How to Build an Affordable America

Carroll Fife, head of the Oakland chapter of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), hit a major turning point last fall. A homeless mother who’d sought help from her organization had just attempted suicide, while up to a quarter of her staff were themselves facing homelessness. For Fife, the complete erosion of affordable housing in the Bay Area, and the despair that came with it, demanded a new, bolder course of action.

"I said, Look, I don’t have any money. I don’t have friends who own apartment buildings or houses. I really don’t have anything to give other than my networks and my ability to organize," Fife recalled. "So we took a house that was speculator-owned and lying vacant in the neighborhood for years."

That November, four homeless mothers, including two who worked at ACCE with Fife, moved into 2928 Magnolia Street in West Oakland and—in plain view of neighbors—sought to prove that they could revive a decrepit house, vandalized and ignored for years, and turn it into a family home. They started sweeping and making repairs and arranged for the plumbing and roofing to be fixed.

It wasn’t long before law enforcement knocked on their door, demanding that they vacate. But the mothers, under the banner of their new collective movement, Moms 4 Housing, were steadfast. The act of civil disobedience made headlines, mothers around the world wrote in support, and even after death threats and break-ins, they stood their ground. Affordable housing in America became international news. Moms 4 Housing’s attorneys would spend the next couple of months challenging the eviction notice, arguing for housing as a human right.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the United States already had a shortage of seven million rental units for households with extremely low incomes as of March 2019. Now, as upward of 40 million people face the risk of eviction because of joblessness caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing recession, finding new solutions to creating affordable housing is key to abating an imminent national housing crisis decades in the making.

Around the country, groups are taking up the challenge. Their approaches are varied, addressing the unique conditions, jurisdictions, geographies, and categories of people in need. But they all call for letting go of outdated notions about what affordable housing is—and whom it serves.