A Movement-Based Federal Housing Agenda

Earlier this year, the Housing Playbook Project released the New Deal for Housing Justice—a set of policy recommendations to help solve the U.S. housing crisis, which has been made worse by the pandemic. And The BREATHE Act, a project of the Movement for Black Lives’ 501(c)(4) Electoral Justice Project, offers a radical reimagining of public safety and community care. Shelterforce, Neighborhood Funders Group, and Funders Together to End Homelessness hosted a conversation on March 10 with people involved in each to discuss the highlights of each proposal and what needs to happen next.

Joining us were Jennifer Cossyleon, a Mellon ACLS Public Fellow at Community Change Action, which managed the New Deal for Housing Justice process and is now working on organizing support for implementing its priorities; Jeremie Greer, co-executive director of Liberation in a Generation, who is a contributing author to the New Deal for Housing Justice; and Philip McHarris, a researcher with the Movement for Black Lives and a doctoral candidate at Yale University.

Miriam Axel-Lute: At every transfer of power, affordable housing advocates—like advocates of every cause—generate lists of recommendations for the new administration. How is the New Deal for Housing Justice different from these documents that come every four to eight years?

Jeremie Greer: [What] really distinguishes this one from the others: its focus on centering racial justice.

It looks at policies that would advance racial justice, but it also integrates racial justice into other sections, like around public housing, homelessness, rural housing. It doesn’t make that false choice that people often do, where it’s like, “Well, do we integrate it through all, or do we focus [on] it?” It actually does both.

The other way [it’s] important is that it actually diagnoses the problem differently than other housing platforms and agendas have done in the past. Traditionally, the job of policy is to try to correct for market failures that create disparity between Black renters, Latinx renters, and white renters, but bound into an assumption that the market is not the problem.

[The New Deal for Housing Justice] diagnoses the problem differently: racism is built in and baked into the housing market, and it has been since its inception, all the way from Indigenous land that was taken when the settlers got here to slavery and then sharecropping and Jim Crow, and so on and so on. When you look at it from that perspective, you actually think about policies that are not going to correct for problems, but actually create new systems that stop oppression and start to build the kind of housing market that works for Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other people of color.

Let’s bring the BREATHE Act into this. Philip, can you give us some background about how it was drafted, what it covers, and what role housing plays in it?

Philip McHarris: The BREATHE Act is a wide-reaching omnibus bill, and it builds on the vision for Black lives; in light of nationwide calls to reallocate police funding and divest from systems of punishment.

This visionary bill divests our taxpayer dollars from brutal and discriminatory policing, [and] invests in a new vision of public safety, a vision that answers the call to defund the police and allows all communities to finally breathe free. It centers building up communities and community resources through health care, education, [and] employment.

And of course, within the BREATHE Act, housing is a fundamental right. [Housing] has for too long been made out of reach to Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other communities of color. And especially given its history of racial discriminatory housing policies and practices, the federal government must ensure that historically excluded groups have meaningful access to affordable housing. [The BREATHE Act is] written as a federal bill that can also be applied at state levels.

The BREATHE Act was drafted by the Electoral Justice Project by the Movement for Black Lives. The proposed policies overlap a lot with the New Deal on Housing Justice—it includes investments in robust social housing development program, money to address the public housing backlogs of repairs, fully funding Section 8 vouchers, as well as creating pathways for affordable housing.

We know that safe housing reduces the likelihood of harm and conflict and violence within communities, and it cultivates safety and provides a central base for building secure and stable communities.

Can you give us a sense of the scope of the New Deal for Housing Justice?

Greer: It’s really comprehensive. We wanted to make sure that ...