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Creating Housing Futures Together

Housing as health, housing as community, housing as a vehicle for liberatory and reparative spatial justice — these are the pillars of the future we are working to build. Envisioning bright and bold housing futures for our communities means new models and frameworks that are unapologetically inclusive of all and sustainable for an ever-changing future. Communities most impacted by systemic housing inequities are boldly imagining these new possibilities, embedding principles of spatial justice at their core. Building on the legacy of Fair Housing Month, every April, Housing Futures Month calls on each of us to consider how we each can contribute to designing and implementing housing models that allow everyone the stability and ability to dream about and pursue bold futures. 

Today, more than 50 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968′s prohibition against housing discrimination, exploitative and discriminatory real estate practices and deep inequities proliferate. In this chapter of our collective histories, the timeline of progress has been designed to lock Black, Brown, and Indigenous people out of the future. Under constant threat of displacement from their homes through economic or climate change pressures, and often occupied with planning how to survive the next day, week, or month, Black, Brown, and Indigenous people and communities — many holding intersectional identities across race, gender, nativity, disability, sexuality, and religion —  are left with little space or time to dream about and plan for their futures.  

Families can have housing, job, and educational opportunities without experiencing poverty, but this is only possible when community investment is prioritized over profit, and when housing stability eclipses commodification as an outcome. We can create a reality where families aren’t being pushed out of their communities through eviction, redevelopment, rising rents, property taxes, and climate change. We can ensure communities have not only material resources they need, but the space and time to think more creatively, expansively, and positively about the futures of their neighborhoods and what a thriving community looks like for them. 

The housing crisis requires a comprehensive and collaborative approach that involves all stakeholders and seeks to address the root causes of the housing crisis, such as the commodification of land and property, systemic exclusion and extraction, flawed policies that create scarcity and competition, and power imbalances in the housing market. Today, a person’s zip code is a strong determining factor in the quality of life they can expect. Housing Futures Month encourages us to build futures where people in all zip codes can thrive, engaging people from all backgrounds to envision and work toward creating inclusive, affordable, and sustainable housing models for the future. We use the month of April to dream, vision, explore, play, and create new housing futures together!

Housing Futures Month is an opportunity to reimagine our approach to housing and land, and to work towards a future where everyone has access to safe, affordable, resilient, and dignified housing. This can only be achieved through collective action, innovative thinking, and a commitment to promoting equity and inclusion in all aspects of housing policy and practice. 

Housing Futures Month Syllabus

This syllabus offers the opportunity to engage deeper in the many facets of housing futures. You can choose your own adventure — working solo, with your family, in your community, in any order you want — this is meant to be adapted and remixed in whatever ways support your exploration.

Watch

Listen

  • Moor Mother - Circuit City [FULL ALBUM STREAM] Poet and noise musician Moor Mother presents her first theatrical work, a futuristic exploration — part musical, part choreopoem, part play — of public/private ownership, housing, and technology set in a living room in a corporate-owned apartment complex. Framed by Moor mother’s bold poetry performed live by Irreversible Entanglements, Mental Jewelry, Madam Data, and Elon Battle, Circuit City is an afrofuturist song cycle for our current climate.
  • Housing as a Human Right - Radical Imagination Podcast. Features Dominique Walker, co-founder of Moms4Housing, discusses how the group is demanding access to housing and taking on investors who treat housing as a commodity they can buy and flip for profit, while a half-million Americans experience homelessness and millions more struggle with skyrocketing rents. Also featuring Tara Raghuveer, the Housing Campaign Director for People’s Action, about the Homes Guarantee, an ambitious proposal to rebuild and reimagine housing
  • Afrofuturism and Housing Justice - Radical Imagination Podcast. In this episode, Angela talks to PolicyLink Housing Director Rasheedah Phillips — Afrofuturist, attorney, tenant organizer, policy advocate, and interdisciplinary artist.  Listen in as Angela and Rasheedah discuss how  time can be created, reclaimed, resourced, and redeemed; and the ways that we, collectively, must operate from a place of temporal abundance versus temporal scarcity.
  • Realizing Spatial Reparations - Radical Imagination Podcast. The pursuit of spatial reparations is a journey toward a more equitable future. It is a journey that requires us to acknowledge the past, understand the present, and imagine a future where everyone has access to housing, resources, and opportunities. It is a journey that we can all be a part of and one that will undoubtedly shape the future of housing justice

Read

Some of the materials linked in the written section require a purchase or an academic log-in, we’ve noted which materials are freely available.

Articles

Books

Interactive Activities

  • Housing Journey Map
    • Create a map of your housing journey with all the places you have lived or called home, and/or places you would like to call home in the future. What does your housing journey say about you? Your identity? Your sense of home? Sense of community?
  • Future Generations Impact Assessment 
    • At the beginning of any project or program, it's important to understand the impact of your activities on generations to come. The worksheet moves you through a series of key questions to assess intended impact, unintended consequences, and community response.
  • HeART & Home Community Art Project 
    • As part of Fair Housing Month, this tool invites artists of all ages to share what home and/or inclusive community means to you. You can find materials and art prompts to guide your creative making. You can use these prompts to encourage your community or individual creative process to reflect on inclusive housing, and its impact on how communities thrive.

Online Tools and Resources

  • Rise Home Stories
    • Rise-Home Stories is a groundbreaking collaboration between multimedia storytellers and social justice advocates seeking to change our relationship to land, home, and race, by transforming the stories we tell about them.
    • DOT'S HOME is a single player game about DOROTHEA (DOT) HAWKINS, a young Black woman in her late 20’s living with her grandmother MAVIS HAWKINS in Detroit, Michigan. Following a cryptic conversation with her grandmother, Dot receives a MYSTERIOUS KEY. This key allows Dot to open a door within her house and travel to another space in time within her own family history.
  • The Roots of Structural Racism Project - Othering and Belonging Institute
    • The Roots of Structural Racism Project investigates the persistence of racial residential segregation across the United States. Among the many components included in this project are the national segregation report which contains startling findings about the intensification of racial residential segregation in recent decades; and an interactive mapping tool that illustrates the level of segregation in every city, region, and neighborhood in the country.
  • The Texas Freedom Colonies Project by Dr. Andrea Roberts  
    • The Texas Freedom Colonies Project is an educational and social justice initiative dedicated to supporting the preservation of Black settlement landscapes, heritage, and grassroots preservation practices through research
  • Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America 
    • How does race structure America’s cities? MoMA’s first exhibition and online learning platform to explore the relationship between architecture and the spaces of African American and African diaspora communities, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America presents 11 newly commissioned works by architects, designers, and artists that explore ways in which histories can be made visible and equity can be built. 
  • Community Futures Lab
    • The purpose of FUTURESLAB.COMMUNITY is to document shared memories, histories, and futures of communities in Brewerytown-Sharswood and the larger North Philly community.
  • Dark Matter University
    • Collective liberation cannot only occur within the confines of individual institutions — Dark Matter University is founded to work inside and outside of existing systems to challenge, inform, and reshape our present world toward a better future.
  • Project Row Houses 
    • Project Row Houses is a community platform that enriches lives through art with an emphasis on cultural identity and its impact on the urban landscape. We engage neighbors, artists, and enterprises in collective creative action to help materialize sustainable opportunities in marginalized communities. Project Row Houses occupies a significant footprint in Houston’s Historic Third Ward, one of the city’s oldest African-American neighborhoods. The site encompasses five city blocks and houses 39 structures that serve as a home base to a variety of community-enriching initiatives, art programs, and neighborhood development activities.
  • The Nap Ministry 
    • The Nap Ministry was founded in 2016 by Tricia Hersey and is an organization that examines the liberating power of naps. Their “REST IS RESISTANCE” framework and practice engages with the power of performance art, site-specific installations, and community organizing to install sacred and safe spaces for the community to rest together. We facilitate immersive workshops and curate performance art that examines rest as a radical tool for community healing.  We believe rest is a form of resistance and name sleep deprivation as a racial and social justice issue. 
  • Housing Justice Narrative
    • The Housing Justice Narrative project is a collaboration of PolicyLink, Community Change, and Race Forward, supported by Funders for Housing and Opportunity. 
  • Webs of Care by Ingrid Raphaël
    • a self-paced workshop on naming your needs and relating to and with care
  • The American Riad 
  • We Make the Future
    • We Make the Future (WMTF) was founded in 2021 and is built on the work of Race Class Narrative Action with ASO Communications and Faith in Minnesota and rooted in the research behind the Race Class Narrative. WMTF combines strategic communications and coalition building to develop a shared narrative that motivates our base and persuades the middle. Working in partnership with researchers, content creators, labor and community-based organizations, WMTF aid in the implementation of messaging research by building the capacity of communicators, organizers, and spokespeople.
  • Displaced New Orleans
    • Beginning with the formation of New Orleans and its cartography of violence and racial slavery, DISPLACED traces the geographies of black displacement, dislocation, containment, and disposability in land-use planning, housing policy, and urban development in the city, combining a timeline and atlas highlighting moments of refusal, rupture, and protest.

Principles

No matter where we come from or where we live, we should all be able to have a safe, stable place to come home to. This is how it could be, but the way housing is set up in America, too many Black, brown, Indigenous, disabled, and low-income people have been locked out of this dream. The following principles should be central to supporting new housing futures for communities that have faced decades of housing divestment and displacement to design just housing futures across the country. 

Principles: 

  1. Communities most affected by disinvestment should shape our housing futures. Communities that have been systematically denied opportunities for fair housing over generations should be at the front of the table in designing new housing policies and investments, and be able to hold governments accountable to action. 
  2. Prioritize protecting renters and homeowners from displacement. Bolstering renter protections against displacement and eviction is critical to building community and family health and stability. 
  3. Ensure freedom from housing discrimination. No matter your race, class, disability status, or religion, everyone should have access to a safe, stable home. 
  4. Expand opportunities and housing options for those in disinvested neighborhoods. New investments can open opportunities for residents of disinvested neighborhoods to access good schools, jobs, transportation, and other public services –– and ultimately offer them expanded housing options. 
  5. Build a future where all neighborhoods allow communities to thrive. Today, a person’s zip code is a strong determining factor in the quality of life they expect. By directing our public funds to neighborhoods that have faced generations of divestment, we can build a future where people in all zip codes can thrive.

Prompts for Learning

  1. What would it look like to scale up and replicate existing models that seek to address and repair longstanding housing discrimination?
  2. How might we develop new models for spatial reparations, land restitution, and housing abolition to achieve collective impact for the 100 million who have been systematically locked out of housing opportunities for centuries?
  3. How do we apply abolitionist and liberatory frameworks to housing in order to both dismantle current systems and create a new world with new systems — instead of the same old world with reconfigured systems?
  4. How do we invoke Black, Brown, and Indigenous spatial and temporal imaginaries in envisioning and creating these new worlds and new futures?
  5. How do we reimagine the ways we collaborate with impacted people and communities to build sustainable power? 
  6. How do we co-develop new solutions for tackling housing insecurity and creating equitable housing futures outside of the crisis-response model and the sense of time urgency that leaves little time and space for communities and individuals to plan for and live out their futures?
  7. How can we decentralize wealth accumulation as one of the primary goals of housing policy?  
  8. How do we decommodify housing as the foundation on which health is built and center it as a platform of health, culture, and community?

Housing Futures Month is founded by Rasheedah Phillips, our Director of Housing. If you haven’t already, check out this Q&A to get to know them better. You can find this work on our website, and be sure you’re following PolicyLink on LinkedIn, and Instagram. This campaign is an invitation to explore together. Throughout April and beyond, we’ll be sharing adaptable and interactive materials, so as you join us, share about your journey using #HousingFuturesMonth.

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