Tag Archives: nonprofit quarterly

Last August, the Biden administration announced a plan to wipe out student debt for almost half of the 45 million Americans who collectively owe over $1.6 trillion dollars. For the 26 million borrowers who have applied, the program would cancel $10,000 in federal student loan debt and up to $20,000 for those who received need-based Pell Grants. In response, state legislatures are pushing back—with help from right-wing nonprofits.

The states that filed the federal complaint argue that the administration’s plan to offer debt relief and new forgiveness policies under the 2003 HEROES Act is not only illegal executive overreach, but also economically unsound. Conservative think tanks, such as the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and other nonprofit organizations, have joined in the legal ground game and are spreading the message that debt cancellation is not only bad for the economy in general, but especially for the nonprofit sector. Now, relief for millions of debtors hangs in the balance. 

Equity for Whom?

Arguments against student loan forgiveness rest on a dubious idea of “equity.” The complaint filed by states opposing debt relief stresses that canceling student debt would be “economically unwise and downright unfair,” disadvantaging both state entities that depend on federal student loans for profit and Americans who do not hold debt. The opening arguments of the complaint cite the example of a beneficiary who makes a six-figure salary and is planning a honeymoon in Italy—but the facts from the White House show that 90 percent of debt forgiveness will go to borrowers earning less than $75,000 per year.

The Biden-Harris plan to partially cancel student loans is the outcome of years of pressure from progressive organizations such as the Debt Collective, who pushed the president to “pick up the pen” and erase student debt in full. Other advocates—including Massachusetts lawmakers Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Ayanna Pressley and nonprofit organizations such as the NAACP and the National Action Network—have called for up to $50,000 or more in debt relief, urging the White House to mitigate racial and economic inequality. 

In a press conference held one week before lawsuits against the Biden administration began rolling in, Rep. Pressley pointed out that “Black and brown students have to borrow at much higher rates because of policies in this country that have historically denied our families the chance to build generational wealth.” Sen. Warren has also urged Biden to “close the racial wealth gap, jumpstart our economy, and expand opportunity for millions of Americans.”

Many young voters were persuaded to support Biden during the 2020 presidential election after his promise to “immediately” cancel at least $10,000 in student debt once in office. Almost two years later, his administration’s modified plan would still benefit the 20 million borrowers making less than $125,000 per year—especially federal Pell Grant recipients who are disproportionately Black—by canceling their debt completely. Borrowers would also be able to cap repayment to five percent of their monthly income. President Biden said that the administration hoped to “give working and middle class families breathing room” with these measures. 

Who Is Behind Debt Relief Opposition, and Why?

Who is behind the coordinated pushback against student debt cancellation? Although national media attention around debt relief focuses on the state-led lawsuits opposing it, conservative organizations have also played a large role in opposing the policy. Together, this conservative nonprofit ecosystem is fighting against student debt cancellation through lobbying, lawsuits, and other political avenues. 

Progressive news outlet More Perfect Union reported that the main case brought to the Supreme Court was advanced by the Job Creators Network, a right-wing donor group advocating for free enterprise and limited government. While the JCN advertises itself as a nonpartisan group advocating for small business interests, the report reveals that the donors behind JCN—such as the Koch brothers—have spent millions of dollars backing conservative, corporate-friendly politicians like Mitch McConnell, Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump—to benefit from their corporate-friendly policies. JCN donors also own right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart News and Turning Point USA, who call student loan relief “questionable” and “an attempt for the American taxpayer to subsidize leftists’ poor choices.”

Organizations belonging to The National Civil Liberties Alliance—a group of nonprofits whose mission is to “protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State”—such as the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and others filed an amicus brief supporting the two lawsuits against student debt that have now reached the Supreme Court. 

The Cato Institute, a think tank founded by Charles Koch, argued in their federal lawsuit that student debt relief would negatively impact the nonprofit sector in particular. The brief reads that nonprofit organizations need the incentive of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Created in 2007, the PSLF promised to pay outstanding balances on federal loans for borrowers who worked full-time in qualifying government and nonprofit positions for 10 years and made 120 payments. With this incentive, the Cato Institute argues, nonprofits enjoy a “materially improved position,” recruiting people who need to pay off their loans even though they offer pay that is comparably lower than their for-profit counterparts.

But while the PSLF may be an incentive for nonprofit employers, it has hardly worked out well for nonprofit employees. In 2018, NPR reported that a staggering 99 percent of applications for loan forgiveness had been denied. In many of these cases, borrowers were told by loan servicers several years into the repayment process that they did not meet program requirements. 

The nonprofit sector cannot, in other words, recruit anyone on the strength or efficiency of PSLF. Nonprofit organizations banking on the federal government’s loan forgiveness program to make their pay competitive with private sector companies can neither offer salaries competitive enough to pay off insurmountable debts, nor force their employees to depend on a government program that is designed to fail debtors. These various strategies of disinformation around student debt are tactics to deliberately justify its resulting injustices; as Brynn Tannehill documented in Dame last fall, student debt is a tool that very effectively reinforces the nation’s existing enormous racial wealth gap. But debt justice organizations like the Debt Collective have provided clear, consistent information over the past two years about why student debt cancellation is racially just, economically sound, and governmentally possible.

Who Benefits from Economic Crisis?

The case against student debt relief, advanced by conservative nonprofits in the name of the nonprofit sector, is a bad-faith attempt to keep millions of people in debt—because student debt limits people’s options. 

Student loan payments continue to be paused until the Supreme Court decides, at the end of this month, whether the Department of Education can carry out the debt relief program. If the Supreme Court overrules the plan, payments will resume—and experts anticipate a massive wave of student loan defaults. As the Debt Collective’s Eleni Schirmer writes, inflation and cost of living increases have already caused people to fall behind on payments for credit cards and car leases. If the student loan payments resume, more debtors will default on those loans, too: “Suddenly, borrowers’ entire balance becomes due, no longer eligible for repayment plans or deferment. Their wages may be seized, tax refunds can be withheld, and even Social Security payments could be garnished.” The decision from the Supreme Court is expected by the end of this month.

The case against student debt relief, advanced by conservative nonprofits in the name of the nonprofit sector, is a bad-faith attempt to keep millions of people in debt—because student debt limits people’s options. In the larger economic picture, many employers have been hoping that a recession will trigger mass unemployment, reigning in higher wages and increased worker power of the past few years. Like unemployment, student debt is a type of economic distress that business leaders depend on to discipline workforces. 

Canceling student debt will not fix the debt-reliant systems that brought us to this trillion-dollar balance. But by doing so, 45 million borrowers will take a small step towards economic freedom.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Rural America is far more diverse than how it is portrayed in media and popular culture. This article concludes the series: Eradicating Rural Poverty: The Power of Cooperation. Coproduced by Partners for Rural Transformation, a coalition of six regional community development financial institutions, and NPQ, authors highlight efforts to address multi-generational poverty in Appalachia, the rural West, Indian Country, South Texas, and the Mississippi Delta.

The focus on high prices in red-hot urban real estate markets, a centerpiece of most national housing crisis analyses, overshadows the affordability challenges faced in rural America. Centuries of racist policy and decades of disinvestment have created low incomes, a lack of resources, and numerous roadblocks to capital. Overcoming these realities requires a different strategy.

Fortunately, a new approach to rural housing that pairs a flexible form of modular housing with community-based finance shows considerable promise.

Understanding the Difference Between Rural and Urban Housing Needs

At a recent convening focused on increasing homeownership opportunities for Black and Indigenous people and people of color, our coalition of rural community development organizations sat surrounded by affordable housing and community development rockstars from the largest housing markets in the United States, from New York City to San Diego.

That is where the problem arises: in facile analysis that compares urban and rural housing markets, barriers, and solutions as if the two are comparable.

As conversations drifted to the rising cost of homeownership and the lack of resources to assist with up-front purchasing costs, a natural comparison emerged between our two worlds. A familiar unease rose as we discussed average housing prices and closing costs; our urban colleagues chuckled and made disbelieving comments about what they saw as unbeatable real estate “opportunities” in our rural areas—joking that they needed to “get a jump on them.”

The comments were not intentionally spiteful or dismissive. It is easy to disregard the lack of affordable housing options in rural areas when comparing the median housing value in Pine Bluff, AK (under $100,000) with that in New York City (over $750,000). The median housing listing in Manhattan as of December 2022 was nearly $1.3 million, an amount unimaginable in most rural communities.

That is where the problem arises: in facile analysis that compares urban and rural housing markets, barriers, and solutions as if the two are comparable. It may seem like a housing market is a housing market, right?

But that is completely wrong.

For decades, the United States has focused on what are called “place-based” strategies and policies to address poverty, housing access, and affordability. Yet the programs developed rely overwhelmingly on data drawn from the largest cities and communities. Despite the “place-based” moniker, there is often little consideration or understanding of how rural and remote areas face distinct challenges requiring unique strategies based precisely on differences in place. In that room, with representatives from Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Chicago, it would have been easy to overlook rural housing needs, viewing rural markets as affordable based on price alone, and move on. But this was a space for difficult conversations.

Our three-person team spoke about an Appalachian community where homeowners were unable to drill wells and lacked indoor plumbing and sewer access; the political limbo of Indigenous homeowners who lack direct access to clean water or safe housing; and the colonias (largely Latinx neighborhoods) along the US-Mexico border with infrastructure more akin to a developing country than the urban areas surrounding them. The communities’ systems of informal land tenure mean that land cannot be used for collateral with banks, keeping homeowners from converting homes to capital that can be traded, sold, or leveraged for needed improvements. 

The Challenge of Persistent Rural Poverty

A county is a persistent poverty county if 20 percent or more of the population has been below federal poverty guidelines for the last three decades. Over 80 percent of these counties are in rural areas, most of which are in the South.

Persistent poverty communities regularly lack access to healthcare, healthy and affordable housing, banking and financial services, broadband, emergency and protective services, and public transportation, resulting in a scarcity of resources and access. 

Studies show that secure housing is critical to reducing generational poverty. So, how can people address housing affordability and access in persistent poverty communities without compelling residents to move elsewhere?

The MiCASiTA Model of Modular Housing 

The team at come dream. come build in Brownsville, TX, has an idea, and it is catching. cdcb is a nonprofit community housing development organization and the state’s largest affordable housing developer. Founded in 1974, cdcb provides safe, affordable housing options for low-income residents of the Rio Grande Valley.  

As the need for more space arises, families can expand their homes by purchasing new modular box additions.

Communities in the Rio Grande Valley are some of the poorest in the nation, particularly in the colonias, where poverty rates average over 40 percent. Because people in these communities typically lack resources and access to credit, they forge their homesteads with whatever they have available. This often leads to homes that are not up to code and unsafe. Realizing that South Texas faced a perpetual systemic shortfall in quality housing, cdcb utilized its experience in natural disaster home replacement to find solutions. The result was the creation of a new rapid home production system: MiCASiTA.  

MiCASiTA is a volumetric modular housing and flexible lending program. Volumetric means that the modular units are constructed off-site with flooring and ceiling included. This system allows families to design their own homes with the potential to add sections over time as their financial capacity increases. MiCASiTA’s incremental and volumetric modules can be financed with cdcb’s flexible lending options that significantly impact low- and moderate-income households’ access to capital and purchasing potential. This design has the potential not only to address the housing crisis in the colonias of South Texas but also persistent poverty and rural communities across the nation.

The MiCASiTA business model has several unique features. First, starting with production, MiCASiTA homes are “manufactured” locally. A single modular unit or “box” is 288 square feet. A home can be any range in size from two boxes (576 square feet) to five boxes (1,440 square feet). Two key advantages of volumetric modular construction are that it can be done at low cost and high speed. The entire construction process takes about 60 days, and homes can typically be bought for between $60,000 and $90,000, depending on the buyers’ preferences.

One particularly valuable aspect of MiCASiTA is the flexibility that its “grow home” model provides. As families grow, needs evolve; as the need for more space arises, families can expand their homes by purchasing new modular box additions. 

Taken together, all these features represent a rare merging of flexibility and affordability in the affordable housing space: families can build the homes they want at the price point they can afford. As a family’s circumstances change, they can adapt as necessary, all the while building wealth in the equity of their growing homes.

Franchising the Model

Franchising MiCASiTA can help extend the reach of this approach. One early franchise partner is Communities Unlimited, a community development finance institution serving seven states in the South—a region that’s home to 45 percent of all persistent poverty counties in the United States. Communities Unlimited works to help ensure that communities have clean, safe water; affordable housing stock; healthy, fresh food; and access to the capital necessary to thrive. Animating this comprehensive approach is the idea that families that live in communities that meet their basic needs and which provide opportunities to grow will reinvest in their community.

Communities Unlimited has partnered with cdcb and WE CENTER—a nonprofit in Pine Bluff, Arkansas—to expand the MiCASiTA model into the Mississippi Delta region. Pine Bluff is a city with immense opportunity and clear goals for economic development, improved infrastructure, enhanced quality of life, and strengthened education and housing. Affordable housing is a key pillar in revitalizing this historic community, but an aging housing stock and declining population has left the city with a total home vacancy rate almost double that of national rates.  

With a low area median income, many low-income and asset-limited, income-constrained, employed families (also known as ALICE) are currently priced out of homeownership or unable to access traditional mortgage options. With over 600 homes identified as uninhabitable and scheduled for demolition in the small city of 40,000 people, the affordable housing stock in the area is expected to continue to decline in the coming years. It is here that Communities Unlimited is pairing the MiCASiTA model with WE CENTER’s workforce training program to create a unique approach to both advance affordable housing and generate jobs.  

Expanding the Model Throughout Rural America

A report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in 2015 estimates that there are 2,294 colonias in Texas, with over 500,000 residents. Even if you get people in homes, there are still other challenges, including a lack of potable water, sewer systems, electricity, and paved roads—to say nothing of modern necessities such as high-speed broadband. And this is just in the colonias: one can find many more pockets of concentrated poverty in the rural South and Indian Country as well. The challenges, in short, are immense.

The MiCASiTA volumetric modular housing development model and flexible lending strategies have significant potential to change the affordable housing landscape in the colonias, Pine Bluff, and other persistent poverty communities across the country. Alone, it will not solve the rural housing crisis. But combined with flexible lending options and policies that foster investment in rural communities, it can be an important part of the solution.

Housing choice is often portrayed as a matter of consumer preference. But housing is much more than that. A family’s home influences where parents go to work, what school district their children attend, and, of course, where they live. Structured well, home ownership can help provide a path toward racial justice and equity. In short, creating affordable housing with choice offers families the human dignity that comes from being able to develop their own answers to the essential question: What would you like?

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Leah Rothstein has been a consultant to nonprofit housing developers, local government, and private firms. Her policy work is informed by her years as a community organizer with PUEBLO and Californians for Justice and as a labor organizer with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE). Recently, with her father Richard Rothstein, she coauthored a book called Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law. This spring, I had the chance to talk with Rothstein about her new book on how to undo race-based housing segregation.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. [SD]

Steve Dubb: What led you to write Just Action? 

Leah Rothstein: My father, Richard Rothstein, wrote The Color of Law in 2017, a book that basically debunked the myth about why our communities are racially segregated. It is the myth of de facto segregation. That is, according to this myth, segregation wasn’t due to government policies and laws, but due to private action, personal choice, or accidental circumstance. And he called that myth nonsense in The Color of Law. He exposed the truth of how our country came to be racially segregated. A lot of people who read that book—me included—asked, “What do we do about it now?”

So, he took my question and asked me to help him write a book to answer that question. He enlisted me, and we started to put together ideas about the different policies and strategies that could go into challenging and redressing segregation on a local level. We interviewed housing policy experts, fair housing experts, and community development experts. 

And then we started finding people around the country who were working on this issue—small community groups that started, many of them after reading The Color of Law, and many long before The Color of Law came out. Our book not only describes the strategies but also gives examples of local communities around the country of people actually implementing and working on these strategies.

SD: Can you share an example of a local community working on desegregation?

LR: One example that is not in the book, but we write about it in our Substack column, is Menlo Park, which is a wealthy community in Silicon Valley in California. People there read The Color of Law and ended up creating an educational workshop about of their own region and how it came to be segregated. They ran this workshop for people all over their community—rotary clubs, the school district, foundations, and community groups. They started building a network and an organization of residents who were concerned about these issues—and concerned about the exclusivity of their city. It was so expensive that nobody could afford to buy into it. Menlo Park is a predominately White community. 

A school district proposed to build teacher housing—housing that was affordable to teachers on a site that they owned in the city. And some residents opposed it and put a ballot measure to vote against basically any rezoning effort would have to go to the voters to be approved. It would basically ensure that no multifamily housing could be built in this town because it was zoned mostly for single-family-only zoning. 

“There are a lot of smaller pieces of the puzzle that create segregation, and many groups are working on one piece at a time.”

The group that started to form around discussions of The Color of Law, they started a field campaign, went door-to-door, talking to voters, and they started to discover that a lot of their neighbors felt like they did. They were concerned that teachers could not afford to live in their community. They were concerned their children couldn’t afford to live in their community. They were concerned about the exclusivity of their town. They ended up defeating the ballot measure. It was a huge victory for them and a somewhat surprising victory in one of the most exclusive regions of the country. 

SD: Any other examples that you would like to share?

LR: Our book was filled with examples of what communities can do. One is in Cleveland, where a group started a right to counsel program that provides a right to an attorney for renters facing evictions. That was a small group. They worked with the United Way and the Lawyers’ Committee there and worked to provide free legal counsel that helped prevent a lot of evictions of renters in that area. There are a lot of smaller pieces of the puzzle that create segregation, and many groups are working on one piece at a time.

SD: Can you talk about how local organizing is building bridges between Black and White communities?

LR: It does take intentional effort to build cross-race relations. We talk about a few examples of the ways these relationships have been formed. Some of them are kind of creative. There was the Map Twins in Chicago. This is an art project that a photographer, Tonika Lewis Johnson, started. In Chicago, you can fold the map of the city in half and [the] streets line up perfectly, the north and south side of the street, the Black side of town and White side of town. 

Johnson created map twins for people whose houses matched when she folded the map in half. So those map twins, a White household from one side of town and an African American household [from] another side of town, they met and gave each other tours of their neighborhoods. They started to learn about each other’s lives and realized that they actually had a lot in common. And they started creating support networks. Many of these people had lived in Chicago their whole lives and had not been to the other side of town. 

So, this group is an example of how one can start to build cross-race relationships that can then lead to organizing for change. A lot of the map twins started to learn about how different their communities were because the same policies that created segregation also segregated resources. They can use that knowledge and the connections they are making to start working toward policies to redress that segregation. They are doing some neighborhood beautification projects and other support projects. It could translate into more effective organizing.

SD: How do folks who are dealing with different aspects of structural racism coordinate their work at the local level?

LR: Part of this work is coalition building, coordinating strategy, and supporting each other’s campaigns. 

There is also another tool, which is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing process. This is a process that is required by the Fair Housing Act. The Obama administration issued a rule that gave jurisdictions some guidance on how to do that. It required that jurisdictions convene all the stakeholders in a community—those dealing with health, education, transportation, incarceration, and access to open space. 

All the advocates in the community and all the government agencies involved had to contribute to a plan to identify what the barriers are to fair housing and identify goals and strategies and responsible parties. This required community participation. What results is a very comprehensive plan that encompasses all these issues. The community can use that plan to hold officials accountable. If officials don’t adhere to the policies, they can be found out of compliance with their plan and federal funds can be withheld.

The Obama administration rule was rescinded by Trump, but now Biden is reinstating it. Soon jurisdictions will have to comply with these rules, and this is one way that all these players can come together. In the book, we give the example of New Orleans coming up with a comprehensive plan, which it is now implementing. 

SD: In your book, you cover housing broadly—from community land trusts to redoing appraisals to zoning. Could you discuss your approach to housing (both place-based and mobility elements) and how you see these actions advancing housing justice?

LR: There are a couple of ways I think about it. The strategies and policies we describe—the goal is to redress segregation. One part of this is forward-looking policies and strategies. Another part is redressing the past harms that created segregation.

It is one thing to say, as the Fair Housing Act did, that you can no longer discriminate in the sale of housing. But to truly redress segregation, you have to both repair past harm and prevent future discrimination and segregation.

So, that’s the broad framework. And then, we group the strategies into place-based and mobility approaches. Many in the housing policy field disagree on which to focus on. Should we focus on place-based strategies, which are those that increase investments in lower-income, segregated African American communities and then prevent displacement in those communities as investments increase, or should we focus on those strategies that attempt to open up exclusive, expensive, predominately White communities to diverse residents?

“It is our constitutional responsibility to redress the unconstitutional acts of our government, which were race-specific . . . that might take going against what the Supreme Court decides.”

These tend to be two different schools of thought—like we should focus on one or the other. We believe that we need both. We can’t truly challenge and undo segregation by only focusing on one type of community and not the other. We both need to increase resources in underresourced segregated communities where the concentration of poverty is the result of government-sponsored segregation, so we address the harms caused by segregation. We must also open up communities that have been exclusionary to more diverse residents. There are policies and strategies for both of those categories—lots of them—that can begin to accomplish both of those goals.

SD: In the second chapter of your book, you write about the Supreme Court, and call for limiting the court’s power. What do you see as a movement organizing strategy that can effectively succeed in challenging the court’s authority and power, which is no small thing?

LR: It is no small thing, that’s for sure. What we argue in that chapter is that people have come to accept the Supreme Court’s decisions and opinions as the ultimate say in these issues of racial equality. In this view, if the Supreme Court rules, as it may well do soon, that affirmative action is not constitutional, then we cannot take any race-specific and race-conscious remedies and actions to redress segregation. 

But we believe that it is our constitutional responsibility to redress the unconstitutional acts of our government, which were race-specific, and the only way to do that is with race-specific remedies. And that might take going against what the Supreme Court decides. It might take some courage on the part of policymakers and advocates, but that is how we are going to make progress. 

And that’s the way that it has always worked. The Supreme Court made a decision that people haven’t agreed with, and they take actions that go against the Supreme Court, and eventually, laws get changed. The Civil Rights movement is an example of that. Abortion opponents today are an example of this; they didn’t wait for Roe v. Wade to be overridden to pass abortion restrictions. We can similarly advocate for race-specific remedies to address race-specific harms in the past.

SD: If you had to pick a particular harmful Supreme Court decision, which one would you pick?

LR: The decision about school desegregation in St. Louis and Seattle (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1). In his opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said that the government had no business to remedy segregation because the government had nothing to do with creating segregation.

So, that’s an example of a Supreme Court opinion that cites this myth about how segregation was created. It advances a completely untrue history that the government had nothing to do with creating segregation. That is the kind of thing that needs to be challenged. 

What persuaded my dad to write The Color of Law was reading that decision. My father remembered a story he heard about St. Louis, where an African American family wanted to buy a home and were prohibited from doing so. And so, a White homeowner who was friends with this family decided to be a straw purchaser; he bought the home and then sold it to his African American friend. When this African American family moved into this mostly White community, there was a mob that formed and harassed the family; the mob was protected by the police. When this all died down, the White homeowner who helped this African American family get into the home was then tried and convicted of sedition. He spent time in jail for this. 

My dad looked at this decision where Chief Justice Roberts said the government had no role to play in creating segregation. He looked at this story, seeing all the government actors enforce segregation, act against a White homeowner, and protect the mob attacking a Black family, and said this doesn’t make sense. And so, we can challenge the myth that even the Supreme Court is advancing by showing that the government did take these intentional actions and therefore has an obligation to redress them.

SD: How do you see the housing desegregation movement interacting with the labor movement?

LR: There is obviously a lot of overlap. One example we give in Just Action in communities that have gentrified and displaced many of the African American and Latinx residents, as they have become more expansive, they have labor unions negotiating contracts with them. Many union members live in far-off suburbs and have to commute long distances. These unions represent workers in service industries, hospitals, schools. Those labor unions could advocate in their contracts for housing stipends and housing affordability for their workforce. Some are doing that, adding worker housing to their negotiating platforms. 

SD: Is there anything else that you would like to add?

LR: Just as there were many policies, actions, and actors involved in creating segregation, it will take many policies, strategies, and actors to undo it. Many people ask when we talk about this book, “What is the one thing we do?”

My answer is the one thing is anything. Which actions are the right ones to start with depends on the community, its challenges, and the opportunities it has. There is no lack of options for how to get started. The best excuse for doing nothing is to wait for the perfect solution. You just need to get started undoing the segregation in our communities one little bit at a time. 

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

What is social housing? The simple answer is that it is a systemic approach to providing homes that treat housing not as a commodity, but as a human right. But to make it more than just a slogan, you need policies and institutions to make that right into a reality.      

Not so long ago, social housing was rarely discussed in the United States. But today there are over a dozen social housing campaigns across the country: from municipal efforts in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Seattle, Kansas City, and San Francisco; to statewide campaigns in California, New York, and Rhode Island, to mention a few. Some are grassroots campaigns; others are led by elected officials. Each seeks a unique path to meet the needs of their own localized version of the broader housing crisis. 

Many reports, too, have called for social housing, including Right To the City, People’s Policy Project, People’s Action, Community Service Society, and the Center for Popular Democracy. Some point to large-scale, government-run rental housing, while others also explicitly include housing cooperatives and community land trusts. And among the most original proposals make an ecological case for social housing as a core part of a Green New Deal.   

It makes sense that social housing is gaining popularity today. In the fallout of the pandemic, it looked for a moment as if US housing policy was about to fundamentally change. But in the end, governments dragged their feet and promised change stayed on the drawing board. But that hasn’t stopped movements from pushing. So, might a profound shift to social housing yet be on the horizon?

Vienna and the Birth of Social Housing

The staff and residents of Karl Marx-Hof, the famous public housing complex in Vienna, have seen an uptick in international visitors. The “people’s palace” houses 3,000 residents in 1,300 comfortable apartments, all in a pleasant and well-maintained complex that includes a large courtyard and ample common facilities. 

When it opened in 1930, it was the largest residential housing project in Europe. Today a city streetcar line makes four different stops along the iconic kilometer-long façade. At the age of 93, it has a storied past but is also a powerful exemplar of Vienna’s ongoing commitment to housing. Visitors from the US cannot help but be shocked at the contrast with public housing at home, as Karl Marx-Hof seems to suffer from none of the problems of underfunding and poor quality that plague its US counterparts. 

And while Karl Marx-Hof is a mandatory stop, what is actually more interesting is the broader system of social housing it exemplifies, which includes public housing, limited equity cooperatives, public developers, inclusive urban and environmental planning, excellent public transit, and extensive regulation and taxation of the private market. Nearly two-thirds of the city’s housing stock is considered social housing. 

Local housing authorities expect the flow of visitors to increase this year as the city celebrates 100 years of social housing. In 2022, delegations from California, Hawaii, and New York visited the housing complexes, and now, for a second year in a row, there will be a course offered by the Global Policy Leadership Academy for elected officials and philanthropists interested in learning about the city’s success. 

Attention to Vienna’s housing is not new, but interest from the United States is. Not since the founding of public housing in the US, when Vienna was also the standard housing expert tour itinerary, has social housing been so prominently part of US public discussion. 

A Looming Housing Crisis

Why is social housing gaining US adherents? The reasons are not hard to discern. Evictions are up, while year-over-year rent growth for new leases of single-family rentals peaked at 16.7 percent in July 2021, and has remained in double digits since then. A leading driver of inflation, rent growth had a singular effect on rising prices.

Meanwhile, housing prices rose so fast in 2021 that, on paper at least, people could earn more from their home than from work. As many would-be homeowners were priced out, investors have swept in. At the end of 2021, investors bought 26 percent of single-family homes on the market, driven by the promise of higher rental incomes. 

These problems stem from the contradictory demands for real estate as a commodity and housing as a social good. For housing activists around the country, the appeal of social housing is its promise to “decommodify” housing—that is, to shield housing costs and access from the private market. 

But 1920s Vienna is not 2023 United States. Vienna’s social housing was created when the city’s hegemonic Social Democratic Party decided to discipline a weak real estate sector and build up a robust local welfare state. The broader development of welfare states in Europe was also in a period when a post-war housing boom, a powerful administrative apparatus, and an organized working class made public inroads into the market possible.

Social housing has three qualities: it’s nonspeculative, it’s democratically run, and it’s publicly backed.

In contrast, neoliberalism, marked by its favoring of private sector over direct government provision, has reduced the financial and administrative capacities of US federal, state, and local housing agencies. After pulling back from providing for the direct ownership and management of public housing, US affordable housing policy is now handled almost entirely through subsidies to the private market via tax credits and rental assistance. 

Even in Europe, in recent years investment in social housing has been on the decline; as much as a third of the original social housing has been privatized due to neoliberal pressures there. Legislative change is difficult, since the real estate industry has largely captured the state at all levels of government, creating what urban planner Samuel Stein calls “the real estate state.” Therefore, policy advocates in the US and beyond must contend with the task of growing a robust social housing system in the infertile soil of neoliberalism.

Advancing a Social Housing Vision in America

What is emerging today in US social housing campaigns is a mosaic of different variations of decommodified housing. Despite the debates on how to define it, for these campaigns social housing has three qualities: it’s nonspeculative, it’s democratically run, and it’s publicly backed. Nonspeculative means that the price of shelter and access to it are not determined by the market. Democratically run means that residents have meaningful say over their living conditions. Publicly backed means that housing has governmental resources, and institutions are ready to support a social housing sector. These qualities distinguish social housing from market-oriented programs like housing vouchers or the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. 

Today’s proposals are building on models and lessons from previous eras of social housing. In an era that we call Social Housing 1.0, governments felt that they could build big projects, and thus created and managed large-scale, nonmarket housing. This includes the well-planned and universalist government housing of many places in Europe, as well as the marginal public housing system in the US that only served the poor. These were almost exclusively rental properties.

But as neoliberalism eroded the capacity and willingness of governments to build housing, communities had to roll up their sleeves and do it themselves. In response to the market-based system’s failure to develop adequate affordable housing, we have seen the rise of cooperatives, nonprofit housing corporations, community land trusts, and tenant syndicates—in other words, housing provisions outside of the government.

Today’s campaigns are drawing on a mix of institutional designs and transitionary policies of the prior eras to deal with the unique conditions of the US. The result is what we might call Social Housing 2.0, a kind of “institutional bootstrapping” where all the tools are potentially on the table. This means campaigns are pushing for a mix of public and community ownership, and that they are grappling with the challenges of where to get the money.

Creating a system where housing is a right is treacherous. Neoliberalism put millions into deep poverty and simultaneously atrophied the kind of public sector needed to pull them out. Thus, an “ideal” social housing policy may have to be preceded by something that could actually be created in the world of today. But too many concessions risks creating a warmed-over version of the market-based affordable housing policies that are currently in place.

Social housing will have to contend with many dilemmas and contradictions, for which the best resolutions are not clear and likely not applicable to every local context. Dealing with these is not necessarily an either/or. In fact, solutions will often lie somewhere in between. In particular, in structuring social housing policy it is important to address the following tensions:

• Targeted versus universalist: A targeted housing policy focuses on those most in need. The existing housing system has left hundreds of thousands homeless, and millions more giving over half of their income to their landlords, only to (often) live in substandard housing. Traditionally, US housing policy has focused on the neediest, yet even that approach has failed miserably.

By contrast, a universalist social housing policy provides benefits to broad swaths of the population. Universal programs cost more money but typically attract far broader political support. This is one reason why Social Security has proven more sustainable than US public housing. A universalist program also doesn’t require means testing, which is both bureaucratically costly and often degrading to beneficiaries.

• Community-owned versus government-owned: Community-owned housing is decentralized and decisions about what to do with a property are made by residents. These models often involve cooperatives or mission-driven nonprofits—and can involve a mix of resident-owned and rental housing. Community-owned housing also has a history of more democratic and engaged management.

Government-owned housing means that governments hold all property rights to the housing. It is therefore entirely rental housing. It is much easier to grow and manage government-owned housing at a large scale, since it has greater financial and administrative capacity than small-scale community-owned housing, though resident engagement, especially in the US, has been mostly symbolic rather than empowering.  

• Revenue-independent versus subsidized: Where does the money come from to create social housing and to keep it running? Revenue-independent social housing is financially sustainable on its own. For construction, it may rely on traditional private sources of startup capital, such as loans, government bonds, or funds from the residents themselves. For ongoing costs, these types of housing often “cross-subsidize” the lower-income rents with higher rents from moderate-income renters. The pool of potentially available private capital has fewer political obstacles than relying on public appropriations. But private capital introduces the pressure to generate surpluses to pay back lenders.In contrast, for subsidized models, the government makes up the difference in lower revenue that results from housing low-income tenants. This may come in the form of initial construction subsidies, or with subsidies for ongoing operations costs. Subsidies reduce the pressure for the housing to “break even” and for deeper affordability for those who need it.

How can social housing advocates proceed? Given the challenges of making federal policy gains, at least initially social housing policies are more likely to gain traction at the state and local levels. That means that policies will need to be tailored to local contexts, especially given budgetary challenges. Therefore, the question may be not whether, for example, to depend fully on private funding or to exclude it altogether, but rather how much market influence to allow, while still ensuring that the housing is nonspeculative, democratically run, and publicly backed.

We have already seen early local legislation that is navigating these tradeoffs. In February 2023, Seattle’s I-135 ballot initiative created a municipal Social Housing Developer. The agency will create housing that will be entirely owned by the city, not by nonprofits or cooperatives. People making up to 120 percent of area median income will be eligible for the housing, thus giving it a broader constituency. The agency relies entirely on bond capital for its work, which will require it to generate a surplus from the housing to pay back investors.

Establishing housing for all as a right requires not just building decommodified housing but also maintaining housing outside of the market for the long haul.

In November 2022, Los Angeles voters approved the affordable housing ballot initiative Measure ULA with a yes vote of over 57 percent, establishing a transfer tax on properties that sell for over $5 million. Seventy percent of proceeds will go to affordable housing and 30 percent will go to various homelessness prevention services. Of the affordable housing dollars, up to 22.5 percent can be used for “alternative models for permanent affordable housing,” which includes public housing, limited equity cooperatives, and community land trusts. The housing is mostly targeted to those making less than 80 percent of area median income—with at least 20 percent of the units reserved for those making less than 30 percent of area median income—while up to 20 percent of the units may be market rate. The revenues from the transfer tax create the ability to provide an ongoing subsidy to low-income renters; therefore, rents do not need to cover all costs.

Like all local social housing advocates, organizers in Seattle and Los Angeles had to make choices on what to prioritize, given local conditions and politics. There is no clear “right” answer, since all the decisions invoke the tradeoffs discussed above.    

Building Social Housing for the Long Haul

A single cooperative, community land trust, or public housing project on its own is not social housing. Real social housing is a system that establishes housing as a right. Advancing and establishing housing for all as a right requires not just building decommodified housing but also maintaining housing outside of the market for the long haul. It also requires an “ecosystem” of policies, organizations, and movements to keep the system working and holding true to its mission. The more that housing and real estate are treated as a primary fuels of capital accumulation, the less our ability to create homes for all.  

Elsewhere, we have proposed a Social Housing Development Authority, which would be a federal institution to acquire and rehabilitate distressed real estate to convert to social housing, as well as build new social housing. This is one possible answer to the complex question of how to build a system of social housing in the United States even amid an inhospitable political context. 

Such a federal authority could help local initiatives scale, while transitioning increasing shares of housing out of the housing market through a combination of subsidies, affordable financing, and revolving funds. It would develop new public rental housing as well as seed housing cooperatives. Central to the work too would be extensive organizing and mobilizing work by tenants and movements to keep the federal agency focused on its mission—and to avoid capture by private real estate interests.

To our minds, all these issues boil down to the question of political will. And political will can change. Already in a few short years, social housing has moved from abstract concept to broadly debated policy. The grassroots organizing that has made this possible shows little sign of letting up.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

A former executive director of the nonprofit Breakthrough New York, Rhea Wong is a podcaster (she hosts Nonprofit Lowdown), fundraiser, and consultant who helps executive directors and development staff raise money. She runs the Fundraising Accelerator, an executive coaching program.

She’s also the author, with Isabella Masucci, of a new book, Get That Money, Honey: The No-Bullsh*t Guide to Raising More Money for Your Nonprofit.

The book is part manifesto, part utilitarian workbook, with do-it-yourself exercises scattered in between Wong’s crisp words of advice for executive directors and nonprofit fundraisers.

Wong’s approach focuses on pursuing (and securing) large, private philanthropic gifts.

NPQ spoke with Wong this May.

NPQ: What brought you to write this book?

Rhea Wong: I was a 26-year-old executive director, and like a lot of executive directors, I was kind of thrown in the deep end without a lot of training, a lot of support. They handed me the keys and my email address in the first day and said, “Good luck.” And so my first day on the job, I did two Google searches. One was: what exactly does an executive director do? Two was: how do you fundraise? Unfortunately, I think a lot of people in our sector are thrown into the same types of situations. And so I wrote the book for the 26-year-old me who had no idea what to do. The idea behind it was, if you’re new to this, if you don’t know anything, grab this book and it’ll at least give you a starting point. Because the other thing is, I learned by trial and error, I made a ton of mistakes along the way. And so my hope is that I can save people who read the book, you know, some of the basic mistakes, like don’t make the same mistakes I made, make new and different mistakes.

NPQ: You write about changing one’s mindset around money—and how you had to do that yourself.

RW: I think the main thing that really was a big stumbling block for me is, so I was in it for twelve-and-a-half years, and I would say I spent the first half of it never having examined my own relationship to money. And I think that’s a mistake that a lot of us make when we enter the fundraising field or into nonprofit leadership.

And the reason why that’s important is that in our society, money means a lot of things, right? We imbue it with lots of meaning, you know, good and bad.

And then I think there’s a lot of trauma, especially for folks of color, around money. Systemic trauma, racial trauma, intergenerational trauma, plus the trauma that we experienced just growing up in our households. That’s a lot of stuff to bring into any conversation, especially a conversation with someone who is wealthy and potentially a donor.

So many of us, and particularly in the nonprofit sector, we have a belief that money is scarce, that there’s never going to be enough, that we see other people as competitors, that we’re never going to be able to afford anything, we can’t pay our people enough, et cetera. Those stories don’t really help us. They’re not empowering. And what happens, physiologically speaking, is when we are in a space of scarcity, we are what we call survival mode.

Our brain is only ever in one of two modes, either survival or executive, right? When we’re in survival mode we interpret the world as a threat. And what happens then is we are not actually able to work from a place of calm, we’re not able to see all of the possibilities.

NPQ: Why did you decide to focus on major individual gift fundraising in particular?

RW: I believe the last numbers I saw, it was that 46 percent of all philanthropic dollars given was given by individuals. So there’s a tremendous amount of money out there.

I see a lot of organizations focus on foundations or corporations or whatever, and that’s a much smaller piece of the pie. And those dollars also tend to be quite restrictive. Individual giving tends to be unrestricted, and it tends to be less cumbersome bureaucratically. When you’re speaking directly to the decision-maker, decisions can happen much more quickly.

The other thing I will say is that we just have tremendous individual wealth in this country. So what’s interesting is even though philanthropic giving is down, overall, the number of people who have donor-advised funds or family foundations has risen. So obviously the wealth is there. It’s just being parked in different places. And I’m a low-hanging-fruit kind of person. If that’s where the money is, we should go there.

But I think that a lot of people are really hesitant to do it because it feels much more intimate to speak to someone about their personal assets. It feels like there are more ways to go wrong than when you’re speaking to a program officer and there’s a set cadence that we’re going to go through, and we all understand what the framework is. I also think that’s why major gift fundraising is really interesting. It’s very improvisational. Anything can happen.

NPQ: You write that, as a fundraiser, you’re not selling your organization’s work to donors; you’re selling them on your ability to meet their emotional needs.

Philanthropy is inherently emotional.

RW: I’m going to tip my hat here to a really amazing researcher named Dr. Russell James out of Texas. He put people in MRI machines and he talked to them about business. And when he talks about business, one part of the brain lights up. Then he talks about philanthropy and a different part of the brain lights up. The emotional part of the brain lights up. It’s the same part of the brain that lights up when we think about family.

Philanthropy is inherently emotional. We use data to back up what is essentially an emotional decision for us. And everyone out here in the world has a story about themselves. They have a movie and they are the main character. We all want something. And when we think about philanthropy, it’s often because somebody wants something. They want legacy. They want to be remembered. They want to belong. They want to transcend.

I think the mistake that a lot of nonprofit folks make is thinking that it’s a sales job. Philanthropy works in a different part of the brain. And so what we as fundraisers need to do, we have to understand that we are merely guides in the story of our donors. We’re there to help them to reach their philanthropic dreams and goals. And we need to figure out what it is that they want and how can we align what they want to see in the world with the work that we’re doing. So it’s inherently a different orientation to the conversation.

NPQ: One of the things that you say is that when it comes to the work of getting and keeping donors, solicitation itself is only two percent of the pie, so to speak, and that the biggest slices are cultivation and stewardship of donors.

RW: I think everyone gets really bent out of shape about solicitation. You get nervous about it. You think about getting rejected. We have so many emotional feelings wrapped up with solicitation, but really, it’s such a small part of the process.

If you’re dating somebody and you decide to ask them to marry you, how much is that one piece of “Will you marry me?” compared to the dating phase, where you got to know each other, where you built something, where you were building trust together? And then hopefully, once you seal the deal, you spend a lot of time on stewardship. You spend a lot of time making your partner feel special, like they’re glad that they said that they were going to marry you, that, you know, hopefully you’ll make it to the next anniversary, right. That you’re continuing to build on stuff. And so, I think it’s a helpful way to think about the kinds of relationships that we should be building with our donors too. The ask is such a small part of the overall engagement process. Pun intended.

I think we really need to think about, how are we building a relationship of trust? How are we building towards an eventual ask? And honestly, if you’ve done it well, the ask will just feel like the natural next step. Like it should not be a surprise.

NPQ: You write a lot about boards and why so many executive directors experience frustration with their boards, particularly around fundraising. What are some of the common pitfalls here?

RW: I think number one, people aren’t recruiting for the things that they want. They’re not onboarding and being very upfront with what they expect, and then they get annoyed when the people get on the board and they’re not doing the thing that they didn’t know that they were supposed to do in the first place—a lot of it is fundraising most of the time.

Once folks are on the board and EDs do want them to fundraise, they often don’t provide the training necessary. Fundraising is a skill like anything else, and I think we assume that because someone does sales, or because they’re coming from a corporate background, they’ll know how to fundraise. I think we can say that that’s probably not true.

And I think there’s a real lack of clarity and leadership. A lot of times folks will join boards and they will have no board experience. They’ve not had any governance experience. So again, we don’t train people for the job that we’re asking them to do. We don’t provide them with information about what’s the proper level of altitude they’re supposed to be working at. And so they end up in the weeds and micromanaging.

NPQ: Speaking of responsibilities and delegating, you have this anecdote in the book about how, as executive director of Breakthrough New York, you initially spent all this time ordering pizzas for the youth the program served. And it was actually a fairly complex task, there were a lot of facets to getting the pizza orders right. But it probably wasn’t the best use of your time.

RW: Absolutely not. Lesson one is encouraging people to take a step back, to think strategically about their time.

I think that sometimes we do things like ordering the pizza to avoid doing the things that make us uncomfortable. So I know how to order the pizza. I feel very comfortable doing that. I know how to answer my emails. I may not know how to pick up the phone and talk to a donor, so I just do the thing that makes me feel comfortable to feel like I’m “busy” to avoid the thing that I don’t really want to or know how to do.

And I say this for not just EDs, but leaders everywhere: I think there’s a fear of delegation, especially if you are a highly competent person because you think that no one is going to be able to do it quite as well as you will, or they’re going to make mistakes. And someone said this to me once: if somebody can do the job 80 percent as well as you can, give it to them. We really need to embrace progress, not perfection.

NPQ: You write about times of crisis and how leaders can be reluctant to fundraise at such moments—but shouldn’t be. Why not?

RW: People are generous and they respond in moments of crisis. The donation rates after 9/11, the donation rates during the pandemic, during Black Lives Matter—we see this over and over again. People want to give. They want to help and they’re more generous in moments of crisis. People want to be part of the solution. They want to feel like they belong. They want to feel that they’re doing something bigger than themselves. I think the nonprofits that are thriving are the ones that dare to step into the breach.

We, as fundraisers, have to be the ones to dare to dream and dare to hope and to give others around us hope.

But also, it’s an opportunity to build your community. It’s so powerful, it especially was in the early days of the pandemic, for people to reach out to their donors, just to say, how are you doing? Are you okay? Because we’re humans and we want we want to feel like we’re part of something. And how powerful would it be for me to feel connected to the nonprofit that I give to in this time that feels really scary and very isolating.

Good things happen in life, bad things happen in life. But the show must go on. And I think we, as fundraisers, have to be the ones to dare to dream and dare to hope and to give others around us hope. And that happens through conversations. And it happens during fundraising.

NPQ: You mentioned that there can be trauma around issues of money, especially for people of color in this space. Are there particular challenges that you see leaders, executive directors of color encountering when it comes to fundraising?   

RW: Do we have another hour? There’s a lot to unpack there, right? There’s the history of enslavement and exploitation and forced labor and stolen lands and stolen people, and capitalism writ large and systemic racism and redlining . . . I could go on and on and on. How do we heal from this history of trauma that has been inflicted on us?

I really believe at the end of the day, fundraising is the most revolutionary thing you can do.

There are big, important questions. And I think as fundraisers, we’re in this tension of holding all of this history and this trauma at the same time that we are the bridge to wealth, really, and mobilizing wealth. And that wealth generally tends to be predominantly White, older, and in many cases built on the very exploitation that we are talking about.

So the short answer is, I’m still struggling with myself. I don’t pretend I have all the answers, but I think one of the answers is that we just have to be able to say what it is. We have to be explicit about it. We have to ask good questions about how we move forward from here. And I think we need to heal ourselves because I really believe at the end of the day, fundraising is the most revolutionary thing you can do. You’re moving capital from one place to another to make change happen, to make the world a more equitable place.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.