Posted on September 12, 2016 by Oscar Perry Abello in Next City Next City, By Oscar Perry Abello When Garrett Wright first started at the Community Development Project of the Urban Justice Center (UJC), he was one of only two lawyers in the housing practice. It was a very busy time, back in 2008. “It was basically a lot of low-income, working-class tenants of color that were fighting landlords trying to displace them and gentrify neighborhoods,” he says of the clients he represented in housing court. “Private equity companies were buying up rent-regulated housing stock and seeing it as a way of making a huge return on their investment through a business model that’s explicitly predicated on harassing and displacing current rent-regulated tenants and flipping apartments to market rate.”
