In 2017, SNOL is launched a brand new base-building campaign to organize tenants in Springfield, Massachusetts who are facing immediate and long-term displacement as a result of the cities private development plan – including MGM Casino, an emphasis on condo & market rate housing and luxury shopping. This campaign comes as a result of more than 12 months of member-led planning and strategizing on how best to build power to advance our vision of winning housing as a human right and ensuring that we develop Springfield without displacing thousands of residents. Over the past few summers, our member surveyed more than 800 residents who named that affordable housing, fear of displacement and community safety were the top concerns of the community.
As the temperature heats up – we’ll be hitting the pavement, knocking on doors, outreaching to our sisters and brothers in parks, in the streets and bringing together hundreds of Residents to build a resident-led platform to protect and increase the rights of renters being impacted by development!
The core goals of STOP in 2021 are:
- Recruit, build and train a grassroots base of renters [100+] [primarily in Springfield] to organize collectively towards a people’s housing justice agenda.
- Defend against immediate displacement of residents as a result of rapid development, the Casino other major developers and/or rising rents [priority is to focus on organizing a whole building facing displacement or tenants with the same Landlord as speculators continue to buy up single family homes and drive up the rents]
- Lead/Initiate a community assembly process to discuss and identify key housing justice issues impacting renters in Springfield & develop a Springfield Tenant Bill of Rights [STBOR] a municipal policy or set of policies identified and decided on by Tenants that we can introduce and fight for at the city-wide level that will address critical housing/displacement issues facing tenants which we did with the Springfield Housing Trust.
- Bring a new base of low-income/working-class renters of color into the SNOL People’s School and support this base in being transformative organizers for long-term change.
- Build resistance and create a counter-narrative to the type of development the City & private developers are pushing that is based in a vision of the type of city residents want to see, increases community control of housing and ensures development without displacement.