FORWARD: Issue #5: Housing
Toolkit
Resources for making connections between art and housing, and working creatively in the housing sector
02
Training and Professional Development
NeighborWorks America
NeighborWorks’s training and certification offerings represent the best in professional development for those serving people and communities in any capacity. NeighborWorks offers both in-person and online training events and opportunities. The spectrum of courses, consulting, networking opportunities, and other support helps professionals and their organizations adopt innovations, improve performance, and achieve meaningful impact. Courses on how to leverage arts and culture for affordable housing and equitable community development are available.
03
Creative Community Development Case Studies
NeighborWorks America
NeighborWorks published a series of case studies that further highlight how new or expanded partnerships with artists or arts-based organizations can help us better elevate and address issues related to gentrification and displacement in our communities. Using creative methods, the partners developed shared goals and tested new community-driven strategies.
04
Dream Job—The Artist, ACRONYM CDC, from Dan's List
Scott Oshima
Scott Oshima’s dream job is an artist fighting for affordable housing and better lives for their family, friends, and neighbors. The position is a mash-up of their work experience as the former director of the Sustainable Little Tokyo creative placekeeping initiative, the work of comrades fighting for the future of Asian American Pacific Islander communities across the country, and the energy and spirit of aunties with baseball bats. They hope to one day see such a posting in the legendary LA nonprofit job listserv Dan’s List.
06
Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS)
Harvard University
The Harvard JCHS advances understanding of housing issues and informs policy. Through its research, education, and public outreach programs, the Center helps leaders in government, business, and the civic sectors make decisions that effectively address the needs of cities and communities. Through graduate and executive courses, as well as fellowships and internship opportunities, the Center also trains and inspires the next generation of housing leaders.
07
Mapping Prejudice
A University of Minnesota team of historians, geographers, librarians, digital humanists, and community activists seeking to expose structural racism
Mapping Prejudice identifies and maps racial covenants, clauses that were inserted into property deeds to keep people who were not white from buying or occupying homes. From our base in the University of Minnesota Libraries, our interdisciplinary team collaborates with community members to expose the history of structural racism and support the work of reparations.
09
A Brush With Kindness
Habitat for Humanity, New York City
In New York, “home” extends beyond the four walls of a house or apartment: it’s the community centers, playgrounds, parks, and schools that make up our communities. It’s our greater habitat. Our A Brush with Kindness (BWK) program involves painting, planting, “fix-up” and general improvement of public spaces, common areas in existing affordable resident-owned buildings, and mission-oriented organizational spaces that lack funds for refurbishing. BWK serves thousands of New Yorkers each year.
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Jim Crow of the North
TPT / Twin Cities PBS
Why does Minnesota suffer through some of the worst racial disparities in the nation? One answer is the spread of racist, restrictive real estate covenants in the early 20th century. Jim Crow of the North charts the progression of racist policies and practices from the advent of restrictive covenants after the turn of the last century to their final elimination in the late 1960s. An update to this series is coming in January 2023.
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Free the Deeds
A Minneapolis-wide public project that illuminates our common history and offers a path to repair
Created by community artists, Free the Deeds is now an initiative of Longfellow Community Council. We invite every property that had a racial covenant on it to display a lawn sign in its front yard to inspire learning and conversation. You are also invited to increase access to home ownership for people historically prevented from buying homes through racist practices and policies by supporting African American Community Land Trust home buyers with down payment assistance funds.
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Department of Beloved Places
Participatory Architecture and Design + Community Engagement
Department of Beloved Places (Dept. of Places) strengthens spaces with Beloved Community, so our neighborhoods reflect our cultural practices and collective identity. Dept. of Places is built on the foundation that everybody, especially Black, Indigenous, and people of color, should shape our own neighborhoods, and live in equitably resourced communities. Dept. of Places is a design practice directed by Theresa Hyuna Hwang (she/her/hers), a community-engaged architect based on occupied Tongva land (Los Angeles, CA USA).
"Welcome, consider this your greeting at our virtual front door!
Take a breath, take off your shoes, and come in. Did you eat yet?"
13
The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts
Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University
"The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts” set out to calculate the amount of money extracted from Chicago’s Black communities in the 1950s and '60s through the practice of what was commonly referred to as home contract sales (also referred to as home installment contracts, contracts for deed, or land sale contracts).
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Exploring the Ways Arts and Culture Intersects with Housing: Emerging Practices and Implications for Further Action
ArtPlace
In September 2015, ArtPlace commissioned independent researcher Danya Sherman to lead an exploration of the intersection of arts, culture, and housing outcomes—focused specifically on work within the housing sector that seeks to build and maintain high-quality housing affordable to low- and moderate-income individuals. Sherman's research was conducted primarily through a literature review, an analysis of philanthropic and federal grants to creative placemaking practitioners and other projects that operate at the intersection of arts and housing, and long-form qualitative interviews with over two dozen practitioners and thought leaders around the country.
15
Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America
By Beryl Satter
Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago—and cities across the nation. The "promised land" for thousands of Southern Blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos, and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South. In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city's Black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: not, as some have argued, Black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation.
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The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
By Richard Rothstein, Economic Policy Institute
In The Color of Law (published by Liveright in May 2017), Richard Rothstein argues with exacting precision and fascinating insight how segregation in America—the incessant kind that continues to dog our major cities and has contributed to so much recent social strife—is the byproduct of explicit government policies at the local, state, and federal levels.
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Design Matters Toolkit
Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute, Enterprise Community Partners
The Design Matters Toolkit provides three industry-tested tools that allow developers to incorporate thoughtful, people-focused design into any affordable housing project—no matter how tight the budget or complex the timeline.
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Project Row Houses
We empower people and enrich communities through engagement, art, and direct action.
A community platform that enriches lives through art with an emphasis on cultural identity and its impact on the urban landscape, we engage neighbors, artists, and enterprises in collective creative action to help materialize sustainable opportunities in marginalized communities. Project Row Houses occupies a significant footprint in Houston's Historic Third Ward, one of the city's oldest African American neighborhoods.
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Participatory Design Toolkit: Using Community Engagement to Improve the Design and Performance of Affordable Housing
Enterprise and Skid Row Housing Trust
This tool will help you facilitate a process with community members and staff, along with other key stakeholders and parties that are involved with living in, maintaining, and servicing your project. It will help you include feedback and design direction from a broad range of constituents.
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FORWARD: Issue #5
Housing
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