About

This oral history project aims to bring together the voices of all those New Yorkers whose past and present organizing efforts shape the city and its history. It seeks to amplify the voices, stories, and movements that have and are changing the way we live and relate to each other in the city. It focuses particularly on the efforts that have used community organizing, cooperativism, and coalition building to not only fight against profit-driven development, gentrification, and displacement but also to envision in collectivity new policy platforms and development approaches leading to the production of non-speculative housing development guaranteeing permanent affordable housing, including mutual housing associations, non-limited equity housing cooperatives, and community land trusts.

Additionally, this project underscores the struggles against redlining outcomes, rezoning processes, and environmental injustices that have plagued Brown and Black communities for decades. Lastly, to celebrate and preserve the voices of those involved in housing movements, this project seeks to visualize where those voices and stories take place and make those narratives accessible to everyone through an interactive digital cartography serving as a permanent archive.

The Housing Justice Oral History Project intends to depict the world as it is envisioned through collective struggles toward social, spatial, and environmental justice and embodied in the everyday actions of those who move that struggle forward. While many activists, organizers, and communities involved in these movements have developed deep relationships based on solidarity and mutual support in the face of profit-oriented development, such inequitable policies and practices continue to drive fragmentations across this complex ecosystem of actors. Each story assembled in the oral history serves to encourage connection, exchange, and dialogue across this ecosystem.

We hope this collective authoring process —a shared history of struggle and creative defiance— will foster new, lasting relationships, sustain far-reaching knowledge exchange, and generate powerful narratives about housing that center on justice, care, and self-determination. Producing and sharing these counter-narratives affirms more dynamic histories and care-based models of housing justice and challenges expert interventions that only serve dominant political and economic interests.

Simultaneously, this project seeks to support and expand the community of scholars engaged in fights for housing justice. Academic researchers have historically employed asymmetrical and extractive knowledge production and interpretation methods that reinforce racial, gender, and class hierarchies. The interconnected practices of oral history, radical cartography, and community advocacy promoted by this project offer a framework for conducting militant research grounded in intersectional and abolitionist theories of change.

We hope this project promotes and models inclusive, reflexive, and conscious research approaches that affirm the agency, knowledge, and dignity of each community member in the development and execution of any research project.

Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility
The institute supports critical and applied scholarship and provides opportunities for social action and policy engagement for faculty, students, and the broader New School community. It undertakes initiatives to inform and influence public debate and public policy at the national and global levels. The term “mobility” in the Institute’s name is the key to its mission. It commits to a dynamic understanding of concepts central to the field of migration studies—borders, citizenship and other forms of membership, the nation-state, forced migration, migration due to climate change, and disasters. It also opens up for examination of the prevailing political, cultural, and economic narratives that both influence and are influenced by scholarship, policy, and social action. For more informaiton, visit Zolberg Institute.

Parsons Housing Justice Lab
A platform for dialogue, research, and design that advocates for equitable neighborhood development. Combining academic and popular knowledge, this collaborative laboratory aims to expose the damaging aspects produced by the current housing system, such as discrimination, tenure insecurity, displacement, and homelessness, as well as explore practices and policy frameworks emerging as a response that pursues housing justice through the promotion of tenant protections and rent regulation, new forms of access to adequate housing, capacity building for collective action, cooperative models of housing and community development, and other social alternatives for housing and equitable development. For more information, visit Parsons Housing Justice Lab.