Love is a House: How Cities Can Change Student Lives Through Affordable Housing
Every child deserves a home their family can afford, in a neighborhood that’s safe, supportive, and welcoming. In short: a loving community.
The United States is in an unprecedented housing crisis: rents and mortgages are at record highs, our housing stock is aging and does not match the needs of the workforce, and 2024 saw an all-time high for homelessness — and the crisis is impacting low-income communities and people of color hardest.
Watch the full online event here.
If the dilemmas we face as a nation are interconnected, how can we approach and solve them in interconnected ways? Nonprofit, philanthropic and public institutions can all step up in this moment to build audacious and equitable solutions to the housing crisis.
The Schott Foundation convened leaders from across the country for a conversation moderated by Schott’s National Program Director, Michael S. Wotorson:
LaRussell – Musician, advocate, entrepreneur
Tiffani McCoy — Co-Executive Director, House Our Neighbors
Brandon L. McGee, Jr. — CEO, Connecticut Social Equity Council; former state legislator; former Deputy Commissioner, Connecticut Dept. of Housing
Anika Whitfield — Co-chair, Grassroots Arkansas
LaRussell is a rapper, artist, advocate, and entrepreneur. Born in Vallejo California, LaRussell is proudly independent, building his own musical infrastructure right in his Bay Area home, and hosting popular “Backyard Residency” concerts there. The non-profit he founded, Good Compenny, brings local artists’ visions to life through new products and apparel. Late last year, he was featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series.
In a video he recorded for this conversation, LaRussell reflected on how housing and education mixed in his life, and the ways he saw it open or close doors for him and the people he’s known. “I was kind of fortunate, because I was able to go to school across town, which was a slightly better school at the time. So I wasn’t at a disadvantage to it. But now, you know, kids that are still on my side of town aren’t able to go to school on that side of town, they got to go to the school within a zone. Growing up in Vallejo, I felt like everything was missing for students, and still is, you know, it’s hard to educate kids that’s in the hood or coming out of poverty or coming through tough living conditions, because the last thing on our mind is learning.”
Tiffani McCoy is Co-Executive Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Seattle-based group House Our Neighbors. Tiffani was the campaign manager for the landmark Yes on I-135 Campaign, the ballot initiative that created the first social housing developer in the United States. Just last month, House Our Neighbors won proposition 1A, which will add a 5% tax to companies with employees who make more than $1 million, the revenues from which will fund social housing purchase and development.
Tiffani McCoy speaking on social housing in a 2022 interview.
“We wanted to be able to put forward an actual approach that we thought would address homelessness and the housing crisis, instead of more police, more carceral systems, so we initiated this idea of social housing,” McCoy said. “It is not a new idea. It is an idea that is so old — in countries like Singapore and in Vienna and in Britain, France, in different parts of Europe and Asia, and even in Egypt… But we wanted to provide housing as a public good, because we had, as individuals, fought for more shelter, fought for more affordable housing, but we realized that if elected officials were honest with us and the public, they would say that we don’t have a plan to solve the affordability crisis.”
In the lingo of housing policy, “social housing” refers to housing that is affordable, removed from the speculative market, open to a wide range of incomes, and is a permanent public good. House Our Neighbors has a good explainer on social housing and how it can complement existing types of housing.
Brandon McGee is CEO of the Connecticut Social Equity Council. The Council promotes equitable economic prosperity by supporting Social Equity Entrepreneurs and reinvesting in the communities most impacted by the war on drugs. Brandon has extensive experience in housing, from his time as a state legislator and Deputy Commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Housing.
McGee emphasized the need for organizations and governmental agencies to break out of their silos to make sure those in need get the right resources and support. In his work in the Department of Housing, an inter-agency Council on Homelessness was established, that consists of “leaders from all of the state agencies that are responsible for housing and intervention, support services, and we wanted to build upon existing efforts already undertaken by many of our state agencies, to bring that in house.”
McGee’s current work involves making grants to those communities hit by the war on drugs, financed by cannabis sales — and communities are holistic things, so multiple issues must be addressed at the same time. “So we want to create opportunities to address food deserts, lack of education, childcare facilities,” he said. “We want to create all kinds of business owners, but at the end of the day, if we are not humanizing our work from our seats of influence, how we manage our budgets, how we are speaking truth to power, then all of these conversations are for naught.”
Anika Whitfield is Co-founder and Co-chair of Grassroots Arkansas, a longtime Schott Foundation grantee partner. Grassroots Arkansas is a grassroots organization of parents, students, educators, and community members who are committed to supporting, advocating for, protecting, and sustaining public school communities with representative democracy, equity, and justice.
Whitfield reminded viewers that for children, the school is their de facto home for much of the time. “That is their home, for nine months out of the year. That is one of their primary homes. And so for a lot of children, what do their homes look like? Their homes in the school buildings look like water running out of the ceiling. They look like mold in the walls and the floors, they look like water that you may not want to drink. It looks like air that is difficult to breathe in,” she said.
Whitfield linked the housing crisis to similar issues facing us: “The crisis of housing is virtually like the other crises that we have in our country, and they’re, for me, defined as a lack of embrace of common humanity, and a culture of acceptance of greed and division that’s masked with ideologies and theologies of scarcity. America has a horrible epidemic of imposing poverty and scarcity upon people who have been devalued for a variety of reasons, ethnicity, culture, gender identity, political affiliation. And the truth of the matter is, as we all know, we have more than enough land. We have more than enough skilled people who can restore buildings, restore homes, who can maintain and restore schools that are safe and healthy foundations for individuals and families, not only to live in, but to learn in and to grow in.”
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