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HOUSING IS THE CURE

How RI organizers, under COVID, illuminate the intersections and imperative of housing justice

For over 30 years, Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) has been struggling for systemic change while balancing the need to secure immediate harm reduction for Rhode Island tenants. Often this relief has come in the form of legislative demands. Terri Wright, DARE’s leading housing justice organizer told the College Hill Independent that the COVID pandemic in particular should impose a sense of urgency on lawmakers. “Our demands have no choice not to [resonate],” said Wright. “Everyone who needs to be listening can hear them; they can hear stories of struggle.”

With COVID deaths closely attributed to housing insecurity, DARE—through a suite of legislative, executive, and budgetary proposals—has articulated in recent months that “Housing is the Cure” to immediate and long-term social, economic, and public health crises. In parallel with legislative pleas, activists have found themselves dedicating much of their efforts to underscoring their mode of organizing—one that is focused on intersectional housing justice that extends beyond legislation—as best positioned to heal from the pandemic and move beyond the conditions that incubated its disparate violence.

In fact, despite organizers having been “at the table forever,” as Wright described, a disconnect persists between institutional responses and the comprehensive demands DARE and partner organizations insist upon. “Enough with the bills, enough with the laws that don’t support us,” she said. “The time is now.”

For housing justice organizers nationwide, 2021 has so far been filled with exhaustive organizing for housing justice in the face of unresponsive lawmakers. On the executive level, organizers correctly anticipated that the Biden administration would implement yet another meager, weaklyenforced extension of the eviction moratorium, lasting only through March 31. Groups across the Right to the City Alliance (RTTC)—a decade-old movement for urban justice and against dispossession and forced displacement, of which DARE is a founding member—staged protests in January and co-signed an “Executive Action Statement” demanding “a universal and comprehensive eviction and utility shut-off moratorium” enforced by the Department of Justice.

On the state level, DARE invited community members to the State House on February 27 to advocate for stronger protections for those facing evictions. As Dan McKee’s incoming gubernatorial administration laid forth a housing agenda born of long-defended austerity measures, DARE—at the protest and through a co-drafted letter—demanded that attention be given to immediate relief for tenants. The state response, activists emphasized, must coincide with and come out of legislative commitments that reflect DARE’s decades-long imperative toward housing justice.

“Why are protections not talked about right now, and why has the CDC moratorium been every 30 days and left tenants and homeowners to worry,” Wright implored a Rhode Island government in transition. “It shouldn’t be that way… Evictions and utility shut-offs need to stop, that’s all to get us through this pandemic, and, long term, we need housing.”

Lady Lawrence, an organizer with Housing=Health in Boston, told the Indy that housing justice activists who have been building against systemic conditions of inequality for decades have come to see the COVID pandemic as a “spike in the fever” during which the crucial, comprehensive, and collaborative scope of their work finally becomes illuminated. Despite differences in local contexts, for example, both Rhode Island and Massachusetts activists spoke to the increased relevance that their demands—ones that cut across intersecting issues and organizing coalitions—hold in the face of COVID as a convergence of long-endured systemic harm.

To activists like Wright and Lawrence, the connection between housing justice and public health, both pandemic-related and produced by systems like mass incarceration, is clear; in fact, COVID represents a symptom of the very ways in which institutional responses have long neglected their interconnectedness.

“In states where eviction protections lapsed, a new study estimates that 433,700 excess individuals have contracted COVID, and 10,700 people have died from the virus,” detailed the RTTC. “It is no surprise today that Black, Indigenous, people of color, and low-income households bear the greatest burden of this pandemic, experiencing the highest rates of COVID infections, including those caused by the highest rates of housing insecurity.”

These figures inform the urgency of DARE’s eviction-related demands. At the “Housing is the Cure” protest, the group outlined a set of policy proposals and moral imperatives: the extension of the eviction and foreclosure moratorium through the remainder of the pandemic, the cancellation of rent and utility debt, and the expansion of eviction protections beyond displacements due to nonpayment.

DARE’s organizing structure also accounts for how housing justice—particularly in the pandemic—intersects with other related exploitative crises under racial capitalism. In their “Principles of Unity” statement, DARE delineates their ideological commitment to solidarity building as a means to combat how “systems of oppression aim to maintain power by continuing to divide and conquer our communities.” Tangibly, this emphasis on collectivity manifests in DARE’s very composition: its primary committees are Behind the Walls (a prison abolitionist campaign) and the Tenant and Homeowner Association (THA, a South Providence-based low-income tenant advocacy group).

“There’s a connection,” emphasized Wright, “in areas of concentrated poverty, you’re gonna end up in a grave, in prison, or on the streets. And the fact that we’re in this pandemic is screaming that if we don’t fix justice, and have laws that support BIPOC communities in those areas, we’re going to end up with a public health crisis that we will not be able to get rid of.”

During the COVID pandemic, DARE has further centered how, as Lawrence captured, “police violence and housing injustice are both modalities of violence. Sometimes they kill us quickly with a bullet, but they’re killing all of us in slow motion.” This shared philosophy was reified by DARE’s participation in a recently-formed, Rhode Islandbased coalition that advocates for a budget that seeks to address the ravages of austerity. Consisting, among others, of sections devoted to Criminal and Housing Justice, their demands emphasized the need for funding universal housing programs for formerly incarcerated persons and reinvesting funds from the Department of Corrections to transitional housing programs and vouchers.

In his organizing through Massachusetts’ National Union of the Homeless local, Paul Johnson alluded to several anecdotes that reaffirm the shortcomings of institutional responses to the housing crisis—even as the Commonwealth purports to be the only “right-to-shelter” state and spends disproportionately more on housing per resident than Rhode Island. Johnson explained that the unhoused persist to be treated predatorily, countering the state’s lip speak: “What you have in South End Lower Roxbury is a funnel into both homelessness and the criminal injustice system.” Exemplifying this disconnect, Johnson denounced the private purchase of a historic public housing development—The Lenox Apartments—and the associated dispatch of armed security guards to police a low-income, historically Black community as the property is privatized.

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh’s abetting of this rapid closure with developers, despite the community organizing and “legal efforts to stop the land transfer” Johnson described, represents the institutional neglect that groups like DARE and the NUH insist must be combatted and circumvented. Continued state belligerence of this nature, in fact, is what catalyzed the resolidification of the National Union of the Homeless in 2018-2019 after its dissolution in the early 1990s.

Little precedent exists for housing justice activists to expect a legislative response aligned with their “universal and comprehensive” vision, one that is required to counteract long-entrenched oversight. As an alternative to state-induced precarity, DARE has come to embrace that “building real security” within communities necessitates “accountability to one another” through collective action by those enduring experiences of poverty and associated criminalization. This is a claim they have been staking for 30 years but whose mandate is urgently sculptive for housing justice movements amid the pandemic.

“There’s a question about how the THA works to go beyond what legislation can capture, and the answer to that is that we’re made up of community members. We live it,” Wright explained, emphasizing the political capital and community building potential inherent to tenants’ making demands informed by lived experience. “You cannot walk a mile in my shoes, but you will hear my voice today, about housing issues and beyond.”

During the pandemic, for instance, Wright recounted that her emotional investment in this work—as well as DARE’s legislative strategy—is founded in amplifying burgeoning grievances voiced by those facing imminent eviction and centering their stories as the substance from which housingrelated decision-making must shape itself. These sentiments toward community care and stewardship echo visions shared by housing justice organizers nationwide, including members of Housing=Health and the NUH. In anticipation of the shortcomings of state relief, Johnson similarly highlighted that unhoused persons have always been, and will continue to be, left to ruggedly sustain their own well-being. “One word would be survival, whether through community or on the individual level,” Johnson outlined, referencing how the NUH conducts much of its organizing alongside those who have sought care through encampments.

At this juncture, where balance between harm-reduction and systemic shifts remains hard to strike, Johnson identified space for transformative coalescence amongst tenants, the unhoused, and the poor across state lines. “Building a network throughout the region, including in Rhode Island, is the basis and beginning of it,” he insisted, expressing interest in coordinating new opportunities for collective action with groups like DARE. “Sometime in 2021, we’re gonna take some road trips, start building this network, and see where our process can fit in.”

JACK DOUGHTY B‘23 and ROSE HOUGLET B‘23 urge readers to follow DARE’s call script demanding immediate relief and look forward to expanding movements for housing justice in Providence.