Conversation

Housing Literacy: Understanding Your Lease, the Rent Law Fight, and Your Rent History

Wed, May 1, 2019

6:30 PM–8:30 PM

Elebash Recital Hall

New York City has some of the strongest, but most complex rent regulation laws in the country. However, when tenants don’t fully understand their housing rights, it’s difficult to take full advantage of the protections that rent regulation offers. To address this issue, Kasey Zapatka, a Digital Publics Fellow at the Center for the Humanities’ Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research, worked with Tenants and Neighbors and website designers Partner and Partners to build the website Housing Literacy. The website is intended to increase tenants’ housing literacy by identifying particularly important aspects of rent regulation laws and developing resources aimed at helping tenants better understand the City’s rent regulation laws.

LIVESTREAM: Click here starting at 6:30 pm to watch the livestream of this event.

The central resource of Housing Literacy is the annotation of the three most common documents that renters encounter when signing a lease for a rent-stabilized unit: a standard lease, a renewal lease, and a lease rider. The annotations highlight specific areas of these documents that tenants should read and understand carefully; point them to resources so that they can learn more about the issues they face; and give them basic knowledge to ask better questions and take steps to address their housing-related issues.

Join us as we unveil Housing Literacy. We’ll talk about the website, how to use it, and highlight some important issues. The Executive Director of Tenants and Neighbors, Delsenia Glover, and housing lawyer Ellen Davidsonwill discuss their vision for the website, the importance of organizing, and layout the legislative agenda for this summer as the New York State Senate and Assembly are set to renew the rent laws. Finally, we’ll talk about the importance of knowing your own rent history and walk through how to read one.

Click here to read more about Kasey Zapatka’s project “Housing Literacy: Decoding NYC’s Rent Regulations,” and click here to read an his article “The Need for Housing Literacy.”

Click here or below to visit the Housing Literacy website at housingliteracynyc.org.

This event is free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by Tenants and Neighbors, andthe Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

https://vimeo.com/334281988