Tenant leaders at the Save Our Homes Rally

Community & Tenant Organizing

Community organizing is based upon the idea that those affected by issues must play a leading role in developing solutions and mobilizing for their implementation. At PACC, we do this by creating relationships between tenants and small homeowners, identifying common needs and providing training to create local leaders, and running issue-oriented campaigns that use direct action tactics to win progressive change. Our community organizing program affirms that the solutions to the problems that affect our neighborhood and city reside in the people being directly impacted.

Every month PACC hold organizing meetings, where residents come together to discuss campaigns, learn about new issues, and decide plans of action. For more information about our next organizing meeting, please call Juanita Edwards at 718-522-2613 x24.

Current Organizing Priorities

PACC’s organizing focuses on three areas: preventing displacement, eliminating code enforcement hazards like lead paint, and preserving subsidized housing developments threatened by deregulation and landlord negligence.

Preventing Displacement
Each year PACC organizers assist hundreds of low-income tenants facing displacement, providing educational information about their rights, hosting clinics in conjunction with South Brooklyn Legal Services, advocating in housing court, staging targeted direct actions, and working with city-wide coalitions for policy solutions to problems like landlord harassment and the deregulation of rent-stabilized units.  

Each every 3rd Wednesday of the month, by appointment only, PACC holds Displacement Watch meetings at our 201 Dekalb office for tenants that have received eviction notices or otherwise need assistance with their housing situation. For more information about these meetings or to make an appointment, contact Juanita Edwards at 718-522-2613 x24.

Organizing for Safe Housing
Thanks to the start up grants of DeutscheBank and the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, PACC initiated an ongoing participatory research project to test homes for lead paint in the high-risk neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Our pilot project, run in the Spring of 2003, led to our discovery of widespread lead hazards--1 in every 3 homes tested with dangerous levels--which was documented in our report "The Politics of Poison," and featured in the New York Times along with numerous other media outlets. In 2004 we published a follow-up report, which found that half of the 73 units tested contained lead levels above the federal safety threshold.

Along with our lead paint organizing, PACC organizes tenants around other code enforcement and health problems like a lack of heat and cockroach and rodent infestations—which can trigger asthma attacks. For more information on our lead paint and code enforcement organizing, contact Hector Rivera at 718-522-2613 x21.