Reese Ricci Armstrong :su:

Housing is a human right. Let’s start acting like it. Table of Contents Austin is in a housing crisis. Landlords are price-fixing rents through algorithms like RealPage, which is used by nearly 50% of apartments in Austin, as homeownership gets more and more out of reach for our city’s working class. This crisis requires bold action, and our current strategy of reducing zoning restrictions to let the free market go to work will not serve everyone. Landlords will always find a way to extract rent from tenants and take advantage of our working class. We need to build public social housing that ensures all people can have a place to call home in our Austin. To build new social housing, we’re going to need to make major investments in our local housing authorities: the Housing Authority of Travis County (HATC) and the Austin Housing Finance Corporation (AHFC). In order to do this sustainably, we need to pass a new property tax. In 2020, Austin voters passed Project Connect’s funding plan, Proposition A, which added a 4% property tax to expand public transportation access. Social housing requires a similar level of investment. Our local housing authorities need a consistent revenue stream that allows them to build units at scale and know they can count on revenue to support them into the future. We must give a mandate to Austin City Council and the Travis County Commissioner’s Court that we demand social housing be built imminently and that we expect nothing less. This requires mass movement building and electing social housing first people to the dais, similar to what we did to pass the Austin Police Oversight Act (“Yes on A, No on B”). We cannot accept underfunded and weak housing authorities that contract out the buildings to private developers any longer. We must also prevent the gentrification of our neighborhoods and the displacement of our communities. We can do this through utilizing Community Land Trusts (CLTs), which are organizations that own the underlying land of a given house or complex and only sell rights to the unit, not the land. This allows the CLT to permanently ensure the housing stays accessible to the working class through deed restrictions that require the home be affordable when sold. For rapidly gentrifying areas like East Austin, we must step in and force land sales to Community Land Trusts instead of private developers to keep communities at home. This has been used to similar effect in Burlington to avoid displacement of residents at the largest affordable housing complex in Vermont, Northgate. The City stepped in under Mayor Bernie Sanders’ direction to purchase the property and put it into joint public and tenant ownership to prevent it from being turned into market rate condos, saving Northgate’s affordability and residents. Similarly, the Champlain Land Trust, also created in Burlington under Sanders’ leadership, owns a myriad of properties which have helped keep housing prices in Burlington low and homeownership within reach of Burlington’s working class. Landlords need to face consequences for neglecting their tenants. Not only are slumlords driving communities out of Austin, they also present an immediate danger to Austinites living in their buildings. We can take over the buildings, clean up the hazards and build social housing at no cost through urban renewal laws while scaring slumlords into caring for their residents. Urban renewal laws were created in order to allow local governments to clean up “slum and blighted areas” through dispossessing and acquiring property. We must start to enforce these laws against landlords by creating a real penalty for slumlords that continue to harm and abuse residents. These are solutions that require political will of politicians and staff to challenge the status quo. We must give them that will and force their hand through strong community action. We cannot settle any longer for ineffectual land use code changes. Rather, we must actively build housing for the working class.

Just posted on my blog a broad overview of what needs to be done and who we can learn from to deliver social housing here in Travis County to lower rents and ensure everyone has a roof over their head. Go give it a read!

http://place.reeseric.ci/writings/2025-07-25/

Community leaders support Reese because they’re trusted to deliver for Travis County’s working class. UsZee McKoy Arshia Papari Abi Mallick Gina Disi Isaac Braman-Ray Conner Praba Lillian Gray Elliot Starr

l am so honored to announce the support of these important leaders in our community for our campaign to build a more affordable county. They're doing critical work to advance criminal, education, social and economic justice in Travis County and I look […]

[Original post on social.hardfork.ngo]

Hey y’all! We are just one day left from our first campaign finance deadline where we report all of our donations recieved. If we want to show Austin that we are ready for progressive change that makes an affordable county for all of us, we need you to chip in before tonight at midnight. So […]

Young people are people too, and if everyone deserves representation in a democracy, so do we.

We deserve to have our voices heard and our presence respected.

We don't want to be tokenized anymore and put into an acceptability box, only to be punished when we fight harder or in a way that […]

Only 1 candidate in this race is committed to building democratic socialism: a vision for the economy that puts working people first and makes Travis County affordable for the people who built it.

We need to recognize that this moment demands vision and action, not incremental 'progressive' […]

Tenants in Acacia Cliffs are being displaced off the backs of greedy landlords converting to luxury apartments.

The Housing Authority of Travis County needs to step up and purchase Acacia Cliffs to stop this conversion and put it into community control.

@alex.sirota.org Congratulations Alex!

Just a reminder that we have our petitioning kickoff TODAY at 1pm at Adams-Hemphill Park! We'll be knocking doors and collecting signatures to get on the ballot and I hope to see you there.

RSVP and more info at https://action.reesefortraviscounty.org/fg3v9/

Just got my new Hidden Disabilities Sunflower lanyard!

Reply to @TechConnectify 's latest video:

Potentially a hot take, but we should have never invented the watt. We should instead be using:

Watts (Wh) => Joules per second (J/S) - which is its actual definition
Watt-hours (Wh) => Kilojoules (kJ)
Kilowatt-hours (kWh) => Megajoules (mJ)

These fit […]

Mastodon stuffed toy Federation beige $42.99 Subtotal $42.99 Shipping $8.94 Total USD $51.94

Did I overdraft my account $50 to purchase the Mastodon plush? Yes
Do I regret it? Not really

I am excited to share that our first event is a go! We will be holding our petitioning kickoff to knock doors and collect signatures to get this campaign on the ballot. Join us and let’s build this campaign for youth liberation together.

Date: April 6th, 2025
Time: 1pm
Location: Adams-Hemphill […]

Wrinkled disability pride flag hanging vertically with the red stripe on the left and two gromets on the top corners on a lightly saturated sea foam green wall with a lamp encroaching slightly on the bottom right. Window trim slightly visible on the right hand edge of the frame, not covering the flag.

Just acquired a disability pride flag for my room! (cc @sarajw)

@m04 absolutely brutal

*Democrats sell out america* DCCC: *square add a tip? screen showing 15%, 20%, 25%*

Join me in supporting Reese for Travis County! Show your support with a contribution.

Hey y'all - We are getting very close to our field launch, and we need to raise a couple hundred more dollars to be able to sustain these efforts and purchase supplies. So if you could head over to https://secure.actblue.com/donate/reese and pitch in $25 now that would be amazing!

--reese

Travis County Commissioner precincts with UT outlined and central Austin circled, showing how it is cracked between all 4 precincts.

For context, here's what the districts look like with UT outlined in orange, and the Central Austin area circled:

Just updated my profile, hopefully it feels a little freshened up!

Was collecting signatures yesterday, and someone who should be my future constituent lives on 23rd and is subsequently 4ish blocks away from my precinct. Truly evil how the precincts are gerrymandered to crack central Austin from getting a real progressive representation at the county commission.

Sign the Petition Hold UT Austin Dean of Students Accountable for Election Fraud & Corruption

Solidarity call from Amin & Ava, the socialist UT student government candidates to stop the fraud by the Dean of Students who intervened to ensure the conservatives were certified as the winners despite their disqualification. Please sign the petition!

https://chng.it/H65Lj4C92F

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LibreVPB mockups

Started mocking up a new open source software for virtual phone banking, in the vein of Spoke. Anyone interested in working on it with me?

"It's [Instagram's] a ploy by Big Happy"

-- @david

@m04 idk com-pew-te sounds like beeps to me

@m04 onomatopoeia of compute?

@m04 guy is just a generic person term at this point 🙄

Jet Lag: The Game — Schengen Showdown The race kicks off to a chaotic day one as Ben and Adam make an unexpected opening move.

Absolutely loving this new season of #jetlagthegame ! https://nebula.tv/videos/jetlag-schengen-showdown

Just removed Instagram from my phone - it’s just a constant reminder of other kids’ social lives that I really don’t need. Just end up feeling sick, jealous and depressed about my lack of social connection with my peers. I like it much more over here on Mastodon because we’re all a bunch of […]

I absolutely adore https://f4mi.com ’s videography, it’s really just props to the past 20 years of vlogs/YouTube and I love it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwpcn93EHhw

Student organizing is thankless and dismissed work with people who are not tapped into the political process. We organize some of the most vulnerable, most disenfranchised and most disengaged members of society - it’s time we got respect put on our names. It’s incredibly difficult to organize […]