Newsletter | April 2019
Community Garden Expansion Fundraiser
La Guayabita Autonoma, our community garden, was started by residents of Albany Park in 2016. Now in our third year, we would like to expand our garden to cover the vacant lot where it was started. This would allow more residents in the neighborhood an opportunity to participate, and create more of a community space for all to use.
Funds will be used to build more beds, create a meeting space, and beautify the garden. Please donate and allow us to continue growing food and friendship.
Donate now: bit.ly/gardenexpansion
Supporting the South Side’s Tenants United
On March 2, ATU members met up with Tenants United at the Andersonville home of slumlord Ethan Del Stone to protest his rampant evictions of South Side tenants. Ethan Del Stone is the owner of six buildings in the South Shore neighborhood, where he has evicted 126 people over the last three years and hasn’t paid for garbage pickup in six months. One of his tenants, Julian, read the names of some of the families Del Stone evicted while we warned his neighbors about his cruelty towards working class families. We took the streets to warn Del Stone that we’ll be back if he doesn’t halt all eviction proceedings, resume maintenance and end his poor treatment of tenants! Solidarity to Tenants United!
Solidarity on Every Block: Tenant Unions Across the Country
ATU may seem like some fringe group with noise-making organizers just trying to crash the political and development scene in a Chicago neighborhood. But would you be surprised to know that the Autonomous Tenant Union is actually not alone in being a tenant union in Chicago. In fact, not only are there other tenant unions in Chicago (close to 10 in Chicago alone), but also ATU is part of a larger network of tenant unions based all over the United States and Canada! As of now, ATU is one of over 30 tenants unions that network in solidarity with one another in North America alone, with more tenant unions that have yet to join the fight! And this isn’t exclusive to tenants in the private housing market. The National Alliance of HUD Tenants (NAHT) includes many different unions across all of the states who live in HUD-assisted housing. Over half of the states in the US have a NAHT-affiliated tenant union!
If you think tenant unions stops in North America, be prepared to be proven wrong. If you didn’t know already, there is a non-profit, non-governmental (NGO) membership organization called the International Union of Tenants (IUT) that was founded in 1926 Zürich, Switzerland. They’ve grown from being localized in Switzerland to now having 69 member organizations (i.e. tenant unions) in 45 countries in the European Union and have had representation at the European Union (EU) to defend the rights of tenants towards the EU since 2008!
Organizing and fighting for tenants rights, for affordable, quality, housing is nothing fringe or nothing new. Organizing for these and better standards has been a fight that has been growing and spreading - even more so now through the power and accessibility of social media and technology. This growing voice in Albany Park is part of a collective of voices in Chicago, a collective of voices in this country and beyond. We are not alone.
