Casa's Lessons from Two Decades of Tenant Organizing in the South Bronx

This paper explores the activism of CASA (Community Action for Safe Apartments), a tenant organizing initiative that has been active in the Southwest Bronx, in New York City, since 2005. CASA is composed of and led by local tenants who collectively fight for the preservation and improvement of the area’s affordable housing stock. Over the past two decades, in addition to organizing tenants block by block, CASA has played a key role in shaping local and national struggles for housing justice. It has spurred campaigns for local participatory re-zoning, for low-income tenants’ right to legal representation in eviction proceedings, and for a ban on evictions during the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, among other actions. The paper builds on oral history interviews with CASA leaders who reflect on how their diverse life trajectories brought them to this collective organizing, on the campaigns they took part in, and on their outlook on their city’s main challenges in providing dignified housing for all. It reflects on how these leaders have turned their housing precarity into a driver for collective organizing and for questioning the rules and power hierarchies of the housing market, including the legitimacy of evictions in the first place.