CAAAV is looking for new board members! The board serves as legal and fiscal oversight of the organization, contributes to fundraising, and supports director-level leadership. Board members would commit to attending virtual meetings once a month, one annual in-person weekend retreat, and other organizational events and activities as needed.

We are looking for new board members who believe in CAAAV’s mission: building grassroots power by organizing working-class Asian immigrant tenants to make a significant intervention in the gentrification of NYC. All are invited to apply, though we are especially interested in applicants with Executive Director experience in grassroots organizations, backgrounds in fundraising or public policy, and/or would be willing to serve as board chair or secretary.

To apply, please send your resume and a short paragraph about why you want to join the CAAAV board to [email protected] by February 28, 2025..

We want to echo back some inspiring words from co-founder Monona Yin: “We are drawing strength from our ancestors.” We hope to activate the archives as a way to draw from our lineage and the organization’s decades of history as we continue to build tenant power to fight gentrification.

Our friends at Self Portrait Project generously offered up a photobooth to CAAAV to document our first celebration for supporters and allies after 3 years! Learn more about how they empower participants to engage in self-representation here.

We truly believe that our archival work is collective work. We are committed to sustaining a living archive, one that is iterative, responsive to community feedback, and always changing to meet the current moment. Please look for updates to the digital archive at archives.caaav.org. We will continue to upload photos, video and audio materials in the hopes that these materials fuel movements for racial, economic, and gender justice.

Many thanks go to Chinatown Art Brigade and Pace University Art Gallery for sharing their exhibition space with us to showcase CAAAV’s rich past. For those who would like to continue to leaf through the newsletters that were exhibited, please refer to this page on our digital archive website.

Please consider helping sustain CAAAV’s ongoing work by making a one-time or monthly donation. For any questions or if you have materials you would like to see included in the digital archive, please email archive [at] caaav.org.

Sincerely,
Vivian Truong and Minju Bae
CAAAV Board Members

A very special thank you to the many supporters and allies that made the event possible, including Chinatown Art Brigade, Pace University Art Gallery, Moshi, and Self Portrait Project!

Our grief this past month returns us to the fundamental questions that drive our work: How can we dismantle an exploitative system–one that transforms housing into a commodity, squeezing rent from scant wages and pensions? How do we build collective power so that our communities can thrive in safe, stable, and truly affordable neighborhoods?

These questions will continue to shape our long-term vision. Our campaigns last year—against Innovation QNS in Astoria, and against luxury developments along the Two Bridges waterfront—showed us that Mayor Eric Adams’s “City of Yes” is no city for us. On city and state levels of government, Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul are pushing forward long-term visions of housing that line the pockets of real estate developers and displace poor and working-class communities of color.

To lay groundwork for our fights ahead, we started off 2023 by imagining the communities we would build with neighborhood power. From Chinatown to Astoria, our members want affordable housing that is safe, stable, and liveable for generations to come. We imagine accessible parks and clean air. We imagine well-resourced public libraries and schools in our neighborhoods.

To win, our housing movements must not only secure stronger tenant protections like Good Cause and TOPA, but also target the real estate industry and build neighborhood power among poor and working-class communities of color. Are you ready to join us?

In Solidarity,
CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities

Upcoming Events

Degentrification Archives, an exhibit by Chinatown Art Brigade, which features a special room dedicated to CAAAV’s history–from our early activism against police brutality to our current fights against predatory developments in Chinatown and Astoria. On view at Pace Gallery through Saturday, March 25.

People’s Budget Campaign Launch, which meets 11am on Tuesday, March 7 at Tweed Building (52 Chambers St, New York, NY 10007). Join the fight against Adams’s austerity cuts–and the fight for housing, anti-criminalization, education, economy, climate, transit, and health priorities in the upcoming fiscal year’s budget.

CAAAV Reads

“Could we end evictions?: A story on the revolutionary potential of direct action,” in Hammer & Hope
“The Politics and Practice of Tenant Organizing,” in The Dig
“Governor Hochul’s ‘Groundbreaking’ 10-Year Housing Plan Mysteriously Lacks Any New Tenant Protections,” in Hell Gate
“What is a Small Landlord?,” in Hell Gate
“New Yorkers Never Came ‘Flooding Back.’ Why Did Rents Go Up So Much?,” in Curbed
“New Data Shows Where Rent-Stabilized Apartments Might Be Disappearing,” in The City
“Landlords want the Supreme Court to overturn NY’s rent reg laws. What happens next?,” in Gothamist
“White House prepares new tenant protections, alarming housing industry,” in Politico

Chinatown tenants have a message: This is OUR city. Small landlords do not speak for us. Tomorrow on Wednesday April 19 at 11:00am ET, CAAAV tenant leaders and members will rally for Good Cause outside of Manhattan Housing Court – Downtown (111 Centre Street, New York, NY, 10013). Will you join us?

In Chinatown and across the city, tenants have been facing skyrocketing rents and displacement under Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul. Small landlords are throwing tenants under the bus, blaming them for missed mortgage payments to banks. But under this predatory financial system, we have shared enemies: banks, real estate developers, and corporate landlords. In other words, we have bigger fish to fry.

In a housing system stacked against renters, Good Cause would protect tenants from exorbitant rent increases and unjust evictions. Join us this Wednesday at 11am, and amplify: We need Good Cause now.

In solidarity,

CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities

CAAAV is officially inviting you to this year’s Karaoke Battle on Thursday, May 27 from 7-9pm EST via Zoom! Yes, it’s that time of the year again! It’s karaoke time. CAAAV is raising $25,000 through our annual Karaoke Battle to support CAAAV’s ongoing work in building the power of Asian working-class communities and growing the housing justice movement. And that’s why our theme is Growing A Movement!

The Growing A Movement fundraiser will support us to continue to organize by building and sustaining long-term power within our communities across generations. We will grow the movement by challenging and fighting structural and capitalistic interests that leverage profit over safe and truly affordable housing. By donating to our Growing A Movement fundraiser, you will enable us to:

• Build the Neighborhood Eviction Defense (NED) committee in Chinatown. Through the Neighborhood Eviction Defense network, Chinatown residents will learn and become equipped in tenant rights, eviction moratoriums, ground in political education, and look into possible threats in the neighborhood due to predatory lending and harassment.
• Fight against privatization in public housing through our NYCHA Trust campaign in Queens. Public housing tenants will organize to stop NYCHA’s Preservation Trust, which if passed, will provide a private-public partnership and management in public housing. We will organize to make sure public land remains public and is not managed by private entities.

Virtual karaoke means our friends and communities outside of NYC can attend the event, take part in the karaoke battle, and fundraise! Karaoke battle teams and non-participating teams and individuals raise funds before the night of the event through their fundraising pages! It’s really easy – click here, make your fundraising page in a few minutes (JOIN), and start sending the link to your network of friends, family, colleagues, and allies! This will help us collectively fundraise $25,000 by May 27th!

You can take part in the karaoke battle by putting together a karaoke battle video in the comfort of your home prior to the event! With your permission, we will share your karaoke performance during the night of the event and folks will vote for their favorite karaoke team!

If you want to support working-class Asian communities and help us raise $25,000, PLEASE MAKE A CONTRIBUTION HERE.

If you want to help us fundraise, create a karaoke team, OR attend the event, RSVP HERE.

Within our neighborhoods, working class, immigrant, women, trans/queer, and precarious workers face violence from a capitalist system set up to use us for profit. We must keep working in risky jobs and living in unsafe conditions despite deadly health risks during a global pandemic, a lack of language access, and even under threats of violence. Often this violence even extends into our homes with threats, precarity, or abuse from a landlord, partner, or family members.

Rarely do public institutions and government care about what happens to us. They think of our well-being as an afterthought. They speak pretty words but fail to give us what we need. In many cases, these institutions contribute to our harm. We know that Asian, Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities face the same threats, and that these forces against us grow more powerful when we fight against each other. We know the murdered women will be scrutinized by those unfamiliar with their situation for their profession and judged as sex workers. Nobody should be put at risk of death – from white supremacist violence or a global pandemic – simply for surviving in racial capitalism.

These conditions are why we must fight and organize for resources to make our lives safer. We respond to anti-Asian violence by organizing with our neighbors to fight for true safety for the working class every single day – safe housing, dignified work and the right to live without fear.

In Solidarity,
CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities

Next year, New York City will be voting for a new mayor as well as City Council members. And as the pandemic rages on, the future of our neighborhoods are at stake. We need to imagine a world in which local elected officials are actually accountable to the people. In 2021, we will continue to build militancy within our membership to stop eviction, fight for full funding in public housing, and for the cancellation of rent.

• Organized to Cancel Rent because many of our members continue to be out of work and unable to pay rent. Some members haven’t paid their rent in months and the industries they’ve worked in have been heavily impacted by COVID-19.
• Helped write Senator Salazar’s and Assembly Member Niou’s Cancel Rent bill, to make sure that public housing and NYCHA were written into the solution.
• Highlighted the failure of the Rent Hardship Policy in public housing. Many public housing tenants couldn’t provide their loss of income and weren’t eligible to apply for the Rent Hardship Policy. We joined a meeting with Deputy Major Vicki Been to demand that NYCHA and the state protect our tenants.
• Pushed Senator Brian Kavanaugh to support the bills proposed by his own constituents, including CAAAV members. In return, tenants received a failed Emergency Rent Relief Act that they didn’t even qualify for.
• Joined a direct action on October 1 with hundreds of tenants across New York City demanding a real extension of the eviction moratorium, and a commitment to cancel tenants’ rent.
• Tenants held an in-person, masked, and distanced protest in Queensbridge Park to demand our federal and state agencies to meet the needs of public housing tenants and cancel rent.
• Consistently held PPE and mask distributions in the park and in the office, often paired with political education.

Can you help us continue the fight in 2021? Donate now to our The Future is Ours To Build fundraiser! Every dollar supports organized working-class people and the fight for a more equitable New York City. Help us reach $15,000 by the end of December!

CAAAV 2020 Voter Guide: Chinese

CAAAV 2020 Voter Guide: Bangla

Locally, we uplift the work of Communities United for Police Reform (CPR) and the many families of victims of the NYPD who are organizing to bring an end to police brutality. We join CPR in calling for NYPD Budget Justice for a disinvestment in the police and a bold, transformative investment in our communities. To repeal 50a and stop police from hiding their abuse. And to pass the Safer New York Act, a package of bills in the New York State Legislature that would help increase police transparency and help increase accountability to New Yorkers’ most common encounters with police. We also support Black, working-class organizing groups in New York City, like Equality 4 Flatbush, BYP 100, and the Audre Lorde Project, which have fought against police brutality and racial violence of many kinds long before this moment, and will continue to do so. We are also grateful to have allies like the Justice Committee, a grassroots organization in NYC, which challenges police brutality and systemic racism, and continues to build the power of low-income people of color.

The murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin and the Minneapolis Police Department is yet another example of the anti-Black racism, police brutality and racial violence that our society is built upon. But as COVID-19 so brutally shows us, racial violence is not limited to murders like these. American capitalism was built through slavery and indigenous genocide, and therefore racial violence is ingrained in America’s economic order:
– The disproportionate COVID-19 death rate in Black, Latinx and South Asian communities is racial violence.
– The austerity policies that have destroyed NYCHA are racial violence.
– The $6 billion spent funding the NYPD is racial violence.
– The systematic deregulation of rent-stabilized housing is racial violence.
– The discrimination, harassment and physical violence directed at Asian Americans due to COVID-19 is racial violence.
– The complete inadequacy of language access in our government and bureaucratic institutions is racial violence.
– The refusal to cancel rent, and to enact tenant protections and a complete eviction moratorium in New York is racial violence.

Anti-Black racism and violence are at the foundations of American capitalism, and therefore at the foundations of the racial violence and class oppression which our Asian immigrant communities face here. While President Trump points the finger at China, and Asians get blamed for the devastation of COVID-19 in the U.S., those who set the foundations for this economic crisis get let off the hook: President Trump, Governor Cuomo and Mayor De Blasio. They have moved austerity policies on healthcare, education and housing, all while funding the NYPD at $6 billion a year.

As we fight for bold demands, like cancelling rent, to transform our economic system, our government is fighting just as hard to keep the current racial and economic order. As Communities United for Police Reform wrote in an April 30 letter to Mayor De Blasio and Speaker Johnson, “Overinvestment in policing and underinvestment in public health, housing, and community needs help explain why our city has been so devastated by COVID-19, especially amongst elders and in Black, Latinx and other communities of color.” Militarized police are aggressively confronting protestors both to enforce anti-Black racism, and to enforce the status quo at a time when our economic system is revealing its deepest cracks.

We will never win the transformative demands we need – like rent cancellation and full funding for NYCHA – so long as $6 billion goes to the NYPD every year. In order to achieve justice, we must fight together against anti-Black racism and racial violence. This will not be easy. Anti-Black racism is deeply internalized in many Asian communities. These wounds run deep and often are most challenging in the places we live side-by-side as neighbors — like in the places CAAAV organizes, the Queensbridge Houses and Chinatown / Lower East Side.

Several years ago, CAAAV stood with the family of Akai Gurley in demanding justice for his murder by Chinese-American NYPD Office Peter Liang. This decision proved controversial within our working-class, Asian immigrant membership, and it made our organization the target of aggressive harassment and threats from right-wing Chinese-American forces. But most importantly, we were met with tremendous challenges because of the extent to which working-class Chinese immigrants in our community and our membership base sympathized with Liang and felt the NYPD was making him a “scapegoat” because of his racial background. Racial violence has created deep and complex wounds in every corner of the Asian immigrant community.

These wounds are challenging, and while they must be honored, we cannot allow them to prevent us from standing in solidarity. We must call upon one another to stand with the Black community, in opposition to police brutality and all forms of anti-Black racism. We must uplift and protect AAPI organizations and leaders who move forward into these roles now, like Freedom Inc and Man Forward.

Ultimately, we know racial violence is much more than individual incidents or tensions. It is the product of an economic order that values the white and wealthy and embroils us in a racist and violent logic. Working-class Asian and Black communities have many of the same enemies. As neighbors, we must work past our tensions, build a politics of grounded solidarity and create something better together for all of us.

In Solidarity,
CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities

CAAAV’s #CancelRent Fund will organize and support CAAAV members to take collective action against real estate, big landlords and against Governor Cuomo. CAAAV has been organizing working-class Asian immigrant tenants for over 15 years. Now is the moment to leverage all the power that we’ve built over the last decade and a half. Crises create openings to win big material and cultural change. Things are possible today that weren’t possible even one month ago. We have been fighting for a #HomesGuarantee for years. Now that millions of renters across the US are at risk of losing their housing, there is an opening to win safe, healthy and guaranteed homes for all of us – to win housing as a human right. Will you stand with working-class Asian immigrants and donate to CAAAV’s #CancelRent Fund?

COVID-19 is an economic crisis as much as it is a health crisis. Public housing was left to decay so developers could swoop in and privatize public homes, which has now left CAAAV members in apartments without repairs, without consistent heat and without adequate cleaning, even in this pandemic. Gentrification has forced members to live in overcrowded conditions in Chinatown, cramming multiple people into small apartments with no possibility for social distancing. Many of CAAAV’s members are undocumented and don’t qualify for stimulus checks or any form of relief. A large number of members are workers over the age of 60 who must choose to work despite the dire health risks or lose their jobs without the possibility of unemployment benefits. 

This is our chance to change real estate’s chokehold on New York City. We are organizing to force Governor Cuomo to #CancelRent for every single tenant in New York State – whether in rent-stabilized, unregulated, public, or informal housing – so that we all have safe, healthy and guaranteed homes. Winning #Cancel Rent, challenging the legitimacy of capitalism and housing for profit, and setting the pre-conditions to win housing as a human right all depend on how hard we fight right now. 

———————–

Our annual Karaoke Battle will now take place virtually on Wednesday, May 20 via Zoom and in the next few weeks our goal is to raise $30,000. By donating to our #CancelRent Fund through our annual fundraiser, Karaoke Battle: The Revolution Starts at Home, your support will enable us to provide:

• Emergency aid: Direct relief to CAAAV members, in the form of food, medicine, rent relief or legal support for CAAAV member-led rent strikes
• Public Housing block organizing: Support for members to pressure NYCHA to cancel rent and for HUD to prioritize sanitation maintenance and emergency repairs so those most vulnerable to COVID-19 can stay in safe and healthy homes
• Building by building organizing: Support for rent-stabilized members to write demand letters, pressure and negotiate with their landlords, instead of being forced to make impossible choices between affording rent or groceries
• Language justice: Rapid translation into Chinese, Bangla and Korean of everything from eviction moratorium know your rights materials, to accurate information about COVID-19 health and safety, to #CancelRent campaign strategy 
• Building power to rent strike: Deepening our collective understanding of the power of coordinated, building-wide rent strikes, and to organize with CAAAV members to build enough power to strike

If you want to donate and support working-class Asian communities in the fight for housing justice during a critical time, CLICK HERE.

RSVP NOW if you want to attend the virtual event or want to fundraise/compete in the battle!

Follow our Karaoke Battle event page on Facebook for more information!