Today, affordablehousingaction.org is starting a series about community. We’ve put a lot of attention on the policy, program, financing, design and construction aspects of housing for people with very low incomes. Why have a series about community at all? And why now?
As we scanned for stories about housing and homelessness, articles about communities in the most unlikely circumstances kept showing up. For example, some of the people who lived in the community of Cabrini Green remember it fondly (despite its poor conditions and reputation) and keep in touch1. This is completely at odds with the dominant narrative that Cabrini Green was a hopeless and dangerous place to live, and which almost certainly contributed to the 3,000+ unit project being demolished.
Even demolition didn’t take away the sense of community.
Then there are the tenants who lived in Grenfell tower, where a fire killed over 70 residents in 2017. Far from turning their back on the tragedy, the community of survivors is advocating to ensure that tenant concerns about safety and other issues are not ignored2. The concerns about safety aren’t the only thing holding them together: they too speak about the community of tenants in the building.
There are also stories about public housing communities pulling together to make residents safer during COVID. At the Sunnydale project in San Francisco, community leaders worked with local health clinics and through academic connections to improve access to testing and to encourage people who might have been exposed to get tested. Those same leaders also organized food deliveries for vulnerable adults and made arrangements for people to isolate safely3.
These accounts demonstrate some of the reasons that stories about community belong at affordablehousingaction.org:
- The people who are part of Cabrini Green community describe benefits from being involved. Those benefits deserve more attention.
- People who are struggling with their housing situation have information and ideas that deserve consideration. As the Grenfell tenants group says, “if you’d listened to us to begin with, the fire would never have happened.”
- The community leaders and tenants express hope and the idea that they are stronger and more resilient thanks to the community’s work to fight COVID.
The stories are about communities of people who are often described as marginalized and excluded because of poverty, the colour of their skin, their sexual orientation, or a disability. Yet these communities are all engaged in undoing that marginalization and exclusion and they are making a difference. The ways they work deserve attention, particularly as the world moves through the pandemic and toward recovery.
In this series, we’ll be reporting stories about communities in public housing projects and in mixed housing communities. We also have some “think pieces” in mind that will delve into the idea of community and how it contributes to ending homelessness and creating the housing that is sorely needed.
It’s important to be clear that this series is not founded on the idealist notion that “community can do it on its own.” There are plenty of structural and systemic barriers between today’s housing situation and one where people with very low incomes have housing that is affordable and safe. These also need to be addressed. We are saying that the contribution that community can make should not be overlooked.
Tomorrow: Engaging Community In Redevelopment
Footnotes
- Cabrini Green was a public housing project in in Chicago. Try: Cabrini-Green: The Frankenstein Monster of American Public Housing . . .Revisited
- Grenfell Tower was a high rise building with 127 homes in London. The fire gutted tower is still standing. Try: “Nobody Listened to Us!” Grenfell Tower Fire Survivors Demand A Legal Voice For All Social Housing Tenants
- Try: Sunnydale Locals Flatten A Public Housing COVID-19 Outbreak
