PNOL is proudly affiliated with City Life Vida Urbana, and directs people facing housing stability issues to weekly CLVU meetings to obtain free legal advice and band together with others facing the same issues.

Renters are usually the last to learn about a foreclosure. “Tenants will get a letter from a bank offering them a few hundred dollars if they leave in two weeks, and threatening to evict them within a month if they refuse and give them nothing,” says Meacham. Those who leave usually lose their security deposits and any prepaid rent. “Most banks depend on people getting scared and leaving. When people resist, especially tenants and former owners, the banks don’t know what to do with that and back off.” Thanks to the group’s tactics, scores of tenants and former owners have stalled foreclosures, negotiated higher payout deals, and even forced banks to cut mortgages.

Despite the best efforts of Grossman’s team, not all foreclosure victims win their courtroom battles. Increasingly, that’s when on-the-ground activists step in to stop people from getting kicked to the curb.

“When we took up the foreclosure battle, we found a way to approach it from an organizing way rather than a casework way,” says 62-year-old Steve Meacham, a longtime community organizer who has worked for City Life for the past eleven years. “Casework is important but individualized. An organizing approach says we do it in a more collective way, that challenges the problem, doesn’t just stick the finger in the dike.”

CLVU is a base-building organization

The hundreds of people who attend our meetings each month regularly win victories farbeyond what they (or most social service agencies) think possible. The difference inoutcomes between someone who finds our meetings and someone who does not is dramatic.Those who commit to our sword and shield model ‘win.’ Those who don’t get evicted rightaway.

Real estatecapitalism inevitably leads to displacement, and this has class, race, and gender effects.

Because City Life has done this work for 46 years, we have experience and resources. Wehave a committed paid staff and a large number of volunteer staff, most of whom come fromCity Life’s base and have direct experience fighting for their homes. We are the oldest andthe main anti-displacement group in the Boston metropolitan area.

City Life works to build the Housing Justice Movement. Our special emphasis withinthat broad current is anti-displacement, anti-eviction organizing. We focus on building ananti-displacement movement for several reasons:1. It is the front line of the housing crisis. It is the point where the drive for maximumreal estate profit confronts tenant resistance to no-fault eviction.2. Working class communities of color, who are directly targeted by the real estateindustry, can be effectively organized through anti-displacement work to play aleading role in housing and other social justice movement struggles.3. City Life’s anti-capitalist orientation, our willingness to challenge market orthodoxy,and our commitment to an intersectional approach, make it possible for us to do thiswork. For the same reason, few organizations can do it.4. Our political orientation helps create a new community of resistance, led by workingclass people of color, that attracts broad sections of the working class: students,homeowners, lawyers, activists from other movements and others drawn to ‘dosomething’ about the out of control housing crisis.5. New leaders rapidly emerge from this community and are trained to becomeorganizers. City Life’s organizing intentionally is structured to develop leaders whocome from our base and who have the skills to sustain radical base building and anti-displacement movement building over the long term.

Organizing requires two other elements – a sense of righteousness and a sense ofcapacity or power. You can’t organize around your grievance if you think it was ‘your fault,’or even if you think it was nobody’s fault. You can’t think about organizing if you don’t thinkthere is any possibility of ‘winning.’ Part of feeling capacity and power is having anunderstanding of strategy.City Life documents have sometimes summed up these two elements with thisshorthand:1. There is a structural crisis of displacement.2. That crisis is not our fault, certainly not the fault of working class people of color.3. That crisis is the fault of people who are identifiable.4. We have the capacity to defeat those people.

In any property wherethe owner doesn’t live in the building, the interest and principal on the mortgage have beenpaid by the tenants. Over time, the tenants buy the building over and over again for asuccession of landlords.

he structural crisisof urban housing displacement requires organizing that, in stopping evictions and racialdispossession also produces grounded tenant-driven knowledge to better understand ourcitie

City Life/Vida Urbana is a grassroots community organization committed to fightingfor racial, social and economic justice and gender equality by building working class power.We promote individual empowerment, develop community leaders and build collectivepower to effect systemic change and transform society.