(Illustration by Raffi Marhaba, The Dream Creative)
Advocacy and organizing for racially equitable housing policies is a cornerstone of building a just housing system in the United States.
Since 2017, Funders for Housing and Opportunity (FHO), a funder collaborative that believes a stable, affordable home is the foundation for health, opportunity, and justice, has directed about a third of its $17 million in grants to policy advocacy and organizing. This strand of FHO’s work has advanced 103 housing policies (with 52 enacted) and although FHO funds aren’t used for lobbying, helped to preserve and leverage more than $124 billion in public investments.
We asked FHO member Amy Gillman of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to set the context for interviews with Liz Ryan Murray of the Alliance for Housing Justice (AHJ) and Mike Koprowski of Opportunity Starts at Home (OSAH) who offer insights into national and local policy advocacy and organizing efforts that are changing the housing system. Responses have been edited and combined for length and continuity.
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Amy Gillman: RWJF is committed to improving health and health equity in the United States, and we know society can’t achieve health equity without addressing barriers to safe, stable, and affordable housing. Robust research demonstrates that high-quality housing in a thriving community is associated with improved physical and mental health, educational and developmental outcomes for children, and financial security and economic mobility for families.
The lasting impact of our country’s discriminatory housing and lending practices has led to widespread racial residential segregation and concentrated poverty, and differential access to community conditions that promote health such as high-quality schools, clean air, parks and open spaces, and job opportunities. People of color living in neighborhoods once subjected to redlining are more likely to live shorter lives, have lower incomes, and be burdened by the cost of rent. COVID-19 has exacerbated this crisis, and the country’s recent racial reckoning has heightened awareness of the need for racially equitable housing policies to support healthier communities.
To help realize this aim, RWJF funds a range of approaches including organizing and advocacy, policy research and development, and technical assistance and peer learning opportunities for local policy makers. We support policy change to address immediate housing needs such as the risk of eviction or displacement, and are committed to advancing long-term structural change in housing and community development policies, practices, and financing systems to address and reverse the historical lack of investment in communities with low income and communities of color.
We also work with peer philanthropies on policy, advocacy, and organizing to pool grants, co-invest capital, and collaborate on learning opportunities for funders and the field. RWJF and FHO fund both grasstops advocacy and grassroots organizing and make connections across these groups—which helps to align work at the national, state, and community levels—so these efforts reinforce each other and have more impact. This support enables advocates to scale partnerships and to have collective influence, rather than operating in silos.
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FHO: Alliance for Housing Justice (AHJ) and Opportunity Starts at Home (OSAH) represent two different approaches to policy change. How would each of you describe your approach?
Liz Ryan Murray, project director, Alliance for Housing Justice: AHJ is a movement of tenants, homeowners, and allies formed to address the nation’s affordable housing and displacement crisis, advance tenants’ rights, respond to harmful public policy actions, and shift the narrative from housing being seen as a commodity to housing as a human right. Our main strategy is to build and support the infrastructure needed for a powerful, grassroots-led housing justice movement.
FHO’s support enables us to staff the National Housing Justice Grassroots Table, which brings key actors in housing organizing together to build relationships, share perspectives and expertise, and plan strategies. The Table includes regional coalitions and national networks. For the past year, the Table has been working on aligning strategies around tenants’ rights, corporate accountability, and displacement. We gather research and analysis and create publications, letters, fact sheets, social media, and videos informed by folks who have deep technical knowledge along with organizers on the ground who are seeing the impacts of policy decisions.
Mike Koprowski, national director, Opportunity Starts at Home: OSAH is a campaign of the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), launched with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Children’s HealthWatch, and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, to mobilize multi-sector national organizations and coalitions to build political will and federal resources on behalf of national housing policy solutions.
FHO’s support helped us bring diverse constituencies—housing groups as well as those that are not explicitly about housing: educators, health professionals, civil rights and anti-poverty advocates, and members of faith-based communities—together to prioritize affordable housing for the lowest-income people and to increase awareness of how important stable housing is, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re helping coalitions in 21 states broaden and diversify their membership and engage national policy makers and elected officials to advocate for more robust and equitable federal housing policies.
FHO: How do national policy advocacy and grassroots organizing complement each other, and why are both important for changing the housing system?
Liz Ryan Murray: Grassroots organizers’ message tends to be more about overhauling systems to achieve long-term change, while policy advocacy is more about changes we can make right now. I think we need both. You cannot move the policy reforms without actually building the power of a tenant movement and of those who are most seriously impacted by the housing crisis. And just building power alone isn’t enough; it has to be directed toward changing how housing is delivered.
Mike Koprowski: I agree. Our fates are linked in all of this.
Success will be when race no longer predicts one’s likelihood of experiencing unaffordable rent, homelessness, and living in areas of concentrated poverty—when we have eliminated those things altogether for all people.
FHO: Low-income people and communities of color have been excluded from decision-making on housing policies and practices through generations of systemic exclusion and disinvestment. How are you engaging these key partners in anti-racist policy advocacy and organizing? What have you learned about partnering in authentic ways?
Liz Ryan Murray: It’s a really critical component. Not only do the folks who are experiencing displacement, eviction, housing instability, and the destruction of communities understand the issues and solutions firsthand, their numbers are large. When they’re organized and have tools, we can really impact policy.
So, although Alliance for Housing Justice does proactively identify some issues to address, a lot of what we do is work through national and regional networks and tables of organizing groups—folks who are out there listening to people in communities and building individual relationships across racial lines—to ask people what they need. Then we help them find levers for change through research and policy advocacy. For example, the White House put out a series of proposals for what to do about housing costs. Our folks said that people in communities weren’t clear about how it tied into their work, so our legal and policy staff quickly got out a memo on the implications. Local organizers used the memo in meetings with members to explain what was being proposed and how it could bolster or impede local work.
Mike Koprowski: OSAH supports people who have lived with housing instability to develop specific skills or advocacy projects. For example, our national partner, RESULTS, has a fellowship program for people with lived experience, which takes them through a robust process of sharpening their advocacy and organizing skills. Their fellows engaged with our campaign by writing local op-eds urging members of Congress to address rental assistance and the affordable housing supply. The Minnesota OSAH chapter provides subgrants to groups of people with lived experience that participate in federal advocacy, such as a Somali social service association that organized to advocate for a tiny home community.
FHO: What constitutes success in reshaping the policies that leave people vulnerable to racist and inequitable housing?
Liz Ryan Murray: Part of what we’re doing is changing the narrative so housing truly is seen as a human right. For instance, there’s a growing theme now in public discourse that the housing system shouldn’t be primarily an investment vehicle, it should be about housing people. Helping to move the needle on that is one type of success. For instance, we’re seeing a lot of press about the damage being done by corporate and private equity firms buying up neighborhoods, jacking up rents, and outbidding owner-occupants, resulting in a House hearing on the issue; and we’re starting to see stories on rent stabilization as well. We’re also seeing successful movement in passing federal legislation with significant investments in housing, and seeing the tenant organizing movement grow in size and power.
Mike Koprowski: Success will be when race no longer predicts one’s likelihood of experiencing unaffordable rent, homelessness, and living in areas of concentrated poverty—when we have eliminated those things altogether for all people.
FHO: What progress are you seeing in public- and private-sector investment in high-quality, equitable housing solutions at the local, state, and federal levels?
Mike Koprowski: There are lots of examples of progress across the country, including laws to end source-of-income discrimination (landlords’ refusal to accept housing assistance vouchers), the elimination of restrictive zoning regulations, voters’ approval of bond programs to raise millions of dollars for investment in affordable housing…
Liz Ryan Murray: …and passage of tenant bills of rights, rent control ordinances, anti-price-gouging statutes, and local funding of legal representation of low-income tenants.
Mike Koprowski: A big success at the national, state, and local levels was the response to the threat of mass evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. After the economic shutdown, housing advocates and their partners pushed for the national moratorium on evictions for nonpayment of rent and the allocation of almost $50 billion in emergency rental assistance. That was an unprecedented amount of funding, which was disseminated to states and localities, and ultimately to renters, very quickly. Research now shows that, despite the logistical challenges of administering the program, it was effective at reducing eviction filings and COVID transmission and fatality rates.
Liz Ryan Murray: Now, folks are trying to build on the momentum to help keep people in their homes and move unhoused people from temporary solutions into permanent housing. That gives me hope: Out of this emergency, they were able to grow the number of people who care about housing and are organized as tenants, and parlay that into policy.
FHO: What are the policy gaps you’re still trying to fill?
Liz Ryan Murray: This country has underinvested in the affordable housing system, both public housing and assisted housing, for so long that we’re way behind. The amount of repairs needed to make the public housing stock safe and climate-friendly is appalling, and every year thousands of units fall offline because they are literally falling apart. A lot of that investment has to come from the federal government, but some also comes from the local level.
Mike Koprowski: We also need to build more affordable housing units, and the federal government could help state and local governments with this by creating incentives for them to ease up on the cost of development. There are burdensome zoning requirements at the local level that make it really hard to build new housing.
Liz Ryan Murray: We need more tenant protections, because the housing system is so tilted in favor of property owners. There are many states and localities where it’s legal for landlords to refuse to accept housing assistance vouchers. And we need better enforcement of fair housing rules.
Mike Koprowski: Absolutely. There should be national just cause eviction standards, and a national right to legal representation for tenants being threatened with eviction, so they can better navigate complicated proceedings.
FHO: What capacities are most needed to advocate for a better housing system?
Mike Koprowski: We always seek to root what we’re doing in a deep, rigorous understanding of history. Without knowing history, you wouldn’t understand why Black people are more likely to experience homelessness and to struggle with rent, and you might think the free market, rather than a history of racist housing policies, was behind segregation.
Knowing how to work collaboratively is key to building a better system—being able to share and trust, to participate in meetings, to exert collective power. We’ve also started to pay more attention to the capacity to imagine a different way of doing things. This honors BIPOC traditions of radical imagination—how people in the throes of slavery, living under horrific conditions with no end in sight, were able to imagine life beyond enslavement.
FHO: Going forward, what are the opportunities in housing policy that you’d like to build on?
Mike Koprowski: There is an awakening in the housing movement to center racial equity in everything we do, and that work must continue. We don’t want this to be a fad that comes and goes.
In terms of policy opportunities, we may have to focus on solutions that have bipartisan traction, like two bills introduced right before the COVID pandemic. One would create new housing vouchers that come with counseling services; the other would create a permanent emergency rental assistance program. Neither would solve the housing crisis, but they would be significant leaps forward.
Liz Ryan Murray: We have a federal administration right now that has put racial justice and housing pretty high on their agenda, in ways we haven’t seen in many years. For instance, the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule (AFFH) is a major federal tool to go beyond just prohibiting housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability—it requires actively dismantling of the systems past discrimination left in its wake. AFFH has been revised several times since it was created in 1968. Beginning in 2018, the Trump Administration first suspended implementation of AFFH and then issued a counter rule that repealed it. When the AFFH rule is finalized, state and local governments will have authority to remove barriers to fair housing.
And with all the attention on eliminating racist zoning laws and more awareness that we don’t have enough affordable housing, there’s an opportunity to increase housing production. Related to that is a need to change zoning laws so they ensure that every family has a stable home in a place where they can thrive, rather than further enriching the wealthy and powerful.
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Read more stories by Amy Gillman, Liz Ryan Murray & Mike Koprowski.