In this panel, housing organizers have identified our most vital source of resilience as climate disasters intensify: the trust between neighbors, which they are forging into a powerful force for collective survival and justice.
Tony Samara:
Welcome everyone. I’m excited to be talking with you about your work at the intersection of housing and climate justice. Climate justice is driving displacement worldwide, from intensifying disasters to longer-term changes that make our planet increasingly uninhabitable for us. This is another blow for low-income and working-class communities of color who have spent decades resisting gentrification. Now climate change compounds these challenges, adding a new dimension to housing insecurity. The challenge is to understand how climate, housing, and land are intertwined and to develop effective campaigns that address short-term needs and long-term transformation to a less extractive, more sustainable world.
Drawing from the experiences and expertise of our members, Right to the City Alliance published a housing and climate policy platform in 2023 that offered both a political framework for making sense of the intersection and connecting anti-displacement to climate resilience through the lens of policy. We found, for example, that the same kinds of tenant protections that prevent people from losing their homes and allow them to fight for longer term housing solutions can also be foundations for longer term community led planning to adapt to climate change. When people are able to feel secure in their homes and communities, it unleashes the creative power of collective thinking and action, and that is the basis of a just transition.
With that, I want to turn it over to folks from organizations driving this change. Tomás, let’s start with you.
Tomás Rivera:
My name is Tomás Rivera. I am the Executive Director of Chainbreaker Collective, a membership-led economic and environmental justice organization in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We have over 800 dues-paying members, mostly low-income people of color, bus riders, and people vulnerable to displacement. We came at this through transit organizing, recognizing that as people get gentrified out of their cities, they become more car-dependent, which drives up CO2 emissions and creates a cycle of displacement and climate disaster. We’re here to work with Right to the City Alliance on structural and policy changes to stabilize our neighborhoods and our environment.
TS:
Thanks Tomas. Frank, can you introduce yourself?
- Frank Southall, he/him/they:
My name is Y. Frank Southall. I’m the Organizing & Community Engagement Manager at Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative in New Orleans. We are a land trust and housing rights organization that builds permanently affordable housing and conducts policy advocacy. Climate change is front and center to our work. We were founded three years after Hurricane Katrina due to unchecked rampant land speculation in our neighborhood of Mid City here in New Orleans. We believe any work around housing rights, affordable housing issues, and immigration must put climate change front and center. Because these systemic issues are why people are being marginalized. If we can’t protect people and preserve land for the people and keep them housed in these vulnerable areas, we are failing.
TS:
Thanks, Frank. Gabriela, over to you.
Gabriela Orantes, she/her/ella:
Hi, I’m Gabriela Orantes. I am the Just Recovery Partnership Manager at North Bay Organizing Project, a multiracial, multi-issue grassroots organization comprised of more than 20 faith based, environmental, labor, student, and community organizations in Sonoma County. My family is originally from El Salvador, and as the eldest daughter I took on the role of interpreter, translator, and resource navigator for my family. My lived experience as the daughter of immigrants prepared me for the disaster response work and the work I do now with leaders in NBOP. We are celebrating 15 years of building power at the intersections of Migrant Justice, tenant rights, civic engagement, and environmental justice. Sonoma County is setting the stage for innovative protections in an era of climate chaos. Our community leaders are organizing on the front lines of fire, floods, public safety, power shut offs, and extreme heat. Since 2017, our frontline leaders, supported by allied organizations like Legal Aid of Sonoma County, have won anti-eviction policies, 32 language justice policies, and emergency response systems, many of which are the first of their kind in California. We are modeling grassroots examples for nationwide policy on climate change and housing.
TS:
Thanks, Gaby. And Santra?
Santra Denis, she/her:
Hi, I’m Santra Denis with the Miami Workers Center. We’ve been organizing with tenants, workers, and families in Miami-Dade County since 1999 at the intersection of housing and climate justice. We are not new to this. As a native of South Florida, I was here for Hurricane Andrew. And as an adult during Hurricane Irma in 2017, we really saw the impact of having no moratorium on evictions during a hurricane. Because we saw folks being evicted and their belongings in the streets, we knew we had to do something about it. That is the role Miami Workers Center has played: making sure that their policies understand this intersection and to lift up the expertise of folks who have come from countries experiencing climate disasters.
TS:
Thank you. Tomas, let’s start with you. Could you say more about why your organization works at the intersection of climate and housing?
TR:
Chainbreaker started 20 years ago as a bicycle recycling organization. The climate crisis was less discussed at that time and our understanding in Santa Fe was that there were several industries that were contributing to climate change, causing emissions, mostly carbon dioxide, in cities all around the country, including in Santa Fe, that was largely private transportation or cars. We asked, “Why doesn’t everybody just ride a bike?” Through organizing, we learned it’s really difficult to ride a bike in a city that is set up structurally so that it basically mandates people drive cars to get around, especially in low-income neighborhoods of color that face disinvestment in infrastructure and lack access to jobs, schools, and groceries.
As we started to deepen our analysis at Chainbreaker, we began organizing bus riders, fighting transit cuts, and recognizing car dependency is both an environmental and economic justice issue; many working families in Santa Fe spend a third of their income on transportation costs with a car.
By 2012, our members got together and said we are holding it down for transit and expanding service but the real issue is we can’t afford to live in our city. We are getting pushed further and further out, to the outskirts of the city. To areas without the resources we need and it deepens the cycle of car dependency. When housing costs are 50% of income and you add 30% for transportation, there’s nothing left for people to live with after that. It became clear that if we want to address the long term environmental destruction of car dependency, we need to break this cycle of people being pushed out of their cities by stabilizing homes and neighborhoods, which first and primarily impacts communities of color. That is the overall guiding analysis that Chainbreaker uses to resist gentrification and tries to change our physical landscape so that it’s people centered and not money and car centered.
TS:
Gaby, how does organizing look different when you integrate climate into your housing work?
GO:
I was first drawn to NBOP for its housing and tenant protections work. Then the 2017 fires happened. With our already low vacancy rate, the fires made housing unbearable and caused massive displacement. This was followed by a series of disasters close together: floods, more fires, and power shut-offs.
Layered with the pandemic, housing and climate were at the forefront for our leaders, people impacted by having to navigate systems of disaster response, of lack of preparedness, and neglect from government at the local, city, county, and state level and federal level to respond and prepare communities. Because not only could we not afford to stay in our homes or afford to move. The vacancy rates were even less after 2017, and so that was what propelled us to engage in the intersections of this work. We used our campaign and mobilizing experience from previous disasters to argue during the pandemic that evictions must stop during declared disasters. We won an emergency just cause ordinance, which led to a permanent one. That was years in the making because we had identified climate-induced disasters as the moment to act for housing.
TS:
Frank, what does the work look like? Is it different from traditional tenant organizing when you integrate climate?
YFS:
Organizing in New Orleans is different, but the main difference from a climate perspective is the profound sense of urgency. We were founded after Katrina, and many of our pivotal moments in policy work come from other hurricanes and disasters.
We look at it from two angles: one, how do we fix what people need to survive now? For example, Hurricane Ida ripped roofs off neglected slumlord buildings. Two, how do we create better systems? We push for a housing trust fund to build resilient housing and ensure working-class Black and brown folks can live in the center of the city, not the outskirts. It’s about forcing repairs now and envisioning social housing that lasts 100 years.
One How do we fix the things that people need to survive now and preserve our cultures and grow? And the second, how do we create better systems? So two years ago, we got the Right to Counsel passed. That was used as a stepping stone to more effective organizing, mainly because many people are dealing with climate change habitability issues. When Hurricane Ida came through, it was the strongest hurricane since Katrina and ripped the roof off slum lord buildings where maintenance wasn’t repaired or up to code. The second piece is really looking forward, envisioning a world where everyone has access to the city. So that’s one of the reasons why we push for a housing trust fund that’s going to be about $20 million a year, and there’s a house ecosystem plan that will generate up to $50 million a year. That’s to build housing that is resilient, as well as ensure that working class Black and Brown folks are in the center of the city, instead of being pushed to the outskirts as they currently are. So that’s what it looks like: repairing, forcing slum lords to do necessary work now and then envisioning a housing stock where working class people are front and center building social housing that can last 100 years.
TS:
Would anyone else like to address if housing & climate organizing feels different from traditional tenant organizing? Frank talked about the issue of urgency.
SD:
I think it helps to make it real. We often say that our ability to be resilient, to face any kind of storm, is the depth of our relationships to people. When organizing building-to-building, it is your relationship with your neighbors, because they are your first responders; they know to look out for you.
Talking about utility costs in this heat, or neighbors disappearing from climate gentrification, makes the conversation and relationship much deeper. It allows people to understand that to recover or prepare for a storm isn’t just individual, but with thinking about as a community to build again and to mitigate costs to prepare for storms. This creates deeper relationships and connections and a realness that, when you’re organizing, feels long term and can also be happening in the very moment.
TS:
What unique role does housing organizing play in building climate-resilient communities?
SD:
Absolutely. Sometimes the climate and environment conversation is not the conversation that working class people feel a part of. They feel left out of it. Talking about carbon markets and all the things that people don’t quite understand what’s happening. But when you talk about neighbors leaving, people you have deep relationships with, people you rely on to take care of your kids, it becomes real. Climate gentrification in Miami is real. People have seen whole neighborhoods disappear.
Tenant organizers build connections in a society where people don’t talk to each other. Your ability to thrive, to remain in this building, but also recover from a storm relies on the depth of these relationships. Our ability to organize the building is also reliant on the depth of the relationships that people have with one another, the trust that they need. When we are tenant organizing, knowing that layer or understanding helps to have an even richer conversation. Who’s not talking about the heat right now in Florida? Everyone’s talking about it, but we can connect that back to how much rent has gone up, and also the storms. All of that enriches the organizing experience. If we can be strategic and make connections in a real way, it will just really help to bolster the organizing that we’re doing.
TS:
Tomas, your thoughts?
TR:
It strikes me that there are two buckets we are talking about here: prevention—mitigating harm being done to the climate that is creating all of these disasters—and survival—adapting, thriving, and being resilient. Housing is a strategic place to organize because most people think about it on a daily basis in one way or another: They have access to it. They don’t. They’re stable. They’re not. It provides a strategic opportunity to bring all these intersections, connections and overlaps into the conversation.
It allows us to address issues systemically by building power. I think that one of the reasons that we feel so at home and with other groups in this conversationl and other groups in the network, is because we really understand that at the end of the day, building power is what’s going to allow us to make any of these changes. When we talk about tenants being organized, having enough power to resist evictions or to resist displacement, means that they can start making calls for things like better utilities. And saying: well, where and how is our energy being generated that keeps our lights on? Why do we not have heat or cooling, and why do we need that so much? These intersections become visceral in housing, making it an entry point to a larger movement. The urgency is there everywhere, even if the effects are different, and it’s an opportunity to build power to change policies that not just help us adapt to the changing climate but to help us take a real proactive edge in reducing the level of harm that is being caused by these systems that we live under.
TS:
Gaby, how does organizing look different when you integrate climate?
GO:
Traditional organizing for us has looked like building tenant associations at apartments and mobile home parks, to organize to end corporate landlord abuse and neglect. But we also build coalitions outside our member institutions. Our Just Recovery Partnership is a cohort of 10 organizations across two counties, that are a range of different kinds of organizations—family resource centers, radio stations, arts orgs—that were first responders during the fires and have been first responders for their communities during different man made and climate disasters.
From this work, we developed a network of promotoras (community health workers) who help with canvassing during climate disasters and making phone calls to neighbors. They’re the ones who have the pulse of what’s happening and what resources are available in their communities. This network of leaders is an extension of our collaborative work that developed out of the fires, and we pair it with our tenant organizing in mobile parks because we don’t believe in siloed work; we see the intersections and know the most impacted need to be invited into this work because we are able to see it collectively as intersectional and not siloed.
TS:
Frank, what are some policy fights at the intersection of these two issues?
YFS:
I mentioned this before, but habitability standards. It doesn’t matter where you’re at in the USA, habitability standards for people in mobile home parks are atrocious. But in the Deep South, they’re the objectively worst. As climate change affects springs and summers, and energy companies charge high rates without transitioning to renewable energy, economic, housing, and climate justice all play out at the same time.
We’re bringing coalitions together we never imagined five years ago to do these fights. At first we thought the fights would be about climate control issues related to heating and cooling, but now we’re seeing things pop up with water issues due to droughts further up the Mississippi River in Minnesota, in Ohio, and in Pennsylvania that have an impact on New Orleanians’ access to water. Because all that water has traveled through all these states, and Canadian provinces, before they get to us, we’re building wider coalitions to respond to challenges.
We’re also doing a social housing campaign. We got a Housing Trust Fund passed last November and that was a very broad coalition. We got 2% of the city budget and now we’re calling for 3% of it for cooperative and land trust development that must include climate-resilient strategies like solar panels and building designed for cooling.
TS:
Tomas, what policy fights are you engaged in?
TR:
What I’m hearing and just reminded of is that climate change is forcing the conversation to shift everywhere. We have to talk about climate change in all of the areas of our organizing work. For Chainbreaker that has come down to a couple areas: preventing displacement is our long-term systemic approach because it reduces car dependency.
The solutions are short, medium, and long-range:
- Stop the bleeding: Protect renters through rent control and eviction prevention policies like Just Cause.
- Stabilize the market: Insulate people from the speculative market with community land trusts and social housing. We’re fighting for a CLT on 64 acres of public land.
- Prevent conditions: Stop investment from targeting low-income neighborhoods of color. Ensure equitable resource allocation for transit, sidewalks, and business support.
TS:
Last question: Does this work create new opportunities and challenges? And what resources are needed?
GO:
The opportunity is to keep people engaged with small wins along the way, not just in housing but in language justice. The challenge is not having adequate interpreters for multilingual spaces. When we engage the immigrant community to push for changes in disaster response, it builds a deeper, more committed community.
YFS:
I’m excited about the opportunities. Engaging these conversations trains people to take leadership to their own communities. Housing is the one thing that affects everyone, regardless of citizenship or race. By injecting resources into this fight, we empower people across other movements. We need more organizers and experts. Working coalitions across state lines is vital—we defeated anti-homeless bills in Louisiana because comrades in Florida warned us.
SD:
The challenges are cuts to resources that keep families afloat. Local dollars are tight. We are concerned about supporting people to remain housed and about adaptation programs. We need philanthropy to step up and support grassroots organizations doing this intersectional work, especially in coastal communities.
TR:
Now is the moment when philanthropy and politicians want to retreat against frontal attacks on organizations like ours. Now’s the time to stand up. Housing is strategic. A funder once asked why support housing justice over food during COVID. We asked our members; every single one said they would go hungry before they stopped paying rent. This issue allows us to make a bigger “we” and organize more people. The urgency is not just needed; it’s strategic.
TS:
Thank you all. You’ve shown how climate and housing are deeply intertwined in how people live. These opportunities to broaden coalitions and create a new politics around this intersection are crucial. Thank you for talking about the challenges, opportunities, and resources needed to step into this next period. Take care.
