In 1988, Jesse Jackson warned that the central challenge of his time was not simply civil rights but control over economic power—specifically, who controls resources, who benefits, and who is left out of the system. For many, that exclusion shows up in whether they can find an affordable home, remain in their neighborhood, or build stability over time.
That warning remains relevant because the underlying structure has not fundamentally changed. Access has expanded. Control has not.
This is not a new insight. During his final speech in Memphis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged the audience to redirect their spending, withdraw economic support from institutions that refused to treat them fairly, and build their own.
In that same moment, King turned to Jackson, asking him to help operationalize what came next. Jackson would go on to do exactly that, translating moral pressure into economic leverage.
Using Protest to Build Economic Power
Jackson understood his constituency clearly. He spoke to what he once described as “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised,” not as a rhetorical flourish but as a political and economic bloc. His strategy was to turn that constituency into leverage, and that leverage into structured outcomes.
In city after city, the same contradiction was playing out: communities could access housing markets but could not control the outcomes those markets produced. Families could qualify on paper but could not find a home within reach, even as development continued around them.
Protests drew attention to this imbalance, but attention alone does not change outcomes. Pressure must be translated into enforceable economic terms.
Jackson did not treat protest as an end in and of itself. Rather, the pattern was consistent: identify leverage points, apply pressure, negotiate commitments, and institutionalize outcomes. Protest created urgency. Structure created durability.
In Chicago, through Operation Breadbasket, Jackson’s campaigns targeted companies such as Jewel Tea, where Black residents were core customers yet largely excluded from jobs and contracts. Sustained consumer boycotts created revenue pressure by exposing the gap between who spent money and who benefited economically. That pressure forced companies to negotiate, leading to hiring commitments and contracts with Black-owned suppliers. Corporate participation in local markets became tied to economic reciprocity, not voluntary inclusion.
At the national level, Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) expanded that model. Campaigns targeting corporations such as Coca-Cola combined public pressure, coalition mobilization, and negotiation, using reputational risk and coordinated consumer action to force structured commitments. These agreements formalized hiring pipelines, supplier diversity, and corporate representation, shifting inclusion from ad-hoc concession to institutional practice.
The same approach did not stop at corporate behavior; it moved into the financial systems that shape access to capital. Building on this approach, community groups used the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) during bank mergers to challenge regulatory approvals and obtain community benefits in exchange for their consent.
Jackson lent his voice and position to back these community efforts, both to stave off efforts to rescind the 1977 law and to support transforming the law from a regulatory requirement into an enforcement tool—pressing banks during mergers and expansions to make specific, measurable commitments tied to lending volumes, geographic targeting, reporting, and the advancement of community ownership in historically excluded communities. Later, through the Wall Street Project, Jackson pushed further upstream into capital markets, applying pressure and negotiation to expand access to underwriting, institutional capital, and deal flow. These efforts increased participation of minority-owned firms and broadened access to capital, extending economic inclusion from employment to ownership and financial markets.
A Housing System with Big Gaps
Housing operates under the same logic, but the field has not always applied the same discipline. Too often, organizing has focused on generating attention without structuring leverage, identifying need without aligning capital, and mobilizing to address symptoms while leaving underlying economic relationships intact.
In Cincinnati, where I work, the results of these half measures have been apparent: families who can qualify for financing but cannot find a home within reach, and projects that should pencil out but instead stall due to zoning, capital, or delivery capacity issues. These are not marginal concerns, as they shape whether working families can remain in the communities where they earn a living.
If housing is truly economic infrastructure, the question is not just how to build more units but also how to align the systems that determine whether those units are financed, permitted, and delivered. This requires analyzing where deals tend to stall, including such matters as zoning and entitlement, underwriting assumptions, capital stacking, and delivery capacity.
Jackson taught us that markets do not respond to awareness; they respond to structure. If we get that structure right, families can live, work, and build stability in the communities they sustain. As Jackson later argued in the American University Law Review, access alone is not enough. Without influence over how capital is allocated, participation cannot produce equity.
Jackson’s corporate campaigns produced real gains, including thousands of jobs and gains in contracts and lending, but they did not change who controls capital. Access expanded, but control within banks, financial markets, and institutional investors did not. As a result, inequality persisted and often worsened. That distinction matters. Access allows entry. Control determines outcomes.
Jackson’s campaigns were effective within these constraints. They secured commitments: Companies gained customers only if they changed hiring and contracting practices, banks gained approval only if they committed to lending, and institutions gained legitimacy only if they opened access.
However, these movement victories, although significant, did not result in community control. Without that control, corporate commitments could be negotiated but not made permanent. What made Jackson’s campaigns work was not moral appeal alone but also conditionality. Access to markets, regulatory approval, and public legitimacy was tied to enforceable commitments.
That is the difference between influence and structure. The same principle applies today: Without mechanisms that tie access to capital to enforceable outcomes, housing systems will continue to produce uneven and unpredictable results.
The strategies and tools that Jackson used, however, including boycotts, regulatory leverage, negotiated agreements—and, in a phrase, tying access to markets to enforceable economic commitments—do, however, offer some guidance for how housing systems must be structured today.
Affordable housing construction typically requires multiple funding sources, including public subsidies, private debt, tax credits, and philanthropic capital—each with different timelines, underwriting standards, and risk tolerances.
Misalignment creates timing gaps, conflicting requirements, and uncertainty in underwriting. Projects stall, costs rise, and viable developments fail to close.
These system failures are not abstract; they show up in the day-to-day realities of both development and household stability. For developers, this means projects that sit for months or years, waiting for capital stacks to align. For families, it means something else entirely: teachers, nurses, and first responders spending nearly half their income on housing; households choosing between paying rent and buying food; and workers pushed farther from opportunity, paying more to get less.
This is not simply a failure of coordination. In many cases, inequitable outcomes reflect systems shaped by past policy choices, such as redlining and exclusionary zoning, that deliberately structured access to capital and land.
Coordination is not a slogan; it is how the system operates. In practice, changing this means aligning capital sources across public, private, and philanthropic actors; synchronizing timelines; reconciling underwriting standards; clarifying who absorbs losses at each stage; and defining the roles of developers, lenders, intermediaries, and the public sector. The challenge is not a lack of tools but how they are used. Regions already have the tools to build this system, yet in practice they tend to optimize capital risk by focusing on who loses money while overlooking execution risk—the factor that most often determines whether projects succeed or fail.
Creating a Capital System That Works
To reiterate, most housing projects do not fail because capital is absent; they fail because risk is misaligned with the tools designed to manage it. A functional housing system requires a different approach: structuring capital to match the lifecycle of risk.
The way to address this is straightforward. First, it requires ensuring capital is available up front, so early-stage risk can be absorbed by flexible, lower-cost capital. Without this, projects stall before they can secure site control or advance to construction financing.
Second, capital must be conditioned on outcomes. Access to financing, regulatory approval, and public support should be tied to clear, enforceable commitments around production, affordability, and participation.
Third, those tools must be coordinated across institutions. Public, private, and philanthropic capital must operate in sequence, not in isolation, to align timelines, underwriting standards, and risk tolerance so projects can move predictably from concept to completion.
Finally, participation must expand alongside production. Systems that increase supply without broadening ownership and access to capital will reproduce the same inequities they are intended to address.
This approach is already being tested in practice. In Cincinnati, coordinated capital strategies have aligned philanthropic and intermediary capital to absorb early-stage risk, allowing projects to move from concept to construction and enabling firms owned by people of color to access working capital and participate more fully in development.
Similar approaches exist nationally. For decades, enforcement of the CRA has tied bank mergers and expansions to lending commitments in underserved communities, turning regulatory approval into a mechanism for directing capital. More recently, special-purpose credit programs have enabled lenders to expand access to mortgage credit for historically excluded borrowers, demonstrating how capital can be structured to achieve intentional outcomes rather than assumed to flow equitably.
In Minnesota, intermediaries such as the Family Housing Fund, show how catalytic capital can absorb early-stage risk, align financing across sectors, and move projects from concept to execution. What these tools share is an approach that relies on structural change rather than voluntary action. This approach aligns incentives and imposes conditions so that capital flows more predictably over time. Without that structure, housing systems fragment. Capital arrives late, risks remain unresolved, and otherwise viable projects fail to close. With it, projects move forward, production increases, and participation expands.
From Protest to Structural Change
As is well known, nationally, the United States faces a housing shortage of roughly 3.8 million units, with the gap most acute at price points affordable to working households. At the same time, a majority of renters, especially those who earn less than the median income, are cost-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing.
There is also a very large racial homeownership gap. Nationally, the Black homeownership rate trails that of white households by roughly 30 percentage points. In Cincinnati, that gap approaches 40 percentage points.
Behind these dim statistics is a question of power. In housing, as in Jackson’s time, capital does not move neutrally; it follows existing power structures and will continue to do so unless those structures are actively reshaped.
Without accountability, capital reinforces inequality. With accountability, capital can be redirected.
Jackson demonstrated how to convert pressure into leverage and leverage into structural change. He also revealed the limits of structural change when it is not embedded in durable systems of ownership and community governance.
This work remains unfinished. Today’s housing challenge is to generate urgency, institutionalize it, and commit to building systems where capital is aligned, accountable, and capable of producing outcomes at scale.
Protest can demand justice and create leverage to advocate for structural change. But absent shifts in who structures, controls, and governs capital, and in how capital allocation decisions are made and executed, those demands rarely endure.
Unless those who control capital and determine where it moves change, justice will remain negotiated, not delivered. In housing, that determines whether families can live with stability, build wealth, and remain rooted in the communities they help sustain.
About the Author
Comments