Housing Futures Month Syllabus

What is Housing Futures Month?

Housing as a foundation for building health, where families and communities thrive, where our experiences are liberatory–those are the housing futures we are working to realize. Bright and bold housing futures for our communities mean new models and approaches that are unapologetically inclusive of all, imagined and made possible by the brilliance, insights, and guidance from the communities most impacted by housing inequities. Today, under constant threat of displacement from their homes, and often occupied with planning how to survive the next day, week, or month, Black, Brown, and Indigenous people and communities are left with little space and time to dream about and plan for their futures. 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. 

Housing Futures Month Syllabus

During the month of April, we’ll be sharing a variety of materials as part of our Housing Futures Month and want you to have the opportunity to engage deeper in the many facets of housing futures, so we’ve developed a syllabus with a collection of materials and activities. 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. 

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.
  • 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. 
  • Mmere Dane: Black Time Belt
    • Mmere Dane: Black Time Belt maps several historic all-Black towns and Freedom Colonies across the United States pre-and post-Civil war — many destroyed by displacement, development, racist violence, and environmental injustice. Mmere Dane: Black Time Belt functions as a Black Quantum Futurist archive of alternative past-present-future(s) where the towns form a network of Black temporal zones–or a Black Time Belt–protecting these communities from the impacts of temporal-spatial oppression and destructive linear progressive timelines.
  • 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.

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.

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.

Recommended Events (Virtual & In-Person)

  • HUD Mid-Atlantic Eviction Prevention & Mitigation Strategies - April 14 at 2 p.m. ET (virtual)
    • The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), presents a virtual convening on eviction prevention and mitigation strategies on Thursday, April 1 from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. ET. This event is designed to support communities in their efforts to minimize family displacements and evictions as the nation builds back from the devastating impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.
  • Time Zone Protocols Exhibition (April 4-18) and Prime Meridian Unconference (April 15-17) - (virtual and limited in-person)
    • Streaming at www.timezoneprotocols.space 
    • Tracing the creation of written and unwritten political agendas, social agreements, and rules underlying Westernized time constructs with the aim of highlighting the impacts that oppressive time protocols and policies have on marginalized Black communities in the US in particular, catalyzing and perpetuating systems of oppression that deny Black communities access to and agency over the temporal domains of the past, present, and the future.
    • Exhibition Photos Available Here 
  • Screening of MINE at the Pan-African Film Festival - April 23 at 12:45 p.m. PT and April 30 at 9:40 p.m. PT (in-person)
    • Place: Cinemark Theaters BHC 15, on the grounds of the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, 3650 Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90008
    • MINE is an animated series that explores the difficult and worthwhile fight for the community you love. When the sudden disappearance of water -- their main life source -- threatens to upend a vibrant utopia, an intrepid teen named Blaze must save their community before it’s too late.
  • TogetherCon featuring DOT’S HOME - April 23-24 from 10 a.m. ET – 12 p.m. ET (virtual)
    • 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.

Prompts for Learning

Below you’ll find some key considerations we are holding throughout our work that may support your exploration this month.

  • 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?
  • How do we invoke Black, Brown, and Indigenous spatial and temporal imaginaries in envisioning and creating these new worlds and new futures?
  • How do we reimagine the ways we collaborate with impacted people and communities to build sustainable power? 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?
  • How can we decentralize wealth accumulation as one of the primary goals of housing policy?  
  • How do we decommodify housing as the foundation on which health is built and center it as a platform of health, culture, and community?