Waging Nonviolence · 10 hours ago

The inside-outside Strategy Behind New York’s Rent Freeze | Waging Nonviolence

When New York City's Rent Guidelines Board voted this June to freeze rents for the first time in years - including a historic two-year freeze - the headlines credited the city's new democratic socialist mayor. But behind that moment stood two decades of unglamorous, persistent work by working-class Asian immigrant tenants in Chinatown who had been showing up to hearings, knocking on doors, and building the kind of power that no single election can conjure alone. Julie Xu, a longtime organizer with CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, describes the core insight that shaped their strategy: "it's not just that our people are moving to the right, it's actually that we're not giving them a vision." Rather than treating base-building and electoral politics as separate tracks, CAAAV learned to weave them together - endorsing Zohran Mamdani on the first day of his campaign, then holding him accountable after his inauguration to make sure the promise became policy. What the story quietly reveals is something about the patience required for real change: the elders who remembered what was possible, the youth who carried honest doubts about politics, and the organizers who held both long enough to act.