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).

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

Our collective members have led tenant organizing efforts across Austin for the past decade (Kensington Apartments, Old Homestead, Rosemont etc), ensuring low-income residents have adequate, healthy, and affordable homes Our collective continues to support frontline tenant organizing, most recently we won a historic deal at the Aero apartments ensuring developers rebuilt an equal amount of affordable units at 50/60% medium family income.

In April 2024 we hosted a 4 day long solutions forum where 30+ directly impacted folks discussed the challenges that unhoused communities, renters, low-income homeowners, immigrants, refugees, disabled folks faced and created real solutions. Findings will be published soon!

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.

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.

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 Susana Almanza from PODER, who stood up to oil giants and won, 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.

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.