Principles

How can artists positively contribute to housing options for low-income and creative populations? Artists can JOIN THE MOVEMENT, working  as ALLIES.

We can recognize the power of the housing movement as a political base and join:

– tenants rights organizations.

– local community boards.

– advocacy groups for affordable housing.

Artists can act as active participants, adding:

– labor

– media

– actions

– and ideas to the movement.

TBD is committed to learning:

– the histories of displacement and gentrification, and the ways in which we are personally implicated.

– how we, or anyone with public visibility/discourse altering power, can RAISE AWARENESS AND

UNDERSCORE THE URGENCY FOR ORGANIZING.

TBD is committed to sharing cultural capital:

– taking responsibility for sharing collective statements at individual speaking engagements, as well as

suggesting that allied activists present instead of us, and that media producers work on housing issues

rather than document our personal projects.

– attempting to live with principled equity.

TBD is committed to sharing information:

– making documents and contact information available to anyone with a stake in this struggle.

– recognizing that we can not “solve the problem” of centuries of structural inequity.

– interviewing a range of people who are willing to share their stories about the struggle to remain in place.

– reminding ourselves and others of the long histories we are confronting and the determination required to

not look away.

We can:

– offer our skills and capacities for creative problem solving in collaboration with others.

– mobilize for artists’ and non-artists’ struggles.

– reclaim and create spaces for convening.

– ask to be taught about what is going on and listen.

– understand the difference between solidarity movements and charity.

– practice mutual aid.

– demonstrate that worker cooperatives are far more promising for artists today than tenured teaching jobs

or art-market success.

– demonstrate that “staying put” is more viable, and responsible than “aspirational precarity”.

– engage in critical pedagogy as a form of democratic opposition; seek alternative forms of education