Housing is a human right and every DC resident has the right to a safe, clean and stable place to live. After leaving the city’s housing crisis solely to private developers for decades, working families have been pushed out of DC or faced higher housing costs so developers and private investors can make more profits. Popularized in Vienna, social housing allows cities like DC to build, manage, and grow a stock of mixed-income, publicly-owned housing. Moreover, by creating a public option for housing, we’ll drive down rents in private market housing, benefiting everyone.

Come learn about the housing problem, why public housing is an essential policy to address it, what the Green New Deal for DC campaign is all about, and how to get involved in the fight.

Speakers:

Shanti Singh is the Legislative & Communications Director at Tenants Together, California's statewide renters' rights coalition, where she helps support local policy organizing, state-level advocacy, and national coalition-building for tenants' rights and social housing. She got her start organizing with tenants in private, public and nonprofit housing, alongside housing justice groups in San Francisco. She formerly co-chaired DSA SF and currently works on tenant organizing & social housing issues as chair of the SF Housing Stability Oversight Board (a citywide policy commission for exploring social housing strategies) and as board vice president of the San Francisco Community Land Trust.

Parisa Norouzi has over 20 years of experience working with nonprofit organizations and organizing communities. Parisa co-founded the city-wide community organizing group Empower DC in 2003, an organization which works to build the confident self-advocacy and organized political power of low-moderate income DC residents with a focus on fighting the displacement of residents amid DC’s gentrification boom. At Empower DC she has led the organization’s Child Care for All Campaign and the People’s Property Campaign, leading to victories including winning funding for child care vouchers which ended the city’s waiting list for those services, and changing DC law to provide opportunity for public input into the “surplus and disposition” process for public property. Since 2001, Parisa has worked alongside the historic Ivy City community to record previously undocumented history through the Ivy City History Project, and work towards revitalization without displacement in that community. Most recently she led a successful environmental justice lawsuit that halted the operation of a polluting tour bus parking lot at the Alexander Crummell School, a cherished African American historic site in the heart of the Ivy City community, an area which already suffers poor air quality.

Nadia Salazar Sandi is a Bolivian immigrant who moved to the US at age 10 with her parents. Seeking opportunity and safety, her family ended in Wheaton, MD. As a mixed status family, fear of family separation was always real and present. Nadia started community organizing after the Federal Dream Act failed by 5 votes in 2010. The understanding of responsibility and the need to step up led her to obtain a degree in psychology from UMBC-USG and to fight back. Her organizing career goes from unionizing farm workers in North Carolina, to supporting teachers and students in Louisiana, all the way to working with youth all over the DMV. As an advocate she has focused her fight in supporting youth and workers in the DMV area and was the one of the youngest Chief of Staff in Annapolis during the 2018 session. Along with her passion for organizing, she is a folkloric dancer for a local Bolivian community group and a new mom to baby Luna. She is incredibly involved with local organizing, the Wheaton community, and the Bolivian community as a whole.

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This hybrid event is open to both DSA Members and supporters. The in-person event will be at the Petworth Neighborhood Library (4200 Kansas Ave NW, Washington, DC 20001). Those who wish to attend virtually can RSVP via Action Network and will be provided with a Zoom link on the next page, under "Instructions From Your Host."

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