Impressed to Inspired: A Conversation with the NYU Wagner Alum Behind New York’s Grassroots Housing Movement
by: Rhea Almeida (MPA-PNP)
“I spent three weeks looking for a place in Brooklyn and almost died,” a friend and fellow Wagner student said about his experience house-hunting in New York City. As a first-year graduate student, I faced my own challenges and discrimination while moving to New York from Mumbai, India to study international policy and development, so I could relate. Even in my classmate’s exaggeration, I would guess he perfectly summarized the sentiments of hundreds of other NYU students—and New York City residents—each year, as they move to the ‘city of dreams’ and realize the city really is as expensive as they thought.
Problems with New York City housing are endless: landlords ask for guarantors which are not always easy to find, discrimination against minority and international groups is common, and living spaces get smaller and smaller until they don’t exist anymore, for example, flex apartments, a Manhattan classic. At the end of a long, tiring, and demotivating hunt, most people are at the mercy of their homeowners. This problem is not unique to NYU students and represents only a fraction of the deeply ingrained housing exploitation affecting the city’s residents for generations.
In the Fall of 2019, I spoke with Cea ‘Celia’ Weaver (MUP 2015), an NYU Wagner urban planning alum and activist integral to the city’s housing rights movement, about her part in one of New York’s landmark rent reform laws.
“The underlying problem in New York City is that there is a deep power imbalance between tenants and landlords,” said Cea. “Our goal is to strengthen and expand renters’ rights, but also whole communities. We aim to mediate that imbalance, which leads to evictions and more instability,” she said.
Cea is one of the distinct voices of Housing For All, an advocacy campaign led by the Upstate Downstate Housing Alliance striving for fairer rent regulation and protection of tenants across NYC. Through organizing efforts, Housing For All has united over 70 groups of tenants, homeless, manufactured housing residents, and advocates in a coalition to lobby for tenant protections and an end to racist, discriminatory housing practices.
“Rent laws in NYC are revised every few years or so, and we knew that in 2019 we could expand and reform them in a serious way,” Cea explained. “We started to come together in 2017.”
Preparations went on for two years as stakeholders joined forces to demand rent regulation and better protection for minority groups of color, immigrants, and others that face housing discrimination. On June 14, 2019, the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act was passed by the state Legislature and signed by Governor Cuomo. This act repealed most of the loopholes in the state’s rent regulations enacted in 1997, thus giving tenants better protection against exploitation and arbitrary rent increases. As Cea walked me through the journey of their campaign, their struggle, and their extremely focused, well-formed strategy, I went from impressed to inspired. I needed to know how she managed to unite over 70 organizations across the city to form this grassroots coalition.
“We spent a really long time doing it!” she exclaimed. “For weeks, we were just always on the phone. We were committed to doing quarterly leadership assemblies and retreats, working face-to-face with the coalition to strategize and brainstorm together.”
After several setbacks, hardships, and lost battles, their hard work paid off as a dense coalition emerged, with equal representation across geographies like Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx. Organizing such a strong, diverse coalition was a feat in and of itself, and this organized collective now had to go up against the Real Estate Board of New York and other powerful players.
“It was definitely challenging,” explained the 30-year-old campaign coordinator who was up against influential opponents like the Durst Organization and the Rent Stabilization Association. “We certainly tried to show legislators in decision-making positions how powerful the real estate industry was and how the industry used its power to push pain on our neighbors and benefit from at the expense of so many people.” As campaign coordinator, Cea was the backbone of this initiative and the messaging was clear: people, residents, and citizens of New York City were uniting to take their city back. This message became clearer than ever on May 14, 2019.
A month before the state laws regulating rent control and stabilization in the city were set to expire, legislation to renew the rules were expected to pass smoothly. However, on that day, Weaver and her allies had different plans. Over 2000 renters, tenants, and advocates organized themselves and marched to the Capitol.
“It was one of our biggest escalations,” Cea started, excitement building in her voice as she talked about people climbing up on box benches and kicking off the day with a big press conference, followed by a march to the Capitol. “It was a day of beautiful chaos.”
Going up against powerful real estate giants, Cea’s success as a strategist, campaigner, and organizer was rooted in the deep trust she built within grassroots communities and with the people affected by this problem. At this point in our conversation, I finally had a chance to the question I had been waiting to ask: How do we as NYU Wagner students do what you have done?
“I think going to NYU Wagner was an extremely clarifying experience,” the young activist recollected. “I learned a lot about the real estate industry’s influence on our built environment and the city we live in.” Cea also worked as a research assistant at NYU’s Furman Center and described this experience as critical in understanding how the real estate industry pushes self-serving policies and how to intervene. While Cea and her allies have come a long way, she feels there is still a long way to go.
“We want to address the housing crisis holistically. There are still 92,000 people homeless in the city and changing this requires a real commitment to housing reform,” Cea said. For all those budding advocacy campaigners hoping to affect change in the way Cea has, she wrapped up with a few words of advice, “Start organizing in your community. Work with local organizations and people on your block. Just get involved and start somewhere. It’s the only way to get the work done.”
Cea’s words made me more interested in my own local policy matters, and I started to follow the work and issues of my district’s councilwoman through the analytical lens NYU is helping me shape.
