Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square

Documentary Film Overview

A trailblazing housing organizer and her diverse working class neighbors fight Robert Moses, the real estate industry and five mayors to create the first Community Land Trust in New York City — an oasis of permanently low-income housing in the heart of the rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side.

In 1959 New York City announced a “slum clearance plan” by Robert Moses that would displace 2,400 working-class and immigrant families and dozens of businesses from the Cooper Square section of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Guided by the belief that urban renewal should benefit – not displace – residents, a working mother named Frances Goldin and her neighbors formed the Cooper Square Committee (CSC) and launched a campaign to save the neighborhood. Over five decades, they fought politicians, developers, white flight, government abandonment, blight, violence, arson, drugs, and gentrification – cyclical forces that have destroyed so many working-class neighborhoods across the US. Through tenacious organizing and hundreds of community meetings, they not only held their ground but also developed a vision of community control. Fifty-three years later, they established the state’s first community land trust – a diverse, permanently affordable neighborhood in the heart of the “real estate capital of the world.”

Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square is a documentary film produced by Kathryn Barnier (Producer, Director, Editor), Ryan Joseph (Producer, Director), and Kelly Anderson (Producer and Director). Its premier was in late March 2023 in New York City. It is really a pleasure to present this masterful documentary film which has become a critical resource for understanding housing activism in cities across programs at The New School and beyond!

Panel Discussion

This panel will focus on the power of community organizing to gain control over land in a context of an unprecedented housing crisis. It will bring together residents, planners, scholars, and elected officials supporting the Community Land Trust movement through organizing and policy campaigns, such as the Community Land Act. These urgently-needed set of bills could would give community land trusts (CLTs) and other alternative housing development models tools to develop and preserve permanently affordable housing, community and commercial spaces, and other critical needs. Its proposed measures seek to combat displacement of low-income New Yorkers while building collective wealth in Black, immigrant, and working-class communities.