We sat down with Daniel Wiley to discuss the role of community organizing in housing policy and housing justice.

Daniel: In my heart of hearts, I’m a community organizer. The more I’ve done the work, I’ve realized that there are so many ways of organizing beyond agitating with bullhorns and signs. The best way for me is to make sure that I’m as resourceful as possible, that I’m not taking up the space but giving the community the space. It’s how you absorb what people tell you, how people absorb what you say to them. You’re building trust, both for you and for what you’re sharing.

You mentioned starting out in arts and hip hop culture. How does that intersect with your work?

Daniel: I was engulfed in hip hop culture in Newark and New York City, working with a collective of street artists. In my early 30s, I came across a job opportunity to organize in my old neighborhood for Ironbound Community Corporation (ICC). I remember my first thought was, I think we could build a wiffle ball field at my old grammar school. But my first organizing campaign began when a public housing tenant came in and shared with me a notice to shut down the Millard E. Terrell Homes public housing. That led me to jump into what felt like one of the longest housing campaigns that folks in the city have worked on. The dream of being an artist led me to where I am, but I still use that creativity, that sense of community, and that energy on a daily basis.

In Newark, including East Ironbound, street art is important to our city’s culture. So we started working with a collective of street artists to figure out how to preserve this culture. We initially started beautifying the area with murals. One artist said, “Oh great, we can use this to gentrify the neighborhood.” And I realized we had to take a couple steps back and talk about why we were doing this. We looked at Wynwood in Miami and Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program, and the contrast between the two. We learned that we had to ensure the rest of the community is part of the process. Bringing more community members in helped us realize what it actually means to preserve a culture. They wanted to see themselves on these walls.

Now that Newark is in the beginning stages of its development boom, we started focusing on other ways to protect our communities. What precautions can we put in place to help our community stay in place? So we worked on a rent control campaign. That galvanized folks to think about what other policies were in place. The executive director of Ironbound Community Corporation drafted the first inclusionary zoning ordinance for the City of Newark. We followed the lead of New York City with Right to Council, making Newark the third city in the whole country to pass it. 

You’ve helped advance several major housing policies in Newark. For those unfamiliar, what’s their impact?

Daniel: Newark’s rent control policy is one of the strongest in the nation. We actually have anti-vacancy decontrol, and other measures that help to keep communities together. Our inclusionary zoning policy is progressive but the challenges come in the enforcement. Same with right to counsel – the enforcement capacity keeps it from reaching its full potential.

One of the things that we’re focusing on now is community ownership. After creating ordinances, how far into the process does community engagement stop? How do we get it to go further? With inclusionary zoning, there weren’t measures in place to make sure that after it crossed the City Hall line, the community was still involved. Enforcement actually impacts development moving forward.

What critical housing challenges are you facing through the Housing Justice Project right now?

Daniel: Development is dictating the future of what our communities are going to look like, and we’re also as a community not having the opportunity to actually define what a community is or what neighborhoods should look like, even though we go through all these meetings for master plans.

We just lost the campaign we were working on for the last year, which was to stop like this 30-story development, in a neighborhood where most of the community is capped at five stories. It started off with three or four people, and it turned into 100 people showing up to a Planning Board meeting, which is unusual. And still basically the city said, it’s cool that you came out, but guess what? We have our own vision of what’s going to happen, and granted that developer their permit.

As development happens, eviction cases are going up. We’re seeing landlords illegally trying to increase rents by $1,000, even though rent increases are capped between like $50 to like $100 when the lawful percentage (attached to the Consumer Price Index) is applied.

Habitability is also a major issue – issues with elevators, buildings with units where nothing is updated or fixed, just issue upon issue all across the city. Unfortunately, all of this lands the hardest on our already vulnerable residents. We’re also paying close attention to our immigrant population who are really suffering right now, on top of what’s going on at the federal level. 

Can you describe the New Jersey Legal Design Lab and your role there?

Daniel: The Lab brings together third-year law students who are interested in movement lawyering. My job as community engagement lead is to bring the community members together with them. Are we introducing community spaces to classroom spaces or classroom spaces to community spaces?

In collaboration, community members and students work together to build prototypes for what might be useful in the community. Right now we’re working on a tenant resource hub. It can be hard to believe the amount of people that don’t understand their basic rights as a tenant because the information is unclear. We have the first part live now as a prototype, and we are always collecting feedback to understand what is the most important information needed, and how community members understand that information so that it is empowering and useful beyond or before crisis.

We’re also thinking about a community school, to help community members understand zoning, tenant rights, reading leases, anti-eviction strategies, and anything else people on the ground feel could benefit their movements. 

Another piece we hope to offer is to help people know the history behind what they might be experiencing. That emphasis on history came directly from community leaders. While one of the members of our Co-Lab space, a librarian, was facilitating a conversation, everybody perked up when they mentioned Newark’s history, and we realized we should talk about this more.

How do you apply an anti-racist approach to your work?

Daniel: Paying attention to the nuance is really important, the ability to listen intently and actually absorb what people are saying. Outside of language justice, there’s also community language that you have to understand. People want to be heard, no matter the setting. So you have to work to understand. It might take an hour to pick up on one thing, or you might get a one word answer, but it comes from a very real place. 

I think we really have to talk about how we get more people of color in positions of power, in a meaningful way. It’s too easy to tokenize community members, to have someone be in your space to legitimize your work, rather than the other way around. Those of us that work in spaces of power need to make sure that us being in community spaces actually legitimizes the community, rather than legitimizing the institution.

Daniel Joseph Wiley is a lifelong resident of Newark, NJ, where he has spent most of his time creating space for public art, and organizing with tenants for housing policy and positive change in communities.

We took some time to talk to Jesse Rabinowitz about his work to confront the criminalization of homelessness and policies that actually make a difference in reducing homelessness.

To start, can you tell me a little bit more about yourself and how you got into this work?

Jesse: My mom used to run the emergency hypothermia shelter at our synagogue growing up. I remember being in the kitchen with her, and I’m sure I was being a brat, and she was like, just go, talk to people. I have this strong memory of sitting with homeless folks on their mats and connecting with them as people, learning that they wanted the same thing that everybody does – a place to live, to feel safe, and to be part of an accepting community. And that has carried with me throughout my life.

I’ve been doing this work for about a decade, from homeless street outreach, a case manager in a drop-in center, to local policy and organizing. For the past two and a half years, I’ve been at the National Homelessness Law Center fighting the onslaught of laws that make it a crime to be  homeless.

What are some misconceptions about homelessness that you’d like to challenge, or alternative narratives you’d like to uplift?

Jesse: The biggest narrative that we have to debunk is that people are choosing to be homeless. I’ve never met anyone who has wanted to be homeless. Homelessness happens  because our priorities are backwards and our systems are broken: there’s not enough housing, there’s not enough support, there’s not enough care. But homelessness is not an individual choice. It’s a policy failure. Anti-homeless laws respond to this false belief that if we make homelessness harder, people will choose something else. But there is no “something else.” People would not be sleeping outside if they had anywhere else to go.

Making it a crime to be homeless makes homelessness worse. It destroys people’s trust with the government. It destroys people’s belongings, like their medicine, IDs that they need to get into housing. It saddles people with a criminal record, making it harder to find a job or housing, and displaces them. It does not work.

One of the interesting things our polling showed is that more people than not now recognize homelessness as a systems failing and not an individual issue, because either they or a loved one has experienced homelessness or housing instability.

Homelessness is not new, but it’s not inevitable. When I talk to folks who are older than I am, they remember not seeing huge numbers of people sleeping outside every night. Homelessness exploded when the Reagan administration decimated the social safety net, and I find comfort in that, in an odd way, because that teaches us that homelessness is solvable. That means that we can get back there. We have to build people power to demand that our elected officials do their jobs and fund a housing system that works for everybody. 

But we have had proven success in reducing homelessness and in connecting people with the services and support they need. Cities and states across the country continue to do important work moving folks off the street and into housing. I feel like that’s unseen because we are not yet preventing more people from coming into homelessness. Housing and support works – there’s just not nearly enough of it. Across the country, the overwhelming majority of folks stay stably housed after the first year. When I was a case manager, folks would get into housing, they got healthy, reconnected with their families, started volunteering or found jobs. We know housing and support works, there aren’t enough of these proven solutions to go around. And that is a policy choice.

As a field, we can often silo community development and homelessness. How do you think about their intersection?

Jesse: Homelessness is the most visible way our failed housing system shows up. And it is frustrating to see people talk about housing justice but not those who are most impacted, people who are living outside. If we want to build a world where everybody has a place to live, that has to include and focus on folks who are living outside and in shelters. Otherwise you’re missing a key segment of the work. People don’t always want to engage with homelessness – but we need to.

It’s also important to address the inflow into homelessness, so we need to be doing both the work of preventing eviction, making sure that people stay stably housed at the same time as we are moving people from homelessness into housing. That requires increased coordination and increased funding of all of these programs.

What is giving you hope in the future you want to see?

Jesse: We’re in this sad but potentially powerful time when half of renters are paying more than they can afford each month. One in four families worry about imminently becoming homeless, and one in five households spend all of their income on rent. More and more people are seeing that our housing system is rigged for billionaires, and more and more people are realizing that homelessness is caused by policy and not by personal choices.

Our polling consistently shows that over 70% of people support solutions to homelessness, like Housing, Not Handcuffs. And we’re seeing results. In the last legislative cycle, there were 54 bills introduced that criminalized homelessness, and advocates and people with experience of homelessness and community members came together and defeated 80% of those bills. When we organize, we win.

I’m excited that our opposition is forcing us to collaborate across sectors. We are coordinating with mental health advocates, harm reductionists, disability rights advocates in new ways. 

When we look at authoritarian regimes throughout history, they have come after two groups first – people they believe to be foreign, and homeless people. We saw this in Italy. We saw this in Germany. It’s happening here right now. Dehumanizing rhetoric turning into dehumanizing policy. In Atlanta, Cornelius Taylor was killed by a bulldozer when the city was throwing away his encampment. There is a twisted desire to remove people from society and force them into camps. At no time in history has forcing people into camps ever been a good thing. While people are rightly concerned about government overreach and authoritarianism, I need them to understand that a key counter to that is fighting against the criminalization of homelessness and fighting for the housing and support that everybody needs.

If you can do one thing, check out our resources and campaigns at Housing Not Handcuffs. We have a campaign right now saying no federal funding for detention camps. Housing Not Handcuffs is our effort to counter the lies of a billionaire-backed campaign to make it a crime to be homeless. People who got rich from Palantir – which sells facial recognition technology to ICE that the Trump administration has used to find, locate and deport migrants – are using their billionaires to fund this anti-homelessness push in cities, states, and now the federal government. The only real solution to homelessness is getting folks housing and support they need. Let’s push for the policies we know we need to actually solve homelessness.

Jesse Rabinowitz is the Campaign and Communications Director at the National Homelessness Law Center. He led the communications and power-building work on the historic Johnson vs. Grants Pass Supreme Court Case. Previously, he was the Senior Manager for Policy and Advocacy at Miriam’s Kitchen, where he managed a coalition that won funding to end chronic homelessness for over 6,000 people. Jesse received his master’s in social work at Howard University and lives in DC with his spouse and kiddo.

We caught up with Kavya Shankar to discuss anti-displacement strategies rooted in community collaboration.

First, tell us more about your work, and what drew you into the work.

Kavya: The most formative experience for my current role was working on the Obama Presidential Center, an over $800 million investment onto the South Side of Chicago, a neighborhood that has been unjustly denied access to investment for a very long time. In talking with residents, there was a lot of excitement around investment after a long time of disinvestment, but also curiosity and fear around who this investment was really for and whether they could continue to afford living in the neighborhood.

I felt like even well-intentioned actors didn’t have the tools to help neighborhoods invest in themselves without sacrificing affordability and belonging. This was my own inspiration for Trust Neighborhoods. We work with communities through a model called the Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trust. Today, we are in five neighborhoods across the country, with MINTs owning over 250 units of housing, and they’re continuing to grow, and we’re continuing to work with new neighborhoods.

So what exactly is a Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trust (MINT), and how does it work?

Kavya: Trust Neighborhoods works with existing neighborhood-based organizations starting to worry about pricing pressure to launch a MINT. This includes two linked entities: a holding company managed by the local neighborhood organization that acquires, renovates, and builds the portfolio, and a perpetual purpose trust that holds control of the portfolio and is legally required to serve those purposes forever. The purposes are co-authored with the community, often including priorities like anti-displacement, affordability, and belonging.

This model ensures that the portfolio outlives any one individual or institution and is legally required to serve those purposes forever. The trust structure ensures that in 50 years, everything won’t get converted to market rate, and the properties can’t be sold to build something else. This is permanent affordable housing for the community.

The housing itself is scatter-site, integrated into the existing neighborhood. Units might be single family homes, duplexes, or larger multifamily buildings. A minority of units can float to market rate to help pay for keeping the rest of the portfolio affordable and to help sustain the portfolio.

We have three primary goals. One, minimizing displacement, making sure that renters are able to continue to afford to live in the neighborhood. The second is improving the housing quality. A lot of the MINTs buy out properties from absentee or negligent owners, and they improve the quality of the housing in the neighborhood. And the final way is shifting community power, centering decision-making in community, rather than with outside investors or developers.

That’s such a critical point, and I’m wondering if you can share more about how the community partnership works.

Kavya: Community is very much the center of all the work. Trust Neighborhoods always starts with an existing neighborhood organization that already has the legitimacy of the community. That could be East Colfax Community Collective in Denver, a tenant organizing group. Or Growing Together, a Tulsa nonprofit that is part of Purpose Built Communities. Or a traditional community development corporation like Lowell CDC in Fresno, or East Boston CDC. The important part is that they show legitimacy, have capacity, have a track record, and are aligned with protecting affordability for renters.

Many partners have already done strategic planning, which led them to anti-displacement work. East Colfax Community Collective conducted an extensive planning process with immigrant and refugee families in their neighborhood, including a survey in 11 different languages and workshops where members selected the MINT model and down payment assistance as the two tools that they wanted to see. So they came to us with this data and invited us to partner with them.

Once we start, we set up a resident task force who scopes the legal purposes. That includes renters in unregulated housing, worried about the possibility of their rent going up, alongside other homeowners and renters. Upon launching, the two governing boards both include community stakeholders, for long-term community accountability. The portfolio is managed locally, and often contractors and rehabbers are local to the neighborhood itself. Community is embedded into every step of the process.

Anti-displacement work is long-term, but what signs of impact have been seen so far?

Kavya: In Tulsa, the MINT purchased six homes, where other interested buyers were interested in rehabbing the properties and kicking out the tenants. Instead, the MINT kept tenants in place, and renovated their units to quality without raising rents. That’s small but meaningful. In the East Boston Neighborhood Trust, families who had been displaced previously from the neighborhood are actually moving back into units.

I’m especially excited that the MINT backs local talent and expertise, and allows them to work with serious capital. Often, outside players raise private capital with major balance sheets, and the local groups are working with grants and public funds. We want to see major capital take a bet on local groups and let them compete in the same way as private developers. Someone with a giant balance sheet can buy up properties and sit on them to see if the neighborhood goes up in value. What if the neighborhood could do that themselves, and the value actually accrued to them? 

What are some of the challenges that arise in launching and running a MINT?

Kavya: The biggest challenge is making sure that the robust infrastructure is in place for this to last forever, from the legal guardrails to the capacity for neighborhood partners to succeed. If there’s a roof that needs to be replaced in 15 years, that’s already in the budget. It’s a lot of work in the start-up phase. 

Another challenge is focus. There is always a desire to further lower rents, because there is always a need for even more deeply affordable housing. We need to be really clear about where the MINT fits into the overall ecosystem of housing. No one tool can serve everyone. That’s why we love collaborating with community land trusts, housing authorities, the whole range. MINTs are meant to intervene at a point in time in naturally occurring affordable housing environments, and lock in rents where they are at, serving a critical missing middle.

We’re also grappling with casemaking about building institutional community power. A lot of anti-racist initiatives are focused on individual wealth building. That is critical, but strong institutions create collective agency. Wealth alone is lonely. The goal is not just to have more wealth, it’s to have more community power alongside that wealth. 

What else do you hope to come out in the field?

Kavya: Bigger capital bets on communities. Capital needs to take this type of work seriously, not concentrating that capital with intermediaries or outside investors. Not everything has to be a pilot. Often the groups we’re backing have proven success for decades, and that track record deserves to have a big capital bet for them to intervene at scale. What would it look like for philanthropy, not to give a million here or there, but $10 million to allow a group to acquire at scale, get things off the speculative market and into the hands of the community?

I also would love to see funders take the lead from community instead of death by analysis of every single model. We don’t always need to spend money and time and resources vetting this model or this other model. Can we accept what the community says they want and back that vision? We need more community ownership investment across the board. 

Lastly, with the volatility we are seeing in real estate right now, what would it look like for community-controlled real estate to meet this moment, so that we don’t replicate what happened in 2008, but rather have a dramatic shift in who owns these assets in this country? That’s a future that’s not only necessary but also possible with models like MINTs.

Kavya has dedicated her career to creating more equitable communities. She is co-founder and CEO of Trust Neighborhoods, a national nonprofit that helps neighborhoods worried about gentrification own their own mixed-income rental housing. She started her career at McKinsey and Company, focused on local and state economic development. She has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard College and a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford Graduate School of Business.