All right, so thank you all for joining us. We're going to cover a really important topic about organizing specifically during this pandemic.

Before we get into it, can each of you please introduce yourself and your organization, say whatever you want about your background so people can orient themselves to you?

My name is Lena Melendez. I live in Washington Heights, I'm a native New Yorker.

I entered the housing fight back in 2016 when my mother passed away. My landlord questioned my tendency and then I joined all of these groups housing justice for all in Woodley Galaction.

I joined the essay. I'm involved in lots of different groups now, so I'm in it next week.

My name is Charlie Duelick. I am a tenant organizer with the Urban Home Setting Assistance Board. I organized with our community group Hope, Out in Brownsville and East New York, Brooklyn.

And I have been organizing and working with our statewide houses and coalition, housing justice for all for over two years now, basically since it started.

I'm Nicholas Vargas. I'm an organizer with the Taffy Tennis Association and organizer with the We Keep Us Safe Collective Abolitioners Collective with the Freedom Arts Movement.

Yeah, and I got into housing movement stuff, basically through this crisis. I've always been an advocate for housing rights, but really on the groundwork with the association through this crisis, through my union that was formed just a couple of weeks ago.

It's wonderful. Well, it's an honor to have all of you here. I know this has thrown together last minute and I know there's lots of people out there who are organizing or wanting to get into organizing, who have a lot of questions.

So this will just be sort of a shorter interview discussing the work that you're doing and hopefully it'll help other people learn about and hopefully be inspired to do similar actions.

So the first question I have and we can answer this in whatever order you all want to, but why are rent strikes right for this moment and in what ways is trying to organize rent strikes fundamentally different than they would be in a non crisis situation.

Rent strikes are right for this moment because people are not going to be able to pay either way. Millions of people are not going to be able to pay their rent either way.

So either we are going to end this quarantine shelter in place period with mass evictions.

The head of one of the major landlord lobbying groups in New York state had a quote yesterday where he said, I think housing court is going to turn into a collection agency.

Either we can have that vision of what happens after this crisis or we can use this opportunity to build much stronger tenant power and I think rent strikes are one really important part to that.

I do think it's important say that they are part of a larger campaign to cancel rent.

So you know rent strikes need to be coupled with you know people who are withholding maybe buildings that are organized and winning a narrative battle against governor Cuomo right now base building and coalition building.

So it's one piece of the puzzle that will be necessary to stay off mass evictions and mass you know people following it to that.

I saw some figures that something like 40% of renters are won't be able to pay their rents in May. So yeah, we already have a captive audience to join on this rent strike.

And I think it's a great way to build solidarity around communities. I know that that's the angle that I'm approaching as I organized my building and the buildings on my block.

I think rent strikes are right for this moment and as I think this moment is defined by what Lenin described as a revolutionary situation, which basically is a time when the people at the bottom don't want to or cannot continue to exist in the current state of things.

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