PROJECTS

Lack of affordable pathways to housing ownership for marginalized communities remains a critically harmful form of inequity that carries negative effects on all aspects of livelihood, health, agency and personal agency. The problem of access to home equity is very much structural, with financing unavailable to minority families; education debt load impinging and undue burden on specific families; structural barriers for low-wage job holders; and lack of know-how to access existing resources such as HUD’s home ownership programs.

Place matters. Halfway homes face significant headwinds that greatly impede future livelihood for residents: programs and services of value have faced cuts from state and federal sources; stigma attached to residents of Halfway homes reduces opportunity; neighborhood attitudes toward Halfway homes pushes their locations to places with worse service access; for-profit aspects of some Halfway home systems create disincentives and misaligned values, whereby the management company does not have the best interests of the residents at heart.

Significant privilege is built into having the time and money to become activists; those in marginalized power relationships simply do not have the needed space. Existing structures of power, such as the School System and ACHD, are inherently supremacist, and so they are ill-prepared to act against their own biased interests. Finally, societal structures of information ownership and incentives already dissuade workers from breaking out of the box and being noisy. Historically, our voices have been taken away from us over a multi-decade process of disempowerment.