David Frisco

The Center for Urban Pedagogy

Grant Awarded: $42,500

CUP’s Rent Regulation Rights Poster and Subway Campaign will help rent-stabilized tenants understand their rights and empower them to organize collectively to prevent illegal harassment and eviction, and maintain access to affordable housing throughout New York City.

Rent stabilization is a law that makes housing more affordable to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers by limiting how often and by how much rent can increase. But tenants don’t always know their rights, and may be afraid to demand them. Landlords are sometimes eager to cash in on increasing property values, pressuring and harassing tenants to move out.

To address this need, CUP is creating two new resources, a printed poster and a subway advertising campaign, in partnership with design collective IntraCollaborative and several New York City housing organizations. The foldout poster will explain rent stabilization rights in English and Spanish; CUP will distribute more than 5,000 copies of this poster through housing organizations to rent regulated tenants. The subway campaign will launch in May 2015 in subway stations throughout the city and will feature a full-color informational poster that explains rent stabilization rights in English, Spanish, and Chinese. CUP expects more than one million people to see the poster during its four week run.

CUP believes that now is the time to engage tenants in understanding their rights and coming together to maintain the network of rent-stabilized apartments across the city to help preserve this affordability for all New Yorkers.