Organizing

In the 1990s, a group I co-founded, the Eviction Defense Network, was asked by public housing residents to organize alongside them during the HOPE VI process. The HOPE VI process […]

With the Federal Reserve Board’s first meeting of 2015 last month and the upcoming 40th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, I had Mr. Peabody crank up the “Wayback Machine” and set it for April 14, 1980. (If Millennials think they can’t afford to buy their first home now, mortgage interest rates then were heading to […]

On January 20, two Portland, Oregon women visited their former property managers with several dozen of their friends in tow. Becky and Aubrey Cook were evicted from their apartments, run by Fox Management, after complaining about slum conditions including raw sewage spilling into their apartments. In a bizarre turn, Fox then charged the women $437.00 […]

Northwest Side Housing Center combines counseling and organizing to empower homeowners facing foreclosure.

“A society grows great when old people plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” If that Greek proverb is true, what does it say about a society where most of our policies for affordable housing and community development look more like the mono-cropping of field corn than the patient cultivation of […]

[Editorial note: In commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Rooflines has chosen to share an essay from the Shelterforce archives. Co-written by Julian Bond, Jesse Jackson, Jr. and John Taylor in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the decade-old essay shows us that the reality for millions of Americans in poverty has not changed very […]

“Ordinary people exercise power in American politics mainly at those extraordinary moments when they rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives, and, by doing so, disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed. The drama of such events, combined with the disorder that results, […]

When a housing policy has the effect of perpetuating racial exclusion, and that policy is unnecessary or unjustified, it must be set aside or changed under the Fair Housing Act, whether or not the politicians who passed it were intentionally focused on racial discrimination. But now, that important principle is at risk.

Do you have a senior housing development? Are you helping seniors age in place with supportive housing, accessibility retrofits, home repair assistance, creative financial solutions, or other services? Are you organizing against financial abuse for seniors? Does your organization run on the power of retirees and their volunteerism? Share their faces and stories with your […]

Alan Mallach concludes his recent commentary on the problem of declining homeownership (Do Urban Neighborhoods Need Homeowners?) with the important reminder that cities and policymakes should not neglect renters. Yet, his argument leading up to this point is a prescription for continuing a century-old approach to housing that structurally advantages homeowners and disadvantages moderate- and […]

A robust debate erupted on Shelterforce in response to Miriam Axel-Lute’s article, “The Dangerous Rhetoric of Escaping to Opportunity,” with strongly worded opinions flowing from both sides of the mobility and place based debate. As practitioners who were involved in this vigorous conversation and referenced in the article, we had a series of private discussions […]

I wrote earlier this week about how the current increase in labor organizing among service workers calls for a conscious choice by other nonprofits who work with low-income households to offer our solidarity to those campaigns. Beyond the fact of supporting workers in their struggle for self-determination, there are some other opportunities for cross-pollination there. […]