AMAZING RESPONSE!!
CITY LIFE SUPPORTERS ARE ANSWERING THE CALL. Can you give $100-$250 today?
If just 450 230 people give between $100-$250 right now, we can reach our goal and keep the pressure on Fannie/Freddie, corporate landlords and luxury developers without having to scale back our organizing.
Can't spare $100? An easy way to help is to give $25-$65 and then get 3 friends to match your gift. We need everyone! Together we can reach our goal.
*****************************************************************************
In early April, 350 people—tenants, homeowners, workers, and activists—answered the call to stand up for our families’ right to remain in our homes at our 2nd Public Hearing Against Displacement at Boston City Hall. And the week after, we temporarily stopped the eviction of Christina Soares after members, supporters and elected officials made countless phone calls to Fannie Mae, and after 75-100 people came to our eviction blockade. Everywhere you look, you see a sea of City Life shirts!
But then,
Christina still wasn't safe from eviction. Taxpayer-owned bank Fannie Mae initially agreed to resume negotiations with a nonprofit able to buy the home but then backed out and gave Christina another eviction notice. City Life members rallied once again to pledge to defend not just Christina's home, but all of the homes targeted by investors and those seeking to make outrageous profit from our homes.
We're working daily on these cases and many others, and we can't stop fighting, not even for a day. We have to keep the pressure on tax payer owned banks Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to live up to their public mission and choose neighborhood stabilization over unreasonable profit.
The added challenge:
Today, we have an active membership of homeowners and tenants fighting speculators who bought up much of the city’s rental stock during the height of the foreclosure crisis. These new corporate landlords seek to displace families from our homes so they can create luxury units that current residents can’t afford.
Our solution:
We say no! Our call is simple: Housing is a Human Right. Our strategy: stop the evictions, building by building—by mobilizing a regional network of tenant associations and homeowners, doing constant street protests and working with our tireless legal partners—and get more community control over housing—through our partnership with a community land trust, COHIF, and the city.
Our newest campaign, working to pass a Just Cause Eviction ordinance, will give all tenants a fighting chance to stay in the neighborhoods they fought so hard to improve. If passed today, all of our tenant eviction battles and many of our Fannie/Freddie cases would be immediately resolved.
And, COHIF, the nonprofit we (along with many other wonderful allies) helped create to get foreclosed buildings out of the market, just purchased its first 4 units for the land trust! We are also working with the City on a new program, which will identify properties to turn over to a land trust or nonprofit in order to keep housing permanently affordable.
WE NEED YOU NOW
We found out earlier this year that an expected major grant didn’t come through. We know the work of stopping displacement is a priority, so we won’t stop. But, that means that we are relying even more heavily on donors like you.
We have to raise $100K by June 30, or we’ll have to scale back our organizing next year, at just the time when we need to be ramping up.
I’m asking you to give within this range if you can and to ask 1 other person to do the same.
If you are fighting a no-fault eviction in Boston, you go to City Life. If you’re facing foreclosure and you’ve exhausted every other avenue, you go to City Life. That’s because our donors make it possible. Please give today.
In love and solidarity,
Lisa