The Sword, The Shield, The March: CL/VU & The Fight for the Jim Brooks Act
Shivering in a playground park in Roxbury on a 30 degree March morning, I stood together with upwards of 60 Bostonians and heard the clamor of a brass-and-bucket-drum street band, the stories of tenants fighting back against their landlords’ eviction notices, and a viable candidate for United States Congress declare that housing is a human right.
And City Life/Vida Urbana, the organization that pulled off this frigid Roxbury rally, was only just getting started.
City Life/Vida Urbana, also known as City Life or CL/VU, is one of the foremost community organizing groups in the Boston area. They describe themselves on their website as “a grassroots community organization committed to fighting for racial, social and economic justice and gender equality by building working class power”. This is clearly a pretty broad mantle to take up, but that’s not to say that City Life isn’t focused enough to realize their goals. Their current work, and their history as an organization, is deeply rooted in grassroots tenant organizing and advocacy. They were founded in 1973 as the Jamaica Plain Tenants Action Group (TAG), a collection of residents and civil rights, feminist, and anti-Vietnam War activists in the Jamaica Plain (J.P.) neighborhood of Boston that banded together to challenge slumlords who were gouging them for rent in decaying apartments. The early 1970s were a time of marked disinvestment from urban neighborhoods, during which homes in areas like Jamaica Plain visibly deteriorated, and some truly amoral landlords decided to burn their tenants’ homes for a profit. Using direct action tactics, TAG residents and organizers successfully pressured city officials into implementing rent control measures and prosecuting the worst of the landlords for arson.
In the 80s, in a pendulum swing that would reassert itself in tandem with the cyclical nature of the U.S. economy, the housing market in J.P. rebounded as capital flooded back into urban areas around the country. Rather than generating wealth and opportunity for residents of these areas, however, the years of real estate investment brought with them gentrification and condominium conversions that threatened to displace the same tenants who, ten years before, had to fight to get landlords to perform basic property maintenance. Luckily, the network of tenant activists built by TAG quickly adjusted to this new economic climate, and established an “Eviction Free Zone” in J.P. by utilizing existing real estate law to jam up the eviction court process and secure housing for tenants long-term. The anti-eviction goals and strategies developed in the 80s became fundamental to CL/VU’s work, and as cycles of recession and disinvestment and speculative rebound have continued to churn across Boston neighborhoods, CL/VU has continued to pursue innovative methods to preserve the progress they’ve made, and push forward new protections and community-empowering policies for Boston-area tenants.
That’s what they were doing that chilly Saturday morning in Roxbury–playing defense and offense all at once.
The rally was partly a gathering of area residents who were coming together to support their neighbors at 26 School Street, whose landlord had recently sent them “notices to quit”–slips of paper announcing an imminent eviction. To show their solidarity and put some pressure on the landlord, rally-goers marched to School Street and picketed outside the six-unit building at stake, chanting slogans, singing songs of resistance, and cheering on the building’s tenants as they defiantly shouted emotional pleas right from their porch steps. This was the more “offensive” part of City Life’s strategy, otherwise known as “the sword,” on full display.
“City Life has an organizing strategy called the sword and the shield,” Benji Mauer, a resident of nearby J.P., explained to me after the protest on School Street had dissipated. “The sword is communities showing up for evictions and putting pressure on landlords to negotiate.”
As in the 80s, Jamaica Plain and Roxbury have seen an influx of real estate reinvestment in the past decade, fueled by recent college graduates’ demand for easy access to downtown Boston and its cultural amenities and high-skill job market. The steady influx of these young professionals is a textbook example of gentrification, and as comes gentrification, so too comes displacement. Area landlords who see the pent up demand will evict long-time tenants in order to open up their units for whiter, wealthier newcomers who can pay higher rents (or raise rents and then evict them when tenants fall behind on their payments, if they’re at least trying to maintain appearances of just cause). That’s what was happening at 26 School Street, and that’s why CL/VU had rallied area residents to picket outside the building–to expose its landlord for exploitative rent hikes.
No soldier can get by with just a sword, however.
“The shield,” Mauer continued, “is the legal defense strategy, which basically keeps people in their homes as long as they possibly can stay–and often does result in negotiations that allow them to stay.”
To see the shield in action, I hopped the Blue Line some weeks after the Roxbury rally to attend a weekly CL/VU community meeting in East Boston. Eastie, as Mauer told me, had become another hub for the organization’s work. According to data collected from the American Community Survey, 71.4 percent of housing in East Boston is rented, and of those households, almost half are rent-burdened, meaning they pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs. That number jumps to 71.8 percent rent-burdened when accounting only for households that the City of Boston considers “low-income,” or making less than $50,000 a year.
To put it more simply, economic conditions in East Boston make it a hotbed for gentrification and eviction. In Mauer’s estimation, Eastie’s displacement crisis has become “more rampant than in Jamaica Plain” due to its rapid pace of development and the speculation it has spawned; some are even betting on Amazon to pick the neighborhood for their new secondary headquarters.
The weekly Eastie meeting was held in the basement of a small brick parish church, and when I arrived and took a seat in a metal chair towards the back, an organizer came up to me almost immediately and handed me an earpiece connected to a belt-clip transmitter. My confusion was soon cleared up once the meeting began–it was conducted almost entirely in Spanish, and the earpiece provided us English-speaking attendees with a running translation of the discussion.
I only mention this detail to demonstrate CL/VU’s commitment to a vital element of community organizing doctrine: the centering of community members. As outlined in Lee Staples’ comprehensive manual to grassroots organizing, Roots to Power, community leadership and decision-making are fundamental to the field’s goals of empowerment. Residents of East Boston are 54 percent Hispanic or Latino, and 52 percent speak Spanish in their homes. Just as gentrification has a clear racial component in J.P. and Roxbury, so too here in Eastie. And as the church basement filled up, these demographics were obvious. Holding the meeting in the language spoken by most of the community members, thus reflecting the makeup of the community and making an intentionally empowering space for them, seemed like a no-brainer. But in another sort of organization led primarily by white outsiders who could only speak English, this could easily have been an oversight, and the earpieces may have been distributed to the majority of the people there instead of to the few native English speakers like me.
Andres Del Castillo, the lead organizer for the East Boston/North Side City Life outpost, kicked off the meeting, and right away my expectations for this to be some sort of procedural, agenda-based meeting were blown away. Instead of running down a pre-written list of topics, Del Castillo facilitated a group discussion where the assembled East Boston residents were encouraged to speak up and share their housing stories with their neighbors. One man told us his house had burned down, and how now, living off a Post Office pension, he couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. Another man expressed his frustration that the translators and lawyers at the Boston housing court always seem to be on the side of the landlords, constantly pressuring him to accept the accept the terms of eviction despite his valid legal standing to challenge them. A woman recounted her six-month battle to stave off an eviction while struggling with an illness and disability, exacerbated by a mold problem that her landlord–who, you might remember, was trying to kick her out–refused to take care of.
Throughout these stories, Del Castillo would listen intently along with the rest of the meeting-goers, but would occasionally jump in to clarify a tenant’s situation, and help reframe their experiences in the legal terms used by the Boston housing court, peppering in important points of advice and elucidation. It became clear that this meeting was CL/VU’s implementation of an important tool of community organizing–popular education. According to Lee Staples’ Roots to Power, popular education is based in “participants’ personal everyday experiences,” and “entails hands-on group activities followed by collective debriefing sessions, which generate new insights and a more critical understanding of the world… especially as regards relations of power.”
That’s just what was happening in this church basement: these East Boston residents were listening to their neighbors’ struggles with evictions and poor housing conditions, comparing them to their own, and coming to a new understanding that their landlords aren’t “your mother, your father, your professor, or your boss” as Castillo put it, but “your employee,” and that as tenants, they had actual legal power to take control of these challenges that are initially so overwhelming and discouraging. CL/VU takes this agenda of empowerment a step further, by providing on-site sessions with pro-bono lawyers from Greater Boston Legal Services and the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau once the weekly group discussion adjourns.
Catching up with Del Castillo after the meeting, I asked him if the primary function of City Life was to provide a legal service to vulnerable tenants, rather than building a community organization that could empower tenants for the long-term.
He responded that CL/VU indeed provides legal assistance, and thinks of itself as a “service-organizing organization” and “the ER or the triaging of the housing crisis in Massachusetts.” That’s the shield of the organization, City Life’s tactic of choice to delay the eviction process long enough to work out a long-term housing situation in the meantime. (For example, if it can be proved that a landlord contractually owes a tenant at least one dollar in neglected repairs, an eviction can be stayed.) But beyond that, and perhaps more importantly, Del Castillo explained that these weekly meetings help tenants dispel shame and embarrassment, and understand that “this isn’t just happening to me.”
“And we focus on the fact that it’s a social problem,” Del Castillo continued, “because any other traditional method of establishing [the presence of] a social problem is that a political scientist or statistician somewhere is going to have to tell us that there’s a problem in our neighborhood, when we right now can tell you that there are entire blocks that are transforming. We know there’s a crisis. The moment we can acknowledge that it’s not our fault, that something is being done to us as a community, then as a community we can counteract it–whether it’s through our specific cases, or, as we’ve done in many of the cases that are here, through public protest, or lobbying, or advocating for legislation.”
And so these weekly meetings, this popular education, these rallies, and these protests–all the tactics that make up City Life’s “sword and shield” strategy–serve as the training grounds for a larger aim, something I’ll call “the march.” Because, despite all of the small yet unquantifiably meaningful battles that CL/VU helps tenants win in apartments across the Boston area, ensuring their right to remain and live in a secure home, the battlefield is still drastically tilted in landlords’ favor. It’s still a seller’s market in Boston, giving landlords all the leverage in the lease-signing and -renewal process, and putting tenants–who, like anyone, need a stable home from which to put down employment, family, and community roots–constantly on the defensive. Trends in rent prices have overshot their historical records by more than 50 percent, during a time when the level of income inequality is the worst of any city in the nation. Rent control was killed by the real estate lobby in 1994, and now the viciously anti-tenant coalition of lobbying groups that helped bring down the axe are mobilizing again to pass a rent escrow bill that would require tenants to pay rent even while they fight their evictions in court. And so the waves of evictions and displacement continue.
City Life’s march, then, is an uphill one. But it’s toward a vision of, in Del Castillo’s words, “community control of land and housing” where perhaps one day people won’t profit off of other people’s need for a home, and tenants can get fair and quality housing through a community land trust instead of fight for it tooth-and-nail with a landlord. Therefore, the march is inherently more offensive than the shield, or even the sword, as its aim isn’t just to help tenants remain in their homes, but to fundamentally restructure the legal framework around which our society conceptualizes housing. When Del Castillo highlighted building political awareness as one purpose of CL/VU’s weekly tenant meetings, and how that awareness helps communities fight for new legislation, it seems he’s talking about the march.
Going to these rallies and meetings and learning about City Life/Vida Urbana, I got wrapped up in this march–specifically, in the campaign for the Jim Brooks Stabilization Act, bill number H.4142 in the Massachusetts State House.
“What the Jim Brooks Act fundamentally does is that it requires landlords to report their evictions–their notices to quit–to the city, and the city can then coordinate with City Life and other organizations to help,” Benji Mauer explained to me after the rally in Roxbury. Collecting data would be a game-changer, because as it currently stands, there is absolutely no accurate measure of how bad the displacement crisis in Boston is. Some would say that the number of eviction cases brought to housing court is an adequate measure. However, it’s common for landlords to issue a notice to quit and tell tenants they have to leave in 30 days, and tenants, not knowing their rights, leave without bringing the case to housing court at all. Because of this, housing court data drastically underestimates the amount of displacement in Boston.
That’s why the bill would also legally obligate landlords to inform their tenants of their rights by sending them a sheet of paper listing those rights along with the initial notice to quit. With more accurate data to back up their warnings of housing crisis, and more informed tenants that know they can actually fight to keep their homes, City Life activists hoped that they could raise more awareness for the struggle of displacement and fight back against the learned helplessness that seems to have set in in the streets of Boston these past few years.
When I got involved right around the time of the March rally, the Jim Brooks Act was already being debated by the Joint Committee on the Judiciary in the Massachusetts state legislature, but it had had a long prior journey of activism and political negotiation to get to that point. Named after prolific human rights activist and long-time Boston resident Jim Brooks, who sadly passed away during the campaign for the legislation, the bill was first proposed in 2015, and at that point included provisions requiring landlords to report to the city an eligible reason, or “just cause,” for every eviction, and to enter third-party mediation with tenants if they wanted to raise rent by more than five percent.
For two years, CL/VU joined other Boston-area community organizations in building grassroots support for the measure, holding rallies, knocking doors, calling officials, and testifying at City Hall on behalf of the bill. In the ensuing wringer of the political process, and facing ardent opposition from the real estate lobby, the provisions about just cause and third-party mediation were stripped from the language. But in shedding those more controversial sections, the remaining compromise bill–still requiring eviction data reporting and tenant rights notification–was able to successfully pass the Boston City Council in early October 2017. However, in accordance with Massachusetts home rule law, the City Council-ratified Jim Brooks Act still had to pass through the State House in order to become law.
And so, once the bill was filed as an emergency petition in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in November, City Life once again mobilized its network of tenants. These were folks who had originally been drawn into the organization to protect their basic self-interest, but were now collectively pressuring the legislative system to pass a bill that would help other tenants across the city that they would likely never meet. With two days’ notice, CL/VU marshaled 100 community members to Boston City Hall on January 30 to voice their support for the bill. Soon thereafter, they started their call-your-legislator campaign in earnest, trying to flood Judiciary Committee members’ lines with testimonies championing for the legislation. And at the Roxbury rally I went to in March, Boston City Councilor and candidate for U.S. Congress Ayanna Pressley gave a fiery speech calling on the state legislature to pass Jim Brooks.
“A part of justice is housing for all. This is a human right!” Pressley yelled through a megaphone through the cheers of a rowdy crowd. “The number one call to all of our offices are people in need of housing. And let me just say this: not just a roof over your head. Not just shelter. But housing that allows you to live a life in dignity that is safe, and sanitary, and affordable. So as much as my heart is breaking at the greed and injustice all around us, in this moment my heart is swelling, because you all have been so vigilant. So I want to say thank you to this coalition, who never gave up, for two plus years, who have soldiered to get this past the Boston City Council. Now we will be victorious on the state level!”
Charged up after the rally, I resolved to do what little I could to put some wind in the bill’s sails before it was reported out of committee in early May. This past year, I organized Tufts Housing League, a student group on campus dedicated to housing justice at Tufts and in the Boston area. Since the Jim Brooks Act was right up our alley, I sent a message out to the other students in the group in late April, calling on them to email the state senators and representatives on the Judiciary Committee to tell them to vote for the bill. Apparently we all bothered the co-chair of the committee, State Senator William Brownsberger, enough that he invited us to meet with him at his office to talk about the bill. So, three days later and in the middle of a rainstorm, four of us trekked to Beacon Hill, waited in his office reception area for the customary fifteen minutes, and proceeded to give Brownsberger an impassioned and data-backed plea for the bill, going over studies of how bad the displacement process had gotten, its racial consequences and historical relevance to American segregation, and stories we’d heard from tenants about their struggles resisting evictions.
Once we were done, he calmly told us that the committee had given the Jim Brooks Act a study order the day before, effectively killing this urgent piece of legislation that activists had sweat over for almost three years for the rest of the legislative session.
While we sat there trying to process the news, Brownsberger explained to us that he and others on the committee had voted against the bill because of a legal technicality that would have required foreclosing property owners to have just cause to evict the former owner of the property. While only a minor part of the bill, we had heard voices from the real estate lobby pushing against this provision as a justification to kill the entire piece of legislation, and apparently on these grounds, Brownsberger and the majority of the Joint Committee on the Judiciary had sided with the wealthy real estate lobby against the interests of some of Boston’s most vulnerable residents.
We went into Brownsberger’s office not expecting to have much of an impact on the committee’s decision either way, but we left stunned at how dismissively the lawmakers had treated the bill. Brownsberger, for his part, implied that there was little the state government could do to limit the consequences of the market once sellers had tapped into a strong demand, and had no plans of his own to offer to stymie the slow bleed of displacement that he admitted had affected the Fenway neighborhood of his legislative district. We tried to keep our responses to what we saw as his excuses polite, but we were profoundly disappointed and incensed at the impersonal and dispassionate way such an important piece of legislation had been done away with. I suppose all of us kids have to learn to contain our hopeful idealism someday, and for me, this was certainly that day.
City Life and their other housing advocate allies could have pursued many other strategies available to steer the Jim Brooks Act through the State House–more press coverage, sit-ins in legislators’ offices, even a primary challenge against one of the committee members. The heart of the problem, however, seems to be that self-styled “progressive” politicians can’t see the forest through the trees. Income inequality and American oligarchy have effectively become such common buzzwords in the American Left’s discourse that they have lost their political meanings and morphed into little more than rhetorical decoration. Without a clear commitment to redistributing wealth and power in this country to meet the most basic needs of the our most economically and socially disadvantaged neighbors, or at least an indication of moving in that direction, some left-of-center officials govern as PINOs–Progressives In Name Only.
Despite CL/VU’s defeat on the Jim Brooks Act, the organization remains an incredibly important bulwark against gentrification and displacement in the Greater Boston Area, drawing its strength from its adherence to the fundamentals of community organizing: centering community members, building community leadership, and building collective pressure to break and realign current power dynamics that keep tenants under the thumbs of profiteering landlords. The sword and shield tactics they have developed are still invaluable in the fight to remain, and they will likely need to defend the laws that underpin them as the landlord and real estate lobbies aim to roll back what meager tenant protections are currently on the books.
But, as Andres Del Castillo pointed out, the goal is to create a society in which there is no entity to protect tenants from–a society in which housing is decommodified, and properly treated as the human right that it is. And on the march to that vision, there are still many issues and campaigns that CL/VU is well poised to champion–tenants’ right of first refusal, the transfer fee affordable housing fund, and public housing, to name a few. There’s no doubt that the organization will be at the center of these coming issues, soldiering on.
Sources (i.e. More Things You Should Read!)
Douglas, Jen. “From Disinvestment to Displacement: Gentrification and Jamaica Plain’s Hyde-Jackson”. Trotter Review, vol. 23 no. 1, article 6. University of Massachusetts, Boston, Sep. 22 2016. https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1363&context=trotter_review
Feloney, Michael L. “Neighborhood Stabilization in Jamaica Plain: Patterns, Responses and Prospects”. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 1994. https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/66192/31758640-MIT.pdf?sequence=2
Fernald, et al. “The State of the Nation’s Housing”. Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2016. http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/jchs.harvard.edu/files/jchs_2016_state_of_the_nations_housing_lowres.pdf
Gao, Lingshan; Kalevich, Alexis; Lima, Alvaro; Melnik, Mark; and Wong, Joanne. “American Community Survey, 2007–2011 Estimate: East Boston.” Boston Redevelopment Authority, Research Division, May 2013. http://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/c6b4a4f7-ed70-40a0-ace9-58874ac79df5
Holley, Grace. “What Does ‘Affordable’ Mean in Boston?” Medium, Nov. 6, 2017. https://medium.com/@graceholley/what-does-affordable-mean-in-boston-54786aaabf34
Holmes, Natalie, and Berube, Alan. “City and metropolitan inequality on the rise, driven by declining incomes”. Brookings Institute, Jan. 14, 2016. https://www.brookings.edu/research/city-and-metropolitan-inequality-on-the-rise-driven-by-declining-incomes/
Jennings, James, et al. “Understanding Gentrification and Displacement: Community Voices and Changing Neighborhoods”. Tufts University Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, August 2016. http://emerald.tufts.edu/~jjenni02/pdf/UnderstandingGentrificationDisplacement.pdf
Marquard, Bryan. “James Brooks, 70, indomitable advocate for disabled, other causes”. The Boston Globe, Jul. 4, 2016. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2016/07/04/james-brooks-influential-advocate-for-disabled-other-causes/r2X3xwu4hsxMlTYPA0gSVL/story.html
Matthtews, Helen. “Housing Justice Advocates Pack State House Hearing on Jim Brooks Act”. City Life/Vida Urbana News, Feb. 5, 2018. http://www.clvu.org/victory_jim_brooks_act
Pattison-Gordon, Jule. “Weakened Jim Brooks Act passes in Council”. The Bay State Banner, Oct. 11, 2017. http://baystatebanner.com/news/2017/oct/11/weakened-jim-brooks-act-passes-council/
Pollard, Amy. “What Amazon’s HQ2 Could Mean For Housing In East Boston”. WBUR, Dec. 21, 2017. http://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2017/12/21/east-boston-housing-amazon
Schutz, Aaron, and Mike Miller. People Power: The Community Organizing Tradition of Saul Alinsky. Vanderbilt University Press, 2015.
Staples, Lee. Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing. 3rd ed., Santa Barbara, California, Praeger, 2016.
“About SPOA”. Small Property Owners Association. SPOA, 2018. Web. https://spoa.com/about-spoa/
“Affordable Housing in Boston”. Boston Department of Neighborhood Development, 2014. https://www.boston.gov/sites/default/files/affordable-housing-boston.pdf
City Life/Vida Urbana. www.clvu.org.
“Mission and Vision”. http://www.clvu.org/mission_vision
“Our History”. http://www.clvu.org/our_history
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Massachusetts Legislature. 190th General Court. House. An Act to preserve affordable housing through a local option tenant’s right to purchase. H.3017. https://malegislature.gov/Bills/190/H3017/BillHistory
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