Cities For People, Not For Profit

Cities for People, Not for Profit: Gentrification and Housing Activism in Bushwick is an oral history project tracing the history of ongoing gentrification and subsequent fight for affordable housing in Bushwick, Brooklyn from the perspective of artists, activists, and community residents. Oral history can be used as an entry point to explore what Henri Lefebvre famously termed the citizen’s “right to the city” and to explore how these narratives can respond to rampant real estate growth and housing policy. The goal is to have these stories posted online alongside informative tools and resources to help activate the community, such as alternative housing strategies, locating activist organizations and fair housing efforts in the area. Ultimately, we want to seek effective ways to empower urban residents to contribute to greater urban democracy, using these stories to underscore the urgent need for politics in this city to prioritize housing that corresponds to the human social needs of the people of this city rather than to the capitalist profit-driven economy of the elite few. This will help ignite relationships amongst urban historians, policymakers and community activists, with the various groups being affected by gentrification in Bushwick in order to participate in real solutions with the community’s best interest in mind.

This project involves various collaborations with grassroots groups, community-based organizations, and activist scholars including the NYC chapter of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, the Bushwick Housing Independence Project, and the Housing Justice Oral History Project. For more information about these collaborations see below.

The Cities For People, Not for Profit project provides a framework for urban historians, policy makers, and community activists to spark relationships with Latine residents being affected by gentrification in Bushwick to activate the community to participate in real solutions with the community’s best interests in mind. The aim of this project was to capture interviews that reflected the social, political, and economic effects of gentrification as it is unfolding in the neighborhood, with the narratives capturing a sense of immediacy in housing insecurity among Latine BIPOC residents, activists and artists. The interviews with Latinx and BIPOC residents as well as with other advocates reflect the community-based nature of the project, which in turn echoes the project’s mission and goals for community-sourced solutions to gentrification and displacement of Latine and BIPOC people in the neighborhood.

Cities for People, Not for Profit is an ongoing oral history project led by artist, archivist, and oral historian Cynthia Tobar. She has collaborated with different community-based organizations and grassroots groups for this project including the NYC Chapter of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, the Bushwick Housing Independence Project, and the Housing Justice Oral History Project.

Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP)
Nos Cuidamos is a collaborative oral history project between the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) and Cities for People, Not For Profit that began in April 2020, documenting stories about how residents of Bushwick, Brooklyn organized to meet each other's needs during COVID-19. They began conducting oral histories with neighboring residents and organizers participating in mutual aid to understand how their work fits within the larger context of housing organizing and racial justice movements. The experiences shared reflect how food and housing insecurity issues, as experienced by BIPOC, poor, and working class communities in Bushwick, were intertwined and had further compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis. The interviewing, transcription and archiving work on this project was supported by a grant from The City University of New York PSC-CUNY Research Award Program. To listen to Nos Cuidamos' oral histories, visit the Cities for People, Not for Profit, website.

Bushwick Housing Independence Project (BHIP)
Building Tenant Power with BHIP is an ongoing collaboration with the Bushwick Housing Independence Project and the Housing Justice Oral History Project under the leadership of Amy Collado and Gabriela Rendón, respectively. This project seeks to reveal the outcomes, tangible and intangibles, of gentrification from the point of view of tenants and those affected. Through local narratives, it exposes past organizing strategies, mobilizations, coalitions, and challenges while celebrating the commitment and determination of those who have fought to preserve the working-class and immigrant character of Bushwick. By amplifying and preserving the experiences, voices, and memories of all of those who have built tenant power, Building Tenant Power with BHIP seeks to build and strengthen relationships with tenants and community leaders who shared BHIP's values and to serve as a tool for community engagement to inform their ongoing organizing efforts in the neighborhood.

This collaboration was kicked off with the assistance of students from Parsons MS Design and Urban Ecologies program Class of 2025. They conducted interviews, transcribed recordings, and analyzed narratives as part of this collaboration with the assistance of Xavier Moysén Alvarez, PhD candidate in Sociology at the New School for Social Research (NSSR). The team includes Soraya Barar, Avery Crower, Aqdas Fatima, Isabelle Groenewegen, Lauren Leiker, Rhaynae Lloyd, Zoe Moskowitz, Leah Roy, Chey Socheata, and Natalie Temple.