We envision a world where every person has a home, and housing is a right rather than a commodity.

The Sustainable Economies Law Center's Housing Program prioritizes working alongside working class communities and communities of color – those who historically and currently have the least housing security – to develop legal structures and policy mechanisms that remove housing from the speculative marketplace and give communities control over land and housing resources. In particular, we promote cooperative housing, community land trusts, and other cooperative mechanisms for creating truly affordable, community controlled, and ecologically sustainable housing.

Our Partners and Clients

We organize communities, build coalitions, change laws, and provide legal support to organizations doing inspiring work to secure housing for all. Our work currently includes:

• Partnering with Homefulness to navigate and shine light on laws in Oakland that repress development of multi-unit permanent cohousing, education, arts, and social change projects for unhoused people on two parcels in East Oakland.
• Incubation and legal support for East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC), a multi-stakeholder BIPOC-centered cooperative organizing communities to vision, finance, acquire and permanently steward housing, land, and commercial space. Our work has included co-creating EB PREC’s cartoon Bylaws, legal support for a groundbreaking national securities offering under Reg A+, supporting a Black cooperative and cultural corridor, and publishing a guide to starting a permanent real estate cooperative.

Check out our other housing justice partners and clients here.

Policy Advocacy

All human beings need economically sustainable housing options. However, the speculative marketplace drives many of society’s decisions about land and housing, converting housing into a financial asset rather than a place to call home and the foundation of community. Decades of public policy incentivizing private homeownership has, in fact, contributed to the growing racial wealth gap, and targeted disinvestment has made predominantly poor and working class communities vulnerable to displacement and gentrification. Throughout the world, tenants’ and landless people’s movements are vocalizing the essential unfairness of the fact that so many people must struggle to secure a place to physically exist, much less make a livelihood, on the planet.

We are “rethinking home,” because we want to challenge and transform many of the predominant models for housing ourselves by creating more cooperative and just alternatives. Learn more about our policy campaigns here.

Resources

We develop resources to make it easier to envision how to build a world where every person has a home. Check them out here. 

Want more info about our Center's Housing work? Contact Jay Cumberland at [email protected]. Sign up below to get the latest updates about our work to build a world where every person has a home.