[A good amount of people know that this happened; far fewer know
how it happened. The new documentary film Rabble Rousers: Frances
Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square, which opens March 24th at the
Firehouse Theater in Manhattan’s Chinatown, aims to change that.]
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“IT TOOK US 50 FUCKING YEARS”: A REVIEW OF RABBLE ROUSERS  
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Samuel Stein
March 20, 2023
Progressive City
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_ A good amount of people know that this happened; far fewer know how
it happened. The new documentary film Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin
and the Fight for Cooper Square, which opens March 24th at the
Firehouse Theater in Manhattan’s Chinatown, aims to change that. _

,

 

If you’ve been around housing movements in New York City, or the
U.S., or maybe anywhere, you have probably heard about a place called
Cooper Square, where the people did the impossible: beat back the real
estate speculators and aligned power brokers to take control of piece
of their neighborhood, creating permanently affordable social housing
while supporting a flourishing arts infrastructure and a slew of small
businesses.

 
A good amount of people know that this happened; far fewer know how it
happened. The new documentary film Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and
the Fight for Cooper Square, which opens March 24th at the Firehouse
Theater in Manhattan’s Chinatown, aims to change that.

 
Rabble Rousers tells the story of Cooper Square, a 12-block section of
Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and its legendary lead organizer,
Frances Goldin. The film takes viewers from Goldin’s youth in the
1920s to the day in 2012 when the Cooper Square Community Land Trust
(CLT) and Mutual Housing Association formally took over the area’s
land and buildings. It’s a long and complicated story to tell, and
producing this film has been a labor of love from Directors Kelly
Anderson, Ryan Joseph, and Kathryn Barnier for over a decade.

 
Full disclosure: I’m biased. The directors are friends of mine. Some
of the people interviewed have been my teachers and mentors, and many
of the activists who speak in the film are colleagues who I’ve
collaborated with on campaigns and educational projects. The first
time I organized a protest I asked Frances Goldin to speak. So maybe
it’s no surprise that I think this is a fantastic film that everyone
with an interest in housing movements and grassroots planning should
see. But my bias also means I’d be pretty pissed off if I felt the
directors missed the mark – if the story they were telling didn’t
line up with the history, or betrayed the true character of the people
it presents. From my perspective, they nailed it.

 
Rabble Rousers does several things that will be notable to an audience
of progressive planners. First, it tells the history of the struggle
for Cooper Square from being slated for Urban Renewal demolition in
the late 1950s to the formation of the Community Land Trust, with
plenty of attention paid to all the unpredictable forks in the road.
The filmmakers tell the story through interviews with CLT organizers
and members (including Goldin, Tito Delgado, Val Orseli, Gisela
Jasmine Gomez, Amir Bey, Maria Torres-Bird) and connected
scholar-activists (Frances Fox Piven, Tom Angotti, Ron Shiffman),
archival footage, documents brought to life with animation, a helpful
timeline, and plenty of character development. We see the community
come together not just to oppose their own displacement, but to work
with Walter Thabit – one of the co-founders of the Planner’s
Network’s precursor organization, Planners for Equal Opportunity –
to create their own alternate plan, premised on the idea that the
people themselves could determine which structures should be saved,
built or demolished. The plan called for the city to use a
“checkerboarding” strategy to house the neighborhood’s poor and
working class residents without displacement. They wanted the city to
build public housing on a large vacant lot, move tenants from nearby
decrepit housing into that development, tear down the bad old housing,
rebuild it, move tenants from other nearby decrepit housing into that
development, and repeat until everyone in the neighborhood had decent
housing. They fought Robert Moses, Richard Nixon, and every mayor from
Wagner to Koch until they reformulated their plan and won control of
their buildings through a Community Land Trust.

 
In the course of this telling, the film also demonstrates and explains
key concepts that can often be confusing or overly abstract. First
among them are – This film is as good as anything at showing what
Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and Mutual Housing Associations are, how
they work, why they keep an area affordable, and what it takes to win
them. Rabble Rousers also helps demonstrate the relationship between
complex socio-spatial processes like disinvestment, “planned
shrinkage,” gentrification and community control through a concrete,
historically and geographically specific example.

 

The documentary also examines an important piece of political history
that is not often a part of our discourse around community planning:
the early relationship between the fight for public housing and the
fight for CLTs. Cooper Square Community Land Trust is known best as a
functioning example of this model of community land and housing
stewardship. The CLT movement is sometimes thought of as distinct from
the movement for public housing. In fact, it can be seen as a turn
away from large-scale state ownership of land and housing and toward a
smaller-scale vision of community control. But Rabble Rousers shows us
that for the people who built the CLT, public housing was always Plan
A. It was only after the Nixon Administration put a moratorium on
federal public housing construction and the city government entered
into a fiscal crisis that the activists devised the CLT alternative.
In other words, the activists didn’t give up on public housing, the
state did. This subtle but crucial corrective is reason alone to watch
this film.

 
The filmmakers don’t sugar coat the way the CLT got the land and the
funds to renovate their decaying buildings. According to Cooper Square
veteran Val Orseli, realizing that they had built up “the power to
block” but they didn’t “have the money to build,” they allowed
the city to sell two large, vacant lots at the southern edge of the
neighborhood – which were the cornerstones of the public housing
“checkerboarding” strategy – to private developers to build
luxury housing. In exchange, they got 25 percent affordability in
those two new buildings, and more importantly secured tens of millions
of dollars from the city to bring their buildings up to code. Once the
buildings were renovated, they were transferred over to the community
in the form of a Community Land Trust and a Mutual Housing
Association, with apartments selling for $250 each and never
appreciating in exchange value. There is still more to this story –
we aren’t told where people moved to while the city was fixing their
apartments, and I’m pretty sure federal vouchers are also a part of
Cooper Square’s financing strategy – but the filmmakers don’t
shy away from the fact that while they won something incredible, there
were real costs and trade-offs involved.

 
Finally, Rabble Rousers closes by pointing its audience to the future.
As the credits role, we see a new generation of activists organizing
to establish East Harlem/El Barrio CLT, about five miles north of
Cooper Square. We see tenant activist Raquel Namuche Pacheco
organizing a building (sounding a lot like a young Frances Goldin),
and Picture the Homeless member and activist Marcus Moore talking
about Cooper Square’s inspiration (sounding a lot like a young Tito
Delgado). By closing with its gaze on a new CLT struggle, the film
reminds us why Cooper Square matters – not just for itself, but as
an inspiration for popular movements near and far.

 
But the film also closes on a sober note: Cooper Square may be forever
affordable, but what about all that surrounds it? Frances Fox Piven
notes that “The harms done by Robert Moses shrink if you compare
them to the harms done by Mayor Michael Bloomberg,” and urges us to
view the Cooper Square story as two truths at once: a remarkable
achievement, and also a drop in the bucket. This may not be the
triumphant conclusion many viewers expect, given that Cooper Square is
often treated – accurately!– as a historic victory over enormous
odds.
 

If Rabble Rousers is the story of a victory in community planning and
the CLT movement, it’s also a demonstration of those movement’s
limits. Community-based planning is just that: community-based.
Without control over the state and capital, it can only ever be local
and partial. This is not anything the protagonists of this story
don’t know already – Frances Goldin got into this movement via
Communism, and while she left the Party (or the Party left her) she
remained a radical and an internationalist to the end. Shortly before
she died in 2020, when much of her memory had left her, I saw of video
of her singing every word of “Der Internatsyonal” (The
Internationale in Yiddish). She may have dedicated much of her time to
a hyper-local struggle, but she never took her gaze off of the wider
world.

 
For those working in Goldin’s political lineage, the question this
forces us to grapple with is: how do we engage in local struggle
without losing sight of what lies beyond? What’s our theory of how
local struggles relate to the rest of the world, and to the global
capitalist system that structures our local politics? One can
reasonably argue any of the following: that the demand to “scale
up” local struggles is in fact a masculinist imposition on anything
that works on a smaller scale; that a network of local projects can
join together and take on the world; that we can do it all at once,
and organize both local projects and global uprisings; or that the
global is simply beyond the reach of our movements right now, and so
we do what we can where we are.
 
 
Any of these are plausible responses, but we need some kind of theory
to explain the duality Piven poses at the end of this film: the
presence of Cooper Square, and the disappearance of much that once
surrounded it. Watching Rabble Rousers should get us all thinking
about what that answer might be.
 
 
In the closing moments of the film, Goldin says, “I think that
fighting back is a very life-giving force.” She explains that
organizing and protesting forced her to have hope and to keep going
for over 90 years.
 
 
I’m 40. Some days my stockpile of hope is in short supply. I’m
sure sometimes Frances Goldin felt the same way. But she didn’t
quit, right up to her dying days. This film is a reminder that it may
take 50 years, but victories do come. And the day after they come,
there’s still a world to win.
 
 
_[SAMUEL STEIN is a housing policy analyst, researcher and writer
living and working in New York City. He is the author of the
book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State
[[link removed]] (Verso, 2019).]_
 

* Cooper Union CLT; Community Land Trusts; New York City Housing;
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