This article examines how housing becomes a basis for mobilization that brings residents in East Harlem, New York City into internationally mobile social movement networks. These networks foster the mobility of people, practices and ideas to transform ‘housing’ from an immobile practice into a mobile, shifting entity experienced as tenuous, a counterfactual demand for immobility, and an expression of a shared desire for self‐determination. Through mobilizing frames that turn the demand for decent housing into a struggle against neoliberalism, gentrification and displacement, and for collective self‐determination, housing struggles create multi‐scale networks of mobility that are essential to pursuing a neighborhood‐level struggle to stay put.