(Illustration by Raffi Marhaba, The Dream Creative)
Homeownership is considered the American dream, but for millions of people who are Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC), the reality of the US housing system is more of a nightmare. Built on a foundation of racism, discrimination, and exclusion, with roots stretching back to the birth of this nation, it has been used both intentionally and unintentionally to limit BIPOC living options and life opportunities. Racism is so deeply embedded in this system, in fact, that housing justice and racial justice are inseparable. That’s why, for a funder collaborative like Funders for Housing and Opportunity (FHO), racial equity is central to our mission of housing equity. We can’t solve the growing housing crisis unless we also address racial inequities, repair harms, and restructure systems to ensure positive life outcomes for all people.
It’s been this way for centuries, beginning with the displacement of Native People in the 1800s and continuing with the use of eminent domain laws to take desirable land away from thriving Black communities. Add to that practices like exclusionary and predatory lending, redlining, single-family zoning, blockbusting (leveraging white fear of a Black influx to buy houses cheaply and then marking them up for Black buyers), and contract buying (selling homes on a predatory contract basis rather than a standard mortgage). The disruptive development or neglect of highways cuts off communities of color or requires homes to be razed, and the neglect of infrastructure (e.g., schools, hospitals) in BIPOC neighborhoods makes living there more difficult. Hard-wired into systems and programs at all levels of government and the private sector, these policies bolstered white Americans’ stability, wealth, and access to opportunity while concentrating the effects of segregation, displacement, destabilization, gentrification, and poverty on BIPOC populations. This pernicious legacy lives on:
- Among the neighborhoods deemed “hazardous” by redliners nearly 100 years ago, three-quarters still have low to moderate income levels, and two-thirds have mostly BIPOC residents.
- Only 41 percent of Black households are homeowners, compared with more than 73 percent of white households.
- A report from the Center for American Progress shows that the typical white household “has 10 times more wealth than the typical Black household.” If current trends continue, “It could take more than 200 years for the average Black family to accumulate the same amount of wealth as its white counterparts.”
The organization I work for, Trinity Church Wall Street based in New York City, is one of FHO’s 13 member organizations, and we’ve seen this injustice play out too many times in our city. Sadly, it’s no accident that 90 percent of the people living in New York City homeless shelters are people of color even though the city’s total population is less than 60 percent BIPOC. Nor is it surprising that two out of five people returning to New York City from prison, most of whom are people of color, go directly into a homeless shelter—or that those who are housing insecure quickly end up back in prison.
Clearly, housing instability is not the fault of individuals making bad choices but of systems behaving badly. Nor will addressing racism in just one part of the system, such as the mortgage industry, cure the whole system. As Susan Thomas, president of Melville Charitable Trust and founder of FHO, observes: “Just fixing one of the spokes on the wheel does not fix the wheel.”
What does it look like to target the whole wheel of racial and housing injustice? FHO is built on the conviction that philanthropy should:
- Target strategies for improving housing and opportunity to those who are most impacted;
- Move beyond providing services—which are important but, on their own, unlikely to produce lasting change—to also changing policies, narratives, institutions, and structures;
- Center the needs and priorities of people with lived experience in what we do and how we do it; and
- Shift more power to those who have been most disadvantaged.
FHO pursues these goals through pooled grantmaking in three priority areas: policy advocacy and organizing, changing the narrative about housing and homelessness, and elevating promising local efforts. The following examples show how FHO centers racial justice in every aspect of its work and offer lessons for other funders supporting housing justice.
Housing Justice Through Policy, Narrative, and Local Change
FHO’s grantmaking focuses on renters’ rights and protections because Black and Brown households are more likely to be renters, and they experience housing instability, eviction, and homelessness at disproportionately high rates. Stable housing also makes it possible to improve other determinants of life outcomes, such as health, education, and economic mobility.
For example, FHO funded the Community Justice Project, Miami Workers Center, Florida Immigrant Coalition, and Florida Rising to mobilize BIPOC women in Florida to confront the eviction crisis caused by soaring rents and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The collaborating organizations held multilingual “Know Your Rights” trainings on eviction defense for renters and tenant union members. They conducted leadership training for residents, equipping them to educate their communities about housing as a human right and demand changes to existing policy and practices. They supported a hotline to help immigrants navigate their options, provided information tenants could use to defend themselves in court, and connected attorneys with organizers working on tenants’ urgent needs. The collaboration deepened a statewide eviction tracking database to provide organizers, community leaders, and decision makers with accurate information. And the grantees supported artists and storytellers in communities to elevate tenants’ voices, expose the challenges they face, and shift the narrative about housing to one of racial justice.
All told, FHO’s grants since 2018 have contributed to 103 policy advances, including 51 housing policies supported or introduced and 52 policies enacted. In St. Paul, Minnesota, for example, advocates used housing justice narratives to drum up voters’ support for passage of a ballot initiative that led to a new residential rent stabilization ordinance.
Changing the narrative around housing is crucial to achieving housing justice. This means shifting the public narrative about housing from one that has emphasized scarcity and competition for resources, the commodification of land and housing, and wealth accumulation by individuals to one that centers housing as a public good and builds solutions around racial and economic justice.
To help change the narrative, FHO has funded the Housing Justice Narrative Initiative, a partnership among Community Change, Race Forward, and PolicyLink. This partnership disseminated narrative change guidance to more than 1,500 housing leaders through training webinars and helped organizers and advocates in local communities align around a shared narrative to shape local housing policies. In addition to St. Paul, advocates in Denver used the housing justice message to persuade voters to reject a proposed zoning change that would have limited the housing options for people experiencing homelessness and those seeking affordable housing. By grounding campaigns through an intentional race-class narrative, these efforts weave together themes of racial justice alongside economic justice.
And during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, FHO’s rapid-response grants to low-income and BIPOC communities quickly helped local communities facing the highest risk of eviction. Having a pooled fund that is set up to disburse grants quickly and staff who could research and recommend grantees allowed us to act nimbly and provide more than $500,000 in direct housing assistance to more than 400 households via local grantees. In addition, a grant to Arch City Defenders in St. Louis supported wrap-around social services and legal representation to keep people housed, while a grant to Housing NOLA in New Orleans enabled unhoused families and family groups to move off the streets and out of hotels into short-term rentals and covered their rent, utilities, and wrap-around case management to find permanent housing.
How We Work With Grantees
Alongside targeted grantmaking, FHO prioritizes grants to organizations that are led by people of color and supports partners and projects that develop BIPOC leadership and build the power of BIPOC communities. Working this way is new for FHO, and we know others are well ahead of our collaborative efforts. Still, it’s becoming a core part not only of what we fund but how we work. We go beyond our usual networks to find more diverse grantees in terms of leadership, resources, mission, size, and experience. To make our grant application, review process, and reporting forms more equitable, less burdensome, and more empowering for grantees, we shifted from written proposals from first-time applicants to a combination of letters of inquiry and interviews. We now ask all grant applicants what they are doing to advance equity in their leadership, target populations, and programming, and we use that information in grant decisions.
FHO’s executive director and senior program officer participated in communities of practice on racial equity, and their experiences sparked conversations within FHO about what a more transformative style of grantmaking would look like and what it would take to get there. Many of us have contributed ideas from our own organizations as we discuss topics such as incorporating narrative change and policy advocacy into a foundation’s other work, improving the grants process for BIPOC-led and grassroots organizations, and forging partnerships with public and private interests. FHO members have also brought ideas from FHO back to our foundations to discuss and adopt. For example, one member organization revised its theory of change and funding strategy to reflect racial equity priorities and is beginning to address income and asset development for communities of color. Another began to advance health equity through housing. A third member took what she learned at FHO about incorporating lived experience and shared it with colleagues at her foundation and at a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine roundtable.
These experiences underscore for us the fact that centering racial justice in housing affects how, and with whom, we interact as much as it shapes how we spend our funds.
What We’ve Learned
1. No matter what philanthropic lens we use to view housing justice, racial equity is the focal point. Because racism is woven into all of the systems that affect housing and homelessness, racial equity is a common thread in every solution. As FHO members, it doesn’t matter whether one foundation puts a priority on ending mass incarceration, as Trinity Church Wall Street does; or ending homelessness, as Melville Charitable Trust does; or taking a feminist approach to the intersections of gender, race, and class, as Meyer Memorial Trust does; or promoting health, the environment, or any of the other topics pursued by FHO’s member organizations. The north star that guides our collaboration on housing is the explicit, intentional focus on racial equity.
Being intentional is key. Trinity Church Wall Street had constructed a theory of change around achieving racial justice before joining FHO, but some other members have not. By creating a collective framework for racial equity, FHO made space for us all to clarify who we’re here to uplift, what results we want to achieve, and how we can move the needle toward those results.
2. Collaboration can lead to solutions that are as cross-cutting, multi-layered, and mutually reinforcing as the problem of racial discrimination in housing.
We need to change local, state, regional, and national systems to eradicate racism. Few philanthropies support change at all levels, but a funder collaborative can align efforts at multiple levels. For instance, Trinity Church Wall Street’s housing and homelessness work is primarily in New York City. But through FHO we played a role in advocating for federal dollars to cover low-income households’ rent arrears during the COVID-19 pandemic, which we know had an impact on our area along with many others. Through FHO, we also supported state campaigns to make the process of applying for federal funds easier. And we learned through the work of local organizers how to mobilize undocumented BIPOC households to apply for federal relief. Those experiences inform and bolster how Trinity works in our realm, and our contributions bubble up to shape systems beyond it.
3. Learning from lived experience is essential because those closest to the problem are closest to the solution.
The meetings among funders that led to FHO’s formation did not include people with lived experience in housing instability, but we soon learned that our work is stronger when it's driven by what people are experiencing. For example, after hearing from grassroots supporters in the Alliance for Housing Justice that a big part of keeping people housed involves addressing the power imbalance between tenants and landlords, FHO focused more explicitly on tenants' rights and protections. We meet with grantees to learn what is and isn’t working, and we make changes in response. We pay attention if they say an idea won’t work or an interaction feels inauthentic. We try to collect input from many different people, from those working to change a single neighborhood to those mobilizing large-scale efforts, and we honor their expertise by compensating them.
We’re still figuring out how to structure long-term relationships with people with lived experience so their perspectives can influence our choices in an organic, non-tokenized way. However, operating collaboratively creates momentum as we all move toward this goal.
Looking Ahead
Although we’ve come a long way in five years, there is much more to do to address housing justice as racial justice. If we truly want to walk alongside our grantee partners in under-resourced communities, we have to rework grantmaking practices to be more empowering and flexible. This could include covering general operating expenses, giving more multi-year grants, helping to bridge funding gaps, helping newer organizations build capacities, and even letting grantees lead the grantmaking process. We also should use our collective power, influence, and dollars to advance racial justice more boldly–for example, by taking more risks on grantees that fall outside our comfort zone but bring something vital to the solution, working to get more federal funds for equity-based housing into disinvested BIPOC communities, and reinforcing the narrative that housing is a human right and a common good, so we unleash more empathy nationwide.
Momentum is growing to solve the housing crisis. We see it in new public-private initiatives involving the federal government, such as The Partnership for Equitable and Resilient Communities, whose grant fund is managed by FHO. We hear it in the multitude of people raising their voices locally to call for solutions, as nearly 62,000 New Yorkers did recently during the NYC Speaks public engagement campaign. And we feel it in the collaboration around racial and housing justice with our colleagues in Funders for Housing and Opportunity.
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