The Housing Justice Branch kicked off the Stomp Out Slumlords campaign on Saturday, June 8th. It was a great success! The Stomp Out Slumlords campaign aims to fight eviction and displacement by encouraging tenants facing eviction to go to their court date. When tenants show up, they are highly likely to get some form of redress: but if they do not show up they are automatically found guilty leading to an eviction that stays on their record.
We pulled a list of people facing eviction in the near future from the courthouse, and on Saturday passed out flyers to as many of the buildings as we could. We canvassed in two teams: one focused in Steven’s Square(primarily Mint Properties buildings) and the other went out to Brooklyn Center to a couple very large complexes. Our primary goals for this first canvass were to see how difficult it is to get into the apartment buildings (great news, not very!) and gauge people’s reaction to the campaign (they hate their landlords!).
Our hope is to get out there a couple weekends a month going forward, and we need your help! This is a great way to get out in the community and talk to people about one of the most immediate impacts capitalism has on their lives, their rent. We also need people that have availability to go to the Government Center during business hours to pull housing court lists and also to help print and fold flyers from the TCDSA Printer.
If this is something that interests you please come to our branch meeting Thursday, June 27th at 6pm at Minneapolis Central Library Room N-402! Follow #housing on Slack for more updates.
Chris K.