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Radical Homeownership

Facilitated by: Sustainable Economies Law Center staff Chris Tittle, adélàjà simon, Janelle Orsi, and Dorian Payán

Featuring: Ariel Luckey of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Ojan Mobedshahi East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative

This workshop was advertised as an hour long. And we have so much juicy content and so many people we want to engage in this dialog, we're going to add an extra 15 minutes at the end for small group conversations. Please stick around at the end to share your voice if you can! And apologies to those who didn't plan for this extra time.

How can people liberate themselves from the unfortunate predicament of private property ownership, while deepening their relationship to home and community? We’ll be exploring these questions and more in today’s workshop.

Cartoons by: Janelle Orsi, Erika Sato, Molly Keller, Ehsan Sadeghi

Old script:

[1.5 min] This is going to be a fast-paced 20-minute presentation, followed by 10 minutes where we’ll invite your ideas and questions. It’s a preview for what could become a day-long workshop, and it’s also designed to empower legal professionals with some high-level issue-spotting skills. Because chances are, if it hasn’t happened to you already, some homeowner will soon come to you asking for advice on how they can get themselves out of this awkward predicament of owning a home in this exploitative, speculative mess that is our private property system. We’re going to briefly outline some legal considerations to keep in mind, then list some of the legal tools or vehicles that people can use to return their homes to community stewardship now or in the future. If there’s time, we’ll even highlight policy solutions. Our intern Erika Sato has prepared the bulk of this presentation in conversation with me, and our intern Ehsan Sadeghi and I will present pieces. All three of us contributed cartoons, and a third intern, Molly Keller, also drew cartoons. Because this will be fast-paced, we’ll share a link to the slides and a video on the Law 4 Economic Democracy network afterwards so that you can digest the material more slowly. Please do keep in mind that we’re recording,

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If you need ASL interpretation, please “pin” the screen of

LISA WASHINGTON

ASL INTERPRETER

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Tomorrow at 4pm

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Thursday at 12:30PM

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Today:

1. What is Radical Real Estate?

2. Racialized housing inequality

3. Nuts & bolts & puzzles to untangle

4. Stories: Meet the radical homeowners and stewardship organizations (Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative)

5. Short Q&A with guests

6. Community conversations in breakout groups

7. Going forward: Next steps and other resources

8. Please take a moment to answer some questions. Thank you!

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Zoomzoomzoom

Zoomz

zzzzooooom

oomzoom

zoomzooomzoom

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Whose Land Are We On?

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Repatriation - Objects or People (treated as objects)

Cultural

Artifacts

People

Human

Remains

Antiquites

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Rematriation is the return of relations!

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5 things about private homeownership and racial capitalism

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1) US housing policy is designed around segregation

Here are just a few examples of public policy...

Chattel slavery
Jim Crow
Racially restrictive covenants
Single family zoning
Federal Housing Administration (redlining)
GI Bill
Mortgage interest deduction
Slum clearance
Housing and Urban Development Act
National Interstate and Defense Highways Act

I grew up in an essentially all white neighborhood even though i went to one of the most racially and ethnically diverse public school systems. I benefited tremendously from that diversity in my public schools. But why when nearly half of my classmates were people of color, was there only one Black family in my entire neighborhood?

This is a basic fact about US housing - it is designed for segregation. Since the violent overthrow of Reconstruction, both public policy and the private market have enforced racial segregation, from the Jim Crow “Black Codes” to the Housing and Urban Development Act in the 1970s to the Trump Administration’s repeal of Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing policy

To take just two specific examples:

Single family zoning: In the early 1900s it was common for cities to have explicitly racist zoning laws that prohibited Black people from living in certain neighborhoods. That was eventually ruled unconstitutional, but gave way to what is still the most ubiquitious form of residential zoning - ordinances that limit neighborhoods to single family homes. These laws don’t mention race, but have the impact of segregating neighborhoods based on whether people could afford single family homes. And to promote single family homeownership...

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is created in 1934 insures home mortgages...but only for houses well inside the boundaries of white neighborhoods. This leads to the industry standard practice of redlining, which systematically withholds credit from homebuyers in black neighborhoods. In subsidizing wealth creation for white familiies, and explicitly denying it to Black families, policies like this shaped our communities in ways that we are still dealing with. The targeted disinvestment in predominantly Black neighborhoods have created the conditions for the current onslaught of gentrification. As new people and new capital pour into places like the Bay Area, we are now seeing a kind of reverse migration back into racially segregated rural and suburban communities.

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2) Segregation enables wealth extraction & accumulation

Some facts:

Homes in majority Black neighborhoods are worth half the price as homes in all white neighborhoods
Racialized differences in home values amount to $156 billion in cumulative losses
White homeownership has hovered around 70% since the 1970s while Black homeownership has never surpassed 50%
The racial wealth gap is worse now than in 1963

But other than being morally wrong, what’s the big deal with segregation? Well, it’s at least in part because segregation enables wealth extraction and accumulation.

I recently became a homeowner myself after leaving the Bay Area to move back South. My wife and I bought a house in a historically Black neighborhood already advanced stages of gentrification. The people we bought it from sold it after only two years -- and realized a 40% profit for doing nothing at all but living in a neighborhood that had artificially depressed home values because it was a largely Black community.

This is a statistical pattern. Homes in majority Black neighborhoods are valued at roughly half the price as homes in neighborhoods with no black residents.
Homes of similar quality in neighborhoods with similar amenities are worth 23 percent less ($48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses) in majority black neighborhoods, compared to those with very few or no black residents. - Brookings study
White homeownership has hovered around 70% since the 1970s while Black homeownership has never surpassed 50% - meaning a majority of Black people have ALWAYS been renters with their monthly rent going largely to White landlords.
So whether they rent or own a home, people living in predominantly Black neighborhoods have wealth extracted from them or denied to them
Racial wealth gap is worse now than in 1963. Remember this is a wealth gap and wealth and wealth disparities are three times greater than income disparities. What’s one of the primary sources of wealth for most Americans? Homeownership.

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3) Homeownership creates wealth for white people ...

As mentioned earlier, the federal govt has long subsidized homeownership for white families. And my family is no different. My family benefitted from subsidized homeownership and education (through programs like the FHA and GI bill, which extended the same redlining standards to insure home mortgages for white veterans but locked out Black veterans.) My parents has already owned and sold multiple homes by the time I was born - they had access to wealth building tools that are a direct result of these government programs.

Likewise the federal govt pours over $400 billion to support asset development - primarily through single family homeownership -- and thus continues to subsidize white wealth accumulation while actually penalizing asset building for poor (and disproportionately Black) people. For example, most social safety net programs, like food and cash benefits, do not allow families to qualify if they have a few thousand dollars in assets.

So while homeownership has created a lot of wealth and relative security for white people …

it has also been one of the primary drivers of the racial wealth gap.

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4)...But can be a tool of dispossession for BIPOC

1968 Urban Housing and Development Act led to 10,000s of Black foreclosures

Proportionately fewer Black people own homes now than when segregation was legal

Particularly in the South, Heirs Property Laws make it extremely easy for developers to take family land from Black families

The subprime mortgage crisis was the greatest loss of Black wealth in modern US history

1)

To take one more example, the 1968 Urban Housing and Development Act -- passed in context of massive urban uprisings against racism and inequality -- made home mortgages available for $200 down payment, linked mortgage payments to income, and capped interest rates at 1% -- all backed by the federal govt’s guarantee to pay the difference. Sounds kinda good, no?

But what happened wasn’t all that surprising. Guaranteed to be paid back by the govt regardless of whether buyers could actually pay, real estate agents and banks colluded to sell uninhabitable homes to poor Black families for inflated prices. When the family couldn’t pay the mortgage or couldn’t afford the repairs necessary to make it even livable, the banks would foreclose, collect the principal from the fed govt, and then sell it to another poor Black family.

“As a result the nation’s first programs to encourage Balck homeownership ended in the 1980s with tens of thousands of foreclosures.” And turned into a gold mine for real estate agents and mortgage lenders. - Keeangha-Yamahtta Taylor

2)

The structure of property laws themselves have historically made land grabs easy. For example ...Heirs Property . Under these laws, title is split between all members of an extended family, and a developer only has to find one person, often someone living in another state with no relationship to that land, who is willing to sell and they can force a sale of the land that a family may have been living on for generations.

3)

Because of all this, today …

In 1968 x% of Black people were homeowners. And today it is 42%...

4)

In large part because of systemic shocks to the system like the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, which disproportionately targeted POC with subprime -- aka predatory -- mortgages.

Also worth mentioning that, as homeowners, my family lost a lot of wealth in the housing collapse, as did millions of people. So a system enabled by white supremacy actually hurt everyone which the exception of the superwealthy who profited from others’ loss.

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There is no way to abolish the racial wealth gap without transforming housing under (racial) capitalism

So in sum:

Single family homeownership is one of the main pillars of racialized wealth inequality

Both the private market and public policy have reinforced an economic and social order that tends to reward whiteness and prey on Blackness

With this in mind, it is arguably the responsibility of White people, or those of us who have benefitted from centuries of public policy and private market actions, to play a key role in transforming racialized wealth inequality.

As homeowners, perhaps we have a special responsibility and thus opportunity to do that, through both personal acts of reparations and rematriation, as well as collective actions to change the rules and spread wealth more equitably.

We don’t have all the answers for how to do this...that’s why we’re hosting this conversation! But we do have some initial thoughts on the mechanics of this. With that, I’ll turn it over to my coworker Janelle!

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Now, how do radical homeowners begin to shift

use, benefit, control, stewardship, and, ultimately, ownership of real estate

....toward communities focused on rematriation & reparations?

...from private, extractive, and exclusive….

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Legal Tools for Radical Homeownership

Let’s dig deeper during Part 2, �tomorrow at 4pm Pacific.

Meanwhile, �here’s a short overview.

How can we build a better foundation?

We won’t spend too much time on this today because we have a whole 90 minute workshop on it tomorrow. Plus, jumping into the legal strategies is kinda the final step in a multi-stage and multilayered process that involves thinking through emotional, social, financial, practical, and so many other considerations. But if centuries of laws and practices have built the foundation for where we are now, we’re going to have to do some deeeep legal work to get out of it. So I’ll share a bit about how are thinking about the legal work and what radical homeownership may look like in practice and on paper.

At Sustainable Economies Law Center, we’ve had a growing number of people attend our legal advice clinics or write to us with so many visions of what to do with their home. Everything from just sharing part of their yard to transferring the whole property to a land trust. And everyone starts from a different place. When we sat down to brainstorm strategies with them, we found it surprisingly complicated, legally, financially, interpersonally, and more!

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Homes are like butterflies...

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Home: a thing of infinite community value

Community-owned solar project

Housing for people of all means

Shared food garden

Classroom

Venue for gathering

Wildlife habitat

Creative studio

Resilience hub

Neighborhood enterprise

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Not just a thing �to sell.

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Untangling possibilities

Our legal system presents a web of complications that make most homes bound to get swallowed up by the market.

Market

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Apologies to actual spiders

The real estate market is waaaaaay creepier.

Blackstone

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Legal constraints

Mortgage loan agreements

Land use laws & building codes

Homeowners insurance

Real estate professionals: realtors, escrow, �& title companies

Tax

Laws that limit “restraints on alienation”

And many more!

So even while there are many legal binds to untangle, we are VERY motivated to do so as if our lives depend on it. Here are just a few that directly impact radical homeowners who have creative ideas for opening and sharing use of their property, for transitioning homes into hands of community, and for keeping it forever off the speculative market. Some of these things are built into our laws – like land use and building codes, while other things are built into common contractual agreements that we tend to have very little power over – like mortgages and insurance policies that strictly limit what we can do with our homes. There’s also the conventions and practices of how professionals work and the fact that they will not at all resonate with what radical homeowners want to do. And there are some things built into the deep roots of our legal system that show us that our system was designed to enable wealth extraction from private property. On the top right, I note that there are laws that limit “restraints on alienation.”

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Our laws WANT us to “alienate” real estate

For example, see CA Civil Code 880.020:

“Real property is a basic resource of the people of the state and should be made freely alienable and marketable to the extent practicable in order to enable and encourage full use and development of the real property”

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Many threads to untangle

New sources of finance

Legislation to liberate land use

New insurance products

Create tax incentives

Legislation to rein in the market

Create a public benefit-oriented real estate profession

Mortgage loan agreements

Land use laws & building codes

Homeowners insurance

Real estate professionals: realtors, escrow, �title companies

Tax

Laws that limit “restraints on alienation”

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Save the Date: Liberating Land Use

panel and discussion on November 19 at noon

Check our events page!

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More layers:

Economic security

We’re treating �homes as �“nest eggs.”

Fewer than half of Americans have savings.

Our social safety net is weak.

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More layers:

Economic security

We’re treating �homes as �nest eggs.

Fewer than half of Americans have savings.

Our social safety net is weak.

Advocate for universal health care and guaranteed housing.

Rethink savings �as a source of financial security.

Build mutual aid and cooperative movements!

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Cultural layers

Our culture doesn’t value interdependence.

Asking for help is viewed as a weakness, not a gift.

Dominant image of home fosters supremacy of white, upper- middle class nuclear family.

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Social and interpersonal layers

Need to communicate, collaborate, and address tensions with neighbors, tenants, housemates, and family.

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Emotional and spiritual layers

How do we practice moving beyond fear and scarcity to find liberation and deep satisfaction in our interdependence with others?

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I’m freeeeee! Now what?

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Stewardship Organizations

�Such as:

Land trusts�

Permanent real estate cooperatives

And groups of all kinds!

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Critical

Elements

Spread control to small, decentralized, and infinitely diverse groups of land stewards everywhere

Keep assets permanently rooted in community

Spread wealth to communities

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Such organizations will naturally guide us through the economic, cultural, social, interpersonal, emotional, and spiritual dimensions, because we will already be practicing new ways of being.

Notice how such organization naturally address the economic, cultural, social, interpersonal, emotional, and spirital elements.

Radical = roots. Mutual care is the root of human communities

And at a time when we need rapid transformation, what’s powerful about cooperatives and other participatory organizations is they tap into a key renewable resource, which is people’s intrinsic motivation. That motivation is driven by survival instincts, to care for one’s own family and community, to provide for the next generation. Plus, it taps into problem-solving capacities not available in top-down or arms-length solutions. When people come together to buy a building and they want to keep it affordable, there are thousands of ways they can solve for affordability, drawing upon their talents and creative problem solving. People come up with creative, responsive, and adaptive solutions when they are in the driver’s seat of their own economic destiny. This is what gives cooperatives and participatory organizations incredible potential to spread, scale, and provide more effectively for community needs.

Isn’t reciprocity the most natural and timeless thing on earth?

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We need a whole forest ecosystem of stewardship organizations!

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How to get from here to there?

Life leases and �life estates

Split title

Wills & trusts

Purchase options

Easements

Shared

ownership

Lease &�licenses

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The world needs stories!

Stories of radical homeowners of varied backgrounds and situations. But they are shy, still getting untangled, and not wanting to be put on pedestals.

And we need stories of land stewards, like Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, but their leaders are working sooo hard to navigate the tangled web.

Need for a diversity of relatable stories. (also stories that speak to would-be home owners, those who are reluctantly considering buying property)

Need for a critical mass of stories of relatable homeowners so that everyone can see their role. But challenge of telling stories without lifting homeowners on a pedestal. This is about liberating homeowners. (could be good to explicitly name this as counter to the saviorism/philanthropic narrative)

Magical powers of imagination to counter centuries of American Dream propoganda… its nearly impossible for most to imagine an alternative pathway to what we really desire, “success” “freedom” “safety”

And the act of telling ones story – and having it be heard and affirmed – may strengthen homeowners on their path to rematriating their land.

Who collects the stories and how. For whom are they. The process is as important as the product.

And stories help us do this in a more nuanced and thoughtful way. When doing something outside of the box and building a new one, all the details and nuances are key. There’s not a copy and paste solution yet, and there probably won’t be for a long time.

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How are radical homeowners navigating fears?

Insufficient resources in old age, sickness, or disability
Feelings of anger and betrayal by family members
Fear of relationships breaking down
Tensions with housemates
Tensions with neighbors
Being judged as unwise or irresponsible
Sharing exposes owners to liability
Costly legal documents or compliance costs
Tensions around power: People tend to default to the authority of the person on title
Fear of not belonging in the community that takes shape on the property
Fear of creating a chaotic or unpredictable home or environment
The future is so unknowable, there’s no way to come up with a perfect plan

How to soothe our reptilian brains?

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What inspires radical homeowners?

Yearning to disrupt and heal their own ancestral lineage of theft and exploitation
Desire for children to inherit and learn to depend on a culture and community of caring and sharing, rather than mere dollars
Belief that the more we give and share now, the best chance our �world and society have in the face of immense challenges
By giving more than we believe we can spare, we are pushed beyond �our comfort zones, and that path of letting go is one of liberation
We are better off if we trust and open ourselves to �the care that our community can provide for us.
Savings won’t keep us safe. Community will.
California is on fire. We need to learn, re-learn, �and practice land stewardship to restore ecosystems

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Conversations with stewardship organizations

What’s your organization’s vision and who’s involved?
What role can radical homeowners play in your work? How do you envision the relationship?
How can radical homeowners connect with or support your work?

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Ariel Luckey of

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Sogorea Te’ Land Trust is an urban Indigenous women-led land trust that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people.

Rematriate: to restore a people to their rightful place in sacred relationship with their ancestral land.

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sogoreate-landtrust.org

ariel@rematriatetheland.org

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Ojan Mobedshahi of

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STAFF COLLECTIVE

SELC

POCSHN

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Our mission is to facilitate BIPOC and allied communities to cooperatively organize, finance, purchase, occupy, and steward properties, taking them permanently off the speculative market, creating community controlled assets, empowering communities to cooperatively lead a just transition from an extractive capitalist system into one where communities are ecologically, emotionally, spiritually, culturally, and economically restorative and regenerative.

MISSION

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Dealing with Legacies of Institutional Racism

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EB PREC creates pathways for everyday people to organize, finance, acquire and co-steward land and housing on our own terms because Housing is a Right Not a Commodity

EB PREC is Transforming an Unjust Finance & Housing System to build collective wealth among historically disenfranchised Black, Indigenous and POC communities to Redistribute the Resources

EB PREC cultivates democratic and non violent governance to short circuit learned colonial power practices, rebuild our capacity to heal one another and use Indigenous practices to Reimagine Collective Power

MISSION PILLARS

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EB PREC CO-OWNERS

CO-OWNERSHIP

RESIDENTS

STAFF

COMMUNITY

INVESTORS

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COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

PROPERTY

DONATIONS

RADICAL LOANS AND INVESTMENTS

ebprec.org/intake-form

ebprec.org/investor-owner

ebprec.org/community-owner

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Single-Family Homes

Multi-Family

Mixed-Use Cultural

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Thank You

Learn more at ebprec.org

Online Orientations every 1st and 3rd Tuesdays

Email: ojan@ebprec.org

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Meet more land stewards!

Join us on Thursday at 12:30PM

The History of Land Grabs & How to Fight Back

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Short Q&A with guests

Please share your questions in the chat box

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Community conversation breakouts

In groups of 3, please reflect on these questions:

What is your vision for liberating / rematriating land?
What’s your role in that vision?
What questions or fears come up for you?
What is needed to support your vision?

10 minutes in breakout groups | 3 minutes each to share

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Please share any recommended resources in the chat!

And here are a couple:

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Rightful Return

A project launching in 2021 to educate, organize, and support white folks to return land and/or the resources to purchase land to Indigenous and Black folks, centering learning, healing, repair, and the unequivocal support of Indigenous and Black self and community-determination.

What do white folks need to learn and do to prepare to engage in the process of returning land in a good way?

Rightful Return Guidebook - Fall 2021

cooperkfreeman@gmail.com

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Regional chapters for people under 35 with access to class privilege.
Organizes youth (and their families) to redistribute land, wealth, & power in non-harmful ways
There’s a land justice working group
Land Reparations & Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit
Resources for Land Justice
Reparations Summer and Black Land & Power
Contact me (Robin Crane): k.bean.crane@gmail.com

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What’s next for this work?

Communities of practice?
Network-building?
Storytelling project?
Legal workshops and resources?

You tell us!

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What’s your role in the radical homeowner movement?
What are your hopes and needs?
Any suggestions? �

Please take a minute to respond to a few questions. Thank you so much!