This originally appeared as a series of tweets but I want it to live on my website instead so here it is.

The issue of a lack of affordable housing in Midwestern cities like Lincoln isn't new, despite what you may have heard. Feeling shivers reading about the 1971 Lincoln City-Wide Tenants Assn., which lobbied senators and city officials but also mounted a "Tent City" direct action.

Tent City was at 22nd & Vine in #LNK in 1971, and the Journal Star reported over 100 people making up ~20 different families lived there - some had jobs, some didn't. Some had other homes, some didn't.

Mrs. Marilyn Tyson and her 6 children were part of Tent City. They shared a 2 bedroom house with rent coming to $150/month. (That's $1,117.91 in today's dollars). Mrs. Tyson would have preferred a 4 bedroom, but couldn't find one.

Tent City's goal was to draw attention to housing shortages for low-income Lincolnites and protest the displacement of low and moderate income people as UNL's city campus was being built out.

I haven't been able to determine yet how long Tent City was active, but newspaper searches suggest the Lincoln City-Wide Tenants Association was active from at least 1970-1974.

The association expressed concerns about discrimination against Black and Indigenous people in public housing, and wanted to see UNL provide more housing for married students so that those households would create less demand pressure on public housing resources.

# Sources:

I had a Newspapers.com subscription that I was using for research, but I apparently did not save the exact link I was referencing when writing these tweets. Sorry!

The Nebraska Newspapers website does have a few university-specific hits, like The Daily Nebraskan, May 1971.