猫咪社区

It鈥檚 time to think big about housing. No more evictions and foreclosures. Rent and mortgage cancellation on a grand scale. Twelve million new green housing units in the next 10 years. A massive reinvestment in housing under public control, resident control, and community control. Rent freezes, rent control, tenant protections, and anti-displacement measures across the nation.

It shouldn鈥檛 come as a surprise that one of our most potent and visionary grassroots social movements has emerged out of the fight for housing justice. The current pandemic and economic crisis reveals in new ways just how cruel the private housing market can be. In April, 鈥攁苍诲 since then. Research by the shows how damaging eviction has always been to families and communities 鈥� evictions during COVID-19 might effectively amount to a death sentence for some people.     

These ideas haven鈥檛 been acceptable in U.S. politics for many decades. Even among progressive social movements, such scale seemed beyond our capacity to dream until recently. Last March, 30 Bay Area leaders  for land justice in the Bay Area. Our vision included fully socialized housing鈥�but not until 2040. All of a sudden, that vision is a real political possibility in 2020 thanks to bold grassroots demands to #CancelRent and . Both demands are now supported by elected officials, including U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar (read her  and ) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (read the ). 

How did we get here? We have increasingly become a 鈥溾�� since real estate lenders and financial institutions crashed the global economy in 2008. Ten million foreclosures later, more than one-third of American families are now renters. Eighteen million families pay more than 50% of their income on housing. How many of those people now have no income at all? And this precarity hits some communities worse than others. The Black homeownership rate recently 鈥攑roportionally, there were more Black homeowners when segregation was legal than there are now.  

For 400 years, American capitalism has thrived on racial exclusion and resource extraction, first through the theft of Indigenous land and Black labor, and more recently, through what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has called 鈥減redatory inclusion鈥�: financial policies and practices designed to siphon wealth out of Black and brown communities through predatory loans, targeted disinvestment, and financial deregulation. The private housing market now simultaneously 鈥渋ncludes鈥� people of color while continuing to enforce segregation through  and .

Nowhere is this intersection between racism and an economy built on plunder more evident today than in the housing market. Decades of racist policy and market practices have created a massive racial wealth gap, one that could take. And it鈥檚 not really going in the right direction: By some accounts, the subprime mortgage crisis produced the greatest loss of Black wealth in modern history, while the wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans has grown by an average of 736% over the past several decades.

While private homeownership has been an engine of middle-class wealth creation for White America, the last 10 years have made it clear that it鈥檚 primarily been an engine of wealth extraction for communities of color and poor communities (read Ta-Nehisi Coates鈥� 鈥溾��). This isn鈥檛 new: In addition to violent dispossession, one of the primary ways that White settler-colonists took control of Indigenous land throughout the 19th and 20th centuries was through the 鈥�,鈥� the forced conversion of communally held tribal land to privately owned plots that could then be purchased, often under false pretenses.   

The housing market will never provide housing for all. Housing under capitalism produces inequality, houselessness, and chronic displacement on a grand scale. It also makes strangers of those who remain in place. According to the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, Oakland鈥檚 Black population has declined by 27% since 2000 in a kind of reverse migration back into racially segregated rural and suburban communities.

Noni Session, executive director of, grew up in the West Oakland flats, a third generation West Oaklander. 鈥淲hen I came back from grad school and research in 2011, I saw a city that I didn鈥檛 recognize,鈥� she . Social scientists have recently coined a new term to describe the sense of 鈥渉omelessness without leaving home鈥� that frontline communities around the world are experiencing as a result of climate disruption, ecological collapse, and mass migration: , the pain of staying put. Whereas nostalgia describes a longing for a lost past, solastalgia describes a lost present and grief for an unlivable future.

In 2018, Sustainable Economies Law Center worked with Session and other community members to launch the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative: a Black, Indigenous, and people of color-led 鈥渕ovement cooperative鈥� designed to stabilize communities facing rapid and racialized displacement. By  and asserting permanent community control through cooperative ownership, EB PREC:

鈥� Creates housing sovereignty and community wealth now by purchasing multiunit buildings to prevent eviction of working class tenants, turning renters into stewards of community land and housing.

鈥� Develops community capacity for governance of land and housing through EB PREC鈥檚 , where neighbors are empowered to come together to purchase buildings and cooperatively govern a community-owned enterprise.

鈥� Builds new community-controlled institutions positioned to demand and receive an influx of private and public capital, as bold new policies, such as U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar鈥檚 Homes For All Act, call for billions in public money to flow into communities for affordable housing.

The alternative to a profit-driven housing system is community-controlled social housing. House by house, block by block, community land trusts and cooperatives have been attempting to democratize and decolonize their relationships to land, housing, and community. Now, . These grassroots organizations are exercising their right to the city by meeting fundamental needs for housing and contesting for public resources.

And neither is this new: I recently visited the South Carolina Sea Islands, one of the few places where 鈥�40 acres and a mule鈥� was a brief but actual program of land reform after the Civil War. For the Black leaders who met with Gen. Sherman in 1865, emancipation from slavery was not enough on its own to liberate people. They recognized that collective liberation required a self-determined relationship to land and control over the means of production (read Ed Whitfield鈥檚 鈥溾��). A hundred years later, the vision remained the same. The modern community land trust movement traces its roots to rural Georgia, when civil rights organizers Shirley and Charles Sherrod . as a sanctuary and radical experiment in mutual aid in response to violent White backlash from local landlords and farmers.

Tenant- and community-owned housing still only meets a tiny fraction of our housing needs, though. Looking to international examples from Austria to Sweden to Uruguay, as well as , the housing justice movement now has a detailed program to deliver homes for all (read People鈥檚 Action鈥檚 ). The formula for today鈥檚 freedom call is a massive reinvestment in green public housing construction; plus a major increase in support for community-owned housing; backed by tenant protections and anti-displacement measures. The right to housing is a precondition for any kind of just transition, and collective control of land and housing is an assertion of those rights. Even with a massive program of publicly owned and financed social housing, the right to housing will still be asserted through local institutions that are accountable to and led by the most affected communities. Projects such as EB PREC are building 鈥減owerful places鈥� in opposition to the 鈥減laceless power鈥� of multinational financial institutions and hedge funds.   

A just and livable future demands a radically democratic present. There鈥檚 no more strategic or morally imperative place to practice that future than our homes, our neighborhoods, our communities. We can decarbonize a significant swath of the economy while democratizing development and building community power from the ground up. A livable future is also about decolonizing and decommodifying our relationship to place, disrupting the logic that drives both the extraction of resources from the earth and the extraction of profits from renters, poor people, and communities of color. Land is a living, breathing, wild, teeming community of life. When we treat it as a site of loving, meaning, and belonging rather than a site of extraction and exclusion, 鈥渉omes for all鈥� becomes not just a political slogan, but a statement of interconnection with all life. 

A version of this article was originally published by . It has been updated and published here with permission.