(Illustration by Raffi Marhaba, The Dream Creative)
“If we want a change, we have to be quite intentional. We’ve got to tell the damn truth that the system we currently have is oppressive.” That’s how Michael McAfee, president and CEO of PolicyLink, describes the centrality of narrative change to the cause of housing justice. In 2020, Funders for Housing and Opportunity (FHO) gave Community Change, PolicyLink, and Race Forward an $800,000 grant to analyze the dominant housing narrative, design and test new messages, and train housing leaders to use a new narrative centered on racial justice and housing security in their organizing and advocacy efforts. In 2021, FHO gave these organizations a $1 million, three-year grant to encourage broad adoption of the new housing justice narrative, in part by working with artists and creators to shift the cultural landscape. Individual FHO members also gave a total of $7.3 million in aligned funding, over three years, to support this work.
More than 1,500 housing leaders have been trained in the new narrative, and 24 fellows (most of whom have experienced housing instability) practiced the new narrative in community actions and national forums, spurring concrete policy wins across the country, such as changes to restrictive zoning in Denver. This unusual collaboration among three very different organizations reflects FHO’s emphasis on silo-spanning efforts that use narrative change, policy advocacy and organizing, and local collaboration to make the housing system more racially equitable and economically just. FHO interviewed the organizations’ leaders, Dorian Warren, Michael McAfee, and Glenn Harris, respectively, about lessons on narrative change from this experience. Their responses have been combined and edited for length and continuity.
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FHO: What is narrative, in the context of housing justice?
Michael McAfee, president and CEO of PolicyLink: Narrative about housing is the dominant logic held by citizens about who belongs in a community and who does not, who is worthy to have places designed for them and who is not.
Dorian Warren, president of Community Change: Narrative is a dimension of power. It shapes what is seen as normal, or status quo. In terms of housing narratives, the dominant narrative is one of neoliberalism, in the sense of all risks and outcomes being based on individual behaviors and actions. This narrative doesn’t address systems and rules or what we know, from social science, to be the actual causes of housing injustice and housing insecurity, especially for Black and Brown folks. In the dominant narrative, you’re on your own and any failings are your own fault.
FHO: How do race and poverty enter into the narrative on housing?
Glenn Harris, president of Race Forward: Housing is a core way in which we see structural racism manifest that limits the potential of people’s lives.
Michael McAfee: Housing in America is about race, and it always has been. We know that housing is fundamental because housing is a prerequisite to everything: health, safety, education, well-being. But the dominant narrative overrides that knowledge with anti-Black racism—the desire not to be associated with blackness and to be as far away from poor people as possible. Entire cities were designed with those goals in mind.
The American dream plays out in the most hostile ways in housing. The American dream says that you buy a house and keep on moving up, and your generation will be better off than the last. But that often happens by displacing or removing the people who built those areas and the culture of vibrant life in them. We push them out and never worry about where they go. Meanwhile, if you get Covid and can’t work, so you can’t pay the mortgage or rent, you discover that America’s social safety net sees the average person as a lazy, shiftless being who is not worthy of support, who should just get the bare minimum so they can get back to work.
FHO: What would it look like to have a more honest, more just narrative about housing?
Michael McAfee: If our answer every time someone pushes back is to avoid talking about race, we will never have a narrative powerful enough to win, because even the people we’re trying to serve will see the disingenuousness and won’t stand with us. If we want to win on our issues we need to stop being afraid, straighten our damn spines up, and fight for it. We’ve got to build the muscle up to do that.
Glenn Harris: People want to imagine better futures for themselves, their families, and their neighbors. So, we’ve learned to talk about housing with messages that are values-based. This helps people understand housing as a fundamental right and need. Housing represents stability, the possibility of a quality education, of a meaningful democracy. In that way, safe, reliable housing is a core part of what it would mean for us to be living in a just, multiracial democracy in which we’re all thriving.
We need to underscore the collective benefit of all of us being housed. We’ve seen that sort of narrative shift succeed with other issues, such as smoking. The argument for smoking used to be completely rooted in rugged individualism and personal expression, as epitomized by the Marlboro Man. That narrative held sway not just in policy but in public opinion until the 1980s. The shift came about by creating a new narrative centered around the importance of our collective health and how secondhand smoke impacts all of us.
Another narrative we’ve been fighting is that market solutions are fundamentally fair and are the best way to ensure fairness, neutrality, and objectivity. Structural racism tells us that isn’t really the case. Private solutions to things like housing need to be regulated to ensure we collectively benefit from them and to undo the harms done to Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). So, we need to underscore the role of government in making housing justice real.
Michael McAfee: Unfortunately, most narrative work in America has become like snake oil: It’s designed to make white people feel comfortable with the racist reality of the world. That’s not good narrative work to me. Good narrative work is about getting America to be comfortable facing the problems we are confronting, and inspiring people to envision a thriving and shared future and to do something about it.
I don’t believe there are any fancy slogans or magic language that will make people who’ve bought into the old narrative give it up. We also know from research that talking about a housing crisis or eviction crisis no longer resonates with folks, first because these are not new crises. People are numb to this reality, it happened by design, and now, the oppressive nature of our housing economy is negatively impacting a large portion of white America, therefore people are more concerned with desperately clinging to their tiny portion of the so-called American dream.
Dorian Warren: There are several other key components of a better narrative. One is that this is a systemic problem that is the result of multiple kinds of choices, particularly policy choices by policy makers and other elites with power. The rules that govern the housing sector either enable discrimination and injustice or combat it. Those who benefit from the system as it’s been designed and constructed are wealthy people, particularly investors and investment institutions, private developers, landlords, and large property owners, to the detriment of the vast majority of people struggling to get housing.
Glenn Harris: In terms of specific language, “affordable” housing is not an effective way to describe what we’re asking for, because it’s too contextual. Plus, when we start with an affordability frame we’re entering the issue with a policy prescription rather than emphasizing the value that’s really at stake. That narrative is about competition, and if someone doesn’t understand the history of institutional racism and how it’s impacted Black and Brown people I could see them saying, “We just need to work harder, get a better job, stop being poor so we can move to a better place.” Whereas if we talk about the importance of “guaranteed” housing, it’s a narrative of responsibility to one another and the value of interconnectedness. The underlying notion is that anyone should be able to access housing if housing costs are tiered to what people can afford.
FHO: Who should we be trying to reach with the new narrative?
Dorian Warren: The first audience is those directly impacted by housing injustice. They need a story that helps them understand it’s not their fault that they’re in this situation, and they need to see themselves in the solutions. The next layer would be our base of low-income Black and Brown people across the country who may not be suffering housing insecurity right now but maybe they have in the past, or for sure they know someone who has, and may experience it in the future. Then there’s an audience of persuadables—people who might have an interest in housing justice but don’t have tools to incorporate a racial justice analysis in their work. They are movable if we can make the case and show the evidence.
FHO: In this initiative, you’ve looked at ways to use arts and culture as vehicles for a housing justice narrative. Why is that an important connection to make?
Glenn Harris: Sometimes we think the only way we can make political change is by talking to elected officials. But culture is the way people create meaning in so many different facets of life. When we introduce cultural organizing into conversations about housing justice, we bring core values back to the center. Arts and culture are spaces that invite us to wrestle with ideas, so they’re one of few places you can grapple honestly with the contradiction between whether housing is a commodity or something fundamental that everybody just deserves. People are much more likely to engage in that discussion around art or music or creative spaces.
It's also important to have consistent messaging, at scale, to shape a narrative, and that can happen when messages are reinforced in movies, music, art, poems, television, and so on. Big shifts in our collective consciousness, such as support for marriage equality, happen because there are people and organizations working across sectors who are getting at the same narrative and creating immersive experiences that are likely to reach a broad audience.
FHO: What are some strategies and tools that help people advance on the pathway from housing as a commodity to housing as a fundamental common good, even when it might be against their individual economic interests?
Dorian Warren: The main tools are: frameworks of how to talk about housing justice in different way; concrete examples of messages that work; evidence and data that shows why they work; trainings to help people adopt and internalize these new frameworks; and case studies on where we’ve seen a different approach work on the ground.
In terms of strategy, we have to center race and the role of racial justice. Race-blind narratives do not work to advance goals around housing justice.
Michael McAfee: We have to be able to have deep, nuanced, truthful conversations to get folks to move with us and to say, “This is what a home means to us.” That’s one reason our project is so collaborative. Policy expertise, data, and the National Equity Atlas (a detailed report card on racial and economic equity in the United States) are brought to a table of culture bearers and creators, community folks, organizers, activists, and others coming together to form a narrative and a platform for telling their stories. Our strategy is very rigorous in terms of creating a story platform, combining the science of shifting attitudes with the art, and infusing the creative capital to launch and tell narratives in a way that is both global and hyper-local.
FHO: It’s unusual to have three major national organizations like PolicyLink, Race Forward, and Community Change, working collaboratively on a project instead of in competition. What are the benefits and challenges of this collaboration?
Dorian Warren: You’re right, this is not normal in our sector. We felt we had to figure out a different way to move from a framework of zero-sum competition to a frame of abundance and solidarity, because the problem is so large that none of us is going to solve it alone.
There were lots of differences of opinion, but we leaned into them and got to solutions. I appreciate the partnership because it has helped us grow and learn.
Glenn Harris: I agree. What’s important is that we three organizations came together to try to figure out how we can break out of our own silos and competitive realities. It does take a lot of coordination and a big investment of time, given the scope and scale of the project and all the funders, plus many of their grantees, who are participating in the process. None of us could have done it alone, but we still don’t have all the infrastructure we need to hold it all. That is the tension, but also what unleashes the possibility!
FHO: Funders for Housing and Opportunity also has a collaborative structure. What are the benefits and challenges of working on narrative change with a funder collaborative?
Glenn Harris: One thing that’s been good about this project is FHO driving what people are agreeing to collectively. Part of the value was understanding that narrative is a great entry door in that way. We don’t have to be in policy agreement to be in narrative agreement.
Michael McAfee: FHO gave us resources that are significant enough that we’ve got a fighting chance to get this right, and they capitalized us in unrestricted ways that allow us to test and innovate, which is important when you’re doing adaptive work. The funders in FHO also are learning along with us how to struggle through a complex issue together. That is no different from what PolicyLink, Race Forward, and Community Change are doing—to abandon our siloed focus in favor of our combined strengths in service of something that’s far more noble. That’s the way the work should be done.
FHO: Looking ahead, what opportunities do you see to further advance a housing justice narrative? What’s on the horizon?
Dorian Warren: I think we’re seeing nails in the coffin of neoliberalism that create openings for us going ahead. Some big narratives on the economy and the role of government are up for grabs in ways they were not before the pandemic.
Michael McAfee: I agree, we are at an inflection point. The nation is talking about housing in ways it hasn’t before, and folks are gaining the capacity, appetite, and energy to do something about it. We also have an invitation, embedded in the founding documents of this nation, to continue to perfect our democracy and our economy. We should take up that invitation. If we could see our fates as inextricably bound to each other, we could possibly get beyond the NIMBYism surrounding housing. We have an opportunity, from a nation-building standpoint, to find the stories that would allow us to see our fates as connected—and design just and fair places and a fair and just housing economy.
That said, we are in perilous territory right now. We could still lose on racial equity because folks are too timid to fight for the things we care about, and housing is one of them. This moment is about finding our voice to advance a vision for America that doesn’t need to be throttled back because white folks—or Black folks—are uncomfortable with it. We have a right to advance an idea of America that is about improving the well-being of everyone. This is our moment to advance this vision.
FHO: What should philanthropy and other social change leaders do to make good use of the opportunities?
Dorian Warren: Funders need to make long-term commitments and also get comfortable with making big bets, calibrated to the scale of the crisis, that may not work out exactly as envisioned. And we’ll need a lot more collaboration to have an impact greater than the sum of the partners.
Glenn Harris: We need to put changes in a frame people can see themselves in. Stories of success feed hope, reveal what we mean by systemic impacts, and exercise the muscle of thinking systemically. We need support for narrative infrastructure, to deliver stories more broadly. And we need to continue to develop and disseminate tools and resources for engaging in conversations about narrative and for talking about housing justice in new ways.
Michael McAfee: The bottom line is that if you want to win on housing, you’ve got to win on race. If you want to win on race, you’ve got to win on the design challenges of the nation that are holding too many people back. The narrative will never be right until we get the race stuff and the design stuff right. We are in a moment where we’re going to either accelerate our work or we’re going to roll back into the Dark Ages, because our opposition is going to take us there. And if we roll back, it will be our own fault for not acting on the opportunity.
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Read more stories by Glenn Harris, Michael McAfee & Dorian Warren.