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ABOUT US Over the past ten years SAJE's winning combination of community organizing, coalition-building, and grassroots policy has gained significant benefits for the community. Our accomplishments include creating the nation's first welfare-to-work bank account and, through the Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice, negotiating the nation's most comprehensive community benefits agreement.
We are working to:
EQUITABLE DEVELOPMENT SAJE organized L.A.'s first Displacement Free Zone and has joined forces with Esperanza Community Housing Corporation and St. John's Well Child Center to combat the threat of lead poisoning of young children in the area's slum buildings—our Better Neighborhoods, Same Neighbors solution to one of L.A.'s greatest environmental justice problems.
SAJE's work in Banking Rights helped thousands move from cash-and-carry lifestyles at the check-cashers to free bank accounts in the financial mainstream. Our Figueroa Corridor Community Jobs Program is designed to prepare the working poor for good jobs that are being produced from development around their neighborhoods. . |
March 2, 2007
On Tuesday, February 27th, the Miami Workers Center and Low-Income Families Fighting Together won a HUGE victory for Scott Carver Projects and the broader Black community.
Seven years ago, Scott Carver Homes, a low income housing complex, was torn down by Miami-Dade County. Eight hundred and fifty families were displaced.
After seven years of fighting for Justice for Scotts, the Miami Workers Center signed an agreement with Kriss Warren, head of Miami Dade Housing Agency.
The agreement calls for 1-for-1 replacement of all 850 demolished low-income housing units, the right to return for all displaced residents, the establishment of a memorial for the displaced community and a recognition of the importance of the Black community and much more.
The Miami Workers Center is a founding member of the Right to the City Alliance along with SAJE and approximately 30 other organizations from around the country.
>> read more about this historic agreement.
February 21, 2007
Community Benefits or Community Control?
What We Really Want
By Gilda Haas
In 2001, the Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice, comprised of 300 predominantly immigrant residents, and five unions joined forces to win an historic community benefits agreement with Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) the owners of the Staples Center.
So here's the good news about that: The developer, AEG, has acted with integrity, has lived up to the terms of the agreement, and, in 2005, joined forces with the Coalition to take on another developer that tried to evade the pact. Both the agreement and the Coalition have served as an example to others around the country and was recently featured in Tavis Smiley's best-selling Covenant with Black America
Most importantly, the Coalition is still around, and continues to fight the good fight.
February 19, 2007
Visit SAJE at MySpace.
Help us reach as many folks as possible with our message of building a Right To The City. Come on over to our MySpace page and add us as your friend.
October 31, 2006
Tenants Want Landlord To Try Their Life
Residents of a building plagued by vermin and with holes in the walls seek to force owner to spend two nights there.
By Jessica Garrison, Times Staff Writer
First, the landlord yanked the pipes out of their sinks. The Jimenez sisters put buckets underneath to catch the water before it streamed onto the floor.
Next, he stripped the facade from the outside of the building, exposing rotting boards and some gaping holes. He removed some windows, allowing cold air and sometimes pigeons into their rooms.
Their phone lines were cut, and gas and water service sputtered off and on. But even as rats and cockroaches ran wild in the walls around them, the three sisters, who, with their families, have each have rented rooms in the building for two decades, decided to stay and fight for their homes.
>> full story
October 24, 2006
By Nancy Cleeland, Times Staff Writer
Santiago Sanchez and Yolanda Ibarra were running out of time.
It was already mid-March, and in less than a month they and their six children would have to leave their $662-a-month apartment in an old building halfway up a dead-end street in Echo Park. They'd been scouring neighborhoods to the north, east and south of downtown Los Angeles for vacancy signs. But even after repeatedly lowering their expectations, they hadn't found a single thing they could afford.
The couple's growing sense of panic was shared by many longtime residents of their 16-unit rent-controlled building, which was being vacated for renovations. In the wide carpeted hallways, the unlucky tenants compared their fruitless searches and joked about sleeping under bridges.
The families at 1616 Delta St. were competing with thousands of other low-income residents being pushed out of Echo Park, Westlake, Hollywood and other gentrifying neighborhoods, the very places where so many immigrants had found cheap housing a decade earlier.
>> full story
October 28, 2006
NO SWEAT World Premiere
In November 2004, SAJE hosted Globalize THIS!, a multi-sensory forum to examine the issues and ideas of globalizing labor standards, free speech, clean water and health care at the grassroots level.
One of the short films screened that evening, NO SWEAT, is now a full length documentary and will debut at this year's AFI Festival.
Please support independent media and your local filmmakers. Head on down to the Arclight on Nov 7th or 8th and check out Amie Williams' NO SWEAT!
"No Sweat" World Premiere Festival Screening:
Tuesday, Nov. 7th, 9:45pm and
October 17, 2006
L.A. Cops Crack Down on Skid Row as
Gentrification Looms
by Jessica Hoffmann
Fear and uncertainty pervade the streets of downtown Los Angeles’s Skid Row neighborhood, which has the highest concentration of homeless residents in the nation, as police activity in the area escalates.
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), in conjunction with the mayor and city attorney, has stepped up its activity in the fifty-block Skid Row area just months after a federal appeals court called the city’s citations and arrests of people sleeping on sidewalks because they have nowhere else to go "cruel and unusual punishment." This month’s increased police presence comes in the midst of rapid gentrification of the area and a city-wide affordable-housing crisis.
People on the streets are "in a state of fear and apprehension," community organizer Rick Mantley said Wednesday after walking through the area with the Los Angeles Community Action Network’s Community Watch program.
October 8 , 2006
SAJE Allies Take Art To LA's Streets.
Artist collaborative THINK AGAIN is pleased to announce THE NAFTA EFFECT, a public projection project that challenges anti-immigrant rhetoric and treatment of migrant labor.
Projections will appear around greater Los Angeles on October 7, 13, and 14 after dark.
THINK AGAIN is an artist collaborative founded by D. Attyah and S.A. Bachman. THINK AGAIN recruits artmaking in the service of public address and uses images to spark debate. Since 1997, they have produced major public artworks in Los Angeles , Boston , and San Francisco.
THINK AGAIN contributed to SAJE's ART & ACTION We Shall Not Be Moved Poster and Book Project.
July 23, 2006
Rich, Poor Live Poles Apart in L.A.
as Middle Class Keeps Shrinking
A growing body of research shows Los Angeles to be a region of extreme polarization, where rich and poor live in separate neighborhoods, surrounded by others like themselves.
Demographers at Wayne State University in Detroit recently found Greater Los Angeles to be the most economically segregated region in the country. The study found only about 28% of its neighborhoods to be middle-class or mixed income, compared with more than half of those in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Portland, Ore.
More than two-thirds of L.A.-area residents live in neighborhoods that are solidly rich or poor, according to the analysis, which is based on 2000 census data. That share has been steadily growing for three decades, said one of the study's authors, George Galster, a professor of urban affairs at Wayne State.
>> full story
May 11 , 2006
1-Year Ban OKd on Loft Conversions
Acknowledging that the rapid gentrification of downtown, Hollywood and other parts of Los Angeles is making it harder for the poor to afford housing, the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a moratorium on the conversion or demolition of low-cost residential hotels across the city.
The action will have the largest effect in downtown Los Angeles, where a boom in loft conversions is spreading to the edges of skid row, and raises concerns about the future of the 240 residential hotels that for generations have housed some of Los Angeles' poorest residents.
>> full story
More About SAJE's Work On The Moratorium
Share The Wealth Coalition
LA CAN
Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles
SAJE
Previously:
Why Los Angeles Needs A Residential Hotel Ordinance
Feb 07, 2006
Taking Back Our Cities.
Dateline: L.A. , Miami , Alexandria 2005
Los Angeles: In June 2005, the lead front page story in the Los Angeles Times shocked residents with new homeless figures topping 90,000—the size of a small city.
Within a few weeks of this report, the paper's real estate section announced that L.A. median home values had risen to $457,000, in a trend that is statewide.
Since that time, the median home price in Los Angeles has risen to $515,000.
Miami: That same June, a Miami Herald article announced that the combined value of Broward County residential and commercial property grew from $14 billion to $128 billion—in a single year (2004 to 2005).
A few weeks later, the same paper covered a press conference by nearby Liberty City small businesses which cited gentrification—rising commercial rents as well as the residential rents of the local consumer base—as the number one threat to their viability.
Alexandria: Around the same time, the Washington Post announced that the $550,000 median home price in Alexandria , Virginia , had more than doubled from $259,000 five years earlier.
Gentrification and displacement of families has caused D.C.'s population to diminish by 90,000.
To some, this is not a problem. “Its (D.C.'s) housing market is stronger and its fiscal markets are stronger than it was 100,000 people ago … If you promote yourself to singles, childless couples, gays, the creative class, that's not going to grow your population, but it's going to grow your municipal budget,” explains Robert Lang, Director of the Metropolitan Center at Virginia Tech.
What these “hot market” cities have in common are a rending of traditional neighborhoods, a growing renter population, and an increased consolidation of property ownership in fewer and fewer hands. In each region, working-class people are experiencing tremendous economic instability and displacement.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that Los Angeles has SAJE, Miami has the Miami Workers Center, and Alexandria has the Tenants and Workers Support Committee—all grounded in justice mission, a base, and a place—and working together to build strategies to fight back and ensure the right of the city belongs to everyone who lives there.
With gentrification taking on national and even global proportions grassroots efforts need to hold on to our roots while reaching across the country to build power, knowledge and new ways to think and work.
Our three organizations comprise the founding core of Right To The City.
Jan 18, 2006
Morrison Hotel Owners
Sauli and Henry Danpour Sentenced!
Must control vermin, relocate tenants, or face jail time.
On Wednesday, January 18 a Superior Court Judge sentenced the owners of the Morrison Hotel to five years probation and ordered them to control vermin infestation at the site or face 120 days in jail.
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STRATEGIC ACTIONS FOR A JUST ECONOMY 152 W. 32nd Street | Los Angeles, CA 90007 | 213-745-9961 phone | 213-745-9969 fax | info@saje.net SAJE.net originally designed by Tumis.com. |