During her EJA Summer Fellowship, Lubaba Ahmed worked with Communities Resist, Inc. (CoRe) to aid vulnerable residents in Brooklyn and Queens. This experience highlighted the transformative role of legal assistance in empowering communities and advocating for tenant rights.

Lubaba worked closely with Tenant Organizations ("TAs"), which serve as essential advocates for fair and affordable housing. These TAs bring residents together, amplify their voices, and collectively address shared challenges while being attuned to the community's specific needs. Lubaba's dedication is centered on driving policy-level changes to ensure long-term housing security for tenants upon her graduation from Brooklyn Law School, contributing valuably to addressing the housing crisis.

She discussed her involvement in addressing the housing crisis this summer.

"New York is in a housing crisis by nearly every metric: rent is unaffordable, evictions are rising to pre-pandemic levels. The precarity of housing brings with it a myriad of other housing discrimination, including discriminatory eviction.

This summer I have learned the importance of tenant-power organizations to creating and sustaining housing stability. Tenants represent a potent political class – making up the majority of the population in many US cities – and often experience unsafe housing conditions (rent hikes, no heat in a multi-family building, etc) collectively.

By building organizations, tenants can work collectively to win safer living conditions in their homes; neighbors can develop stronger social ties that lead to deeper civic participation and healthier overall neighborhoods. And finally, tenants can create a political constituency and leverage their organization to pick (and win) political fights. Now my question turns to - how can we support tenants to create a political constituency and leverage their organization to pick and win political fights?"