Homeowners everywhere are beginning to seek liberation from their roles in one of the most deeply harmful and divisive institutions on our planet: private property and speculation. From Native genocide to the exclusionary creation of the white middle class through subsidized white homeownership to gentrification and displacement - buying and profiting from a home both fuels and is fueled by racial inequity and white supremacy. Yet with so many people’s material and emotional wellbeing tied to single family homeownership, how do we begin to unpack these complexities while contributing to the movement for reparations and rematriation of land? 

In part 1 of this workshop and community conversation, we will ask complex questions about homeownership, hear stories from homeowners and Black and Indigenous-led organizations restoring right relationship to land, and point toward concrete ways to return land to community stewardship. [Part 2 will dive deeper into the legal nuts and bolts of land reparations and rematriation.] It’s time to come together around a new vision: One where communities steward housing to benefit and create belonging for everyone. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Janelle Orsi is a lawyer, advocate, writer, and cartoonist focused on cooperatives, the sharing economy, land trusts, shared housing, local currencies, and rebuilding the commons. She is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), which facilitates the growth of more sustainable and localized economies through education, research, and advocacy. Janelle has also worked in private law practice at the Law Office of Janelle Orsi, focusing on sharing economy law since 2008.

Dorian Payán is a legal apprentice at the Sustainable Economies Law Center’s Radical Real Estate Law School. They are originally from El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua where they straddled a border most of their life. Along with many others in my community, Dorian is a border abolitionist and condemn the juxtaposition of our Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem.

Raised in Baltimore, adélàjà simon is a first generation U.S.er of Yoruba, Ayisyen and Arawak/Taino descent living and offering a deep exploration of the question, ‘What does a truly regenerative, purposeful and place-based human lifeway, rooted in ancestral praise look like, feel like, and take to create and sustain?’ The process of chewing on this question is bringing forth the work of emergeazurescens, integrating modalities of bodywork, somatic healing, dream work, processes for mapping the human psyche and framing the stages of human development, ecopsychology, Holistic healing, plant medicine work, grief work, movement building, Permaculture and ancestral arts.

Chris is a facilitator, organizer, and attorney focused on land and housing justice, participatory governance, and co-creating post capitalist / post white supremacist futures. He is Director of Land and Housing Justice at the Sustainable Economies Law Center, a democratically-run nonprofit supporting communities to create and control their own sustainable sources of land, labor, and capital. At the Law Center, he co-leads or contributes to the Law Center’s Housing, Worker Self-Directed Nonprofits, Farmland, and Money & Finance Programs.  He trained to become a lawyer without going to law school through the California Law Office Study Program, passing the California Bar in 2018. 

RADICAL REAL ESTATE WEEK SPONSORS: