(Illustration by Raffi Marhaba, The Dream Creative)
Too often, national funders look at national problems and think the solutions must be in Washington, DC. Well, we know that’s not always the case. Usually, new solutions are imagined, developed, and piloted at the local level by local leaders. From historic, regional supportive housing efforts in Portland, Oregon, to first-of-its-kind tenant voting blocs in Kansas City, Missouri, the local level is often where new challenges and creative solutions are first seen. That’s why one of Funders for Housing and Opportunity’s (FHO) major strategies is to support and elevate successful local efforts to make affordable housing more accessible, reduce racial disparities, and improve the choices that Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and Latino, and people of color have about their education, health, and economic mobility. Ultimately, successful local strategies and solutions can inform other cities and states across the nation.
Funders for Housing and Opportunity is a collaborative of 13 philanthropies, including JPMorgan Chase, where we collectively pool $4 million in grant funds annually and work across three focus areas: elevating what works, influencing policy, and changing the narrative about housing. As described in an earlier article in this in-depth series, collective funding through FHO complements the investments that each foundation makes on its own. FHO has a role in seeding and piloting strategies and amplifying the voice of the most impacted people within these solutions. Member foundations can then advance solutions even farther by helping to scale up pilot programs in the areas where they work and carrying local voices to audiences they might not otherwise reach.
Local initiatives will tell funders and the housing industry a lot about the partnerships and strategies needed to reduce evictions, create and preserve affordable housing, and encourage the development of racially just housing policies. In this article, we’ll explore an example of a successful housing justice initiative in Miami-Dade County and share what we’ve learned from working together with the local practitioners on the front lines of America’s housing crisis.
Key Ingredients of Local Initiatives
Fifty percent of FHO’s annual budget goes to supporting and amplifying local work. But funders and their grantee partners can’t rely on dollars alone to achieve big changes; we have to work together and advance strategic solutions that have the greatest impact, influence, and leverage. From our experience as a funder and a leader of an organization working in communities, and as a member and a grantee partner of FHO, local housing initiatives have shown success when they are:
- Focused on systems change—designed to eliminate the barriers to access, affordability, and stability that are embedded in the systems that determine who gets to live where. This includes testing new innovations and models that can influence policy and practice, and building tenant and resident power over the long-term.
- Grounded in racial equity—designed to redress harms and inequities in housing; eliminate racism in policies, institutions, and structures; and build the power, leadership, and wealth of people who have been most impacted by racism in housing.
- Community-driven—led by and centered on those directly impacted by housing injustice, addressing the specific issues impeding their progress and what they want to see in their communities. Beginning with our response to the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, FHO has increased the number of grants given to local organizations, and today about two-thirds of our grants fund local initiatives.
- Cross-sector, multi-system, and collaborative—working collectively with nonprofit, private, and public sectors and across the many systems that touch people’s lives, such as health, education, employment, criminal justice, and aligning the skills, knowledge, and resources of multiple organizations to maximize their impact. In 2022, 57 percent of FHO’s grants, and 76 percent of total awarded funds, went to multi-organization collaboratives.
- Knowledge-building—designed as opportunities to strengthen the housing industry, especially by supporting BIPOC leaders’ access to professional and leadership development and by enabling funders to learn what works on the ground.
Piloting Cross-Sector Solutions in Miami-Dade County
Through “elevating what works,” FHO made a two-year, $330,000 grant to support collaboration among four organizations in Miami-Dade County and statewide in Florida, all led by people of color: the Community Justice Project (CJP), a group of lawyers that works with community organizers and grassroots groups in low-income communities of color; Miami Workers Center (MWC), a member-led organization building power with tenants, workers, and women; Florida Immigrant Coalition, a statewide coalition advancing immigrant justice; and Florida Rising Together, which organizes tenants to conduct policy advocacy. The organizations’ mission: to confront the root causes of the eviction crisis in Miami-Dade County and statewide, including systemic racism and inequality and a legal system that does not adequately protect marginalized renters. The initiative provides frontline, culturally fluent eviction defense, legal assistance, and community education to help renters stay where they are or, when necessary, find a better alternative.
The community-driven element of this grant supports weekly, multilingual “Know your Rights” trainings on renter protection and self-help measures. It has reached about 1,500 renters and tenant union members, with an emphasis on low-income Black and Indigenous women, women of color, and women heads of household—especially those who work in the cleaning and caring sectors, who are often most vulnerable to eviction. Through a statewide hotline operated by Florida Immigrant Coalition, immigrants receive multilingual help navigating the housing and legal systems and understanding eviction rules. Attorneys with the Community Justice Project are on call to help organizers working with tenants who have an eviction case filed against them or face illegal housing conditions.
MWC applied the same techniques used by get-out-the-vote and census-completion campaigns and knocked on hundreds of doors to reach people who could benefit from eviction defense resources. That was effective. But to ensure that the most vulnerable people in communities weren’t left behind, and to center their experiences and build their capacities to shift power in their favor, more specialized efforts were also needed. Together, MWC and CJP curate community advocacy through arts and storytelling, creating spaces where tenants could share their stories with new, broader audiences, and an artist in residence worked with community members to highlight specific issues, such as an audio/visual installation featuring the responses filed in court by tenants facing eviction and a short film capturing tenant leaders’ efforts to secure expanded rights.
The grantee organizations and community residents collaborate with artists, researchers, and journalists to track evictions, advocate for systemic interventions, and shift the narrative about housing from one of scarcity to one in which housing is a basic human right. CJP created a dashboard to track eviction filings, available on CJP’s website, which then equipped organizers and community leaders to use the data in conversations with local commissioners and state legislators to paint a fuller picture of the crisis tenants faced. An award-winning journalist, Nadege Green, documented the history of tenant movements in Florida to provide historical context and continues to cover current tenant battles. One of Green’s articles, published in February 2022 on medium.com, focused on tenants in Hialeah, a city in the Miami metropolitan area. Miami Workers Center helped tenants form a tenant union, which Community Justice Project provided legal representation for, after real estate investors who purchased their building increased rents a staggering 65 percent. Green wrote of similar organizing by Hialeah tenants 40 years ago that had succeeded in stopping or limiting the increases. Out of the present-day fight grew policy models for expanded notice, which now cover more than half of Florida renters.
These strategies have had an impact locally and nationally. Miami-Dade County became the first county in the nation to declare a COVID-related eviction moratorium. Miami Workers Center organized tenant leaders to persuade city leaders to offer temporary rental assistance, using coronavirus relief dollars. MWC then developed and organized constituents around a Tenant’s Bill of Rights, which called on Miami-Dade County to establish dedicated capacity for tenant advocacy, inform tenants of their rights, address discrimination based on past evictions, enforce accessibility and safety for tenants, protect tenants’ freedom to organize with neighbors, and ensure that tenants facing eviction have legal representation in court.
In May 2022, Miami-Dade County commissioners passed the Tenant’s Bill of Rights ordinance, which met the tenants’ demands and established in county government an Office of Housing Advocacy (OHA), which collaborates with other county departments, developers, nonprofits, and other community stakeholders to formulate policies and initiatives, coordinate responses, and serve as a clearinghouse on issues related to affordable housing nationwide. One of OHA’s roles is to educate the community on tenants’ rights and make the process for filing complaints more robust and visible; to that end, it provides toolkits on the Tenant’s Bill of Rights for renters and landlords.
Now FHO’s grant is supporting collaborative efforts alongside Florida Rising Together and the Florida Immigrant Coalition to scale successes in community organizing and renter protection from the county to the state level. JPMorgan Chase also separately made a $1.6 million investment to Community Justice Project as part of its Housing Innovation Program to implement the community lawyering model supporting grassroots organizations and tenant-led campaigns, and to expand this model beyond Miami-Dade to eight other counties across Florida.
Developing Leaders of Color
Lifting up and investing in local solutions is key, but making sure the leaders of color spearheading this work in their communities are also lifted up and invested in is even more important. If funders provide capital, but no support to help leaders get the most out of it, we’re not doing a good job of positioning people of color and the organizations they lead for success.
To address this, FHO supports leadership development of tenant leaders. One example is Miami Workers Center’s tenant organizing meetings and tenant advice assemblies, which convene hundreds of members and residents. Graduates serve as peer leaders, educating other community members about their rights and accompanying them to eviction hearings. Similarly, JPMorgan Chase incorporated funding for adaptive leadership training as an integral part of the Connecting Capital and Community initiative where the majority of organizations and project managers are leaders of color. Investments like these have become an essential part of committing to racial equity and community-driven change.
Sustaining Support to Maintain Local Wins
There’s always a risk in seeding or scaling up “innovative local models,” especially when much of what we’re funding is new to the field. Even as we’re replicating successes in new places, we have to keep pushing in the cities we worked with previously, because local change isn’t a one-and-done undertaking.
For example, when it comes to local policy change, first local governments must be persuaded to pass ordinances that acknowledge a serious housing emergency and propose policy interventions. If local government passes the ordinance, support and mobilization from residents are needed to sustain the work—and likewise, long-term funding. Even then, the wins aren’t permanent. In some states, such as Florida, local government and voters must re-approve the rent stabilization policy every year to keep it in place. In other places, such as St. Paul, Minnesota, the city council passed a voter-approved rent control ordinance in 2021 but amended it less than a year later to exempt recently vacated units and buildings constructed in the past or next 20 years—effectively gutting the reform. We’ve also seen time and again that deep, authentic collaboration across sectors is hard and takes significant time and investment.
What Funders Can Do
This work is especially critical now, as JPMorgan Chase Institute research has shown almost one in four renters experienced a greater than 10 percent drop in total income during the pandemic, even after accounting for government support. That’s why JPMorgan Chase is a member of FHO, and why we also separately have a $400 million, five-year philanthropic commitment and data-driven policy recommendations to improve housing affordability and stability for Black, Hispanic, Latino, and other households of color. Two major initiatives driving this work are the Housing Innovation Program in partnership with the Urban Institute, where we are testing and scaling innovative affordable housing solutions, and Connecting Capital and Community in partnership with Center for Community Investment, where we are bringing stakeholders together across sectors to solve local housing affordability challenges. These commitments and policy solutions are part of the firm’s $30 billion commitment to advance racial equity and help drive an inclusive economic recovery.
Affordable housing and eviction diversion are now prominent topics of public debate and seem poised to stay there a while. Funders and their partner organizations, system leaders and service providers, tenants and landlords, policy makers and advocates can build on what we now know to create increasingly powerful solutions. When we do, we elevate not only good strategies but the entire housing industry.
Funders should look for evidence of what’s working at the local level to continue to expand these efforts in more communities and continue to prioritize the key ingredients we’ve seen contribute to successful local initiatives: focus on systems change, ground the work in racial equity, uplift and invest in the leadership of the people most directly affected, meaningfully resource organizations on the front lines of housing justice, and strengthen the field by building knowledge of what works on the ground.
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Read more stories by Mercedeh Mortazavi & Alana Greer.