Community Change’s Housing Justice Team provides strategic support and technical assistance to state and local housing initiatives that advance racial and gender justice, and increase housing opportunity and protections for the most economically vulnerable. Building off more than three decades supporting state and local housing trust fund initiatives, the housing team works with state and local partners to pass policies and laws that increase and subsidize affordable housing, protect and support renters, create opportunities for community ownership, and that address racial and gender inequity.
Community Change is building a housing justice movement led by those most directly impacted, rooted in grassroots power, and that utilizes inside/outside strategies to get what our communities need. We prioritize working with partner organizations that are committed to advancing racial and gender justice, and that center the leadership of low-income people of color, immigrants, women and other people directly impacted by injustice and inequity, such that they wield power necessary to make change and grow the justice movement.
In addition to supporting state and local housing justice campaigns, we are working with partners in California, Louisiana, Oregon, and Washington state to build networks of organized residents of affordable housing to impact state housing and homeless policy. Our theory of change is that the voices of people who benefit from access to a safe, affordable home will transform the policy debate. Nine years into this new model for building state power, the resident organizing networks have demonstrated the power to win policy change, including historic funding and tenant protection wins . This model also creates an infrastructure for investment in the leadership of those most impacted by the lack of affordable homes. To learn more, read the evaluation of the Resident Organizing Network model by Innovation Network and Community Change published in May 2023.
Put Tenants First 2023 Grassroots #HousingJustice Tour
On May 10, 2023, Community Change and partners from 12 states met face-to-face with HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge to discuss three policy demands for immediate HUD action that would advance housing justice nationally: Push local and state governments to end the criminalization of people experiencing homelessness, enforce HUD health and safety standards within all HUD subsidized homes, and support and expand tenant organizing with protections against retaliation for all HUD subsidized families. Read more about the Put Tenants First Tour, and be sure to check out this amazing video.