Housing is a human right, or so says the International Declaration of Human Rights. But could we organize our economies with that in mind? Across the country, communities have land and properties and people who need homes. What’s stopping us bringing them together in a way that increases community wealth and wellbeing for everyone? That’s the question we explore in this episode of our special series on community wealth building, produced in collaboration with the radio and tv show, Laura Flanders & Friends. Featuring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Writer; Saoirse Gowan, Policy Associate with the Democracy Collaborative; Noni D. Session, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative

This is the final episode of a 4-part series exploring how communities are working to transform their local economies by harnessing their assets, anchoring capital and resources locally to directly invest in that place and its people – from land to money and finance. Explore the full series here.

Guest Host

Laura Flanders is the host and executive producer of Laura Flanders & Friends, which airs on PBS stations nationwide. She is an Izzy-Award winning independent journalist, a New York Times bestselling author and the recipient of the Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Media Center.

Credits

• This series is co-produced by Bioneers and Laura Flanders & Friends
• Laura Flanders & Friends Producers: Laura Flanders and Abigail Handel
• Production Assistance: Jeannie Hopper and David Neumann
• Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
• Senior Producer: Stephanie Welch
• Producer: Teo Grossman
• Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
• Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

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Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): Housing is a human right –– or at least, that’s what international human rights law says. Could we reorganize our economies with that principle in mind? Across the country, people need homes. And in those communities, land and properties are available. So what’s stopping us from bringing them together, and increasing community wealth and wellbeing for everyone? 

That’s the question we explore in this episode of our special series on community wealth building, produced in collaboration with Laura Flanders & Friends, a public TV and radio show that reports on social change experiments. 

We hear from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who’s a historian and writer; Saoirse Gowan, Policy Associate with the Democracy Collaborative; and Noni D. Session, Co-founder and Executive Director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative.

This is “Commodity or Human Right? How Community Wealth Building Can Address the Housing Crisis” with guest Host Laura Flanders on The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Laura Flanders (LF): Your home: what is it to you? Is it a shelter, a place of safety, a place that nourishes your being and your sense of belonging; perhaps a place where you feel your ancestors, imagine your future and those who come after you? Or is it an investment, a tradeable commodity? And if it’s an investment, whose? What’s your home for?

Different cultures and economies consider homes and land in different ways. Under globalized corporate capitalism, our system more or less, the value of a property or a place is typically set by the market: which is to say, the price a house or apartment or piece of land can be bought or sold for, or at what rate it can be rented or taxed. Under this system, a home can have value in a company or a city’s investment portfolio whether or not anyone is living or working on it at all. In fact, sometimes property’s worth more when it’s empty, or emptied of certain people, as writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has observed.

Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor lives in Philadelphia where she has watched city policies displace Black and Brown people in an effort to increase profits. Philadelphia’s not unique, in this respect. Call it slum clearance, urban renewal or simply urban development, neighborhoods like hers have been worn down for decades, as communities of people are broken up and families are forced to move – especially out of gentrifying urban centers. People of color and low income people have ended up concentrated in smaller and smaller areas, on shrinking plots of land with few services and little political power.  Marginalized physically, they become marginal politically – which makes it even easier to cut services, cause desperation and vilify the residents even more. It’s a vicious cycle that has long roots, writes Taylor. Black vulnerability, in effect, was engineered.

Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor (KYT): There has been a consistent shortage of safe, sound and affordable housing in the United States over the entirety of the 20th century and now into the 21st century. And this is by design. If we think about the way that our government has left the production and development of housing almost exclusively to the private sector. And so why is there no affordable housing? Because it’s not profitable. It’s that simple. And you can see it in terms of the building priorities and cities across this country. In Philly, the main housing that is being built are million dollar condos. That’s the housing that is being built, because that is where the profit is.

LF: Taylor is the author of “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership”. A regular contributor to the New York Times op-ed page, she is currently a professor in the Department of African-American Studies at Northwestern University.

I spoke with Keeanga Yamahttaa Taylor in 2021 as an uprising against gentrification was happening in her city. How land and property are owned and managed are key features of any local economy, she said, because property ownership is tightly tied to political power – and it all makes for a toxic brew, especially in a country with a history like ours. Here’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.

KYT: Well, I mean this is the long history of African-American experience, moving from a mostly rural population to an urban population. When the federal government begins to take new policy initiatives, they call on the private sector for its, quote unquote, “expertise”. Well, in the real estate industry, this expertise had everything to do with how to segregate African-Americans, for whom it had determined, had a deleterious impact on property values.

But those practices, which began very early in the 20th century are then used to influence policy making decisions about where black people should live and should black people have access to the same kinds of programs that really created a middle-class white population in the U.S. after World War II, where white GIs, and ordinary white people in general, were given access to government-backed home loans that allowed them to purchase houses in suburban areas that became, of course, the cornerstone to the American dream. Black people were excluded from this endeavor really until the 1960s and the urban rebellions forced the federal government to relent and finally create home ownership programs that were directed at them.

So this is a really insidious practice that happens in cities across the country, where you have public housing authorities – organizations that are established by the federal government whose purpose is to actually provide housing to low income and poor families – well, now that they find themselves in the position of lording over public housing properties, so properties that are owned by housing authorities. And instead of rehabilitating these properties, instead of fixing them and housing people who need them, a lot of these housing authorities are waiting to– what we would describe as the peak of the market– to then flip the houses to developers for profit.

LF: In 2021, as Philadelphia was just emerging from pandemic related lock-down, a  massive housing fight broke out. At issue was UC Townhomes, a subsidized housing complex near the center of town. Near quality schools, hospitals and good food and transport, UC Townhomes was an attractive spot for gentrification. But the complex was operated under a subsidy contract with the federal government, meaning that low income tenants could stay there and pay no more than 30 percent of their income on rent. In July of 2021, with demand for upscale housing rising, the owners of UC Townhomes declared that they intended to cancel their so-called Section 8 housing contract with the federal government and sell the property to private developers who could charge what they like. All the roughly 70 families currently in the townhomes would have to move.

The tenants were having none of it. UC Townhomes wasn’t alone. Lots of housing subsidy contracts were on the verge of expiring in the Philadelphia area – at least 2,000 units in at least 37 complexes were within five years of ending their contracts, according to local activists. There weren’t many places left for low-income renters to go. Given those options, the residents rebelled. They organized, protested, sued the city, and eventually after a long bitter fight that involved even camping in the streets, they won a partial victory. In a settlement, the owners of UC Townhomes won the right to develop most of their three-acre site. But half an acre they had to donate to the city to be used to build affordable housing, at least 70 units. In addition, from the sale, the owners of UC Townhomes had to give $3.5 million dollars to support the displaced residents themselves. This fight, and the community mobilization that drove it, has implications far beyond the City of Philadelphia itself.

KYT: This kind of housing owned by public housing authorities that they are just sitting on, exists in many cities across the country. And so I think that that model of taking over and occupying that space can exist everywhere in this country.

I think what is important to say about how to go about doing that has to do with the level of organizing, organizations that have been involved in local housing struggles over period of time, who know literally the physical terrain of the city and where the housing is located and available, but also most importantly, how do you utilize your networks to call upon people to do eviction defense when the city inevitably tries to move in and take those properties. And so there’s a kind of informal network of eviction defense tenant-rights organizations forming across the country so that people are in touch with each other.

But I think as long as we are in what I would describe as an acute housing crisis, where you have mass unemployment, where you have people, millions of people being pushed into poverty, millions of people experiencing the anxiety of housing insecurity, millions of people facing eviction. And at the same time, millions of empty properties where either public officials or developers are just waiting to turn a profit on these properties, that all of the ingredients for both a confrontation, and occupation of these properties in the name of actually being able to provide people decent places to live is on the table.

LF: In the 20th century, the primary shapers of our housing market have been, racial segregation, anti-black racism, and the neoliberal economic myths that getting government out of the market would trickle down wealth to everyone. It just hasn’t happened. In fact, what’s happened is the reverse. Today, private equity firms have vacuumed up entire neighborhoods of homes for their investors – driving rents up while investing as little as possible, in order to secure maximum gains, not for residents but for far-off investors, or investment companies. At the same time, Airbnb and similar short term, for profit private rental platforms have knocked millions of units out of the long term housing market, causing further scarcity and driving prices impossibly high for most people.

In 2019, Saoirse Gowan co-authored a report on public housing for the People’s Policy Project, a think tank focused on social, economic, and political equality in America. And she also led the social and public housing sector of the Home Guarantee Campaign during the 2020 presidential race. Gowan spoke on the Democracy Collaborative’s Next System podcast in 2019.

Saoirse Gowan (SG): What we’re trying to get at is that the function of housing in this country and what it has been for a very long time is as a commodity, something for people to make profit on, not something that people need to live in. So when you have significant hardship, whether that’s because of poor conditions in housing, unaffordable housing, homelessness, and criminalization of being homeless, skyrocketing rents, predatory foreclosures by banks after loans made on predatory terms. All of this sort of has at its root this idea that housing is a commodity and not a place to live in. 

LF: The Homes Guarantee campaign would have policy makers move away from seeing housing as a commodity, and require that they focus instead on getting all Americans housed in safe, affordable and stable ways. Again, Gowan.

SG: So what we try to do with the Homes Guarantee and sort of core policy proposals about it is first that we need to start moving away from this profit orientation and stabilize people who are already in place. For some people, like public housing tenants, that means a lot of public investment in renovating their places, in making the homes fit for habitation and turning them into green resiliency centers so that they’re fit for the future under climate change.

Decarbonizing places and putting in new low-energy appliances that cost people less money in the winter. And, for people who are already in the private rental sector who are often suffering from skyrocketing rent increases, we want to have a national rent control standard that is truly universal and applies to everyone who’s renting from a landlord in the country. That, combined with a just-cause eviction law, gives tenants more ability to organize because they can’t be threatened with eviction just for organizing as tenants and it also gives them a measure of stability.

Then we also have a forward-looking policy which is that we want to construct 12 million new units of social housing that would be permanently affordable and off the private market. There are multiple models that those could be built through, whether that be municipal ownership or ownership through housing authorities, limited equity cooperative ownership, community land trusts. But really what we want to see is millions and millions of new social homes that are permanently off the private market.

Now, obviously, there are people at the moment who have a lot of wealth that’s tied up in their homes. We think that it’s important that when we are moving away from the speculative market that we don’t let any working-class people who are genuinely vulnerable who are in negative equity to their banks or whatever are left behind.

But it is important for us to recognize that the goal of providing safe, stable, truly affordable housing to everyone is, in a certain sense, incompatible with people making millions and millions of dollars off the housing market as a good investment.

Then what we also want to see, that the damage that’s already been done by this, which has been heavily racialized, to start being repaired.

LF: Author/activist Saoirse Gowan says this system we have now can’t be tweaked by helping a few more people buy a few more homes. That won’t solve the supply problem or the environmental one. What we need now is a new, non-market-driven approach to housing.

Is it possible for government policy to approach housing differently? Absolutely. In the years after World War One, socialists in Vienna, Austria, built enough new housing to rehouse one-tenth of the city’s population, and set rents at 3.5 percent of the average semi-skilled worker’s income, just enough to cover the property’s maintenance and operation costs.

A century on, 80 percent of residents in Vienna still qualify for that kind of public housing, and their contracts last for life, even if they get richer. So that today, the city’s  social housing complexes are home to a mix of residents with no stigma attached and a certain amount of political power. Could the same happen in racialized America?… Well we’ll talk about another model for housing after the break.

I’m your host Laura Flanders and you’re listening to the Bioneers.

LF: In 2008, the whole world saw what can happen in a hyper-speculative housing market. Unregulated trading in housing debts on the stock market was not only risky, but catastrophic. Cheap credit and weak lending rules caused a housing bubble that burst on real people. While Wall Street traders and their firms were able to recover, millions of mortgage owners were left “under water” – that means owing more than their houses were actually worth.

The 2008 financial crisis showed how the American Dream of individual home ownership could become a nightmare. Incentivized by their firms to issue as many contracts as possible, brokers encouraged poor families to take on impossible levels of debt.  And families were desperate, not only because governments had done so little to regulate housing markets – or rein in predatory lenders – but because they’d also done next to nothing to support housing alternatives. Among those possible alternatives – publicly or collectively held land trusts or cooperative housing.

Noni D. Session is Co-Founder and Executive director of The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative in Oakland, California. I spoke with her in 2022 about how the co-op model works. And she explained how, in a co-op, members buy, own and manage property collectively, thus pooling resources, risk and responsibility and building some power in the process. Here’s Session.

Noni D. Session (NS): Every person who is a member of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative – the staff owners, the investor owners, the community owners and the resident owners have a collective right to that property through a set of bylaws and covenants that we make with our community owners. So we are the owner of record. We do that particularly to do things like hold risk for communities that are often deemed, before they even step across the threshold, high-risk folks. So we do that to build a financial identity, to offer the technical assistance and really to wrap around services for folks that typically wouldn’t be able to engage in any point in the arc because of the absence of those resources.

LF: The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, or EBPREC, helps people – especially Black, Indigenous and other people of color to finance, purchase, and occupy land and housing in a way that’s then collectively owned by the community. They do that through pooling risk, but also through pooling relationships, and using the assets they hold collectively to guarantee loans in a strategic, mission-based way. It’s strength in numbers.

NS: Our technical work is guided by three ethical principles that we actually refer to as our mission pillars. And the first is Land Without Landlords, which really understands that one of our critical work is to decommodify land and housing. Not only to extract it from this really damaging conversation around what housing is for, what land is for, but it transforms it then into having the potential to be a cultural asset where people can find permanence, they can find the time they need to build a base for themselves over generations. And they have a place to return to because of the permanence of removing it from the speculative market.

Our second mission pillar is Restorative Economics and restorative economics really recognizes that communities have been dispossessed of more than just the tangible asset of land and housing, but all of the intangibles that really constitute wealth – education, inclusion, and conversations, awareness of techniques and strategies, presence in the flows of movement of politics and money. So the people we serve are not just our resident owners who live and work in our acquisitions, but actually are community owners who we include in planning conversations, strategy conversations, so that they understand the landscape and their access to tools where EBPREC is not the bottleneck, but rather the fomenter of their empowerment.

And our third mission pillar, Heal People Power, is really about rejecting these entrenched Western hierarchical practices inside of our own organizational practices, which is what makes Black and Brown organizations quite fragile. So each of our technical interventions are informed by a deeper need to heal interpersonal, intercommunal relationships, so that our access to capital is not so short lived as it has been in the past, right?

LF: Not owing high rates of interest makes resources available to invest in community culture. In Oakland, EBPREC’s investment fund helped local artists start a cafe and a community center. Community Development Corporations, or CDCs, which grew out of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, are nonprofit organizations intended to do much the same thing, through institutionalizing democratic control over the development process. Land can be used for racial justice, as in EBPREC’s case, or for green transition as in the Dakotas, where indigenous communities are developing a wind farm on tribal land that will generate revenue for the Standing Rock Nation.

But there’s no action for transformative change if people in communities don’t act. As Noni Session put it, waiting for leaders to lead is a fool’s errand. Cooperation is a place to start.

NS: Two of our residential acquisitions are fully homed with their owners. Our first one is a multi-unit building in North Oakland with teachers and activists and gardeners. Our second is a single family home in Berkeley with a detached dance studio where incidentally, they’re now launching a business plan for working Black women artists. Our third acquisition is Esther’s Orbit Room where we have closed escrow, we’ve hired a local firm, Sobi Design Build. We have done lots of community engagement and actually brought jazz back to this historical venue for the first time in 10 years. And now we’re on a search for our artists and businesses who we will support in being grounded and launching from inside of the Esther’s Orbit Room venue.

And so Esther’s Orbit Room functions as kind of a cultural artifact for West Oakland, where we’re leveraging the meaningfulness of it to gather kind of a customer base and a community base around it as a pilot model, that then we’re planning to duplicate along the 7th Street corridor.

If we continue to wait for our city leaders to restart our communities, we’re going to wait because the formula isn’t there. The formula is in cooperative economics.

LF: The word “economy” comes from the Greek word “oikonomos,” which means household management, more or less. The word “ecology” has the same root, as in management of the Earth household. Global corporate capitalism could hardly be further from that way of making the world. To the contrary, it is single-focused on the concentration of wealth, which results in a whole lot of poverty – a world of have-nots and have-a-lots. Ironically, its ecological consequence may well be a world that is uninhabitable – a homeless planet.

So what can be done? The reality is that all the great American fortunes were made mostly as a result of government policies – by the rules that govern the economy and the decisions that governments make. As we’ve seen in these examples of community wealth building, government can serve the people through its use of land and property to create affordable public housing – through policies that support tenant-rights, rent control and eviction defense – or through social housing that’s off the private market permanently – and ultimately through making affordable housing a human right. Maybe we can even start thinking about homes and our planet as places to live and tend for ourselves and the future, rather than flippable commodities for somebody’s short term profit.

American philosopher Henry David Thoreau once said, “I have faith in a seed.” And today’s experiments in community wealth building are like those seeds –they’ve been sprouting around the world, largely without much help. Where government policy, power and culture shift, they’re ready to grow and take root.

But what if we put economics back at the center of our decision making as pertains to the good life? Much of what we’ve talked about in this series isn’t new. But it is what communities and people all around the world believe we urgently need now, which is new thinking, new radical thinking – as radical as the changes that are coming to our homes and our lives and our Earth. Are we thinking radically enough for these times?

For The Bioneers, I’m Laura Flanders. Thanks for joining me.