There When It Gets Real
SCENE: APARTMENT:
It’s the last day of the month, and your landlord has ended your month-to-month lease. Last week, you sent a letter to your landlord asking him to look into what you suspect to be a lead paint issue in your apartment.
Given the fact you didn’t contact the city to report this first, your landlord is under no consequence for any sense of retaliation. You’re devastated.
You have 30 days to relocate and have to notify your roommates about this issue. You feel lost, unsure of how to pack up everything you own into neat boxes to move into your next place. You’re not even sure where your next place will even be. You need help.
It’s the last day of the month, and your landlord has ended your month-to-month lease. Last week, you sent a letter to your landlord asking him to look into what you suspect to be a lead paint issue in your apartment.
Given the fact you didn’t contact the city to report this first, your landlord is under no consequence for any sense of retaliation. You’re devastated.
You have 30 days to relocate and have to notify your roommates about this issue. You feel lost, unsure of how to pack up everything you own into neat boxes to move into your next place. You’re not even sure where your next place will even be. You need help.
ENTERS A.M.T.R.
No, really. That’s where we come in. Rather, that’s a situation we’ve worked through in the past. Fast forward to one week left in their lease, they called us to help. We packed them up in that week, found donation centers, minimized their belongings, and worked to make their camper functional by the time of eviction.
Housing stability in America has become a luxury. Housing stability according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) means that a household does not spend more than 30% of their income on housing. Any household that does so is considered “housing challenged”, any household spending 50% of their income on housing is considered “severely housing challenged.”
Ironically, this post is being written during a pandemic. Millions of people are stuck at home, unable to work, and are now questioning what it means to afford their housing. Citizens have a greater understanding of housing as a human right. However, before the pandemic, housing has always been a human right. The inequalities that cause people to lack fair access to housing haven’t been under such scrutiny until now.
Yet, for years we’ve seen it up close.
A Move To Remember has worked side-by-side with folks facing homelessness, evictions, and unsafe living conditions. As our blog posts roll out, and we continue doing the work we do, you’ll hear these people’s stories.
It might seem like we’re creating caricatures or writing fiction. It can be strange to fathom the founder of a moving company packing a personal SUV at ten o’clock at night with someone’s belongings to help them salvage the last of what they own before being thrown out on the street. We’ve done this. This is an event that has already happened and is likely to happen again until we reconstruct the models on assisting the homeless in finding shelter. In the meantime, we’ve adapted and taken on guerilla tactics to help folks when they need it most.
We won’t back down.
A Move To Remember has always been a moving company that’s invested in the communities it serves and works with our customers on an empathetic level. We hold the community member’s experience in our hearts. You would be hard-pressed to find a moving company that’s as sensitive to and invested in its community on a grassroots level.
We’re passionate about stimulating these larger conversations revolved around housing equality, discrimination in both renting and home-buying, and conversations around implicit bias against marginalized communities. We want to change our systems.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Our vision is to offset the nationwide gentrification crisis by strengthening community bonds. We plan to start as a moving company focused on helping out our communities by offering economic diversity to our neighborhoods. This looks like diverse employment, partnering with small businesses that are POC or queer-owned, and creating zero-waste initiatives (in terms of food, furniture, and supplies.)
We hope to further expand in offering storage services to our clients, especially those who expect to temporarily relocate while they reestablish themselves in their next home.
We aim to build profits to further expand our work towards building community centers. These community centers will expand more opportunities for people to access both education, jobs, and a network rooted in local suppliers and community members.
We hope to link this all back to our moving company by creating large-scale partnerships with corporations that have the ability to lobby for affordable housing and support creating partnerships for affordable housing using modular spaces.
We’re dreaming of revolutionary movements.
We don’t plan to feed the gap between social classes by putting folks into our assistance programs long-term. We hope that these opportunities will give someone the chance to find a firm grounding to grow. We believe that strengthening the bonds people have in their communities is how diversity perseveres. How we as humans persevere.
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Let’s Unpack is a blog that focuses on helping clients prepare for their moves, our client’s stories and the small businesses in our communities making a big difference. Keep up to date with the climate we work in by subscribing below.
