Housing Justice

After seeing a gaps, conflict, and challenges in Austin and national movement spaces, I wrote a document about creating an organizing collective to build collective power and reached out to two of my friends to make it happen. We then brought together a group of local grassroots organizers to meet and discuss solutions. This led to the creation of Community Powered ATX in early 2023 as a network to bring grassroots organizers together to provide real solutions to pressing issues in Austin, such as the mass gentrification and displacement that low-income communities of color are facing in East Austin. We are led by young BIPOC organizers and directly impacted folks who have experienced displacement/being unhoused. We seek to shift political and cultural narratives by centering the lived experiences of directly impacted Black and Brown communities, and address challenges within organizing spaces to ultimately strengthen our movements and create material changes. We have led groundbreaking organizing efforts and continue fighting for housing and land justice. As the founder and a core organizer I’ve led campaigns, tenant organizing, research, community-led planning and policy solutions, storytelling, social media strategy, coalition building, teach-ins, and more.

• Tenant Organizing

  • We won a historic deal at the Aero apartments ensuring developers rebuilt an equal amount of affordable units at 50/60% medium family income.

  • We also organized to save the affordable housing at Acacia Cliffs which led to the passing of a resolution to create a fund to protect naturally occurring affordable housing.

• Equity Overlay

  From the Fall 2023 to May 2024 we built a grassroots campaign against HOME, an upzoning policy, written and backed by libertarian think tanks, tech billionaires, and developers, that will lead to the destruction of affordable housing in the eastern crescent to build luxury development – furthering gentrification and displacement. As a result of HOME passing in city hall on Dec 7th, we worked with the community to research, write, and introduce an Equity Overlay. The overlay would aim to protect vulnerable communities, particularly BIPOC residents in Austin's Eastern Crescent, from potential displacement due to changes (such as HOME) in the Land Development Code (LDC).

  • Equity Overlay Sign-on

  • Community Development Commission Presentation

  • City of Austin Equity Overlay Feasibility Study Amendment Update

  • Austin Equity Overlay Feasibility Study

  Key Accomplishments: 

  • 15+ teach-ins on housing justice and gentrification in east austin 

  • 4 protest

  • 2 press conference

  • Training 50+ community members to become organizers through regular leadership development work

  • 12+ city council meetings with community members

  • Facilitated for community to attend and testify at 5 council meetings, 3 planning commission hearings

  • 500+ frontline community members to testify against HOME 

  • Wrote and proposed equity overlay

  • Created a housing justice campaign led by those directly impacted by displacement, gentrification, and homelessness

• Shifting Narratives & Art

  We shift narratives by using social media and cultural organizing to highlight those directly impacted by the housing affordability crisis, displacement, and gentrification. Some of our key accomplishments include: 

  • Storytelling impact training for community members

  • Media meetings + 1-1s

  • In June of 2023 Renters and Unhoused Neighbors Alliance and Start:Empowerment and SAUNTR collaborated to host a 2 week filmmaking training where impacted community members created a mini-documentary on their experiences with displacement and being unhoused.

  • Over the summer we worked with Start:Empowerment to host 2 youth fellows who created 10 episodes for the Community Powered ATX podcast.

  • We are working with bird house for a community puppet built and have hosted several art nights to build community and create movement art.

• Movement Building Capacity

  We are building capacity and collaboration between our advisory collective members who are all organizers leading work in mutual aid, tenant organizing, building community development corporations, fighting for environmental/climate justice, healthy equity, food justice, immigrant justice, etc etc reaching over 10,000 folks. 

• Teach-Ins

  Our teach-ins have been instrumental in changing the narrative around housing justice in Austin. Our collective worked to put on 15 teach-ins - both in-person and hybrid- on housing and land use with a focus on Austin’s history. We held these teach-ins at universities, policy classes, and neighborhood meetings. We also partnered with local churches, Texas Harm Reduction and VOCAL-TX to facilitate teach-ins and workshops with them. A group of bilingual facilitators in our collective worked to translated our teach-ins and we had 2 additional teach-ins in Spanish.

  Event Highlight:

  • In collaboration with Start:Empowerment, Community Powered ATX put on one of our largest land use teach-in on March 12th, 2024 with over 200 people attending. The teach-in was lead by community organizers from East Austin and then followed up by a panel discussion of with leaders such as Chris Smalls who started the Amazon Labor Union, Steven Donziger who represented 30,000 farmers and Indigenous communities in Ecuador against Chevron and won, and Bekah Hinajosa, leading the resistance against Elon Musk’s SpaceX in Brownsville Texas.

• Campaign Against Home

  In the fall of 2024, the HOME initiative was introduced by Leslie Pool to city council. HOME changes the land development code (which limits how much and what can be built on a property) to allow more units to be built on lots zoned for single-family homes (called “upzoning”). Phase 1 of HOME will allow three units per lot, and Phase 2 will allow for even more. The HOME initiative is only going to further displacement and gentrification by raising the property tax and rising rents. "HOME" has no requirements for affordability, meaning developers will sell to the wealthiest buyers, not middle class families. HOME will cause low-income homeowners to feel the pressure to sell to investors due to rising property taxes so low-income homeowners and renters will be displaced for demolitions to build luxury condos. The ripple effects of rising rents and displacement will be felt throughout our working class and poor BIPOC neighborhoods in the Eastern Crescent. HOME will accelerate gentrification, especially in the Eastern Crescent where investors profit margins are the highest. For-profit redevelopment plans like HOME are the cause of the housing affordability crisis, not the solution. Therefore we came together and led an year long rapid response campaigns bringing 500+ community, 30 neighborhood groups, 30+ organizations to fight against HOME.

  • Here is our one-pager on HOME

  • Here is our policy position on HOME

Graphics breaking down issues

Land Use Research & Policy Solutions

ArcGIS StoryMaps on Gentrification

Our Policy Solutions: Equity Overlay