For months, tenants in dozens of rent-stabilized buildings owned by Pinnacle Group tried to do something New York housing law almost never permits: stop their landlord from selling their homes to another speculative owner.

They organized across buildings, formed what became a tenants’ union across Pinnacle’s real estate portfolio, staged protests, and went to court. As one tenant put it during the town hall, the organizing began because “nothing else was working”: complaints went unanswered and conditions worsened. Eventually, they won the backing of city hall under Mayor Zohran Mamdani. They still lost in court.

Last month, a federal bankruptcy judge rejected the city’s request to delay the sale of roughly 5,100 rent-stabilized apartments across more than ninety buildings, clearing the way for the portfolio to be transferred from Pinnacle Group to Summit Properties USA. The case grew out of years of neglect. Under Pinnacle’s ownership, the properties fell into severe disrepair and accumulated thousands of housing code violations, before the company declared bankruptcy last year after defaulting on more than $560 million in loans.

Tenants described years of neglect, including buildings left without power after the landlord failed to pay Con Edison bills. One resident described living with heat outages and broken elevators while management remained unresponsive, saying conditions had become “unlivable.”

The bankruptcy triggered a citywide wave of tenant organizing, as Pinnacle residents formed the Union of Pinnacle Tenants (UPT) and tried to slow the sale and push for what they considered to be a more responsible buyer who would address their concerns with disrepair. That effort ultimately failed. Summit Properties USA lined up a $451 million bid for the portfolio, positioning itself to take control of the buildings despite tenant opposition.

On Sunday afternoon, roughly three hundred tenants logged onto a virtual town hall organized and facilitated by members of the UPT. Tenant organizers walked participants through the ruling, explained what it did and did not change, and devoted most of the meeting to strategy: how to enforce the commitments extracted from the buyer, how to continue organizing buildings, and how to push beyond one-off concessions toward something more durable.

Mayor Mamdani and Cea Weaver, a longtime tenant organizer who is now director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, attended, but neither ran the meeting. Mamdani framed the administration’s role as contingent on tenant pressure rather than a substitute for it.

“I want to be very clear that this work has only just begun,” Mamdani told tenants. “It is also work that would have never even been able to be started, were it not for all that you had already done prior to this moment.”

The focus now is on what tenants are trying to build beyond the courtroom.

Transcript

Each chunk of the city (Southside, Uptown, Whittier, and so on) has rotating shifts of dispatchers, who admin a running Signal call throughout operational hours. Sometimes, multiple dispatchers overlap to split up the extra tasks of watching the chat, relaying reports to other channels, and checking license plates. Dispatch also helps people evenly distribute patrols across an area, takes notes, and assists people through confrontations. All patrollers in cars and on foot and stay on the call throughout their patrol. There is a constant flow of information, allowing other cars to decide whether they are well-positioned to join in, take over tailing the car, or continue searching for additional vehicles.

Since the structure has divided up into more granular neighborhood-based zones, people in many areas have also developed a daily chat system, with chats that are re-made and deleted each day to keep them clear and not maxed out of participants (as the maximum number of members of a Signal group is capped at 1000). Various areas of the cities and the suburbs have replicated the basic structure of this system but with slightly different models, chat structures, vetting systems, and data collection.

A data collection team collects anonymized data submitted from Whipple Watch and many of the local rapid response chats, aggregating them into consumable formats, such as interactive maps of hotspots. This team also admins the searchable database of license plates sorted by “confirmed ICE,” “suspected ICE,” “confirmed not ICE,” and other categories.

Additional place-based chats have emerged around school systems, faith communities, mutual aid grocery deliveries, and the like. Another development was the Neighborhood Networks intake chat, which acts as a clearinghouse for incoming volunteers. New people from anywhere in the city—or anywhere in the state of Minnesota—can be added and oriented to a list of chat options, and admins will add them to the open chats or connect them to the vetting and training processes for the more closed chats.

Most recently, dispatchers have experimented with a relay system in which patrollers who tail vehicles to the edge of their zone can communicate through dispatch across chats to pass off the vehicle to a patroller in the next region. This allows the patrollers to remain in tighter and tighter routes, which they can swiftly come to know intimately well in order to navigate them better than any ICE agents.

Finally, Spanish language relayers copy ICE alerts from dispatch calls and local chats, translate them, then send to large Spanish-language Signal and WhatsApp networks.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/lirtU

With the ICE shootings happening in the US (including the tragic death of a lady in Minneapolis named Renee), do you think we need more self-defense (or community defense organizing) classes now more than ever (and fast)?

I got banned from posting on Lemmy.ml, so I post this to the Beehaw Socialism community.

Across industries, sectors, and geographies even the best organized unions struggle to stop owners from closing up shop. If the owners decide they’re done – if they can afford to decide they’re done – workers can’t force them to stay. The reverse is also true, however: when owners invest a whole bunch of capital in an enterprise, this gives workers a window of opportunity to organize themselves before the bosses make their investment back. So it was at Barboncino.

But here’s the trouble: The clock is ticking, and you make your first move; then, you wait. You have to wait because you need to see what the boss is going to do – or, rather, you need what the boss is going to do to be seen. Maybe you know what the boss is going to do because this isn’t your first campaign, and you know that it doesn’t matter what kind of person the boss is, or where they went to school, or how they address you, but that they are going to be compelled to act in certain ways by forces greater than themselves to protect their business and their reputation. Maybe you know this, but your coworkers don’t, or don’t believe it, or don’t want to believe it. Maybe they just want to see it for themselves. Fair enough. But this means you have to wait. And wait. And the clock is still ticking. And you’re still waiting. Maybe the boss makes their move, you respond – and you’re back to waiting. Who, now, is really in control? Who is setting the tempo?

Every union drive, every organizing campaign, every workplace struggle, formal and informal, is, on some level, about time. A demand for more of a voice on the job is a demand for a greater say in the ends to which one’s time is put. Clock in and your time is no longer your own; clock out and you are, once again, on your own time. It is no coincidence that the new bosses’ first reforms at Barboncino were to change how scheduling worked and to effectively prohibit people from hanging out at the bar for too long after they got off their shifts.

For the Barbs union, then, the time spent waiting for the bosses to respond was not only time lost against the ticking clock but time that was actively given back because we did not claim it for ourselves. “There were a series of crises that were basically management’s fault,” one core organizer, Michael Kemmett, recalled to me. “And then the ones that followed were [from] our own mismanagement of our response.” Every day spent waiting to hear what Jesse and Emma were going to say or do made them appear to be, once again, the prime mover in workers’ lives at exactly the moment when the opposite should have been true.

In 2024, media workers of the Ziff Davis Creators Guild (ZDCG, part of the NewsGuild of New York, local 31003) won pro-worker artificial intelligence (AI) language in their first successor collective bargaining agreement. Despite being a union of 62 workers among a corporate conglomerate of 4,000, we came together to fight the boss and set up AI guardrails.

Here are the highlights of the AI section of our contract.

• Definition of “generative artificial intelligence”: We specified generative AI as systems that can generate content, not existing technologies that can assist with content creation like spellcheck and Grammarly. We don’t consider those things to be threats to our jobs.
• No layoffs due to the implementation of generative AI and no reduction in base salary (meaning, no reduction in someone’s annual salary as opposed to a bonus)!
• Implementation of an AI subcommittee where unit members and management will come together and discuss issues that come up including if the company plans on implementing anything that will impact our jobs. Management must give the subcommittee and thus the members reasonable advance notice of this.
• Editorial integrity: We have a separate article about editorial integrity that already existed from our first contract but we wanted specifics about AI here.
• Any AI content must be done at the direction and editorial review of human beings with editing duties — this is very specific because we didn’t want to create a situation where reporters whose jobs are to write would now be saddled with this work.
• The company must provide transparency around use of AI on-site for our readers in the form of disclosures both in text and multimedia.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory disrupted politics as they were and inaugurated a new moment for what politics can and should be. It was also “proof of concept” of what socialist strategy might achieve and forced the question: could Mamdani’s strategy be replicated elsewhere? Does NYC provide a roadmap to advance the socialist project nationwide?

This article reviews strategic visions that differ not in ultimate goals but in paths and timing. On one side of the spectrum are those who suggest that conditions favor replicability and a national push now in time for 2028. On the other side, there are those, like me, who suggest that NYC’s campaign is more unique than presumed. Under these circumstances, a national strategy should prioritize expanding power in the most favorable urban areas, consolidating those strongholds, and using them as platforms for expansion when conditions and opportunities allow.

Replicating the Mamdani strategy where conditions are absent will lead to large expenditures of resources that will likely bear little to no fruit. Yet, consolidation does not mean socialism in one city. DSA can prioritize deepening its influence where: 1) favorable demographic conditions exist, 2) organizational infrastructure is established, and 3) middle-class fracturing creates openings for working-class/renter coalitions. This could mean consolidating NYC while expanding in LA or Chicago rather than less viable localities. The point is not geographic contiguity but demographic, organizational, and political strategy and readiness.

The question confronting the Left now is which strategy best fits social and political conditions as they actually exist, not as we wish them to be. The Left is particularly susceptible to this error. As partisans, our identities are animated by an optimism that human emancipation remains a material possibility. Nevertheless, the value of our prognoses depend on diagnosing social and political conditions as realistically as we can and moving ahead on such terms.

just here reading about project 2025 stuff and if i understand correctly, the head of project 2025 / the heritage foundation is kevin david roberts… a catholic

don’t know if this is true for most conservative christians in the usa, but in my experience a lot of them really hate catholics for some reason?

many maga conservatives are hypocrites or just refuse to believe any fact that doesn’t align with their worldview.

but if you know any maga people that really hate catholics for some reason, you should inform them that project 2025 has catholic ties and ask them how they feel about trump implementing a project led by a catholic.

i don’t believe this is enough to destroy maga (not sure if i believe anything is 🫠) and i really don’t think it’ll be a big deal to 99% of maga. but hey, if you know a maga person who REALLY hates catholics, spread the word…

With grocery giants ripping off Canadians, it’s time for a bold alternative: public grocery stores.

Food analyst Aaron Vansintjan explains how a publicly-run grocery option could solve the crisis of skyrocketing food costs.

Transcript