Staying Power (Volume 1, Second Edition)

<p>Staying Power is a print and digital publishing platform that amplifies a people’s history of public housing. Conceived and designed by Ariana Allensworth during her residency as a Create Change Artist-in-Residence at The Laundromat Project, the inaugural edition brought together oral histories, photographs, neighborhood memories, and reflections on everyday life collected in collaboration with NYCHA residents across generations.</p> <p>For decades, public housing has been represented primarily through narratives of crisis and failure — deteriorating buildings, deferred maintenance, and government mismanagement. While these conditions are real and consequential, such narratives can obscure the deliberate histories of disinvestment that produced them, while erasing the relationships, cultural practices, and forms of collective care that have sustained public housing communities. Narratives of failure can also help make privatization, downsizing, and the dismantling of public housing appear inevitable.</p> <p>Staying Power offers a counter-narrative by positioning residents not simply as subjects of housing policy, but as historians, cultural producers, and experts on the communities they have built. Through limited-edition posters, zines, booklets, community activations, and an interactive digital archive, the project preserves and circulates a resident-led account of public housing as a site of culture, political struggle, kinship, and belonging.</p>