Organizing happens in rooms — and in public.

The documentary about how a working mother named Frances Goldin and her neighbours fought Robert Moses, the real estate industry, and five mayors — and built New York's first community land trust. It took them fifty years. They won.

I organized this screening to put an alternative on the table: that there are other ways to finance housing and other ways to hold land, and that we have already proved it works, in this city, in living memory. Then we sat down and argued about how to do it again.

On the panel: Tito Delgado, Cooper Square organizer and one of the people in the film. James DeFilippis, Rutgers professor and a founding member of NYCCLI. Council Member Alexa Avilés. And others. It was a wonderful conversation, and everybody left it thinking harder.

Our landlord cut off negotiations. We had found a nonprofit preservation buyer, ready to make an offer. So we rallied outside our own front door and demanded he come back.

Our elected officials sent him a letter the day before. Comptroller Brad Lander, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Senator Zellnor Myrie (the Senate sponsor of TOPA), Assemblymember Marcela Mitaynes (the Assembly sponsor), Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon, Borough President Antonio Reynoso, Council Members Shahana Hanif and Alexa Avilés — all of them stood on that sidewalk with us.

Tenants waved signs reading TOPA and COPA. That is what a building looks like when it decides not to disappear quietly.

The first rally. The goal from day one was simple: that everyone in New York would know what was happening at 63 Tiffany Place. Seventy families, thirty years, and a tax credit about to run out.

It worked. The press came. The electeds came. And the landlord, who had ignored us for years, suddenly hired a law firm — which is how you know a rally landed.