Our History

We began working in the housing justice movement in 2017 through a project known as Stable Ground. The team formed by the Stable Ground initiative received two rounds of grants from The Kresge Foundation's Arts & Culture program. Through this project, we addressed the complex relationship among chronic housing insecurity, its psychologically traumatic impact, and municipal housing policy through participatory community-based art and cultural programs structured to inform the work of the City of Boston's Office of Housing Stability (OHS). Stable Ground began as an artists residency program that embedded artists, legal designers, and trauma experts into community settings that hosted local visual/performing arts exhibits and art-making events. 

Through Stable Ground, our collaboration with artist Anthony Romero began in May 2019. It evolved into the creation of Fight Displacement!, a trivia board game designed to educate local Bostonians on how to fight housing displacement and influence development.

That effort was one part of the lab's long-term engagement with Romero and Northeastern University's Archives and Special Collections. Romero's work, “…first in thought, then in action”, to which the NuLawLab and Northeastern Law students contributed, was part of the Institute of Contemporary Art’s (ICA) exhibition When Home Won't Let you Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art. Our part of the ICA work provided partnerships and support for the ICA’s public relations with residents.

It also created a model for how the NuLawLab could meaningfully support residents while also creating new, innovative contemporary art. Of benefit to the ICA, the program brought in and engaged new, local audiences with exhibitions and educational programming, and planted seeds for long-term partnerships with local organizations. 

We were poised to launch the second phase of Stable Ground when the COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the second phase of our work. As we entered the pandemic, our team began to respond to the expected wave of mass evictions and COVID-19 economic instability by providing residents who have been experiencing housing insecurity with the technological access and legal knowledge to defend themselves against eviction and secure pandemic rental relief.

This aspect of our pandemic response to the emerging crisis became known as the Boston Housing Support Station Coalition (BHSSC). Our BHSSC teamwork has included organizing neighbors, direct action, and supporting tenants at Maverick Landing, an affordable housing development in East Boston. This work has included standing up a team of law students who have been assisting residents by filling out pandemic rental relief applications. At the same time, Maverick Landing Community Services (MLCS) is providing access to food by offering bags of groceries every week. Unfortunately, most of the people we support have struggled to survive since the onset of the crisis in March 2020. This reality has affirmed the coalition’s determination to continue our work in East Boston.