Join us on February 18th at 7pm EST for a panel discussion for Beyond YIMBY/NIMBY Binary: Towards Working Class Control of Housing and Land led by socialist organizers from NYC-DSA who have been wrestling with this question for years on a grassroots level.

NYC has long been in an affordable housing crisis stemming from the deep failures of neoliberal policies and real estate speculation.

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, the crisis has been severely exacerbated. For unregulated tenants, landlords are extorting rents, increasing average prices by 30%+ since last year. Rent stabilized tenants are also not protected: in 2021, landlords warehoused countless rent-stabilized units and fraudulently rented countless more, causing upwards of 90,000 units to fall out of the rent-stabilized system. In addition, rent regulated tenants have seen the highest legal rent increases since the Bloomberg era. NYCHA is severely underfunded -- and the more local land values increase, the more private actors cynically use this distress to allow public-private market schemes to take over this critical public infrastructure.

While a majority of renters now pay over 50% of their income on rent, hundreds of thousands face evictions, Eric Adams wages a revanchist war on encampments, and over 100,000 New York City students are homeless, politicians and non-profit organizations have failed to respond in any concrete way to this crisis. As working class people struggle to deal with the consequences of real estate speculation, extraction, and dispossession, tenant organizers and organized tenants are fighting to build the power necessary to assert control over our lived space.

The panel will discuss the importance of moving beyond the inadequate and deficient YIMBY/NIMBY frameworks. The outlook of experienced housing organizers and planners will offer a perspective that seeks to activate NYC-DSA members, as well as the broad spectrum of worker-tenants, on this contentious issue, and help us chart a strategy for organizing a working-class base towards a socialist horizon; universal social housing; for full sovereignty and control of where and how they live.

Moderated By:

• nicolás vargas, facilitator, CBK DSA, DSA National Housing Justice Commission, Brooklyn Eviction Defense

Discussion Panel:

• Sabrina Bazile, CBK DSA, NYC DSA Housing Working Group, Anti-Displacement NYC

• Avi Garelick, BUM DSA, BUM DSA, NYC DSA Housing Working Group

• Esteban Giron, CBK DSA, NYC DSA Housing Working Group, Crown Heights Tenant Union, Tenant PAC

• Sarah Lazur, CBK DSA, NYC DSA Housing Working Group, Crown Heights Tenant Union

• Holden Taylor, CBK DSA, NYC DSA Housing Working Group, Marxist Unity Group, Brooklyn Eviction Defense

Co-sponsored by NYC-DSA and the NYC-DSA Citywide Housing Working Group

Virtual event: Virtual attendees will be emailed a YouTube link on the day of the event.