{"id":2891,"date":"2020-12-18T17:46:42","date_gmt":"2020-12-18T17:46:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=141086"},"modified":"2020-12-18T17:46:42","modified_gmt":"2020-12-18T17:46:42","slug":"homes-guarantee-campaign-demands-housing-for-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/18\/homes-guarantee-campaign-demands-housing-for-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Homes Guarantee Campaign Demands Housing for All"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When grassroots housing justice activists\u2014tenants, unhoused folks, and renters living in both public and privately owned buildings\u2014were brought together by People\u2019s Action<\/a> in 2017, they began to strategize about how best to promote housing as a human right.<\/p>\n

Linda Armitage, a board member from Chicago\u2019s Jane Addams Senior Caucus<\/a>, was at that meeting.<\/p>\n

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\u201cA Homes Guarantee is a matter of political and social will, and is not anything radical.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cWe started talking about different issues including the need for protection against arbitrary evictions and the need for rent controls, but as we debated, we decided that the best way to put teeth into the idea was to put forward a homes guarantee,\u201d Armitage tells The Progressive<\/em>. \u201cMany of us had experienced housing insecurity ourselves, and we began to imagine a world in which people lived in environmentally sound homes that they could not be thrown out of if they fell on hard times.\u201d<\/p>\n

For a year and a half, People\u2019s Action worked to iron out the nuts and bolts of its vision, creating a national housing plan to turn housing from a salable commodity into a universally available public good.<\/p>\n

These efforts led to the Homes Guarantee Campaign<\/a>, which launched in the fall of 2019. \u201cEveryone living in the United States should have safe, accessible, sustainable and permanently affordable housing,\u201d the campaign\u2019s briefing book begins. \u201cEveryone\u2014no matter their income, background, or their conformity to social or legal norms\u2014has the right to a home.\u201d  <\/p>\n

The multi-dimensional campaign calls for the construction of twelve million publicly owned social housing units to be managed by municipal governments, community land trusts, community-based organizations, or the residents themselves; reinvestment in the 1.1 million largely deteriorated public-housing apartments that presently exist; an end to real-estate speculation; and reparations for centuries of racist housing policies, including redlining and other lending restrictions that have led to housing segregation in every part of the country. Organizers expect initial funding to come from a $1 trillion federal outlay.<\/p>\n

\u201cA Homes Guarantee is a matter of political and social will, and is not anything radical,\u201d Armitage says. \u201cSome people say it sounds like pie in the sky, and maybe they\u2019re right that it won\u2019t be achieved anytime soon. But I see it differently. We\u2019re laying the groundwork so that the children, grandchildren, or great grandchildren who come after us will not have to worry about finding a decent or affordable place to live.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Armitage notes, the idea of a guaranteed right to shelter is nothing new. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s 1944 State of the Union address proposed a Second Bill of Rights<\/a>, which included \u201cthe right of every family to a decent home.\u201d <\/p>\n

Although FDR died before he could make headway on this goal, four years later, in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was issued by the United Nations. The document\u2019s Article 25 affirms that \u201ceveryone has the right to a standard of living adequate to the health and well-being of himself [sic] and his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, it has taken more than seventy years, until the Homes Guarantee campaign took off, for the domestically dormant idea to once again gain traction.<\/p>\n

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Tara Raghuveer, the Missouri-based director of the Homes Guarantee campaign, notes that Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, made the Homes Guarantee the centerpiece of his housing platform. Similarly, three newly elected democratic members of Congress\u2014Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri, and Marie Newman of Illinois\u2014also support it, as do Squad members Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. <\/p>\n

Despite this momentum, COVID-19 and the economic instability it\u2019s caused have pushed those working on the guarantee to temporarily shift gears and embrace more immediate concerns. Among them, a call to cancel rent retroactive to April 1 and  impose a meaningful, loophole-free eviction moratorium through 2021. <\/p>\n

These incremental steps, Raghuveer says, are \u201ca step toward a Homes Guarantee, since they  directly intervene in the relationship between tenant and landlord and shift the power dynamic a bit.\u201d <\/p>\n

In addition to supporting these measures, People\u2019s Action and the Homes Guarantee Campaign are calling for other short-term reforms. Among them: Congressional repeal<\/a> of the Faircloth Amendment, which has banned the construction of new public housing since 1998. <\/p>\n

They also want to stop landlords who receive federal rent subsidies from arbitrarily evicting tenants without reasonable cause, impose national rent controls, and ban rent hikes for at least a year after the COVID-19 pandemic ends. And they are calling for the creation of a Social Housing Development Authority to permit state, local, and federal entities to purchase, rehab, and permanently oversee buildings that have fallen into foreclosure.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest threat to our community is gentrification,\u201d says Otis Ubriaco, a member of Lancaster Stands Up<\/a>, one of more than 115 organizations that support the Homes Guarantee. \u201cAlready, more than a third of renters in Lancaster County spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent and many spend 50 percent or more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prior to the pandemic, Ubriaco says, Lancaster Stands Up held numerous forums and public meetings to talk about the burgeoning affordable housing crisis in the area. \u201cWe spoke to people and asked them what a Homes Guarantee would mean for them. One guy said it best: \u2018After a long day, every single person needs to have a place to take a deep breath, a private, secure space where they can fully be themselves.\u2019 \u201d <\/p>\n

Raghuveer agrees that the desire for a place to call home is universal, something evidenced by the support the Homes Guarantee Campaign has received from longtime progressive activists, faith groups, unions, community-based housing organizations, and senior-citizen assemblies. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe grassroots leaders who created this vision will not be satisfied with reforms that dance around the edges of what’s needed,\u201d she says. \u201cThe social conditions of today are untenable. The United States is the richest country in the world. We can and we must guarantee that everyone has a home.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When grassroots housing justice activists\u2014tenants, unhoused folks, and renters living in both public and privately owned buildings\u2014were brought together by People\u2019s Action in 2017, they began to strategize\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2891"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2891"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2892,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2891\/revisions\/2892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}