Leslie St Dre

Leslie St Dre (formerly Dreyer) is an artist, organizer and educator dedicated to building joyfully militant and intersectional movements for land and housing justice. They’ve spent the past decade honing a tactical arts organizing practice utilizing integrated narrative and media strategies. This work merges popular education, on-the-ground organizing, direct action, performance and visual art towards specific goals to change our collective situation. The actions become ephemeral multigenerational community spaces where unhoused and housed tenants, workers and families can share their ideas to end the commodification and exploitation crises. By pairing the exposure of injustices with the celebration of art and community visions of home with groups like Coalition on Homelessness, the SF Anti-Displacement Coalition, and POOR Magazine’s Homefulness Project, among others, they have co-created projects and spaces through which residents can powerfully communicate that safe, dignified homes for all is possible in a manner that simultaneously invites more people into our shared struggle.

Through mutual aid projects and collaborations with poor and houseless residents, St Dre has learned the power of centering and amplifying the solutions of those most impacted by our racist, extractive and exclusionary capitalist system. The interdependence echoed in poor people’s campaigns, Indigenous teachings on reciprocity, and Black feminist, abolitionist and internationalist organizing has been a guiding North Star for their practice. Their work as an organizer and cultural and communications strategist with Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition and Coalition on Homelessness has helped spotlight global real estate speculation, hyper gentrification and the tech industry's impact on housing and inequality. Stolen Belonging is the multi-year project that they’ve been working on with Coalition on Homelessness and unhoused San Franciscans to visibilize the possessions stolen in the sweeps and the ways in which such violence steal a person's ability to belong in the city. Through oral histories, media, art and actions, the project team is amplifying the demands of folks without housing security, while uplifting solutions that center care, interdependence and dignity.

In Durham, NC, where their family landed after being displaced in 2020, they helped create the Eno River Tenants Association with their neighbors facing eviction. In a resounding victory, especially in a state that bans most renter protections, the campaign has won the cancellation of rent, habitability repairs, home updates, and the tenants are currently in the process of becoming homeowners of their units under a shared equity land trust housing model.

St Dre believes that tenant movements, where, to reference the LA Tenants Union, “tenant” is broadly defined as anyone who doesn’t control their own housing, have the potential to become spaces that bring together residents across organizing spheres and political lines to build the culture of care we need to survive and stay rooted in our communities. They believe, at its root, land and housing justice work is liberation, healing justice, healthcare, harm reduction and abolition work. Through their work with local and statewide campaigns to protect housed and unhoused tenants, as well as national campaigns to cancel rent, they’ve  been able to participate in developing collaborative narratives and strategic communications that amplify these intersections. 

Their motto: by decommodifying and repairing our relationships to land and home, we can also repair our relationships with each other.