Black News Hour: Meet Beyazmin Jiménez, activist, writer, and creative

Jiménez talks housing, reparations, and travel

With the first-ever How to Boston While Black Summit underway, Black News Hour has contemplated the many challenges and circumstances that make planting roots in this city a challenge for our community. Boston’s housing crisis isn’t an exception.

We spoke with Beyazmin Jiménez, a housing activist, writer, and creative for this week’s spotlight. Some of her current titles include co-founder and president of Abundant Housing Massachusetts, senior account director for The Lazu Group, and a member of Mayor Michelle Wu’s rent stabilization advisory committee. Jiménez discussed the role housing plays in making or breaking the Boston experience for Black residents.

BG: What led you to your current work as a housing advocate?

BJ: I would say definitely my lived experience. I’m a first-generation immigrant. My mother and I spent plenty of days at housing court, where she would receive a notice in English, and she didn’t know how to read it. And she was just tuck it under her bed because she was just nervous that it was a super-official letter. And next thing, you know, we’d have marshals at our door asking us to move. So I grew up getting evicted from her house to house; my mother is someone that also suffers from a lot of mental health issues. And I think that only exasperated her condition because of our housing instability. So think it’s something that I definitely thought about the older I got. This was something that always interested me … so I immediately got into policy. I did my Master’s in urban planning. I literally just wanted to figure out the nuts and bolts of housing and how it fits into the rest of our daily lives.

Read or listen to the full interview here.