In this webinar, we examine what a solidarity economy approach is, what its principles are, how these principles are being applied presently, and how they might be applied more broadly to support housing justice and transformative economic change. The webinar was moderated by Steve Dubb, Shelterforce’s strategic initiatives editor.
The speakers were:
- Miki’ala Catalfano, cofounder and executive director of Native Roots
- Alison Chopel, professor at the Graduate School of Planning, University of Puerto Rico
Watch the full video above or read a lightly edited transcript of the conversation below.
Steve Dubb: For this webinar, we will explore the efforts of people and communities, from rural California to Puerto Rico, to situate housing justice within a broader, systemic vision of economic and social transformation. [This is] a vision [that] goes by many names, but [that] here we will call a solidarity economy.
With that, I wanted to start with Miki’ala. If you could, introduce yourself and discuss how you came to be involved in the solidarity economy, and explain also for our audience what you see as the core principles of a solidarity economy.
Miki’ala Catalfano: Thank you, Steve. Aloha e kākou, everyone. … I am, as Steve said, cofounder and executive director at Native Roots Network. Our work has involved, over our 22-ish years, many different aspects of cultural revitalization in the Indigenous community here. I also want to say, I am a guest here as a Native Hawaiian who grew up in my homelands. My work takes place in Wintu territory. We not only have leadership in Wintu folks, both on staff and on our board, but also surrounding tribes in Pitt River. Our work initially began out of [the] need to take care of those communities with cultural revitalization projects.
A good 15-ish years in, we realized all of those projects are very important, but we were not significantly changing the material conditions of the community, and so we began to look at what kinds of economic opportunities existed. Being from Hawaii, we traveled back there to take a look at what folks [were] doing—at that time—around social enterprise, and through our exploration for different ways that we could … not just have episodic events for our community—that we could actually have people be players in their health and wellness, economic opportunity, workforce development, and all those things—we came upon solidarity economy and the values that we have really paired well with solidarity economy.
It is through that learning, and the relationship that we built with others who are in that ecosystem, that we came to know [the] solidarity economy.
This is from an article that Emily Kawano wrote. It’s “Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and the Planet.” In it, she writes, “The solidarity economy is a global movement to build a just and sustainable economy. It is not a blueprint theorized by academics and ivory towers; rather, it is an ecosystem of practices that already exist—some old, some new, some still emergent.”
In our neck of the woods, we call it knew, with a ‘K.’ These are the things that we knew as human beings, and things that we’re now reapplying as we move forward in the situation that we’re all in now. But these practices—some old, some new, some emergent—are aligned with solidarity economy values. There is already a huge foundation upon which to build the solidarity economy [and that] seeks to make visible and connect these siloed practices in order to build an alternative economic system, broadly defined, for people and the planet. The solidarity economy seeks to transform the dominant capitalist system as well as other authoritarian state-dominated systems into one that puts people and the planet at its core.
The solidarity economy is an evolving framework as well as a global movement comprised, and here’s the important part: community, practitioners, activists, scholars, and performers.
The principles [of a solidarity economy] vary in how people express them from place to place, but they share a common ethos of prioritizing the welfare of people on the planet over profits and blind growth. The U.S. Solidarity Economy Network uses these five principles of solidarity, cooperation, [and] mutualism; equity in all dimensions (and that includes race, ethnicity, and nationality, class, and gender, etc.); participatory democracy; sustainability; and pluralism.
Individually, these [principles] are insufficient to undergird a just and sustainable system. It is entirely possible to have alignment in one dimension but not in others. For example, it is possible to have equity without sustainability, democracy without equity, sustainability without solidarity, and so forth. Like any healthy ecosystem, the solidarity economy flourishes with a full spectrum of interconnected principles.
Alison, could you introduce yourself and how you came to be involved in the solidarity economy, and explain how land ownership and housing have become such a central focus of economic justice organizers in Puerto Rico?
Alison Chopel: Like Miki’ala, I am also a guest in my home in Puerto Rico. I moved to San Juan in 2018, just after the 2017 hurricanes, Irma and Maria, in part to support and really witness the recovery processes. I ended up witnessing the ways that recovery and much of community development are distorted by colonialism while I was working in the largest privately funded housing system recovery program.
This led me to look for truly community-led projects and processes. I found a lot of them were happening not only outside the public sector but also outside the nonprofit sector. That’s really what brought me to study and learn from and in the solidarity economy.
To the second part of your question, I can’t speak to the whole economic justice movement in general, but I can share what I’ve observed as someone who cares about economic justice and economic democracy in Puerto Rico, where traditional democracy in the way that some Americans often think about it is so lacking as a colony.
There are about 9 million Puerto Ricans in the world, and less than 3 million of them live in Puerto Rico. This is a direct result of economic exploitation and extraction. I won’t get too much into the colonial history here, but I will say that a core principle of economic justice in Puerto Rico is the right to stay and not be displaced. We can see from those numbers that so many people already have been displaced from their home. This is especially true now since neoliberal policymakers have responded to bankruptcy with racist laws designed to attract people from outside Puerto Rico with wealth to take up space while requiring very little in return.
I’m talking about [Acts] 20, 22, and now Act 60, which enable people who have not lived in Puerto Rico for the past six years to pay little to no local and federal taxes if they live in Puerto Rico 183 days per year and buy a house. You can imagine what this, along with quintessential disaster capitalism, is doing to the housing market in Puerto Rico and affordability for people who live there. But land ownership has always been core to any justice strategy—economic or otherwise—as the largest island of the archipelago is only 100 by 35 miles and not growing (rather, shrinking).
The housing program that I worked on—back after the hurricanes in 2018 and for a few years after—put the bulk of its resources toward repairing damaged homes, and a large part of those resources toward verifying eligibility of the households, where they needed to prove that they had 80 percent or less of the area median income. This work was certainly meaningful for those homeowners, but it did very little to touch the underlying injustice that the housing system reproduces and that [Act] 60 itself is accelerating.
Land is the foundation for all of this, and in Puerto Rico, it’s limited, it’s fertile, and it’s beautiful and healing, and it really should be commonly owned. Spanish and American colonizers murdered its original stewards, and they trafficked enslaved people to work it. These crimes need to be atoned and repaired, and that can also be a basis for solidarity.”
Alison Chopel, professor at the Graduate School of Planning, University of Puerto Rico
I started to see this broader picture as a struggle, as a race for space. While rich outsiders are moving in and sucking up resources, people who have lived in these communities, stewarded the lands and waters, and nourished culture for generations are getting squeezed out. I partnered with three other researchers, sociologist and lawyer Belinés Ramos, social worker and cooperativist Eduardo Rodríguez, and planner and lawyer Orlando Velázquez, together with La Futura Rosario, which is a collective of people based in the queer and artistic communities of San Juan, who are committed to cooperative housing, to explore opportunities for community-owned real estate.
The reason I’m here talking about it, and not them, has to do with language, justice, and schedules. The last thing that I’ll say on this question of economic justice, land ownership, and housing is that it’s core to the economic justice agenda in Puerto Rico, but it can’t stand alone. People need safe, accessible, affordable housing, and to make a living in their communities. They also need decent, dignified jobs with thriving wages, access to healthy food, even when the ports are closed, and basic services like education and healthcare.
Our austerity agenda and Act 60 that gives rich people tax breaks and other mechanisms mean that the government is reducing the resource pot available to organize those other basic goods. Land is the foundation for all of this, and in Puerto Rico, it’s limited, it’s fertile, and it’s beautiful and healing, and it really should be commonly owned. Spanish and American colonizers murdered its original stewards, and they trafficked enslaved people to work it. These crimes need to be atoned and repaired, and that can also be a basis for solidarity. I would argue that wealth reclamation is an important part of a solidarity economy because economic justice requires economic democracy, which is counter to colonialist extraction. Like Miki’ala emphasized, we can’t just focus on one to the exclusion of the others.
I’m also really enthusiastic about the systemic strategies that the People’s Network for Land and Liberation are imagining and realizing in an integrated way, so I’m looking forward to hearing more about that from Miki’ala.
How [are] solidarity economy principles specifically being applied to housing, what legal forms are being employed, and how is it financed?
Catalfano: A lot of what Alison said resonates with the way we are approaching housing, because housing is, as we were talking about earlier, really an ecosystem approach when we’re talking about solidarity economy. And holding land in a community land trust, I think when I first was introduced to that, we [were] looking at housing only, but … through both Native Roots Network, and then as one of the nodes of the People’s Network for Land and Liberation, community land trusts, yes, are holding land to do things like community-controlled housing. But in addition, for us, in particular, core to our values is the earth is our mother, and that we are specifically taking land off the speculative market in perpetuity to be held by the original, inherent stewards of this land.
I also really resonated with the building of economic opportunity for the community, and land and housing being key features of our ability to do that. Initially, in those first 15 years, as I was talking about, there would be times when people … had to make a choice if they [were] going to pay their rent or get healthcare.
I think, more and more, that’s happening for people who maybe they weren’t at that margin, and now it’s just creeping into everybody’s lives.
Housing is a right, in my view, and how … we actually achieve that is a lot more complicated. The route that we went—that we’re seeing have the most legs, at least for us—is the community land trust model. How that’s being financed— here is a potential place where I can say it’s very complicated.
People’s Network for Land and Liberation is a multiracial, multiethnic network of six community-based organizations, or nodes, located across the United States. We have a concrete plan to transform the current extractive capitalist economy into a cooperative, regenerative solidarity economy. That all sounds well and good, and the program is fantastic, but how do we actually fund that? What we found is we needed to create a way to do that ourselves. What we did—because very few impact investment opportunities exist to transform the entire system—we created a fund to build liberated futures, which we call the Butterfly Impact Fund. We created this impact investment fund to support and proliferate a just transition to an entirely new system that propagates the shift from extractive systems to collectively create self-sufficient and resilient communities.
We’ve already deployed $5 million to solidarity economy ecosystem projects, and we’re currently seeking to support other shovel-ready projects at existing nodes, as well as connecting to and supporting organizations who have alignment around [our] vision for how to do that. We’re sharing that model and encouraging adoption wherever people are also seeking answers. Those are the ways that we’re looking at it. We actually had to build some of that infrastructure ourselves. I think that the agency to do that, where there are not partnerships that are favorable in municipalities where you may live, that’s just the route in which, particularly for us here in far Northern California, was most relevant.
Alison, I’ll put the same question to you. Your team has done a lot of research on finances and legalities, and how to actually make a solidarity economy work in Puerto Rico. What are you finding? What are the challenges?
Chopel: I’ll start with the study that I referred to earlier. In that study, we looked at the four viabilities of cooperatives that were identified by the Union of Madrid Workers Cooperatives, COOPERAMA, which are philosophical, psychosocial, economic, and legal. We found that across cases, the most challenging—and the viabilities with the least amount of information and solutions—were the economic and legal.
This is by design because the financialization of the housing market serves powerful interests who are using every resource they can get their hands on to hoard more power and money and to give them more control over the labor force of the world, essentially. One of our findings is that we should add a fifth viability, which is narrative, and that supports movement and all the others. I’ll say that there are lots of legal forms of housing and financing for housing that are in opposition to the financialization of the market, which is the biggest obstacle to solidarity economy housing, in my opinion, which is informed greatly by the work of my colleague, Raúl Santiago-Bartolomei, at the UPR [Universidad de Puerto Rico].
These strategies, I see them as being on a spectrum, from those that remove housing from the financialized market, perhaps even temporarily, like community land banks, to those that oppose and create alternatives to the financialized market, like the permanent real estate cooperatives, or PREC. When I think about financial and legal structures, I’m really the most inspired by the PREC. The PREC collectivizes ownership and decision-making of real estate assets among four categories of member-owners: resident-owners, worker-owners, investor-owners, and community-owners.
It applies, I would say, all of the solidarity economy principles that Miki’ala shared with us in some ways. For example, it embodies solidarity and cooperation by being accountable to social movements. To be specific, the first one that was started, the East Bay PREC or the EB PREC, was codeveloped by the People of Color Sustainable Housing Network. In its bylaws, it states that in the case [that] the cooperative, or the PREC, itself ceases to exist, its assets will go to the local Indigenous community land trust and to organizations that are embedded in the East Bay’s Black community in East Oakland—and the People of Color Sustainable Housing Network.
It also experiments with finance that moves toward equity in all dimensions by enabling regular people, also known as unaccredited investors, to invest their savings in their own communities and to be the ones to benefit from any modest returns, of course staying within the limits of nonextractive finance while also setting boundaries around maintaining long-term affordability to prevent displacement and decelerate gentrification.
How are you seeing the solidarity economy approach to housing developing in Puerto Rico and in San Juan?
Chopel: The example that I want to share from Puerto Rico is more of a housing system strategy than a specific community initiative, but it’s being pursued with different legal and financing forms, and that’s rescuing abandoned buildings and lots. In Spanish, they’ll say—sometimes ‘invading’ has been a word that people have used—but really … we refer to it as ‘rescuing’ because you’re rescuing it from blight and abandonment. In particular, as we think about how to do housing in a way that is sustainable and puts people and planet first, we need to rethink the idea that we can build our way out of the crisis.
About one-third of Puerto Rico’s homes across the three inhabited islands are abandoned, and there are lots of efforts to rescue them by neighbor groups, community associations, and organizations. Actually, my friend, Jhomary Diaz, is the leader of one of those organizations, and I saw her here in the chat. I really believe that this should be core to any solidarity economy housing project because building and maintaining buildings has a not-insignificant ecological footprint. Usually, the focus is on transportation when we think of carbon emissions, but all the ways that we use land impact all of our planetary boundaries, of which climate change is only one.
That’s why a solidarity economy strategy for land stewardship must also contemplate commercial, industrial, and agricultural land uses as well, just like Native Roots Network is doing. When the people who live in and love an ecosystem are stewards and decision makers, they’re more likely to use the resources in ways that enable intergenerational survival for our species. That sounds a bit romantic, and of course there are exceptions, but Elinor Ostrom did identify lots of places and ways around the world in which people can and do collectively manage commons sustainably.
I’m collaborating with another organization that’s really focused on rescuing abandoned buildings through community processes in Puerto Rico; its English name is the Center for Habitat Reconstruction. In Spanish, [it’s] CRH for short. We’re going to be working together to pilot ways to move integrated capital, which is money that has to be paid back and money that doesn’t, to communities that have visions for rehabilitating such places. When I say places, I mean both buildings and lots, and converting them back into community assets rather than allowing them to remain blighted.
We’re specifically partnering with communities that practice collective governance, which is core to social and economic democracy, and of course an important solidarity economy principle. To make it work, we have to be pluralist because each community has different assets and challenges, particularly when it comes to integrated capital. Many of them employ legal and financial strategies that are found on that spectrum that I referred to [earlier].
The organization CRH has advocated for community land banks to be integrated into our legal code, and they work directly with municipalities to use them to quickly remove abandoned houses from the market so that they can be dedicated to affordable housing. However, challenges arise when there are few or no legal entities to acquire them for long-term ownership. Puerto Rico has one of the most famous community land trusts, the Caño Martín Peña, but it has proven very difficult to replicate. However, there is a current effort in my neighborhood, where an urban community land trust is being developed with mostly volunteer labor.
Over 100 abandoned houses have been inventoried, and a brilliant group of activists and lawyers have created the title and bylaws for the trust. It’s still unclear what the financial mechanism will [be to] allow them to acquire some of the abandoned buildings that they’ve identified to meet the great need for affordable housing in my urban neighborhood. I’m really hopeful that it will be successful, and that hope in part comes because Puerto Rico has a very long tradition of solidarity economy—from before the term even existed. For example, my neighborhood was founded as a maroon community that was a refuge for people who freed themselves from slavery, and today it’s a living example of disaster collectivism, which maps beautifully onto solidarity economy principles in many ways. I’m also super hopeful about what’s happening at Native Roots Network, so really glad to hear about that from Miki’ala.
All right. Miki’ala, back to you. I did want you to talk about how the solidarity economy approach to housing and land management is being implemented where you are. I know we talked before the webinar a bit about the difference between doing development in a rural area and an urban area, so maybe you can talk a little bit about that, and how you’re financing and how you’re structuring it.
Catalfano: Housing is part of what we’re calling ‘acornomics,’ which is our holistic Indigenous framework for building a knew ecosystem—knew with a ‘K.’ First and foremost, we are dealing with a community that doesn’t necessarily have the ability to have the partnerships with municipalities, partially because we have a number of different things happening in this region. You might have heard of us on the news because we have a lot of different factors in our community that make it hard for us to partner with those organizations.
Then, when we’re dealing with land—because of the genocide, the displacement, the slavery, all of those different things—there’s a level of trust-building with our allies that is ongoing. It’s going to take us a whole lot of time to rebuild some of those trust networks. What we’ve had to do, particularly in regard to land, is to acquire it ourselves so that we can build out our acornomics framework, and an aspect of that is to provide housing. That footprint—I love the ideas that I’m hearing about those abandoned buildings and lots. We see more and more of them in the city, 10 miles away from us.
What we want to do here in our more rural, further-out setting is to take the infrastructure that exists, convert that to be able to support the community that will be working in the land-caretaking aspect of our work, in the community production center that we are now beginning to deploy, with the food and fiber and medicine that is right here out on the land as we do our land restoration work. It’s a combination of acquiring the land ourselves so that we can control it in perpetuity and then building housing to be able to support those who will be part of the different activities that have already begun here.
That’s the manner in which we’re doing that in our rural setting. In the urban—or, I don’t think you can really say Redding’s urban—but where there’s more concentration of the population … I’m very interested in how we might see if it’s possible, to begin to look at abandoned buildings and lots and not have it be converted to gentrification …Like Puerto Rico, you have outside investors coming in and taking up that land, making it impossible for us to compete. Then that pushed us out.
I wouldn’t say that we’re disappointed in where we are on our land because it actually helps us to do so much of that land restoration work that we were talking about. That’s how it stands here in the Redding area.
Alison mentioned integrated capital. It’s a mix of grants and favorable loans at low interest rates and so forth. What is the type of capital that you need in order to have the kind of solidarity economy-based development that you’re trying to create? What are you finding? What are the gaps? You mentioned raising $5 million, so that’s a step. How is this going?
Catalfano: I’ll speak to this coming from the Native Roots Network perspective. Certainly, we had to rely on private donors and grants. One of our long-term goals—and we’ve begun to do that through our community production center, [which] people might understand … more from a perspective of thinking of that as a digital fab lab—[is] taking an approach that is looking at our own economic development so that we can lessen, in that integrated stack, our reliance on grants and private donors.
It can only last so long, and the reality is we’re also simultaneously working on workforce development and everything all at once, so that we can build the financial sustainability that we require while transitioning from, really, the greater amount coming from donations and grants.
Alison, I don’t know if there’s anything you wanted to add in terms of how folks in Puerto Rico are trying to put together financing. I know you wrote an article about one example of piecing together, I think it was $10 or $11 million. Maybe talk about that and how difficult it is, and how maybe we can make it a little easier.
Chopel: Sure. That’s actually with the same organization that I had mentioned before. As I mentioned, they’re in a race to space. Miki’ala mentioned gentrification and displacement. It’s really important that people who are working together with local communities have an understanding just of where the abandoned buildings are—the abandoned lots—and the quality and the different health risks that they have with them, and then what it will take to rehabilitate them. They needed to do inventories, and this is the only organization that’s really purely dedicated to that in Puerto Rico.
They, after years of negotiation, were able to get a multimillion-dollar grant from the government of Puerto Rico to do those community-led inventories in all of the 78 municipalities across Puerto Rico, which is important because on the other side, we have the extractive investors coming in and doing mapping, using Google, using drones, etc., so that they can find the places where they can extract the most value. Oftentimes, when they buy up these places, they even have no intention to develop them. All they have to do is keep them in their portfolio. As the price of the land rises, they’re getting rich off of keeping that place abandoned. They don’t even have to put anything into it to rehabilitate it and make it come back to life.
We also looked at health impacts on neighborhoods of having those abandoned places in their neighborhoods. On the other side, positive community health and social impacts of rescuing those places collectively.
Going back to your question about finance, when they got this multimillion-dollar grant from the government of Puerto Rico, they were in a tough position because they had to scale up their organization very quickly from about a dozen people to over 100 people in order to get to the place where they could do the work to get the reimbursements from the government to pay for the work.
They were in a place where they needed bridge capital to be able to survive as an organization. They knocked on the door of every bank that they knew within Puerto Rico, including savings cooperatives, which are essentially like credit unions, and also outside of Puerto Rico. It was really hard to find anyone who would put up that bridge capital. What we had to do, we ended up doing some relational organizing and some network[ing] and connecting them with one organization that was able to put up the capital or connect us to people who were willing to take the risk. It wasn’t much of a risk, to be honest, but they were willing to move their own wealth in that way.
It was an anti-capitalist wealth management firm called Chordata. They could put up the capital, but they didn’t have the vehicle to move the funding, so we had to connect them with a different organization that could create the loan note to be able to create that line of credit that would fill that gap. That organization was Seed Commons, which is a network of cooperative loan funds.
In addition, in the meantime, because the timing was so crunched, we also had to work with a local foundation, who was a wonderful trust-based foundation in Puerto Rico called Segarra Boerman, who was willing to experiment with recoverable grants for the first time. Their executive director educated herself very quickly on what a recoverable grant is, and then she educated her board, and they were able to approve that, which bought us the time to be able to make those other kinds of arrangements with Seed Commons and Chordata.
Just for those who might not know what a recoverable grant is, it’s essentially a loan, but it’s called a recoverable grant because the foundation gives it with the idea that they might never get paid back, but if a certain milestone is met, then they expect to get it completely paid back. In this case, the milestone was just that we would find another line of credit that could serve as bridge capital in the meantime.
That milestone was met very quickly, within a matter of weeks, and so the foundation did get their money back. There was no interest paid, but it was a really great opportunity to engage with philanthropy in a really solidaristic way to help make this bigger thing happen in a timely manner in the way which you need it to.
There are current efforts in a number of cities to promote what’s sometimes called social housing, so a combination of public housing, community land trusts, and co-ops. Do those efforts advance solidarity economy principles? If so, under what conditions?
Chopel: I would say, yes, certainly many do. There are a number of conditions, and I think that I’ll talk about them in relation to some of the principles. One important condition is to intentionally combat residential segregation with intentional design that not only integrates racially and ethnically minoritized people but also integrates across classes. This responds, in part, to the solidarity economy principle of equity in all dimensions. Racial residential segregation, as we know, has persisted in many ways, even though it’s technically illegal because we have done very little to design for class integration.
The intersections between economic injustice and structural racism have conspired to increase the racial wealth gap that keeps us apart, and then, in turn, racial residential segregation and economic residential segregation conspire to keep those gaps further widening. Class-based residential segregation, in particular, is quite intense in Puerto Rico, where, on the one hand, we have the largest public housing project in the country, Luis Lloréns Torres. On the other hand, we have so many gated communities, and some even function as entire towns on their own, with private golf courses, supermarkets, and churches within their gates.
We also have the second-highest economic inequality in the world. As long as we maintain the status quo, class divides will continue to deepen, and what’s left of the middle class will continue to erode. It’s for this reason that we can’t only rely on means-tested housing or other affordable housing schemes to solve the housing crisis. We need to all get involved, especially those with the means to purchase homes. This is one reason why community land trusts on their own aren’t the answer.
I think that the PREC is really innovative in that it incorporates cooperatives and the opportunity for people of different economic means to engage together in cooperative ownership, collective ownership, and cooperative decision-making.
A second condition that feels really important has to do with participatory democracy, or as I prefer, deep democracy. Here again, it’s essential, I believe, to get away from a nonprofit organization–designed and –controlled model and take the time to design and experiment with collective governance processes. Many of us have little to no experience making decisions together. It’s a muscle that we need to stretch, flex, and exercise, and it’s something that we need to learn, document, and share because there are plenty of examples and processes that work. The one ingredient that seems to be essential in such an endeavor is time, and in our accelerated world, we’re often convinced it’s a resource that we don’t have control over. However, in reality, for most of us, it’s the one and only resource that we do have the ability to exercise some control over if we commit and prioritize.
La Futura Rosario is a real-life example of people who are committed to the messy work of relational and participatory democracy. They celebrated over two years of consistent weekly meetings and relationship-tending before they even officially became a cooperative in legal terms.
The other condition is, of course, we’re talking about solidarity economy, but solidarity, cooperation, and mutualism are essential preconditions. I’ve referred to the need for narrative work to shore up these as valued behaviors. I’ll just add here that we need to stretch the meaning of this to include solidarity with past and future generations. Past generations in that we can learn from them and honor their struggles by listening to them so we don’t have to endure the same sort of suffering many of them have, and future generations by designing and planning long-term structures that maintain these values through transitions, as the PRECs have done, designing for permanence as far as possible and even beyond it, recognizing that most human organizational structures are nonpermanent.
I already spoke a little bit about economic balance in terms of sustainability. With regard to that principle, I’ll just add that to adhere to this principle of people and planet first, we can’t forget the people part. Currently, we’re living in a place and time where loneliness has reached epidemic proportions. Part of the responsibility for that lies, honestly, in our built environment and how it structures and organizes our day-to-day activities.
Even something as simple as moving a front porch to a fenced-in private backyard has deeply impacted how we make community and who we make community with. Social housing is physical space that orders social relations. Let’s be explicit and intentional about that relationship when we’re rehabilitating and building. The community land trust that I referred to earlier that’s in design is an example of this because they’ve inventoried abandoned houses within their very small neighborhood after clarifying the boundaries of that neighborhood with neighbors through sometimes-contentious processes. They’re prioritizing homes that are abandoned within their neighborhood in recognition of the harm that abandoned buildings can do to people who live near and next to them.
My background’s in public health, and there are so many studies that show the specific harm that those buildings do, even to accelerating stages of cancer, amazingly.
Then lastly, of course, we’re going to need lots of pluralism, just because no two communities are alike. As Movement Generation talks about, if we engage in trans-local organizing, we’re more nimble, like a bag of marbles, rather than scaling up in homogeneous ways, which makes us more like a bowling ball with less precision.
I’ll stop there. Those are just a few of the preconditions that I think are important.
Miki’ala, I wanted to ask you: Housing and land management can be really detail-oriented. How do you maintain the transformative solidarity economy vision, even as you’re mired in spreadsheets and whatever else you have to do to make these things work?
Catalfano: The relationships that we have formed with others who are further down in the journey of solving for this, particularly in rural settings, has been helpful. Also, we’re just constantly needing to return to our values and how we want to operate. I think there are efforts to have folks actually invest in something, but for us, giving us space in that downtown area that I was talking about, I think that it was an offer that we had to refuse because it came with strings attached. For us, sometimes our values require us to go do it on our own or with partners who have forged different ways forward, like what Alison was talking about.
I think that we’re always—maybe because of our situation, and when we’re talking about land, in particular—we really have to be following the direction of the people whose land we’re on. It means that we have to do that with integrity. That integrity is completely tied to solidarity economy principles and acornomics and how we do things. … The PREC model was the first model that we were looking at. It sounds like a fantastic model, and it is a fantastic model.
At least for us, because we’re working with [the] Indigenous community, we also had to balance out making sure—and it was a tough decision—that we had to shift that model to something that would not further displace Indigenous people because it became a touchy subject. That’s one of the ways in which we had to recalibrate because what is a good model elsewhere when we’re talking about people who are just now beginning to have their land back in order for them to steward it and create economic opportunity and do all of those things required us to look at the CLT model, which I know is not the perfect solution either, but those are some of the things that we’ve had to do to maintain that integrity and to also make sure we’re accountable to our community—always.
That goes back and points to that deep democracy in that community. It’s just that relationship piece; it is such an important thing. We don’t have that muscle, and we need to practice that muscle. Those are some of the ways that I think, forward progress, we could talk about. We could do it faster, but for us, we’re focused on doing it right, and doing it with community 100 percent behind it and directing it.
Those are some of the things that we are working with here. It’s a slow process. Hats off to those people who are meeting for all that time weekly. It’s taken us a good five years because we’ve also begun to work interculturally, because there’s so many people who want and need us to have the world that we deserve. I think it will take all of us. I think traditionally—me coming from Hawaii—but I’ve also heard that here: we have to work together.
What colonization has done, what capitalism has done to all of us, it’s that relationship-building, and it’s taking the time, even though it feels like we don’t have the time. It is thinking about things like meeting your neighbor, and you put your porch on the other side, and you really welcome people, and they get to talk to one another. Those are the things that we’ve begun to do.
In our situation here, it can be a volatile place where we have militia. White supremacy is here loud and proud, so we’re careful about doing that because those people are also suffering. How do we talk to one another, make friends with our neighbors? Those are some of the approaches that we’re working with.
What changes do you see being required at the level of culture and education to support solidarity economy housing work? What role can different actors play, whether they are advocates, policymakers, activists, or wherever they are in the ecosystem?
Chopel: I think there’s such a big role for culture and education and all of the other players that you mentioned: activists, advocates, policymakers—we all need to get in there because it’s a big problem, and it’s going to need lots of brains to address it.
As I mentioned when I referred to the study that I conducted with some of my wonderful colleagues and with La Futura Rosario, we found that narrative is another viability that we really need to be thinking about that’s essential to cooperative endeavors, in particular in our context in Puerto Rico, because it’s part of the U.S. politically, whether for good or for ill.
People like the members of La Futura Rosario can help to propose and make real different visions for housing, not just because they’re artists but also because they’re queer and do family and household differently. The nuclear family and single-family household is part of the so-called American dream—that unique mix of individualism and irrational hope that separates us from each other more often than it brings us together. That helps the people with control over wealth and power over our labor to make it seem like there’s only one way to organize ourselves economically and socially—the famous TINA: there is no alternative.
The U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, the People’s Network for Land and Labor, Resist and Build, and so many other people and organizations and networks—Solidarity Research Center—are working with much fewer resources to show us that there are so many other ways we can learn, and importantly, other ways that we can steward, manage, and collectively own resources.
The quote that I love from the study that we did, because it was very qualitative, is the rebellion in “Star Wars.” [It’s] one of the things they repeat most often. “The rebellion is built on hope. That’s the foundation. Yes, feeling hopeful can be a little overwhelming because we’re not used to it, but I love that the future is hopeful.” That was translated from Spanish, so it’s not an exact quote, but it feels really important. In a way, as Walidah Imarisha has observed, activists, advocates, policymakers, and all of us trying to change systems and imagine new realities are practitioners of science fiction. We’re asking ourselves, “What are the future realities we can create?”
The Othering & Belonging Institute released a report last year that looked at community real estate all across California. They identified that we need more and better public infrastructure and more and better movement infrastructure. At the center of all of that is relational organizing. Really, we need to experiment. As Mariame Kaba encouraged us, we need a million experiments. We need to connect globally and learn from each other and share resources.
This includes education about all different kinds of solidarity economy housing that have existed and can exist, and also deep cultural change. Many of our ideas of what it means to be American are wrapped up in private property and getting ahead, and a big part of that is homeownership. Yet there are over three-quarter million people, so not even a million people, who are currently houseless, and 15 to 16 million vacant housing units. That’s a huge mismatch.
This means that people are being denied access to a very basic necessity, not due to a housing shortage, but due to a solidarity shortage. I’ll share, personally, that I’m a formerly homeless person, and the most painful part of that experience for me was seeing that people knew I was lacking this basic necessity, both in my childhood and young adulthood at different times, and they were so often unwilling to spare even a kind word, much less a quarter, to help.
I don’t think that it’s because they were all unkind. Maybe some were, but I think it’s mostly because we have to work so hard every day to steel our hearts against the suffering that our systems cause. Being part of the solidarity economy is a way that we can change that culture little by little and reduce that suffering bit by bit.
Catalfano: You were talking about who can do this work, or how should people do the work, and I feel like, along with being told that we are separate, and the loneliness that we experience, we’re also told that there [is] somebody on high who knows more than me who’s going to take care of this. We think that those are our governments or people who are working in public health.
Coming from a community perspective, our communities know what they need. The reality is there’s a lot of agency that we need to take back in order to construct the lives that we actually want to make. That includes housing and what that can look like. I don’t think that that’s a direct go and get a degree for everyone, although I find that that’s very helpful, and one of the reasons why we’re working with so many people, because there’s so much diversity of knowledge in our communities.
That expertise exists. The policies, and some of those things, that’s where the partnerships can come into play with people who do that work. I said something about [the fact] that we are dealing with municipalities that might look at us—do look at us—like we’re crazy … some of these ideas of solidarity economy are so new, and that’s just not the way it’s been done.
There are individuals within some of those organizations that do see the need for us to be bringing all of that knowledge together, working in deep democracy. Those are many of the people who are active in our community looking for those solutions. I think that the knowledge-sharing is critical. Things like this. Thank you very much for putting it on, so that we can be talking with people who maybe you’re coming from a municipality, and then you’re hearing from the community.
I do think that we need to set the table more and more within our communities, but also within our organization, so that we can get the knowledge to the communities that need it. Technical support, when you’re talking about some of the grants that we’ve received, has been very instrumental in our own growth and how we’re going to find solutions to these problems.
There was a question looking at workforce development and solidarity economies, and two parts to it. One was about how do you negotiate or navigate the need to function autonomously from philanthropy in the state and the need to abolish work as we know it?
Then, more specifically, about reskilling—once you purchase land or purchase a home, that’s not the end of the story. There’s roofs to repair, there’s gutters, there’s all sorts of renovation costs, maintenance, construction. Is reskilling part of these solidarity economy efforts?
Catalfano: Regarding workforce development and solidarity economies, I think that the reality is we’re working in a capitalist system. We’re really working on a pathway to be able to free ourselves from that, but we’re still in that. Steve mentioned the community production center. We call it a community production center purposefully. We don’t call it a fab lab. … Well, it is, in some respects that, but it’s also so that we can do community self-provisioning.
We can lessen our need to go to Lowe’s, so we can then balance the desired labor that people want to provide into the community with supporting them with not having to go and spend that money in other ways. We’ve done a number of different experiments. One was something as simple as having chickens. How much does that offset the grocery costs that we see rising for our staff and for our community? At a larger scale, as we’re beginning, because it’s part of the practice of how we work together, how do we redistribute that? Who does get that? What are the communication systems? All of that is groundwork that we’re laying now.
When it comes to housing, there’ve already been experiments in Idyllwild with the Lake County Merry Makers, where they’ve already made tiny houses using community production centers. That’s a model that we are scaling up ourselves to be able to do that. It’s also coupled with our traditional ecological knowledge [and] land restoration efforts. We live in California. We’re looking at another year of drought. Even beyond that, we’re wanting to create health in the forests that have just experienced so much overgrowth.
The idea is having a fuels-reduction team go out and be able to reduce those fuels and then take some of those materials and turn them into meaningful goods. That can also mean that we then put that into our community production center and build tiny houses. That can also mean that we can do something to also lessen people having to go and buy—I’m trying to think—a garden cover … [that’s] made out of plastic, which is fossil fuels, and taking bioresins and creating some of those materials that then, when their life cycle is over, they biodegrade and go back into the earth.
The workforce development piece is a huge piece—that scaling-up piece—to be able to do that, because we know that eventually, who knows if capitalism is just going to absolutely crash and we’re all going to be like “Mad Max”? But it’s probably going to be slower. In that slowness, it’s a transition from wage labor to provisioning ourselves on the land. I think a lot of us have to put those systems in place, and we need that ramp of time in order to do that. Like Alison had said earlier, these kinds of things have been going on prior to us having this question set before us. That’s how we’re moving, knowing that it’s going to take time for us to build.
The questioner asked this of [Alison]. They found the aspect of narrative that you talked about as being really important, and [they] were asking, how can storytellers, journalists, people who study communications, decenter TINA—there is no alternative—and help promote people and planet first approaches to housing?
Chopel: Yes, storytellers, journalists, people who are doing communications. Just like Miki’ala said, things like this: talking about it, sharing about it. In Puerto Rico, there’s an organization called Nueve Millones … which just means, in English, nine million, which refers to the number of Puerto Ricans in the world that I mentioned earlier.
There is Solutions Journalism [Network]. They have all kinds of stories about community land banks, community land trusts, and housing cooperatives, and showing the fact that there are actually so many different ways that we can organize our housing and [talk] about it and [share] about it. Beyond that, it’s also, like I mentioned, the role of artists. Our imagination has been so narrowed and controlled. When we talk about the neoliberal order, there was that recent thing that happened where Netflix was potentially going to be acquired.
Narratives that are pushed out through traditional channels are becoming more and more narrowed. Miki’ala mentioned “Mad Max,” which refers also to capitalist realism—this idea that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world, for some people, than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. When we do imagine the end of capitalism, we imagine a chaotic world full of violence and even more competition than we have now, which doesn’t really jive with our reality around how humans behave.
Another thing that I mentioned a little bit that I study in Puerto Rico, and the work that I do at the University of Puerto Rico, is really around planning for disaster reduction, looking at theories around disaster and the different phases that we go through when we’re mitigating, responding to, or recovering from disaster. One of the major theories that we look at, of course, is disaster capitalism, which I referred to, which is that many capitalists and extractive investors find hazards and disasters as ways to come in and extract, exploit, and change the rules.
The other side of it that doesn’t often get referred to is disaster collectivism. That’s something that researchers are finding again and again in different sites around disasters or hazards around the world: People actually behave in much more mutualistic and solidaristic ways when our systems and the infrastructure that we’re used to relying on crumbles.
There’s another theory that’s about elite panic, which explores the ways that elite people who are often in charge of things make decisions based on this assumption or this idea that if there’s too big of a change, as happens with disasters, that the public will just go into panic mode, and so they need to be controlled.
Other scholars have looked at disaster preparedness as social control. When you put all of those things together, what you find is a real mismatch between the ways that the people who have hoarded most of the money and control over labor in the world—that are responsible for maintaining systems that continue to erode our environmental and social systems—have ideas about humans and how humans are likely to behave.
They act on these ideas in ways that are controlling and almost … self-fulfilling prophecies, but when you look and go and see how people are behaving and how people want to behave, it oftentimes is almost exactly the opposite. There’s a great podcast on Shareable called “The Response,” which details many of these disaster collectivism stories, examples. Then I mentioned science fiction, speculative fiction, but also just all kinds of art. Music is a big part of resistance in Puerto Rico, for example, and imagining different ways—not just different futures, but different ways—that we can be together and resist and enjoy and hope, and not just anger and sadness.
Miki’ala, a question for you. There was a … participant wondering if you could speak to the challenges of multiracial organizing, specifically, and effective strategies for bridging urban and rural communities in building a solidarity economy.
Catalfano: The intercultural aspects of organizing have probably been the most surprising and fruitful for us. I think we started out maybe a good 10 or so years ago thinking that we wanted to have conversations with the community, certainly within [the] Indigenous community … to see what are other people in our community thinking about particular aspects? We started to conduct—and I think this model is fantastic, by the way—we were using USCAD, U.S. Culture and Arts, but it is not a governmental agency. They had all of these modules for communities to engage in arts modality, around topics of politics, because what we really wanted to do was to have political education, political discussions. When you say politics, and let’s have political education in our community, that is, like, “Well, stop, nobody wants to do that.”
If you put it in the guise of, we’re going to have a conversation, we’re going to eat some food, and we’re going to talk, then they were more than happy to have those conversations. That was the ground for us to begin to have conversations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous folks in our case. Then what happens when you share food and you have conversations, and then you hear people responding to prompts about—geez, at the time we were talking about, it was the Women’s March and some other things. Wow, they have similar thoughts to me, and they don’t look like me. Then it seems like such a—well, of course, people think alike, but here it’s very separate. It’s very segregated, like you were talking about, Alison, in Puerto Rico. There’s that colonization and that safety and that lack of trust. Those were spaces where you ply people with food and some good questions and some company and some relationship-building, and that became the basis for how we do that intercultural bridge-building that has led to us having an intercultural solidarity economy we call CoLab Shasta. We call it Collaborative Laboratory because it’s just a process that has been unfolding, and it began with some of those discussions around food and topics that would otherwise be really hard to approach, but that we were able to talk about using an art modality toolkit.
There’s one question about an emerging planner who wants to ask, are there examples of nonprofit or for-profit developers supporting the solidarity economy housing ecosystem, either with funding or incubations? [There’s] a separate question: Can city government be an effective partner and not just a regulatory obstacle, if you will? Allies in unexpected places, whether at the city level or in the housing development world, nonprofit or for-profit.
Chopel: Right to the City is a wonderful example of folks that are looking at funding and integrated capital. I don’t know a lot about them, but I really like what I’ve seen that they do. I know that they are really thinking about how to move the amount of funding in nonextractive ways.
We talked a little bit about integrated capital, but I think it’s really important to be thinking about things in terms of integrated capital. [It’s] really essential that we do move away from philanthropy because philanthropy is twice-stolen wealth, as Edgar Villanueva has talked about. It’s a way for rich people to keep their money away from the taxes. Because they only have to give 5 percent of it out in grants when they’re foundations, 95 percent can be put back into Wall Street, creating the kind of capitalist and colonialist destructive cycles that we are trying to move away from.
As long as we remain and accept to remain dependent on philanthropy, we’re complicit in that pattern. Yes, we need to move away from philanthropy. Also, in the meantime, like Miki’ala said, we accept the reality that we live in, which right now is mostly capitalist. Part of the way that we can build out away from philanthropy is by leaning on it in the short term because the truth is we can’t just jump from having an idea for community vision, for development or solidarity economy, housing cooperatives, whatever, to getting loans and expecting that we’re going to be able to pay back that money, that there’s going to be a way that we can turn real estate assets automatically into revenue.
Traditionally, the financialization of the market—the reason that they are revenue-creating entities—is because of the exploitation of not just renters but [also] the ways that they exploit the entire community. In order to plan and design different ways to collectively own and use those assets in our communities, we do need some grant funding or some funding that we’re not going to have to automatically pay back. I think it’s important to develop that scaffolding with a mix of integrated capital.
I think that Right to the City is one that’s thinking about that. There are a number of other wonderful funds similar to what Miki’ala mentioned: the Butterfly Impact Fund; there’s Seed Commons, like I mentioned, that’s dedicated to cooperative models; and then there are other ones that we can learn from, like the PREC model, which incorporates the funding into it.
Really quickly on the city government question, I’ll just point to the community land banks, which are developed in collaboration with city governments. In Puerto Rico, the first community land bank was created by Toa Baja. Unfortunately, that one recently closed, but it’s an interesting story because Toa Baja is a town that’s about 20 minutes outside of San Juan— the main capital, the biggest city in Puerto Rico—and it’s also on the coast. As you can imagine, it’s very attractive to developers and exploitative investors who are ready to jump in and gentrify or displace local communities.
The mayor and the city infrastructure there, they were prescient in terms of, they saw this coming because it wasn’t directly after the hurricanes, and it wasn’t exactly a hot spot for extractive investment because [the town] was about 90 percent a flood zone. However, because they were able to attract recovery funding to create infrastructure that would reduce how much of their town was in a flood zone, they saw that within five years, once that project was completed, the exploitative and extractive investors would have their eye on the land that was easy to snap up—“easy,” in quotes.
The mayor partnered with CRH and was the very first to create a community land bank, recognizing that it was a way that they could quickly acquire those homes and lands that could be in danger of being acquired by extractive investors and then hold onto them until they could find an affordable housing developer that could turn those into affordable homes that are for the long term held, removed from the markets.
That’s just one example of how a city government could be an effective partner, not just a regulatory obstacle. I think that there are a lot more. I wish that Kali [Akuno] was here because I was reading a little bit about how they have worked with the city of Jackson.
The one other that I will mention is Richmond, Virginia. A friend of mine works in the government there, and they’re doing participatory budgeting through the city, and they’re also creating an office of community engagement, similar to in Toa Baja; they had an office of cooperativism and citizen participation. There are definitely examples to be found.
I was actually also just talking to a friend who’s working with Mamdani’s office in New York, so we’ll see what’s going to happen there. I think that they’re probably going to be an effective partner in better housing policies there, too.
There was a question about how do you navigate supporting those in our community with complex health needs in a solidarity economy? This is coming from somebody who works in permanent supportive housing.
Catalfano: We are early in our housing development here, but one of the things that I’ve heard folks do is that they have wraparound services in some of those formations to be dealing with that. Cooperation Vermont has a program that helps keep elders in the home while also offering an opportunity for young people who otherwise could not afford to buy anything to come and live with them. That speaks a little bit to taking care of people and their health.
It’s so exciting to be thinking about that because it’s also that intergenerational piece. We have a throwaway society. We throw away our old people, and we shouldn’t ever do that. There’s so much knowledge. In this case—in the case of the housing—it’s been experimented there, and that’s been working there. I know that it’s not an isolated situation.
The other part that I wanted to say about it was really weaving in, intentionally, wraparound services for folks who are involved in some of these housing developments.
How would you summarize your vision for the world if whatever transitions you’re working toward took place on a large scale? Maybe what is your greatest dream, at some level, and what do you see as the greatest opportunity for solidarity economy and housing going forward? [I’ll] give you both a minute to answer a question that probably could take an hour.
Chopel: I’ll jump in with the greatest opportunity, and then I’ll let Miki’ala close with the vision because I’m sure that Miki’ala has a beautiful and inspiring vision that would be a wonderful note to end this webinar on.
I was thinking about greatest areas of opportunity. There are so many. It’s very scary times that we live in, and also exciting because as the neoliberal order is cracking, it’s opening up previously unimaginable possibilities.
[For] the sake of time, I’ll just limit myself to one specific opportunity that I’ve been thinking of, which is as we work on housing policy at any level, we must be thinking about permanence, in the sense that it’s used in the PREC acronym—or as I prefer, intergenerationality, because nothing’s really permanent. For example, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit at the federal level only requires affordability for 30 years. That’s crazy. We’re giving for-profit developers public money for something that [is] … the blink of an eye in the life cycle of a well-built home. Thirty years is nothing.
There are other municipal policies that only require affordability for five years. We need to recognize that we’ve found ourselves in cycles that have expanded and contracted the precariousness of housing, in particular by finding vulnerabilities in community or cooperatively owned housing. Anyone that looks at the history of housing cooperatives from the ‘70s can see that. Let’s design away from those cycles by adding into bylaws, municipal policies, and even federal policies, clauses that not only remove housing from markets permanently but even plan beyond that permanence by encoding what happens to the real estate after the life of the stewarding entity ends.
The necessity of that is something that I’ve learned personally by working in the mess of U.S. inheritance law dropped on top of Spanish inheritance law as a result of the back-to-back colonialism of Puerto Rico over half a millennium, and also as I’ve served as a thought partner in the design of community land banks being created to preserve intergenerational affordability. There’s a lot of work to be done there, and also a lot of opportunity to prevent future generations [from] repeating the same struggles we’re in today.
How do we actually express love within a community, with each other, with all of creation? That is what we ultimately are seeking. It’s not without its bumps and lumps, and it never was, but we can be there and get there.”
Miki’ala Catalfano, cofounder and executive director of Native Roots
Catalfano: We are in a scary time. When we were talking about disasters, it made me think about how that brought us together as a community despite all of our differences that are actually volatile-type situations. What I would like to see, and what I think we can build, is returning to how we, as humans, in our right relationships with land and with all of creation, and humans being part of that—not just the land, but the creatures, the birds, plants, with all of it.
In short, I think that’s like a return. Don’t cringe too much, but it’s love. It’s how do we actually express love within a community, with each other, with all of creation? That is what we ultimately are seeking. It’s not without its bumps and lumps, and it never was, but we can be there and get there.
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