Homes For All

Location: Nationwide

Website: homesforall.org

Homes For All is a national campaign with the goal of broadening the conversation of the housing crisis beyond foreclosure and putting forth a comprehensive housing agenda that also speaks to issues affecting public housing residents, homeless families, and the growing number of renters in American cities.

Homes For All aims to protect, defend, and expand housing that is truly affordable and dignified for low-income and very low-income communities by engaging those most directly impacted by this crisis through local and national organizing, winning strong local policies that protect renters and homeowners, and shifting the national debate on housing.

RTC is working collaboratively across sectors to develop national housing policy that ensures that our communities and future generations have homes that are truly affordable, stable, and dignified.

Today, people who buy their homes are thrown out if they cannot make their mortgage payments, renters are either the new hot deal on the housing market or dealing with rising rents and costs and buildings in disrepair. With no comprehensive federal plan to preserve and build public housing, the idea of housing as a human right is under threat of demolition. As vacancies climb in cities, homeless families look on, wondering why there are so many homes without people in them.

The Homes for All campaign wants to draw attention to the housing crisis facing urban and suburban low and extremely low-income people of color. We want a to assert a holistic vision to affirming housing as a human right. Through this campaign, we are challenging the absurd assumptions that the housing crisis is over and that the market holds all (if any) of the solutions to our problems. We believe our government has a responsibility to create and strengthen laws and programs that will allow our communities to remain and flourish.

The recent and ongoing financial crisis has revealed that millions of residents of the United States experience housing insecurity, many of them for years at a time. Yet, housing policy in recent decades, whether implemented by government, the corporate sector, or some combination of the two, has contributed to a loss of affordable housing and has often displaced the members of our communities in the name of de-concentrating poverty. At the same time, corporations have shifted enormous amounts of investment into our cities, but their interest in property speculation and maximizing quarterly profits undermines our interest in long-term neighborhood stability. And when the crisis hit, they got bailed out and we got left out.With the latest wave of REO (Real Estate Owned) to rental properties being snatched up as the newest gambling scheme for hedge funds and private enterprise, we are on the cusp of what could become the creation of yet another housing bubble. Astronomical rents and displacement are already on the rise and this unbridled “game” threatens to further weaken an already fragile economy and devastate the hope for stable and sustainable communities now or in the future.

We want policies that allow us to strengthen the bonds we build with each other in our communities, and which help us to survive in the face of resource scarcity, economic hardship, environmental degradation, and political marginalization. To this end, we call for an end to speculation driven development in our cities that produces housing our communities can’t afford. We assert our right to stay in the communities we have built and refuse to be displaced!