Screengrab: TikTok/@Kwajohousing

In New York City, nearly everyone has a housing horror story or a gripe with a landlord. Perhaps no one more so than public housing tenants, whose landlord is New York City. The city’s public housing stock has repair needs in the tens of thousands of dollars after decades of disinvestment. New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) tenants protest poor housing conditions often, have frequently taken their complaints to social media, and are very vocal in town halls and public hearings.

Kwajo Tweneboa, a 24 year old public housing tenant in the U.K., has carved out a following putting agencies on blast for letting problems fester in his country. He’s currently visiting the U.S., where he said the situation in NYCHA is possibly worse.

“Some of the worst that I have seen has been here and in some of the videos that I’ve seen,” Kwajo Tweneboa told Motherboard. “What I’m seeing is a similarity between here and London, in regards to tenants just being ignored,” he said.

Tweneboa is a housing activist who has spent the last 18 months using TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram to advocate for tenants in publicly-funded housing in the UK. What he does is very similar to what famed Pix-11 reporter Monica Morales does for NYCHA tenants: speaking to tenants and highlighting horrific housing conditions with a camera. The difference is that Tweneboa acts independently, relying on social media to highlight the conditions of tenants.

Some of his videos, including a repost of a tenants’ ceiling sweltering with black mold, have over a million views. In another video, he showed that the door to a tenant’s roach-infested apartment couldn’t open without strenuous pushing. In another, he highlighted a crumbling apartment, so damp from leaking sewage that large mushrooms were blooming in the ceiling corners.  The videos have made Tweneboa a powerful advocate in a short amount of time.

Social housing has been getting more media attention in the UK, not just through Tweneboa’s advocacy but because of high-profile tragedies. Tweneboa was invited to news programs to speak about the 2020 death of a toddler, Awaab Ishak. A recent report found Ishak died from inhaling mold in social housing after his families’ repeated requests for help were ignored.

Tweneboa is in New York City for a few weeks visiting family, but he also plans on visiting public housing residents in NYCHA to highlight some of their shared problems. He was surprised by videos that he’s seen and chats with NYC tenants, including a video where enormous rats took over a kitchen sink and another where water is flooding down a staircase and pouring from a light fixture.

Tweneboa has lived in social housing for the majority of his life. He said prior to 2018 he was living in a temporary accommodation in a crumbling converted garage while waiting for permanent government housing. There were leaks, mold, and an ant infestation. When they were approved for permanent housing in 2018, Tweneboa said the house was “falling to pieces.” There were roaches, mice, missing ceilings and an unusable bathroom.

“It was described by some of the tenants in my house as not even fit for animals to be living in,” he said.

Tweneboa’s father was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2018, which quickly progressed to stage 4. He was being fed through his stomach when he died in 2020 of an infection, which Tweneboa said was likely the result of the mold-infested house he was living in.

After his father died, the housing provider attempted to evict his sisters and himself, all while the unit was continuing to deteriorate. Then the ceiling collapsed.

”It got to a point where I knew they weren’t listening and I was depressed, on medication and suicidal,” he said. He repeatedly asked Clarion, the housing association managing his unit, to fix the ceiling, but he was told to wait. He decided to start publicizing the issue on his own, taking to TikTok to chronicle his conditions. The ceiling was eventually fixed, but Tweneboa continued to expose problems in other peoples’ apartments, traveling around the UK and meeting tenants who reached out to him on social media. 

“I don’t think that’s an excuse or there’s any justification as to why human beings are being allowed to live in these conditions”

Over the past 18 months he’s been a guest on Good Morning Britain and other news programs. He has been profiled multiple times and has met with high-ranking government officials, including Michael Gove, the UK’s Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, who oversees social housing. He says some of his suggestions are going to be included in legislation later this year. 

“My world’s blown up, completely blown up, in the UK. 18 months ago no one had a clue who I was,” he said.

While other organizers have banded together in tenant unions or formed nonprofit organizations, Tweneboa says he prefers to advocate on his own because it allows him to say whatever he likes. But he says the grind of his lifestyle has been tiring.

“There’s times where I’ve been out here where I felt a bit depressed and I've had some days where you feel alone, you really do,” he said.

While in NYC, Tweneboa will be meeting with Housing Justice For All, the coalition of New York State groups that helped deliver 2019’s landmark rent reforms, in an attempt to learn more about housing in New York and share strategies. While HJ4A’s base mostly rents in privately-owned housing, campaign director Cea Weaver told Motherboard they’re interested in Tweneboa’s ability to publicize the housing crisis and activate people.

“The strategy around building a strong narrative and really excellent digital and influencer-type communications around bringing light to the housing crisis are just really inspiring to the work that we're doing,” Weaver said.

To Weaver, the housing crisis has become ubiquitous in the US and in NYC—Most Americans are rent-burdened—but the key is getting people organized to do something about it.

“Everyone is talking about how bad the housing situation is at bars and parties with your friends,” Weaver said. “When we first started talking to him, it was really about we have a theory of change that involves trying to get regular people who are scrolling and taking the housing crisis for granted to take political action. And I think that's what he's doing.”

But there are differences; Weaver said the US public housing stock is likely in worse shape than the UK. “Our housing stock is on the brink of privatization or on the brink of falling down if it's public, and the private housing market is the main thing that most US organizers are contending with.”

16 percent of tenants in England live in social housing,a number that has cratered over the course of decades due to policies designed to sell off social housing. An even smaller share live in public housing in the US: there’s over 2 million people living in over 1 million public housing units in the United States, or about .6 percent of the US population. 

In both countries, the defunding of social housing happened as the buildings took on more Black and immigrant renters.

“When it was white families living in social housing out here when it began, it was heavily funded. And it was really looked at as something people could be proud of. And then the demographic of people started to change,” Tweneboa said. He adds, “I think it's not just a racism issue. I think it's a class issue.”

Aside from racism and classism at play, much of the problems shared by UK and US public housing stock stems from their governments’ ideological opposition to government-funded housing. In the US, nearly-all Republicans and most Democrats are hesitant to invest in long-term repairs to the social housing stock, viewing it as inefficient and akin to welfare, which itself was shredded by Democrats in the early 1990s.

The $1.7 trillion spending bill passed in December actually defunds the long-term repair budget for public housing by $8 million. NYCHA’s long-term repair needs alone are about $40 billion according to the city.

The federal disinvestment has led to infighting among leftists over how New York should fund NYCHA’s repairs. Some embraced a “preservation trust,” which would allow NYCHA to take on debt for repairs. Others, including a vocal group of tenants called “Save Section 9” have protested this path, likening the trust to privatization. But the conflict could have been avoided altogether if the federal government had taken up the bill, rather than defunding public housing over the course of decades.

Tweneboa points out that the ideological disagreement on the federal level is not a reason to avoid funding repairs. For now, people live in public housing in the US and UK, whether elected officials believe it should exist or not.

“I don’t think that’s an excuse or there’s any justification as to why human beings are being allowed to live in these conditions,” Tweneboa said. He says repeatedly that if elected officials wouldn’t see fit to live in the conditions of public housing, they shouldn’t ask others to do so. “They get to go home to their nice homes at the end of the day after their day shift,” he said.