September Newsletter 2019
Membership and Dues Launch Party, APDN Block Party, and an excerpt from our new Member Handbook!
Membership Party
On Friday, August 23rd, ATU threw a membership party at Tortuga’s Latin Kitchen to celebrate the power of organized tenants and to officially launch our dues model. Over 60 community members turned out for an evening of food, drinks, and dancing — and to share stories of their common struggle for dignified housing.
Those who signed up to be dues-paying members of ATU received a package including t-shirts, buttons, stickers, tactics zines, membership cards, and our brand-new member handbook (see excerpt below!). Members also donated prizes for a fundraiser raffle, drawing from their array of talents to offer items and services like baked goods, haircuts, and psychic readings.
On behalf of us all, many thanks to the Party Planning Committee for their work in organizing a great night, to those who offered their time and labor, and to anyone who came out and celebrated!
If you weren’t able to attend but would like to become a dues-paying member of ATU, please contact us here!
APDN Block Party
The Albany Park neighbors from the Lawrence/Lawndale/Wilson block had a final communal block party on Saturday Sept. 14th coordinated by the Albany Park Defense Network (APDN). APDN seeks to ensure that all immigrants and residents can feel safe, thrive and remain in the community they helped build.
The perfect summer afternoon and evening was filled with music, endless food, grill smoke, bouncy castles, lawn chairs, families, laughter, community, and new friends meeting and building a more organized neighborhood against ICE raids.
APDN is a coalition of neighborhood organizations including Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD), the Autonomous Tenants Union (ATU), 33rd Ward Working Families, Latino Union, National Domestic Workers Alliance, Albany Park Neighbors for Peace and Justice and Christ Lutheran Church. We invite other organizations and all residents to join us! We are organizing a rapid response network to document and deter immigration enforcement activity in the neighborhood and support families under threat.
Albany Park is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Chicago. It is home to dozens of immigrant communities and more than 40 languages are spoken in its public schools.
What Is Gentrification?
The excerpt below is from ATU’s newly published Members Handbook.
The neighborhood is changing. Some stores close and more expensive ones take their places. You start seeing different sorts of people walking around, and maybe some familiar faces are no longer there. Older apartment buildings are being converted into fancy condos and it feels like everything is under construction. There are more cops on patrol and a homeless encampment that’s been around for ages suddenly disappears.
But the way that many renters first experience gentrification is through rent. It can be little by little or all at once, but when landlords notice these types of changes, they start seeing dollar signs and it’s only a matter of time before tenants feel the changes directly.
While a neighborhood is gentrifying, some of the everyday issues that people have with their landlords can be exacerbated, and conflict can boil to the surface. Maybe your landlord never fixed anything, but you let it slide because the rent was cheap. But when the rent goes up and you have less money to work around these issues or fix them yourself, you might decide to request repairs. Landlords in gentrifying neighborhoods might jump at the opportunity to evict a tenant who complains so that they can cash in on rising rents or get a new tenant who won’t speak up.
We all notice the neighborhood changing. But there is a traumatic, violent process going on in the background: displacement. Building by building, block by block, the population that made the neighborhood a vibrant and desirable place to live is removed — some priced out or evicted, others incarcerated and/or deported, and many leaving on their own when they see the writing on the wall. In their place, a wealthier and whiter population moves in, co-opting some elements of the old neighborhood and erasing others. Now, schools that had been starved of resources find funding, vacant lots turn into beautiful parks and potholes are finally filled. The newcomers get credit for “revitalizing” the neighborhood, and the people fighting to save their homes are accused of standing in the way of progress.
We all deserve to live in thriving communities. This is why ATU fights for an end to all displacement and for community control of housing. As our neighborhoods are treated like cash cows and playgrounds for the owning class, we demand housing justice. That means communities shaped by and serving the needs of the people who live in them.
The Autonomous Tenants Union (ATU) is an all-volunteer organization committed to organizing for housing justice from below and to the left. As an independent collective based in Chicago, we strategize together to defend and enforce our right to dignified housing. We believe that housing is a human right not a commodity! We fight for an end to all of evictions, and for community control of housing through the building of popular power.
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