April 22, 2021 • 37 mins
Imagine a land without landlords or racialized displacement. Sounds too good to be true. The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative [EB PREC] is fighting for this future. Baratunde sits down with Executive Director Noni Session and learns how EB PREC is reclaiming their community, and building local ownership through real estate.
Guest: Noni Session Executive Director of East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative
Twitter: @NoniSession
Bio: Noni is a 3rd generation West Oaklander, Cultural Anthropologist and Grassroots Organizer. After a 2016 run for Oakland City Council in which she garnered more than 43% of the vote, Noni came to believe her community’s clearest pathway to economic justice and to the halt of rapid displacement was a cooperative economy.
SHOW NOTES + LINKS
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We are grateful to Noni Session for joining us! Follow her at @NoniSession on Twitter, or find more of her work at ebprec.org. You can also watch the full EB PREC intro video here.
ACTIONS
PERSONALLY REFLECT
Where is home?
Take a moment to reflect on where you live. How did you end up there? What influenced your decision to rent or buy in a particular place? Was it based on real estate speculation, rental prices, family history, relationship ties, or something else? Does it feel like home? Do you know any neighbors who have lived there for generations? Consider the role privilege has played in determining your place of residence.
BECOME INFORMED
Learn more about gentrification
Gentrification is happening all over the country, from big cities, to small towns, and even rural communities. And there’s a lot more to it, than just the buzzword. To learn more, check out the podcast, There Goes the Neighborhood. Watch the documentary City Rising produced by PBS and KCET. Or read the book The Color of Law, which you can find on bookshop.org/shop/howtocitizen and support independent bookstores instead of Amazon.
PUBLICLY PARTICIPATE
Invest in communities, not commodities.
Check out EBPREC.org and Sustainable Economies Law Center to find out ways you can invest in community-based real estate or start this model where you live. If you’re in the Oakland area you could join the cooperative and become a community owner for just $10 a month. Or if you want to make a non-extractive, but savvy real estate investment you could also invest in one of EB PREC’s projects. We know there are more new models like this emerging to deal with our housing and ownership crisis. Please contact us if you know of other groups doing similar things across the country by emailing us at comments@howtocitizen.com.
If you take any of these actions, share that with us - action@howtocitizen.com. Mention Land Without Landlords in the subject line. And share about your citizening on social media using #howtocitizen.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, I'm Barraitune Day Thurston, and this is how to
citizen with Baritune Day in season two, we're talking about
the money, because, to be real, it's hard to citizen
when we can barely pay the bills. When I grew
(00:23):
up in d C in the nineteen eighties, it was
known as Chocolate City because it was that black. Then
I left d C in the mid nineties that went
off to Boston for college, lived there twelve years. New
York after that, mostly Brooklyn another twelve years. And in
every one of these places, the neighborhoods I lived and
(00:44):
the ones that felt so much like my childhood neighborhood,
there was something changing. I couldn't put my finger on
it until I revisited my hometown, my home block, and
Chocolate City didn't feel so chocolate e anymore had more
of a Caramelfuly. My mother had to sell our home
(01:08):
before we fully left d C. Not because she really
wanted to, not because we couldn't afford the payments, but
because it was just too dangerous. This was the peak
of the crack Wars, and she was worried about the
safety of her baby for good reason. So when I
went back to look at our family home, my childhood home.
(01:30):
We weren't there. The residents were a nice white couple
from Iowa. Sometimes I torture myself to this day looking
up the real estate value of that childhood home and
seeing how much wealth is not in my family, and
it creates a little bit of a conflict in me
because I've been a part of that change in so
(01:52):
many neighborhoods. I've been the new money coming in, And
to be honest, I like some of the new stuff.
I am a sucker for an over priced cocktail from
the school of mixology. I love fancy coffee, more foam,
more happy baritune day. That's my jam. But I'm also
troubled by the idea that new folks coming into a
(02:13):
culturally rich environment are part of the destruction of that
very culture. That all this nice new stuff is not
for the people who held it down for so long
in their neighborhoods, and that's not right. We've got to
have a different way of letting people own their community,
(02:35):
determine that future, and have the benefits for themselves. I
believe we can improve neighborhoods for the people already there,
and I know someone who has an idea of how
to do it, who believes that nice things, including good coffee,
shouldn't mean displacing long term residents because it's all about ownership.
(02:57):
And she's at the epicenter of gentrification in the US Oakland, California.
You ask how Oakland could get into the condition it's
in now. No one has had a moment to stop
and build a future for themselves. You better believe these
hedge funds have hundred and five hundred year plans for themselves.
(03:19):
After the break my conversation with third generation West Oaklander
Noni Session, let me fix my hair. Oh, your hair
looks great coming out. I mean, you know, the messy
afro is a look, but it's very messy, so I
(03:41):
have to work on bad. Noni Session is the executive
director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative eb
PREC fights gentrification in West Oakland by buying up real
estate and historically black and brown communities and then collectively
owning and managing those properties within the community. Alright, so
(04:01):
can you introduce yourself? Say your name and what it
is you do. My name is Nony Session. Um I
am an accidental community led movement builder, real estate developer,
and impact investment galvanizer when in my actual professional training,
I'm trained as a cultural anthropologist who stumbled into grass
(04:24):
roots organizing. And here we are today. Okay, wow, we
are clearly going to go on a journey with you,
because that was a lot of nouns. You know, we
got organizer, galvanizer, developer, anthropologists, woo woo. Okay, why do
you use the word accidental to describe so many of
your jobs? Well, I'm essentially just this little kid from
(04:49):
West Oakland who was raised on Sesame Street and Nature
TV shows and read lots of sci fi before it
was cool to read side Hi. And then I majored
in Black studies and cultural anthropology, and then did my
doctoral work at Cornell in Nairobi on the United Nations
(05:09):
Development Program. And um, when I came home after ten
years away for grad school, the city was just crazy.
West Oakland has been a hot spot for local artists
and musicians. Jessica Florida shows us as gentrification transforms the neighborhood,
the people who have long called it home are getting
pushed out. High rents not only forced out families, but
(05:33):
mom and pop shops. He and his companies have issued
at least three thousand eviction notices. Prostitution, crime, poverty, the
illegal duppling, the homelessness were like second class citizens here.
And it was quite accidental because it started with me
just volunteering because I wanted to meet some people, you know,
(05:55):
and talk about really interesting things I had learned in
grad school. And ten years later it's culminated in this
work that is actually shocks me every day when I
wake up. It's it's it's quite powerful for me to
be involved in it. So where do you live now?
I live in West Oakland. I actually live in the
(06:16):
house that I was raised in. I'm speaking to you
from there right now, which is radically unusual given the
extreme and accelerated racialized displacement that's taken place in my
city and cities like it. So I'm pretty proud of
that accelerated racialized displacement. Can you define that term please.
(06:38):
We've lost over fifty of Oakland's black and legacy population
in the last ten years. With a boom in our population,
the ratio of people of color has dropped to such
an extreme degree that you can't help but call it
racialized displacement. Your family has been in West Oakland for
(07:01):
how many generations? My grandparents migrated here in the early
nineteen forty, So my grandparents, my cousins, my aunt's mincles,
my dad, my my mom, my sisters, my brothers, and
then I have another generation after me as I was
a teenage mother. So I now have a very very
(07:21):
very adult daughter living her life here as well. So
what does it mean to you to have so many
generations from your family be based in West Oakland? I
think prior to this tenure arc, it didn't mean a lot.
I did not understand the privilege of being grounded in
a place for generations. And when I compare myself to
(07:45):
my counterparts who have moved a lot, or who have
had to live squarely in white dominated situations, I realized
it was almost as if I was raised in a
royal or cloistered or a situation where my identity was
reinforced on a daily basis. We were well known, our
(08:06):
life was stable and predictable, and it it really gives
you this grounding to both claim and imagine a future
for yourself that I think a lot of people around
me haven't had the privilege to capture in their life trajectory.
You use the word wealth to describe what your family
(08:28):
gave you, and I suspect you don't mean buried chests
of gold or stock certificates. How do you define this
wealth that your family left for you in West Oakland? Um?
I think I define it as identity right, as a
well from which I can gather new creative material. I
(08:52):
think that it really drives a lot of the underlying
mission and political philosophy of my work now, and that
that is the definition of culture and Black Americans as
one of the clear landless people on this planet. It's
one reason that we've had such complications with getting a
foothold here and that we don't have a firm place
(09:16):
to retire ourselves, to to define and build for the
next generation. We are in a constant state of rebuilding,
not just generation to generation, I mean day to day,
month to month, year to year. So that is really
the definition of wealth. Can you describe your West Oakland?
(09:37):
What does it look like, what does it smell like?
Who's in it? Lots of oak trees and big, wide
empty streets. You know, I think as a kid, and
as Black Americans, we still thought we were living in
a place that would show up for us and rescue us. So,
despite Oakland being empty, washed out city, we at least
(09:59):
we're left alone to our um class identities and our
daily goings on. Um. My parents were small business owners.
My mother ran a board and care home for development
lee disabled adults, and so I was really safe on
the same streets that most people were not safe on.
Nobody bothered this little black kid. I would go to
(10:19):
bookstores and hang out for hours. I would go to
West Oakland Public Library to that like quiet, warm, muted
space and lay on the floor and read book after book,
and then skip down these wide, empty, silent boulevards. It
was open space for me. It was a super quiet,
safe space. And describe your West Oakland today, my poor babies.
(10:45):
You could call that stretch of road homeless Lane. It's
an encampment that has grown so large you can see
it's spilling out onto the roadway. There are hundreds of
similar tense cities across Silicon Valley, all within a few
miles of the world's most profitable tech companies. All of
those wide open boulevards. They're stacked neck high with tents
(11:05):
and lots of discarded hoarded goods. But it's sporadic. Right.
If you don't know West Oakland, Google with its racialized
and class algorithms, will direct you right around those hot
spots of neglect. The funny thing is the boulevards are
still wide open, the skies are still huge, so there's
(11:27):
still this hopefulness. Um, while we stand next to start poverty.
How do you explain the change in the West Oakland
of your youth versus your description of the West Oakland
of today. What happened? You know? It was it was
a ghost town when I was growing up because it
was in the middle of of the Reagan years and
(11:48):
benign neglect. For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit,
mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary
convenience of the present. When what is benign neglect? That
was an economic policy of the Reagan years. That was
when you started to see a lot of money and
resources pulled out of urban cities. And that is really
(12:11):
what accelerated urban decline and the loss of value in
urban communities which could then be preyed on by speculators. Right, um,
folks had a plan for Oakland that most of us
were not privy to. It's a hot market, and um,
there's very little care and forethought in planning for lives
(12:32):
that have been led here for generations. So it's a fearful,
insecure place under the surface of these bride white boulevards.
What's a hot market? What does that mean? That means
that after I watched my neighbors across the street be
removed by the share of the house with two tiny
eight by eight bedrooms, the house immediately sold for one
(12:54):
point four million. That's a hot market. So what's what's
your home ownership situation? Are you renting? Are you owning
in this home that you're living in yourself? Well? Interesting enough,
in the subprime lending of the late eighties and early nineties,
my mother also lost this house. My amazing maternal uncle
(13:18):
bought it to keep it from going back on the
speculative market, and we paid all the expenses, but he
maintained it as the owner of record until someone could
get another mortgage, and that has just been recently. Me
and I closed escrow on my childhood home September three
(13:38):
of twenty The whole family breathed a sigh of relief.
I'm breathing it for you. I can feel the stability
under your feet. What do you mean when you say
speculative market? You were able to keep your family home
out of the speculative market. Well, you know, we're currently
living under a financial game that's been in development for
(14:01):
a long time but is really accelerated, and that everything
around you is a commodity, the air you breathe, the
water you drink, and so how currency is currently traded
is on a speculative basis of its future value. It
is a gamble or a bet on the future price
(14:24):
of a commodity item. It's actually meant to drive up
the value. It's the artificial creation of scarcity in order
to create excess capital. And so when you speculate on housing,
you're buying something, you're holding it in reserve from the market, right,
Meaning you're keeping housing away from people often empty and
(14:48):
wait for the rise in its value to create excess
profit for yourself. And through that speculation, you're raising the
costs and making it inaccessible. Um, it sounds to me
like what's happened in your area, and it's not limited
to West Oakland for sure. I'm from d C. I
used to live in Brooklyn, Boston, like everywhere you look
(15:11):
in many parts of the world, housing is not being
treated as a place for people to live, but rather
as a place for people to park their money and
make the money grow, raising money rather than kids inside
of these homes. Uh Is that is that a fair
rephrasing of what you just said? Yes you could. You
could name them bread and Chad and it would really
(15:32):
be reflective of what's going on. So, so what is
the impact on people when housing is withheld from the
market for those who want to live in it to
those who want to profit from the value of the
increasing you know, financial worth of that housing. Well, I
mean you circled us back around to accelerated racialized displacement,
(15:54):
because not only does speculation become this increasingly tight loop
of accelerating the cost of land and housing, but it
means that a very specific class and group of people
are not only going to be pushed out of their
current housing and access to future housing, they then have
to lay on the sidewalk as they watch that housing
(16:16):
being either held in reserve or in some manner developed
for new populations that are the demand of the current
labor market, which focuses in on tech. So as seven
thousand people scrape and scrabble for a living, they watch
new folks have fifty dollar branches right outside of where
(16:36):
their children used to play and eat their meals with
the landscape of affordable housing right now in Oakland? What
is the landscape of affordable housing? Well, it's the I
It eats me inside out when people use the language
of affordable housing, tell me why you made. As of
(17:00):
two thousand and seventeen, the average Black Oaklanders salary was
thirty six thousand dollars. That same year, the average White
Oaklanders salary as eighty thousand dollars. Almost all affordable housing
as it exists right now is not for the very
folks who are rent burdened or on the actual sidewalk
(17:23):
sleeping every night. And those affordable housing developers who are
trying to produce affordable housing that serves those at that
median income of thirty six thousand dollars are finding that
they are hog tied in terms of leveraging state and
(17:45):
federal subsidies and bond money, and so all of that
capital that comes from state, federal money bonds still gets
cloistered among those who are not from the very populations
affected by rent burden and rent blight. It's a game.
It's a game. It's a game. It's a shell game,
(18:06):
if you will. My understanding of shell game is there's
some trickery involved, that you're covering up the fact that
something's not really under those shells. There's some deception of
So bring me to the moment, because I can. I
can feel the energy. You got me all fired up.
I'm like, yo, they're not telling this story the right way,
(18:27):
but it's emotional. This has had significant impacts on people's
lives and their ability to live, and you took some
steps to end that game. So what does the East
Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative do around housing? The East
Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative is a democratically lad people
(18:50):
of color, multi stakeholder cooperative that supports Black, Brown and
Indigenous Oaklanders in collectively organizing, financing, stewarding long term land
and housing in Oakland in the East Bay. Although we
are not an affordable housing developer, we develop permanent and
(19:15):
affordable land and housing for people to live in dip
back into generation after generation, and through our by laws,
we restrict ourselves from ever selling it or using it exploitatively.
So there's a guarantee of permanence and the future for
people who invest in our revision. So you have created
(19:38):
a different way for people in a community two own
land and buildings and housing in their community. And the
results is what what's different? The result is the rebuilding
of a community. What is happening in Oakland and cities
(20:04):
like it is unchecked speculation, where the city is allowing
folks who actually don't understand community development to stick buildings
in arbitrary open spaces and then sell off the fractions
to people who are unconnected to the outcome of the
place in which they buy the item, the idea even
(20:26):
and so there is a weird disconnection between where and
how you build what and who and what it's built for.
After the break, what happens when instead of a corporate
developer owning the real estate and the community, it's owned
by the people. What actually changes? Hi, I'm no need
(20:56):
and I'm Greg. We're part of b B pre Per
real Estate Cooperative. First, we get local residents, You me, Greg,
your mom, your neighbor, to invest a thousand dollars apiece
into our collective fund with a lot of people that's
a lot of money. Then EB prec uses that money
to buy up properties in Oakland and the East Bay.
(21:16):
We've already picked out properties where long term tenants are
in danger of being pushed out, and once we buy
the property, the people who are already live and work
there get to stay. I think I understand how your
approach is different. It is grounded in the community. It
is collective with the community. The ownership sounds like it's
distributed among the community, not just in the single hand
(21:39):
of one rich corporation or maybe even one very wealthy individual,
as is the case with many a building. Why did
you choose the co op model not the nonprofit model
for this land and housing need. Well, well, there's a
couple of reasons. One is sort of a core underlying
philosophical and political reason. Folks like W. E. B. Dubois,
(22:02):
Fanny lew Hammer, we just thought, you know, if we
had land to grow some stuff, only then it would
be a help too. They were not civil rights activists
first and then coopers. They were co operas first and
then became civil rights activists. So we founded Freedom Bombs
in nineteen nine. The plan of the thing is that
(22:26):
it didn't grow to produce enough. The people just won't
know what. From the date the change dropped off of
us after emancipation, we knew that cooperative and collective economics
for our answer. On the North Carolina Coast, we had
over a hundred hectares of cooperative land for which over
(22:51):
the next hundred years we were judicially an extra judicially
dispossessed of that land. But we've always known the solution.
And what I try to communicate to people is that
we work on this sort of individualistic rhetoric. But even
if you look at hedge funds, you look at speculative development,
those are collectives of people combining their economic and political
(23:15):
power to create an outcome. So that's number one. Collective
economics is the way of the world. Just those of
us who are on the ground scrabbling don't understand that.
That's an important point because I think a lot of
folks here collective economics, cooperative economics, that's communist MAO with socialist, leftist.
(23:35):
But a corporation is a collection of people's interests, aligned
boards of directors, shareholders. So we're all operating as a
part of some collective, whether we name it that or
not exactly exactly, So tell me what it looks like
on the ground. What have you accomplished, what have you done?
(23:57):
So we're very new and we're have a grand vision.
So right now we are the owners of two land
and housing acquisitions. So our first is a multi unit
building that has teachers and lawyers and activists and gardeners
who live there. Multiple gardeners. You have multiple gardeners. Gardeners. Yeah, yeah,
(24:19):
we're in Oakland, Like urban gardening is the deal right now,
don't play um. And they're very busy, active people. One
of them is the founder of Community Democracy Project, which
is working to change the city charter in Oakland so
that Oaklanders can participate in defining the city budget. Another
is a founder of the first People of Color Cooperative
coffee roaster in Berkeley. Right, these are folks who are
(24:42):
working in and for our community, and now they pay
rent at about eight hundred and twenty bucks when most
people are paying fifteen hundred to twenty hundred for the
same square footage. Our second acquisition is a single family
home in Berkeley, League, California that has a detached dance
(25:03):
studio and there were housing two black women artists, one
who's formerly homeless with a daughter, and the interview was
really about their vision as opposed to them being able
to pass the credit check and show us that they
hadn't been a victim of other predatory housing situations which
often result in evictions. Right. And in addition, those two
(25:25):
women who are now living in this amazing, beautiful shingled
house in Berkeley, they are now launching a business out
of the dance studio for an additional stream of income
because they are active members of the arts community. Right,
this is transforming people's futures. And so our current acquisition
and this is this is our biggest one yet, and
(25:47):
we're we're really going out on a lamb to really
show the proof of concept for this motto. It's on
historic Seventh Street, which has been the heart of the
gutting of Oakland. And so we're take in this historic
corridor that used to be called the Harlem of the West, right,
some of the greatest acts in Black history, and it
was a bustling black business district. It's been a ghost
(26:10):
town for thirty years and people have tried over and
over again to restart that corridor. And so we're acquiring
Esther's Orbit Room Jazz and supper club, and we're creating
three footprints of commercial ground floor space for a co
op where one part is intended to be a performance
venue and a bar, the middle part is a cafe
(26:32):
and coffee shop where the young can come do spoken
word and open mic and open jam. And the far
right spaces of fine arts and movement arts gallery. Above it,
there are three units of cooperative co housing where we
will be grounding black arts housing cooperatives in to start
to ground the community back into the actual physical space
(26:53):
of the street. And we have a back parking lot
that's part of this acquisition and really wide, like a
seven ft wide sidewalks were going to be grounding the
Freedom Farmers Market, which is a black farmers market. It's
been displaced again and again over the last like nine years.
So Esther's Orbit Room Cultural Revival Project is the first
acquisition among many for what we have named the Seventh
(27:14):
Street Cooperative Cultural Corride or revitalization Plan. It is a
site specific plan that thinks about the people and the
places that exists for which you build the thing the
commodity object. You described people who are living in these
(27:35):
cooperatively owned units as resident owners. Why is ownership important
to them? Uh, and to you and to West Oakland.
I mean, in the most literal sense, land is the
ground upon which we define our past and our future.
(27:56):
Without land, without permanence, the past in the future go
up and smoke, they disappear. There's nothing to connect you
from before, and there's there's very little the ground YouTube after.
So ownership permanence is critical for culture building, identity building,
(28:17):
the building of futures. You ask how Oakland could get
into the condition it's in now. No one has had
a moment to stop and build a future for themselves.
You better believe these hedge funds have hundred and five
hundred year plans for themselves. How long out do you
(28:39):
think the arcis for Black Oaklanders plan for themselves. So
this is a model for how to cement ourselves as citizens. Structurally,
identity wise, we are here, we are part but in
terms of having to pick up our bags and move
every generation. That is the key to this nation continuing
(29:03):
to deny our right to the benefits of citizenship. And
it's a losing battle actually, because if you actually look
across nationwide, it's not just black communities that are being
eaten alive by this impermanence. We took a southern trip
and a couple of years ago when we were really
ideating and building out this project, and we looked at
(29:24):
Midwest cities, we looked at southern cities. There are ghost
towns Baritune day. No one is thinking about this widening
gap of impermanence and and corporate ownership of people's homes,
of their histories, of their stories, of their cultures. So
this is a model for folks who want to use
their money in a more ethical manner, to divest from
(29:47):
extractive industries, to invest in models that can assure them
their modest return. Our return is only one right, but
it's enough to build hope and a future for people.
You shared a bit about what it felt like to
reclaim your family home. For a member of the West
(30:09):
Oakland community, how do they respond with this new possibility
from being unable to afford any living in the community
they grew up in to now having a chance to
own and define the future of that community they know
and love. I think there are stages to it, if
(30:32):
you think of like the stages of grief or healing.
So the first response for the most underserved is kind
of like disbelief, right, like you've you've heard it before.
So many organizations, so many nonprofits coming through doing a
focus group, putting butcher paper on the walls and like
saying like we want your ideas, We're here to support you,
(30:52):
and you really never hear from them again, or maybe
you see them sort of in the distance, supporting someone
who's not you and probably not as brown as you.
And then the next stage, when they see that we're
actually doing the things we say we're doing, it's hope
and excitement and investment. And then the next stage is
kind of a stage of dismay, because the arc of
(31:14):
a real estate project is a long, gritty arc, and
it's slow, and we're moving into the next stage where
we're starting to be able to share why this thing
takes so long, why it's taken us four years to
get to the place where we can have the capacity
to raise fifty million dollars of non extractive capital, and
(31:37):
so all of the emotions are there because all of
us want to stay here. Well, that leads me to
you know, this is not a problem unique to West Oakland.
Are you in conversations with people in other cities. Is
there a way for them to pick up this model
and work on it themselves. What is the plan? Absolutely,
we have UM so far shared in great detail with
(31:59):
probably were fifteen and thirty nascent organizations UM nationwide, two
or three international. So, for example, an organization called Brick
by Brick and quebec UM the year before last that
really hit a wall and they flew me out there
and I spent a week with them and sort of
like took the project apart. And now they're launching their
(32:22):
first project in partnership with the City of Montreal. You're
very busy, a lot of cities depending on you to
save them, including the one you are a part of. However,
I gotta ask you this, how do you define what
a citizen is? A citizen is one who takes ownership
and responsibility over their space. But I think a better
way to define citizen is how the Quakers define citizen.
(32:46):
The Quakers are friends. We're a friend to everyone. We're
a friend to our neighbors, We're a friend to our enemies,
We're a friend to our land. Collective care over a
joint space, pick up trash on your street, and be
nice to the old lady on the bus, you gotta
be nice, and old lady on the bus. I mean,
(33:07):
who's being mean to the old lady on the bus?
Gotta be um. This has been so wonderful. Thank you.
I appreciate it so much. What's exciting about this to
me is that I've seen what the world looks like
(33:29):
when we let money take over our neighborhoods. It looks
like abandoned apartment buildings that are old and crumbling, or
empty and abandoned apartment buildings that are new and unaffordable
to anyone, Or it just looks like the same strip
mall everywhere, or the same furniture shop everywhere, the same
(33:49):
yogurt stand everywhere. That's not culture. That's financially rich, but
culturally poor. And I'm excited for our neighborhoods to feel
different again, to be rooted not just in money, but
in people again. I want to live in this world
(34:10):
where we can preserve the culture of a community and
have it be owned by the people who've lived in
that community. So how do we protect that and make
sure that the wealth built there benefits the many and
doesn't just fall into a few hands or a few corporations.
Next week, I'm talking to someone who's doing just that,
(34:33):
protecting our communities from big business, and she's taken on
perhaps the biggest business of them all. We're gonna have
a real fight on our hands as citizens about whether
we live in a country that we control, that we
set the rules for, or a country where Amazon decides
how our economy works. Next week, my interview with Stacy
(34:54):
Mitchell and now our Prentice Sam with some actions you
can do where for you is home? Take a moment
to reflect on where you live. How did you end
up there? Was it based on real estate speculation, rental prices,
(35:17):
family history, relationship ties, or something else. Really consider the
role privilege has played in determining your place of residence.
Learn more about gentrification. Gentrification is a buzzword, but there's
a lot more to it. To learn more, check out
the podcast There Goes the Neighborhood, watch the documentary City Rising,
(35:38):
or read the book The Color of Law. Lastly, invest
in communities not commodities. Check out eb PreK dot org
that's e B p R e C dot org to
find out ways you can invest in community based real estate,
or start this model where you live. If you're in
(35:58):
the Oakland area, you could join the cooperative and become
a community owner for just ten dollars a month. Or
if you want to make a non extractive but savvy
real estate investment, you could also invest in one of
e b prex projects. And we know there are more
new models like this emerging to deal with our housing
and ownership crisis. So if you know any other groups,
(36:19):
let us know. Email us at comments at how to
citizen dot com. If you take into these actions, please
brag about yourself online using the hashtag how to Citizen.
Visit how to citizen dot com to sign up for
our newsletter or learn about upcoming events or even more
stuff than that. And if you like the show, spread
(36:41):
the word tell somebody. If you don't, definitely just keep
it to yourself. Appreciate you. How does Citizen with Bartune
Day is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts and
Dust Like Productions. Our executive producers are me barrattun Day, Thursty,
Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha you Said. Our producers are Stephanie
(37:02):
Cone and Ali Kilts. Kelly Prime is our editor, Valentino
Rivera is our engineer, and Sam Paulson is Our Apprentice.
Original music by Andrew Eaping. This episode was produced and
sound designed by Stephanie Cone. Special thanks to Joel Smith
from I Heart Radio.
Hey, I'm Barraitune Day Thurston, and this is how to
citizen with Baritune Day in season two, we're talking about
the money, because, to be real, it's hard to citizen
when we can barely pay the bills. When I grew
(00:23):
up in d C in the nineteen eighties, it was
known as Chocolate City because it was that black. Then
I left d C in the mid nineties that went
off to Boston for college, lived there twelve years. New
York after that, mostly Brooklyn another twelve years. And in
every one of these places, the neighborhoods I lived and
(00:44):
the ones that felt so much like my childhood neighborhood,
there was something changing. I couldn't put my finger on
it until I revisited my hometown, my home block, and
Chocolate City didn't feel so chocolate e anymore had more
of a Caramelfuly. My mother had to sell our home
(01:08):
before we fully left d C. Not because she really
wanted to, not because we couldn't afford the payments, but
because it was just too dangerous. This was the peak
of the crack Wars, and she was worried about the
safety of her baby for good reason. So when I
went back to look at our family home, my childhood home.
(01:30):
We weren't there. The residents were a nice white couple
from Iowa. Sometimes I torture myself to this day looking
up the real estate value of that childhood home and
seeing how much wealth is not in my family, and
it creates a little bit of a conflict in me
because I've been a part of that change in so
(01:52):
many neighborhoods. I've been the new money coming in, And
to be honest, I like some of the new stuff.
I am a sucker for an over priced cocktail from
the school of mixology. I love fancy coffee, more foam,
more happy baritune day. That's my jam. But I'm also
troubled by the idea that new folks coming into a
(02:13):
culturally rich environment are part of the destruction of that
very culture. That all this nice new stuff is not
for the people who held it down for so long
in their neighborhoods, and that's not right. We've got to
have a different way of letting people own their community,
(02:35):
determine that future, and have the benefits for themselves. I
believe we can improve neighborhoods for the people already there,
and I know someone who has an idea of how
to do it, who believes that nice things, including good coffee,
shouldn't mean displacing long term residents because it's all about ownership.
(02:57):
And she's at the epicenter of gentrification in the US Oakland, California.
You ask how Oakland could get into the condition it's
in now. No one has had a moment to stop
and build a future for themselves. You better believe these
hedge funds have hundred and five hundred year plans for themselves.
(03:19):
After the break my conversation with third generation West Oaklander
Noni Session, let me fix my hair. Oh, your hair
looks great coming out. I mean, you know, the messy
afro is a look, but it's very messy, so I
(03:41):
have to work on bad. Noni Session is the executive
director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative eb
PREC fights gentrification in West Oakland by buying up real
estate and historically black and brown communities and then collectively
owning and managing those properties within the community. Alright, so
(04:01):
can you introduce yourself? Say your name and what it
is you do. My name is Nony Session. Um I
am an accidental community led movement builder, real estate developer,
and impact investment galvanizer when in my actual professional training,
I'm trained as a cultural anthropologist who stumbled into grass
(04:24):
roots organizing. And here we are today. Okay, wow, we
are clearly going to go on a journey with you,
because that was a lot of nouns. You know, we
got organizer, galvanizer, developer, anthropologists, woo woo. Okay, why do
you use the word accidental to describe so many of
your jobs? Well, I'm essentially just this little kid from
(04:49):
West Oakland who was raised on Sesame Street and Nature
TV shows and read lots of sci fi before it
was cool to read side Hi. And then I majored
in Black studies and cultural anthropology, and then did my
doctoral work at Cornell in Nairobi on the United Nations
(05:09):
Development Program. And um, when I came home after ten
years away for grad school, the city was just crazy.
West Oakland has been a hot spot for local artists
and musicians. Jessica Florida shows us as gentrification transforms the neighborhood,
the people who have long called it home are getting
pushed out. High rents not only forced out families, but
(05:33):
mom and pop shops. He and his companies have issued
at least three thousand eviction notices. Prostitution, crime, poverty, the
illegal duppling, the homelessness were like second class citizens here.
And it was quite accidental because it started with me
just volunteering because I wanted to meet some people, you know,
(05:55):
and talk about really interesting things I had learned in
grad school. And ten years later it's culminated in this
work that is actually shocks me every day when I
wake up. It's it's it's quite powerful for me to
be involved in it. So where do you live now?
I live in West Oakland. I actually live in the
(06:16):
house that I was raised in. I'm speaking to you
from there right now, which is radically unusual given the
extreme and accelerated racialized displacement that's taken place in my
city and cities like it. So I'm pretty proud of
that accelerated racialized displacement. Can you define that term please.
(06:38):
We've lost over fifty of Oakland's black and legacy population
in the last ten years. With a boom in our population,
the ratio of people of color has dropped to such
an extreme degree that you can't help but call it
racialized displacement. Your family has been in West Oakland for
(07:01):
how many generations? My grandparents migrated here in the early
nineteen forty, So my grandparents, my cousins, my aunt's mincles,
my dad, my my mom, my sisters, my brothers, and
then I have another generation after me as I was
a teenage mother. So I now have a very very
(07:21):
very adult daughter living her life here as well. So
what does it mean to you to have so many
generations from your family be based in West Oakland? I
think prior to this tenure arc, it didn't mean a lot.
I did not understand the privilege of being grounded in
a place for generations. And when I compare myself to
(07:45):
my counterparts who have moved a lot, or who have
had to live squarely in white dominated situations, I realized
it was almost as if I was raised in a
royal or cloistered or a situation where my identity was
reinforced on a daily basis. We were well known, our
(08:06):
life was stable and predictable, and it it really gives
you this grounding to both claim and imagine a future
for yourself that I think a lot of people around
me haven't had the privilege to capture in their life trajectory.
You use the word wealth to describe what your family
(08:28):
gave you, and I suspect you don't mean buried chests
of gold or stock certificates. How do you define this
wealth that your family left for you in West Oakland? Um?
I think I define it as identity right, as a
well from which I can gather new creative material. I
(08:52):
think that it really drives a lot of the underlying
mission and political philosophy of my work now, and that
that is the definition of culture and Black Americans as
one of the clear landless people on this planet. It's
one reason that we've had such complications with getting a
foothold here and that we don't have a firm place
(09:16):
to retire ourselves, to to define and build for the
next generation. We are in a constant state of rebuilding,
not just generation to generation, I mean day to day,
month to month, year to year. So that is really
the definition of wealth. Can you describe your West Oakland?
(09:37):
What does it look like, what does it smell like?
Who's in it? Lots of oak trees and big, wide
empty streets. You know, I think as a kid, and
as Black Americans, we still thought we were living in
a place that would show up for us and rescue us. So,
despite Oakland being empty, washed out city, we at least
(09:59):
we're left alone to our um class identities and our
daily goings on. Um. My parents were small business owners.
My mother ran a board and care home for development
lee disabled adults, and so I was really safe on
the same streets that most people were not safe on.
Nobody bothered this little black kid. I would go to
(10:19):
bookstores and hang out for hours. I would go to
West Oakland Public Library to that like quiet, warm, muted
space and lay on the floor and read book after book,
and then skip down these wide, empty, silent boulevards. It
was open space for me. It was a super quiet,
safe space. And describe your West Oakland today, my poor babies.
(10:45):
You could call that stretch of road homeless Lane. It's
an encampment that has grown so large you can see
it's spilling out onto the roadway. There are hundreds of
similar tense cities across Silicon Valley, all within a few
miles of the world's most profitable tech companies. All of
those wide open boulevards. They're stacked neck high with tents
(11:05):
and lots of discarded hoarded goods. But it's sporadic. Right.
If you don't know West Oakland, Google with its racialized
and class algorithms, will direct you right around those hot
spots of neglect. The funny thing is the boulevards are
still wide open, the skies are still huge, so there's
(11:27):
still this hopefulness. Um, while we stand next to start poverty.
How do you explain the change in the West Oakland
of your youth versus your description of the West Oakland
of today. What happened? You know? It was it was
a ghost town when I was growing up because it
was in the middle of of the Reagan years and
(11:48):
benign neglect. For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit,
mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary
convenience of the present. When what is benign neglect? That
was an economic policy of the Reagan years. That was
when you started to see a lot of money and
resources pulled out of urban cities. And that is really
(12:11):
what accelerated urban decline and the loss of value in
urban communities which could then be preyed on by speculators. Right, um,
folks had a plan for Oakland that most of us
were not privy to. It's a hot market, and um,
there's very little care and forethought in planning for lives
(12:32):
that have been led here for generations. So it's a fearful,
insecure place under the surface of these bride white boulevards.
What's a hot market? What does that mean? That means
that after I watched my neighbors across the street be
removed by the share of the house with two tiny
eight by eight bedrooms, the house immediately sold for one
(12:54):
point four million. That's a hot market. So what's what's
your home ownership situation? Are you renting? Are you owning
in this home that you're living in yourself? Well? Interesting enough,
in the subprime lending of the late eighties and early nineties,
my mother also lost this house. My amazing maternal uncle
(13:18):
bought it to keep it from going back on the
speculative market, and we paid all the expenses, but he
maintained it as the owner of record until someone could
get another mortgage, and that has just been recently. Me
and I closed escrow on my childhood home September three
(13:38):
of twenty The whole family breathed a sigh of relief.
I'm breathing it for you. I can feel the stability
under your feet. What do you mean when you say
speculative market? You were able to keep your family home
out of the speculative market. Well, you know, we're currently
living under a financial game that's been in development for
(14:01):
a long time but is really accelerated, and that everything
around you is a commodity, the air you breathe, the
water you drink, and so how currency is currently traded
is on a speculative basis of its future value. It
is a gamble or a bet on the future price
(14:24):
of a commodity item. It's actually meant to drive up
the value. It's the artificial creation of scarcity in order
to create excess capital. And so when you speculate on housing,
you're buying something, you're holding it in reserve from the market, right,
Meaning you're keeping housing away from people often empty and
(14:48):
wait for the rise in its value to create excess
profit for yourself. And through that speculation, you're raising the
costs and making it inaccessible. Um, it sounds to me
like what's happened in your area, and it's not limited
to West Oakland for sure. I'm from d C. I
used to live in Brooklyn, Boston, like everywhere you look
(15:11):
in many parts of the world, housing is not being
treated as a place for people to live, but rather
as a place for people to park their money and
make the money grow, raising money rather than kids inside
of these homes. Uh Is that is that a fair
rephrasing of what you just said? Yes you could. You
could name them bread and Chad and it would really
(15:32):
be reflective of what's going on. So, so what is
the impact on people when housing is withheld from the
market for those who want to live in it to
those who want to profit from the value of the
increasing you know, financial worth of that housing. Well, I
mean you circled us back around to accelerated racialized displacement,
(15:54):
because not only does speculation become this increasingly tight loop
of accelerating the cost of land and housing, but it
means that a very specific class and group of people
are not only going to be pushed out of their
current housing and access to future housing, they then have
to lay on the sidewalk as they watch that housing
(16:16):
being either held in reserve or in some manner developed
for new populations that are the demand of the current
labor market, which focuses in on tech. So as seven
thousand people scrape and scrabble for a living, they watch
new folks have fifty dollar branches right outside of where
(16:36):
their children used to play and eat their meals with
the landscape of affordable housing right now in Oakland? What
is the landscape of affordable housing? Well, it's the I
It eats me inside out when people use the language
of affordable housing, tell me why you made. As of
(17:00):
two thousand and seventeen, the average Black Oaklanders salary was
thirty six thousand dollars. That same year, the average White
Oaklanders salary as eighty thousand dollars. Almost all affordable housing
as it exists right now is not for the very
folks who are rent burdened or on the actual sidewalk
(17:23):
sleeping every night. And those affordable housing developers who are
trying to produce affordable housing that serves those at that
median income of thirty six thousand dollars are finding that
they are hog tied in terms of leveraging state and
(17:45):
federal subsidies and bond money, and so all of that
capital that comes from state, federal money bonds still gets
cloistered among those who are not from the very populations
affected by rent burden and rent blight. It's a game.
It's a game. It's a game. It's a shell game,
(18:06):
if you will. My understanding of shell game is there's
some trickery involved, that you're covering up the fact that
something's not really under those shells. There's some deception of
So bring me to the moment, because I can. I
can feel the energy. You got me all fired up.
I'm like, yo, they're not telling this story the right way,
(18:27):
but it's emotional. This has had significant impacts on people's
lives and their ability to live, and you took some
steps to end that game. So what does the East
Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative do around housing? The East
Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative is a democratically lad people
(18:50):
of color, multi stakeholder cooperative that supports Black, Brown and
Indigenous Oaklanders in collectively organizing, financing, stewarding long term land
and housing in Oakland in the East Bay. Although we
are not an affordable housing developer, we develop permanent and
(19:15):
affordable land and housing for people to live in dip
back into generation after generation, and through our by laws,
we restrict ourselves from ever selling it or using it exploitatively.
So there's a guarantee of permanence and the future for
people who invest in our revision. So you have created
(19:38):
a different way for people in a community two own
land and buildings and housing in their community. And the
results is what what's different? The result is the rebuilding
of a community. What is happening in Oakland and cities
(20:04):
like it is unchecked speculation, where the city is allowing
folks who actually don't understand community development to stick buildings
in arbitrary open spaces and then sell off the fractions
to people who are unconnected to the outcome of the
place in which they buy the item, the idea even
(20:26):
and so there is a weird disconnection between where and
how you build what and who and what it's built for.
After the break, what happens when instead of a corporate
developer owning the real estate and the community, it's owned
by the people. What actually changes? Hi, I'm no need
(20:56):
and I'm Greg. We're part of b B pre Per
real Estate Cooperative. First, we get local residents, You me, Greg,
your mom, your neighbor, to invest a thousand dollars apiece
into our collective fund with a lot of people that's
a lot of money. Then EB prec uses that money
to buy up properties in Oakland and the East Bay.
(21:16):
We've already picked out properties where long term tenants are
in danger of being pushed out, and once we buy
the property, the people who are already live and work
there get to stay. I think I understand how your
approach is different. It is grounded in the community. It
is collective with the community. The ownership sounds like it's
distributed among the community, not just in the single hand
(21:39):
of one rich corporation or maybe even one very wealthy individual,
as is the case with many a building. Why did
you choose the co op model not the nonprofit model
for this land and housing need. Well, well, there's a
couple of reasons. One is sort of a core underlying
philosophical and political reason. Folks like W. E. B. Dubois,
(22:02):
Fanny lew Hammer, we just thought, you know, if we
had land to grow some stuff, only then it would
be a help too. They were not civil rights activists
first and then coopers. They were co operas first and
then became civil rights activists. So we founded Freedom Bombs
in nineteen nine. The plan of the thing is that
(22:26):
it didn't grow to produce enough. The people just won't
know what. From the date the change dropped off of
us after emancipation, we knew that cooperative and collective economics
for our answer. On the North Carolina Coast, we had
over a hundred hectares of cooperative land for which over
(22:51):
the next hundred years we were judicially an extra judicially
dispossessed of that land. But we've always known the solution.
And what I try to communicate to people is that
we work on this sort of individualistic rhetoric. But even
if you look at hedge funds, you look at speculative development,
those are collectives of people combining their economic and political
(23:15):
power to create an outcome. So that's number one. Collective
economics is the way of the world. Just those of
us who are on the ground scrabbling don't understand that.
That's an important point because I think a lot of
folks here collective economics, cooperative economics, that's communist MAO with socialist, leftist.
(23:35):
But a corporation is a collection of people's interests, aligned
boards of directors, shareholders. So we're all operating as a
part of some collective, whether we name it that or
not exactly exactly, So tell me what it looks like
on the ground. What have you accomplished, what have you done?
(23:57):
So we're very new and we're have a grand vision.
So right now we are the owners of two land
and housing acquisitions. So our first is a multi unit
building that has teachers and lawyers and activists and gardeners
who live there. Multiple gardeners. You have multiple gardeners. Gardeners. Yeah, yeah,
(24:19):
we're in Oakland, Like urban gardening is the deal right now,
don't play um. And they're very busy, active people. One
of them is the founder of Community Democracy Project, which
is working to change the city charter in Oakland so
that Oaklanders can participate in defining the city budget. Another
is a founder of the first People of Color Cooperative
coffee roaster in Berkeley. Right, these are folks who are
(24:42):
working in and for our community, and now they pay
rent at about eight hundred and twenty bucks when most
people are paying fifteen hundred to twenty hundred for the
same square footage. Our second acquisition is a single family
home in Berkeley, League, California that has a detached dance
(25:03):
studio and there were housing two black women artists, one
who's formerly homeless with a daughter, and the interview was
really about their vision as opposed to them being able
to pass the credit check and show us that they
hadn't been a victim of other predatory housing situations which
often result in evictions. Right. And in addition, those two
(25:25):
women who are now living in this amazing, beautiful shingled
house in Berkeley, they are now launching a business out
of the dance studio for an additional stream of income
because they are active members of the arts community. Right,
this is transforming people's futures. And so our current acquisition
and this is this is our biggest one yet, and
(25:47):
we're we're really going out on a lamb to really
show the proof of concept for this motto. It's on
historic Seventh Street, which has been the heart of the
gutting of Oakland. And so we're take in this historic
corridor that used to be called the Harlem of the West, right,
some of the greatest acts in Black history, and it
was a bustling black business district. It's been a ghost
(26:10):
town for thirty years and people have tried over and
over again to restart that corridor. And so we're acquiring
Esther's Orbit Room Jazz and supper club, and we're creating
three footprints of commercial ground floor space for a co
op where one part is intended to be a performance
venue and a bar, the middle part is a cafe
(26:32):
and coffee shop where the young can come do spoken
word and open mic and open jam. And the far
right spaces of fine arts and movement arts gallery. Above it,
there are three units of cooperative co housing where we
will be grounding black arts housing cooperatives in to start
to ground the community back into the actual physical space
(26:53):
of the street. And we have a back parking lot
that's part of this acquisition and really wide, like a
seven ft wide sidewalks were going to be grounding the
Freedom Farmers Market, which is a black farmers market. It's
been displaced again and again over the last like nine years.
So Esther's Orbit Room Cultural Revival Project is the first
acquisition among many for what we have named the Seventh
(27:14):
Street Cooperative Cultural Corride or revitalization Plan. It is a
site specific plan that thinks about the people and the
places that exists for which you build the thing the
commodity object. You described people who are living in these
(27:35):
cooperatively owned units as resident owners. Why is ownership important
to them? Uh, and to you and to West Oakland.
I mean, in the most literal sense, land is the
ground upon which we define our past and our future.
(27:56):
Without land, without permanence, the past in the future go
up and smoke, they disappear. There's nothing to connect you
from before, and there's there's very little the ground YouTube after.
So ownership permanence is critical for culture building, identity building,
(28:17):
the building of futures. You ask how Oakland could get
into the condition it's in now. No one has had
a moment to stop and build a future for themselves.
You better believe these hedge funds have hundred and five
hundred year plans for themselves. How long out do you
(28:39):
think the arcis for Black Oaklanders plan for themselves. So
this is a model for how to cement ourselves as citizens. Structurally,
identity wise, we are here, we are part but in
terms of having to pick up our bags and move
every generation. That is the key to this nation continuing
(29:03):
to deny our right to the benefits of citizenship. And
it's a losing battle actually, because if you actually look
across nationwide, it's not just black communities that are being
eaten alive by this impermanence. We took a southern trip
and a couple of years ago when we were really
ideating and building out this project, and we looked at
(29:24):
Midwest cities, we looked at southern cities. There are ghost
towns Baritune day. No one is thinking about this widening
gap of impermanence and and corporate ownership of people's homes,
of their histories, of their stories, of their cultures. So
this is a model for folks who want to use
their money in a more ethical manner, to divest from
(29:47):
extractive industries, to invest in models that can assure them
their modest return. Our return is only one right, but
it's enough to build hope and a future for people.
You shared a bit about what it felt like to
reclaim your family home. For a member of the West
(30:09):
Oakland community, how do they respond with this new possibility
from being unable to afford any living in the community
they grew up in to now having a chance to
own and define the future of that community they know
and love. I think there are stages to it, if
(30:32):
you think of like the stages of grief or healing.
So the first response for the most underserved is kind
of like disbelief, right, like you've you've heard it before.
So many organizations, so many nonprofits coming through doing a
focus group, putting butcher paper on the walls and like
saying like we want your ideas, We're here to support you,
(30:52):
and you really never hear from them again, or maybe
you see them sort of in the distance, supporting someone
who's not you and probably not as brown as you.
And then the next stage, when they see that we're
actually doing the things we say we're doing, it's hope
and excitement and investment. And then the next stage is
kind of a stage of dismay, because the arc of
(31:14):
a real estate project is a long, gritty arc, and
it's slow, and we're moving into the next stage where
we're starting to be able to share why this thing
takes so long, why it's taken us four years to
get to the place where we can have the capacity
to raise fifty million dollars of non extractive capital, and
(31:37):
so all of the emotions are there because all of
us want to stay here. Well, that leads me to
you know, this is not a problem unique to West Oakland.
Are you in conversations with people in other cities. Is
there a way for them to pick up this model
and work on it themselves. What is the plan? Absolutely,
we have UM so far shared in great detail with
(31:59):
probably were fifteen and thirty nascent organizations UM nationwide, two
or three international. So, for example, an organization called Brick
by Brick and quebec UM the year before last that
really hit a wall and they flew me out there
and I spent a week with them and sort of
like took the project apart. And now they're launching their
(32:22):
first project in partnership with the City of Montreal. You're
very busy, a lot of cities depending on you to
save them, including the one you are a part of. However,
I gotta ask you this, how do you define what
a citizen is? A citizen is one who takes ownership
and responsibility over their space. But I think a better
way to define citizen is how the Quakers define citizen.
(32:46):
The Quakers are friends. We're a friend to everyone. We're
a friend to our neighbors, We're a friend to our enemies,
We're a friend to our land. Collective care over a
joint space, pick up trash on your street, and be
nice to the old lady on the bus, you gotta
be nice, and old lady on the bus. I mean,
(33:07):
who's being mean to the old lady on the bus?
Gotta be um. This has been so wonderful. Thank you.
I appreciate it so much. What's exciting about this to
me is that I've seen what the world looks like
(33:29):
when we let money take over our neighborhoods. It looks
like abandoned apartment buildings that are old and crumbling, or
empty and abandoned apartment buildings that are new and unaffordable
to anyone, Or it just looks like the same strip
mall everywhere, or the same furniture shop everywhere, the same
(33:49):
yogurt stand everywhere. That's not culture. That's financially rich, but
culturally poor. And I'm excited for our neighborhoods to feel
different again, to be rooted not just in money, but
in people again. I want to live in this world
(34:10):
where we can preserve the culture of a community and
have it be owned by the people who've lived in
that community. So how do we protect that and make
sure that the wealth built there benefits the many and
doesn't just fall into a few hands or a few corporations.
Next week, I'm talking to someone who's doing just that,
(34:33):
protecting our communities from big business, and she's taken on
perhaps the biggest business of them all. We're gonna have
a real fight on our hands as citizens about whether
we live in a country that we control, that we
set the rules for, or a country where Amazon decides
how our economy works. Next week, my interview with Stacy
(34:54):
Mitchell and now our Prentice Sam with some actions you
can do where for you is home? Take a moment
to reflect on where you live. How did you end
up there? Was it based on real estate speculation, rental prices,
(35:17):
family history, relationship ties, or something else. Really consider the
role privilege has played in determining your place of residence.
Learn more about gentrification. Gentrification is a buzzword, but there's
a lot more to it. To learn more, check out
the podcast There Goes the Neighborhood, watch the documentary City Rising,
(35:38):
or read the book The Color of Law. Lastly, invest
in communities not commodities. Check out eb PreK dot org
that's e B p R e C dot org to
find out ways you can invest in community based real estate,
or start this model where you live. If you're in
(35:58):
the Oakland area, you could join the cooperative and become
a community owner for just ten dollars a month. Or
if you want to make a non extractive but savvy
real estate investment, you could also invest in one of
e b prex projects. And we know there are more
new models like this emerging to deal with our housing
and ownership crisis. So if you know any other groups,
(36:19):
let us know. Email us at comments at how to
citizen dot com. If you take into these actions, please
brag about yourself online using the hashtag how to Citizen.
Visit how to citizen dot com to sign up for
our newsletter or learn about upcoming events or even more
stuff than that. And if you like the show, spread
(36:41):
the word tell somebody. If you don't, definitely just keep
it to yourself. Appreciate you. How does Citizen with Bartune
Day is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts and
Dust Like Productions. Our executive producers are me barrattun Day, Thursty,
Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha you Said. Our producers are Stephanie
(37:02):
Cone and Ali Kilts. Kelly Prime is our editor, Valentino
Rivera is our engineer, and Sam Paulson is Our Apprentice.
Original music by Andrew Eaping. This episode was produced and
sound designed by Stephanie Cone. Special thanks to Joel Smith
from I Heart Radio.
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