In the past five months that have seemed like an eternity, philanthropy has faced a reckoning on the deep racial inequities that plague society and our institutions at all levels.
The response from philanthropy has been swift and bold, especially given that grant makers are typically cautious and more comfortable with words like “equity” than “justice.” Already, companies, individual donors, and foundations have made statements of solidarity with the racial-justice movement and donated at least $5 billion, more than the previous 11 years combined.
But few of these efforts have recognized that we can’t put an end to racism until we create a more just housing system: A stable place to call home is necessary for learning, maintaining employment, being healthy, feeling safe, and building strong family and community life.
However, the history of racism and white supremacy in the United States is completely intertwined with access to land and housing, as seen in the longstanding pattern of official government policies to deny, steal, and devalue the property of people who were enslaved and their descendants.
At the end of the Civil War, Black Americans were offered “40 acres and a mule,” but they rarely got that. Decades later, the New Deal did much to lift Americans out of the Great Depression through federal housing aid; but, in what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “the Quiet Plunder” in his seminal essay “The Case for Reparations,” it also created policies such as redlining, restrictive covenants, and public housing that denied people of color, mainly Black Americans, access to homeownership and led to racial residential segregation that has had lasting effects for decades.
The cumulative effect of these policies, says Andre Perry, a Brookings Institution scholar, has created as corrosive a problem as the culture of violence in policing we see today: “The same attitude that would lead an officer to kneel on the back of the neck of someone under their custody, under their supposed care, are the same attitudes harbored by bank lenders, real estate agents, appraisers.”
Perry and his colleagues found that racial bias means that homes in majority-Black neighborhoods are undervalued by a total of $156 billion, an average of $48,000 per home. Black people have always been more likely to rent, rather than own their homes, and even there, they are at a disadvantage. Their rent is more than white people pay for identical housing in identical neighborhoods. About 44 percent of Black households pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing, compared with just about a quarter of white households. The legacy of racial discrimination lives on: The Trump administration recently announced that it was repealing the Obama administration’s 2015 fair housing rule to encourage integration on the basis that it “threatened our nation’s suburbs.”
The most extreme form of housing injustice is homelessness, and Black people are highly overrepresented here as well. Nationally, African Americans make up about 13 percent of the population but 40 percent of people experiencing homelessness, resulting from decades of discrimination in housing and employment, overincarceration, and disparities in access to health and mental-health care.
How to Make a Difference
Housing has rarely commanded much attention in philanthropy; tiny shares of all foundation money go to nonprofits working on housing and homelessness. But now that new dollars are flowing in to fight racism, that must change. Here’s where foundation dollars and influence could make a big difference:
Build the power of grass-roots networks. Philanthropy has traditionally relied on the expertise of researchers and planners to figure out what to do on housing matters. Given where those approaches have left us, it’s time to listen to and lift up the expertise of people who have experienced housing injustices. Borrowing from the idea that disability activists have long proclaimed — “nothing about us without us” — grant makers need to ensure their work is guided by people who live in the neighborhoods where they are trying to solve housing issues. These efforts need flexible, long-term support to build advocacy efforts that focus on housing justice and intersecting issues like criminal justice, health, and economic equity.
Grant makers shouldn’t have to look far to find these groups to support and learn from. Organizations like True Colors United and CSH organize people who have been homeless to advocate. Many tenant-organizing groups exist at local and state levels across the country. The Neighborhood Funders Group’s Amplify Fund backs organizing efforts to advance equitable development in eight places across the United States. Flexible funding from philanthropy can support people closest to the problem and results in creative efforts like Moms 4 Housing, a group of mothers whose occupation of a vacant home in Oakland, Calif., led to an agreement to purchase the home as part of a land trust and has inspired similar efforts.
Use their own voices to engage in advocacy efforts identified by housing-justice organizers. In the short term, it is urgent to advocate for emergency relief and protections for people to stay in their housing. Governments must pass strong eviction moratoriums, offer direct assistance for rent and mortgage payments, and provide aid to those who have lost their jobs.
Grant makers can educate policy makers on their community’s needs (even if as private foundations they cannot weigh in on specific legislation) and also provide support to regional or national advocacy organizations like the newly formed National Coalition for Housing Justice at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Other advocacy groups work to reimagine the housing and homelessness systems entirely, like the National Innovation Service and its new Center for Housing Justice arm.
Advocacy organizations and coalitions can push the envelope, looking to examples of housing justice outside the United States, such as a policy in Barcelona that allows the city to seize housing that has been vacant for more than two years.
Longer term, philanthropy should be advocating for antiracist policies and racial equity in homelessness, housing, and mortgage-lending systems to repair decades of disinvestment in communities of color.
Build public will to fix housing injustices by changing the narrative. Most people consider housing as primarily an issue of consumer choice: People get what they can pay for and “deserve.” Given the fundamental role that a safe, stable place to call home plays in human development and access to economic, educational, and community opportunities, we need to shift understanding toward seeing housing as a public good and human right. Research at the FrameWorks Institute and the Housing Justice Narrative Initiative are informing how people understand housing and what can be done to create more-just systems and outcomes.
Philanthropy can play an important role in supporting efforts to shift thinking. The Melville Charitable Trust is spearheading research to build and advance a new narrative to help the public better understand homelessness and encourage people to support policy solutions that ensure everyone has a place to live.
Throughout the pandemic, Americans have been told we should take collective action to curve the spread of a deadly disease because “we’re all in this together.”
But that rings hollow to people who have long suffered injustices. People are tired and fed up with the long history of racism, violence, and disinvestment in Black communities. If we truly want to show that we care about one another and that we’re working to create what the late Congressman John Lewis pursued as “the beloved community,” then we must ensure that we make housing justice a key part of repairing the racial injustices throughout society.
