Housing Rights, Spatial Justice Making

Topics

No one should be homeless when homes are sitting empty. Housing is a human right.
Moms 4 Housing
We should center Black folks and Black mothers as far as housing, because we have been the most evicted and marginalized throughout history.
Dominique Walker

Housing Rights, Spatial Justice Making

Event Description

On April 12th, 2023 the American Cultures Center and the Multicultural Community Center at UC Berkeley hosted, "Housing Rights, Spatial Justice Making", an event in the Staff as Students of Social Justice (SSSJ) public discussion series, "Aspirations of Material Anti-Racism: What's Next?"

The ongoing and seemingly unending shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic has both exposed and deepened the inequalities of racial capitalism. This is starkly apparent in the sphere of housing, where the expansion of wildly exorbitant luxury housing takes place alongside a growing crisis of housing insecurity for rent-burdened tenants and the unhoused. These current conditions have a long history, but so do the fights for spatial justice, knowing that changing the racialized nature of opportunities and life chances requires policies, practices, relationships, and institutions that serve public needs, not private greed. In this discussion bringing Bay Area grounded scholars and organizers together, we will discuss the past/future contours of building liveable futures through spatial justice organizing.

Panelists

Resources

Moms for housing protest in Oakland

Moms 4 Housing

Moms for Housing is a collective of homeless and marginally housed mothers. The Moms for Housing are uniting mothers, neighbors, and friends to reclaim housing for the Oakland community from the big banks and real estate speculators. They organize together with the ultimate goal of reclaiming housing for the community from speculators and profiteers. Moms for Housing ultimately believes that our children deserve housing and that housing is a human right.

ACCE logo

Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment

The Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action is a grassroots, member-led, statewide community organization working with more than 15,000 members across California. ACCE is dedicated to raising the voices of everyday Californians, neighborhood by neighborhood, to fight for the policies and programs we need to improve our communities and create a brighter future. (34:42)

Black Housing Union Logo

Black Housing Union

The Black Housing Union is a chapter of Oakland ACCE that works to stop the mass displacement of Black people from the Bay Area through organizing, education, and direct action. The Union looks at how housing issues impact the Black community and supports homegrown solutions. (34:42)

Cover of Flatlands newspaper

Flatlands

The Flatlands newspaper consists of news and op-ed articles, profiles, photographs, and events calendars mostly related to poverty, education, housing, police brutality, and politics in East and West Oakland. (36:32)

Larkin Street Youth Services logo

Larkin Street Youth Services

Larkin Street Youth Services is a nonprofit empowering young people to move beyond homelessness. They have helped over 78,000 young adults in San Francisco by providing healthcare, housing, employment, and education services. They connect young adults to a spectrum of services designed to help young people develop the knowledge and skills for adulthood. Their mission is not to interrupt homelessness but rather to end it permanently for those in their care. (39:33)

Rally for the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act

Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act

TOPA empowers tenants with options when the property they live in is going to be sold. Tenants can purchase the property or assign rights to a qualified organization (QO), such as a community land trust, nonprofit housing developer or cooperative. Tenants will be able to explore different ownership options (limited equity homes, condos, cooperatives, etc.) as well as choose to remain renters at an affordable rate. In Washington, DC, TOPA has helped preserve over 3500 units of affordable housing since 2002, and those numbers continue to grow. (44:40)

Care 4 Community Action Oakland logo

Care 4 Community Action Oakland

Care 4 Community Action organizes at the neighborhood level to deliver a working city government that is responsive to the needs of Oakland residents, and to dramatically increase the participation of Oakland residents in our government. They seek to advance a progressive agenda of making housing a human right, investing in alternatives for real community safety, taxing corporate wealth to improve City services, and winning climate and environmental justice for all.

Key Takeaways

What is housing justice and how does it extend past the need the basic need for shelter?

  • (Starting at 10:03) In thinking about housing justice, you have to imagine that there is something called housing injustice. Housing justice means affordability, adequate space, and the ability to feel safe and loved in a space. Housing justice also means opening up our designation of what family and home can mean, such as by acknowledging the prevalence of multigenerational households in low-income communities and communities of color. Housing justice means working toward the ability to live fully and not just accumulating wealth. – Brandi
  • (Starting at 11:49) Housing justice means working toward the end goal of housing as a human right. Working toward housing justice requires using all strategies, from legislation to on-the-ground work, and ensuring that all end goals are met. – Dominique
  • (Starting at 12:23) In addressing housing injustice, we must address the intersectional injustices that many people face, including homeless youth. We must include and acknowledge groups like youth and families that often get left out of conversations about homelessness. There are multiple models of housing justice that must be explored that can address the unique needs of different groups, especially those who are most often excluded. – Colette

Why is it important to think about who is invisible in the dominant housing policy discourse?

  • (Starting at 16:21) The housing of Black people is integral to housing justice, particularly in the Bay Area and Oakland. From broad issues, like police violence, educational inequity, and health injustice, to legislation such as Propositions 13 and 209 that disproportionally affected Black people, it is critical to focus on how housing justice can address the unique needs of the working-class Black community. Black housing justice also requires a fight for greater spatial justice—the ability to be in public spaces without being surveilled, attacked, or judged. – Brandi
    (Starting at 18:36) Black mothers have the highest rate of eviction in Oakland, which is why it is critical to center them in housing justice activism. The foreclosure crisis had concrete negative impacts on Oakland communities leading to 7 out of 10 of the homeless people being Black. We should center Black folks and mothers in housing justice movements because they have been the most affected throughout history. Black have fought for a space where they can belong since they have been in this country. – Dominique
    (Starting at 19:56) Addressing issues of invisibility requires challenging how dominant methods like homeless counting on the census significantly undercount families, youth, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community. Narrow definitions of homelessness have led to the invisibility of many children of color and LGBTQ children; for example, resources for unhoused people are not provided to young people who couch surf. Until not very long ago, the official number of unhoused minors in Alameda County was zero, due largely to the county’s concern about the negative impact on its public image. We need to make the wide range of experiences visible by including all types of people who need to be counted so that we can get them the resources they need. – Colette 

How do we emphasize the importance of maintaining and expanding housing rights while organizing for futures where these rights are no longer necessary?

  • (Starting at 24:36) To organize for a better future, we must understand local histories of housing justice and recognize policies that were implemented with good intentions but ultimately caused harm. Given that rights often need to be legislated and enforced, we should consider how we can spread information on housing justice based on our roles and jobs. We should ask ourselves, “How can we use the institution of the university to spread information that can further the fight for a just future?” – Brandi
  • (Starting at 29:03) We must not just assert housing as a human right but have the audacity to take up space through occupation. The end goal of housing justice is to put an end to the commodification of housing. Moms 4 Housing’s efforts to fight for more transitional housing, no-income housing, social housing, cooperative housing, and other alternative models can help move the needle towards a decommodified future. – Dominique
  • (Starting at 30:50) A just housing future requires communities to take up the responsibility of housing. The United States’ failure to sign on to the Convention for the Rights of the Child speaks to our country’s refusal to acknowledge housing as a human right for some of society’s most vulnerable. We must restructure the current housing system such that housing is based on a legislatively enforced system of rights. – Colette

What lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic can help us grow, build, and imagine more just housing futures?

  • (Starting at 34:13) Moms 4 Housing’s protest of the phase-out of the Oakland COVID-19 eviction moratorium is an important example of how the pandemic led to many important on-the-ground organizing efforts to expand local housing rights. The pandemic amplified the disproportionate effects of homelessness that Black folks in Oakland already suffered due to the ongoing housing crisis. Black-led organizations' efforts to house folks during the pandemic saved many lives, demonstrating the power that ordinary communities hold to address these issues that city officials have continued to ignore. – Dominique
  • (Starting at 36:32) It is critical to consider the long history of the government targeting low-income Black people (especially in Oakland) in order to recognize that the modern-day housing and health crises have been building for decades. However, on-the-ground organizing efforts to create community-based solutions have also been ongoing for years. The dual health and housing crises have shown in many ways that we have to account for ongoing work, especially in the face of elected officials’ indifference and neglect. – Brandi 
  • (Starting at 39:33) One of the most prominent lessons from COVID is that people get left out. In California, only 2% of hotel rooms for unhoused people went to youth and 1% of that population was transitioned to permanent housing, despite 20-25% of people experiencing homelessness in California being youth of color. We need to assert that investing in underserved unhoused communities, particularly youth of color, is an important investment. – Colette

What new models of housing have come into the realm of possibility for new housing justice solutions?

  • (Starting at 44:40) Moms 4 Housing’s Community Land Trust and work with the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act are important models that grant power to tenants and ensure that land stays permanently affordable. The Community Land Trust Model is important because it preserves land for low-income communities. These initiatives are ways to ensure that housing is in the hands of the community and that individuals are able to access social housing. – Dominique
  • (Starting at 47:31) Many preexisting methods of ensuring housing affordability like rent control could be important ways to mitigate the effects of housing inequity. Oftentimes we don’t actually have to come up with new solutions because they already exist. We have to make sure we know about these histories so we can recognize that these types of solutions are actually quite feasible. – Brandi
  • (Starting at 50:18) We need to create programs that are specific to young people who are unstably housed or homeless as well as make sure that they are included in programs that already exist. While we have funding for people experiencing homelessness, we’re very rigid about who can get that funding. A possible program that could have a big impact could be funding unhoused students’ university or co-op housing. That kind of scaffolding would allow young people to have access to their best possible selves. – Colette