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The Housing Justice Lab is a platform for dialogue, research, and strategic design that advocates for equitable neighborhood development. It brings together students, faculty, researchers, activists, community-based organizations, housing experts, and local politicians committed to housing justice and community-driven development across cities. 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 exploring practices and policy frameworks emerging as a response that pursue 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. Through public programs, this laboratory seeks to amplify the efforts of communities, housing coalitions, urban movements, and policy platforms promoting housing justice. Building on the exchange of current experiences and emerging practices, the ultimate goal of this platform is to facilitate university-community partnerships to produce new knowledge, methodologies, and instruments to advance local efforts bringing about social and spatial justice.

 

WHAT WE DO

COMMUNITY ADVOCACY

Multi-year neighborhood-based research and design-driven projects developed in collaboration with local communities, grassroots groups, and nonprofit community-based organizations are central to this initiative.

ORAL HISTORY

Oral history as a method for documenting and preserving the voices and memories of people and communities actively shaping New York City’s housing movements, while challenging extractive forms of information gathering and knowledge production.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Public programs are organized connecting students, young professionals, activists, citizens, grassroots groups, community-based organizations, and experts who are interested or actively involved in social and spatial justice.

HOUSING JUSTICE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

The Housing Justice Oral History Project amplifies and connects the memories and voices of all New Yorkers who have been involved in shaping the history of the city's housing movement through their past and ongoing organizing efforts.

HOUSING JUSTICE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
COOPER SQUARE CLT ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

This project documents and honors the struggles, experiences, and memories of the individuals who have stewarded the land of the Cooper Square Community Land Trust since its inception. This transgenerational project seeks to uncover lessons from past struggles, triumphs, and setbacks, while honoring the dedication, love, and care invested in this land by those who came before us.

VOCES CIUDADANAS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

This project unearths the voices and memories of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park residents who have been involved in creating community spaces for the benefit of all. It seeks to foster community learning from past strategies, methods, and motivations to inform future imaginaries and concrete possibilities leading to the creation of new community spaces to address structural inequalities.

SUNSET PARK IS NOT FOR SALE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

This project documents, connects, and preserves the organizing efforts that residents, community leaders, grassroots groups, and community organizations have carried out to protect the working-class character of the neighborhood and the well-being of the working-class and immigrant communities that proudly call Sunset Park home.

We are friends of The Shape of Cities to Come Institute (SCCI). SCCI invites organizers, activists, thinkers, cultural workers, writers, science nerds, and artists from across New York City's grassroots communities and movements to work collectively as peers on shaping our cities through the STUDY. PLAY. ACT program. SCCI peers exchange experiences and knowledge, collectively unpack urban processes, build capacity through narrative organizing, workshop issues, and nurture relationships with other committed folks. This journey culminates in projects in communities across the city that grow on the peers’ existing work and practices. The institute offers a stipend and resources to participate in public programs, study sessions, retreats, and collaborative initiatives.

We listen to Politics In Motion, a new nonprofit anti-capitalist media platform that offers piercing insights and thought-provoking analyses on political, social, spatial, cultural, environmental, and economic issues through a range of engaging mediums, including YouTube streams, podcasts, and live events. Politics In Motion strives to educate, challenge, and motivate by pushing the very boundaries of critical discourse in pursuit of inspiring radical change, actively informing the growth and development of mass movements fighting for social and environmental justice. Its broadcast includes Anti-Capitalist Chronicles by Prof. David Harvey, Cities After by Miguel Robles-Duran, Cultural Counterpower by Laura Raicovich, and Mercados Populares by Ana Rodrigues.

We support the Radical Housing Journal (RHJ), an open access, free online publication and collective that seeks to push the boundaries of how we think about housing, understanding it as a practice in the making, a space of contestation, and as a politics in and of itself. The RHJ accessible content comes from both academic and non-academic contributors, and their peer-review process also involves both scholars and self-defining housing activists. As a collective, they also promote a non-exploitative, anti-capitalist, ecologically oriented, antiracist, feminist, decolonial, and horizontal politics in their own structure and functioning. The RHJ wants to create a space that challenges the study of conditions and processes that render housing alienable, combining heterogeneous theoretical standpoints from across the world.