Welcome to the May Check-in Organizer Form!
Even if people fill out the form on their own, there may very well be details that come up in your conversation that would be useful to append. To see the existing submissions and check if your contact is on there, go to this link and enter the same password you will for this form.
On this form, none of the fields besides their name are required. Just fill in any information you collect that wasn’t in their original response — for example, landlord stories.
If you need the password, contact an organizer you know from ITU — they probably have it, it’s not a very hard one.
Here are some FAQs you might get — it’s a good idea to read through them and be ready to give answers to these questions as soon as they’re asked.
What is this about?
The ITU is running a community check-in project called the Rent Check to see how everyone in Ithaca is doing, in the interest of identifying immediate needs and mutual aid opportunities, as well as communicating statistics about renter status with legislators as we continue to push for rent forgiveness. We’re also building a rate-my-landlord site where you can look up landlords before you rent from them!
What can the ITU do for me?
First and foremost, we can help connect you to community and legal solutions to problems with landlords, as well as answer general questions about tenancy, leases, laws, protections, and so on. Second, we have several organizing veterans and experts volunteering who are ready to assist you with resources and advice if you want to organize your building to negotiate lower rents or better maintenance. Third, we are creating a landlord rating/review database — if you contact us with an inquiry about someone you’re thinking of renting from, there’s a decent chance we’ve gotten a review of them and can let you know in broad terms what it’s like to rent from them.
Why do you ask about landlords?
Besides preparing building a rate-my-landlord-type site for apartment hunters to look up who they’re renting from, we’re also realizing that a lot of the time, landlords are using shell companies to hide who owns what. It turns out that this multi-billion-dollar Ithaca real estate industry is a lot more interconnected (and able to collaboratively keep our rent high) than we thought. If we want to push back on this industry and lower rent in Ithaca, we’ll need to study it. If you want to inquire about a landlord, please visit our Contact Us page, email ithacaTU@gmail.com, or message us on Facebook!
Why do you ask about financial status?
New York State is denying that there’s anyone in the unemployment and stimulus check backlog, but our conversations have told a different story. We’re trying to do the work that the State isn’t doing, and actually ask people whether the aid is working for them.
How does the ITU keep this information secure?
The ITU has a dedicated Data Security team consisting of a small number of long-term volunteers who have pledged to make union member privacy their primary focus in designing our systems, and to minimize the team’s turnover so as to reduce infiltration vectors. They retain sole access to our database, which is hosted on AirTable — one of the premier database hosting companies, who describe their security practices as follows: