and privatization is really a process of ending publicly owned affordable housing.
NYC is the world’s wealthiest city, with 66 billionaires, 818 centimillionaires (who own $100 million or more), and 384,500 millionaires. Mayor Mamdani and the City Council must TAX THE RICH to fully fund public housing!
We need a fighting strategy to STOP all NYCHA demolition and privatization. That means mass mobilizations of tenants and working people to expose the politicians in City Hall. We need to SHUT DOWN the meetings of the NYCHA Board, the NY City Council, and Mayor Mamdani. We need to fight for resolutions to be passed in labor unions. We need to organize major protest actions.
How Tenants and Revolutionary Socialists Won Against Attacks on Seattle’s Public Housing
Seattle’s revolutionary socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and the city’s working class won a whole series of historic victories for workers and renters, like the nation’s highest minimum wage and the Amazon Tax. It also included a stunning victory against a federal attempt to destroy public housing on a grand scale in 2014.
President Obama and both parties presided over a nationwide program called “Moving to Work,” a plan to massively increase public housing rent. The purported idea was that the tenants of public housing would be forced to get higher-paying jobs, based on the neoliberal ideological claim that people are poor because they are lazy. In reality, Moving to Work was a neoliberal assault on a national scale on the little remaining public and affordable housing. Moving to Work was also racist and sexist, given that a large proportion of public housing residents are low-income families of color, many immigrants, and many single-mom households.
The Seattle incarnation of Moving to Work was given the Orwellian name “Stepping Forward.” If Stepping Forward had been allowed, it would have increased rents for 4,600 working-class and poor tenants of Seattle Housing Authority (SHA) by a stunning 400 percent over six years. It was a move to drive out tenants and begin dismantling public housing. Democrats and the SHA Board presented Stepping Forward as a fait accompli. But the tenants refused to accept it, and wanted to fight against what they knew was a pipeline to increased poverty and precarity and even homelessness.
Kshama Sawant’s City Council office organized hundreds of the tenants. The federal government, with the city establishment, had organized public meetings meant to force Stepping Forward on tenants. But Kshama and the tenants turned every public meeting into a protest action, speaking out boldly to expose the lies of the political establishment and interrupting the establishment speakers repeatedly with chants. These protest actions culminated in an incredible walkout of hundreds of tenants from the final meeting. Following the walkout, Kshama and the hundreds of tenants held their own powerful People’s Assembly!
The movement completely exposed the plans of the Obama administration and Seattle’s so-called “progressive” Democrats as hostile to working and poor people. Seattle’s Democrats were ultimately forced to join Kshama in publicly opposing Stepping Forward. In a historic victory, the Obama administration was forced to withdraw Stepping Forward and allow SHA tenants to stay secure in their homes with no rent increases! To our knowledge, Seattle was the only city in which Obama’s Moving to Work initiative was defeated.
What this showed was that class struggle, not trying to negotiate with corporate politicians, is what gets the goods.
Get involved with Workers Strike Back in NYC!
Workers Strike Back members in NYC are getting organized alongside their coworkers, neighbors, and community to members to build for the kind of mass mobilizations of working tenants needed to expose the Democrats from the NYCHA board and the NY City Council all the way to Mayor Mamdani and win real, permanently affordable social housing by taxing the rich!
You can download and print copies of our petition and statement to table and talk to working people in your neighborhood, become a member of Workers Strike Back today to stay involved in our upcoming local and national meetings, and check for other upcoming events in the city on our events page.
Please send a photo of filled out petitions, or contact us with any questions, at solidarity@workersstrikeback.org
Workers Strike Back is a nationwide organization fighting to shut down ICE, for a permanent end to all U.S. military aid to Israel, and to win national rent control and taxes on the rich to fund free healthcare for all and a massive expansion of publicly owned affordable housing. Workers Strike Back was founded by revolutionary socialist and former Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and is based on the fighting strategy Kshama used to win unparalleled victories like the nation’s highest minimum wage, the Amazon Tax, and renters’ rights.
