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Fighting the Housing Crisis with HOME

Jason Boleman | March 6, 2020

Topics: community, events richmond va, eviction crisis, home, housing, housing crisis, Housing Opportunities Made Equal, housing opportunities made equal of virginia, politics, richmond, Richmond Public Library, richmond va, RVA, things to do richmond va

Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia sets sights on reform, working to change housing policy in the Commonwealth by informing the public through art. 

On chilly winter mornings, patrons begin gathering at the steps of the main branch of the Richmond Public Library to await its 10am opening. 

A security guard pulls open the doors, and as library guests begin funneling in, they are greeted first not by a bookshelf or a computer lab; instead, the first thing that visitors see when entering the library are two tall columns of brown blocks, with “EVICTION CRISIS” stenciled in white letters. They are surrounded by what appears to be bags of trash. Instead of bookshelves, visitors are entering an art exhibit, with doorknobs, keys, Monopoly homes, and broken outlets highlighting Richmond’s eviction rates on orange and black posters. 

Photo by Jason Boleman

The exhibit is a current project from Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia, a Richmond-based organization whose mission is “to ensure equal housing access to all people.” Through advocating for legislation and community outreach, HOME of Virginia has its goals set on changing housing policies in the Commonwealth. 

In the current General Assembly session, HOME’s main concern has been adding sexual orientation and gender identity protections to the Fair Housing Act of Virginia. Both the House of Delegates and Senate versions of that bill passed their respective chambers on February 6. 

“We’ve been working almost two decades on that,” said Mike Burnette, Director of Communications for HOME. “That’s going to be a huge change. We have never moved the needle this far.” 

HOME’s other main legislative focus is House Bill 6, introduced by Del. Jeff Bourne, D-Richmond, which “adds discrimination based on a person’s source of income to the list of unlawful discriminatory housing practices.” The bill passed the House on February 7 and the Senate on March 3. 

Photo by Jason Boleman

HOME began in September 1971 to enforce the Fair Housing Act. Burnette says its biggest win as an organization came in 1982, when Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman went to the Supreme Court of the United States. The ruling allowed anyone aware of a fair housing violation to sue, including “testers” who are looking for violations. 

“That really changed the way we do things, not just for housing organizations, but any other organizations that want to sue,” Burnette said. 

Today, HOME employs testers to act as prospective renters, in order to see if local landlords are complying with fair housing policies. 

Currently, the organization employs around 30 full-time employees, and is funded primarily by government grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as from state and local governments. Aside from those sources, Burnette said HOME receives funding from foundations, institutions, individual donors, and companies, including Wells Fargo, the only corporate sponsor of the “Eviction Crisis” art exhibit.

Photo by Jason Boleman

HOME president Heather Crislip said the organization will ensure equal housing access, and address the systemic barriers that prevent implementation of fair housing policies. 

As for the exhibit, Burnette says this current display is expected to at least ride through this full year, but did not rule out future art exhibits. 

“We’ll see what the next crisis is, or the next issue that we feel we need to raise up,” Burnette said. 

Scott Firestine, director of the Richmond Public Library, said the exhibit is among the best of his tenure. According to Firestine, the exhibit achieves the library’s mission to inform, enrich, and empower. 

“The best and most rewarding thing to happen as a librarian is that people are using this to become informed,” Firestine said. “Then they are asking, ‘What can I do?” 

Top Photo by Jason Boleman

Fighting For Food Justice In A Gentrified Richmond

Cat Modlin-Jackson | April 23, 2019

Topics: community gardens, Duron Chavis, Housing Opportunities Made Equal, Kinfolk Community Empowerment Center, Leonard Githinji, Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens, McDonough Community Garden, Randolph Farm, redlining, Richmond Food Justice Alliance, Richmond Food Justice Corridor, urban agriculture, Virginia State University

You’ve seen the community gardens, the small farms springing up in the city, the folks standing out on the side of busy streets sowing the seeds of tomorrow’s harvest. Some of these spaces are emerging in areas where families have to travel several miles before reaching a grocery store. But what’s striking about a lot of these green spaces is not their urban existence; it’s the people taking care of the land.

Across the city, gardens have emerged in communities of color, but the stewards don’t always match the neighborhood demographic. Without representation and community ownership, are these spaces making the food system more equitable? Not according to food justice activists like Duron Chavis, Manager of Community Engagement at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden.

Since 2002, Chavis has served as a community advocate in the Richmond metro region. When Chavis graduated from Virginia State University with a degree in mass communications, he had no idea he’d become a champion of regional food justice. He became invested after meeting farmers through starting Happily Natural Day, a festival he founded in 2003 while working at the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia.

Almost ten years later, in 2012, Chavis started the McDonough Community Garden in Southside. He had just moved to that part of the neighborhood and he was eager to grow. He spent a great deal of time talking to his neighbors and working with the city to transform an underutilized plot of land into a community garden through the city’s Richmond Grows Gardens program. He toiled in the garden after work and on weekends, taking care to engage with folks who walked by. Chavis has since moved from the neighborhood, but seven years later, the McDonough Garden is still a place where folks can grow, congregate, listen to music, and revel in the outdoors.

“It’s everybody’s space,” he says.

As an urban agriculturalist, Chavis’s goal is to realize equitable food systems by way of education, communication, and collaboration.

Food justice, says Chavis, necessitates equity and ownership. It’s not just about building gardens; it’s about empowering communities with the tools to take control of their own food system, which includes helping establish grow-spaces.

“What [food justice] means to me is that communities have ownership of the means of production, distribution, consumption, processing, and waste management,” he explains.

Duron Chavis.

Chavis is a busy man. In addition to coordinating a community storytelling project that will showcase the work of urban agriculturalists, Chavis spent the last weeks of winter reviewing applications for the fourth cohort of the Lewis Ginter Urban Gardener training program, an initiative that teaches aspiring gardeners how to both build relationships and develop green spaces in communities. The group will work with two faith-based organizations and the Richmond Association of Black Social Workers to create an agricultural space on the border of Richmond’s East End and Henrico.

The review process is selective. Only 16 people are chosen from a pool of more than 40 applicants. Chavis strives to create as inclusive a team as possible, which means taking into account applicants’ race, gender, sexuality, religious perspective, ability, income, and education. Given the importance of establishing trust when doing community work, garden program applicants who are from the neighborhood are given priority.

“We try to make sure the cohort has as much difference as possible, so that when people are in the room, they get the experience of having to build community across difference,” says Chavis. “[This] is important because it’s a skill to be able to work with people who don’t have your shared lived experience.”

The Lewis Ginter Urban Gardener training program is designed to probe the systemic disparities that have perpetuated food insecurity in neighborhoods and households across the country.

“My conversation is about racial equity,” says Chavis.

“For the Ginter Urban Gardener program, the first thing we talk about is race and place,” he says. “It’s not just that they don’t have grocery stores, it’s also that they don’t have affordable housing. It’s also that these areas have high levels of police intervention. There are also places with high eviction rates. All of this is about racism and focusing on the urban center.”

McDonough Community Garden.

Injustice rooted in redlining, poverty, and gentrification

Today in Richmond, it’s easy to find cheap or free garden land in areas with lower property values, which tend to be in communities of color. Perhaps that’s why predominately white-run organizations have established farms in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Church Hill and Manchester.

Food grown in these spaces may or may not be an alternative to the grocery store for residents with lower incomes. But the lack of accessible fresh food from nearby grocery stores is only part of the problem in food-insecure areas. The history of racism and poverty that beleaguers these neighborhoods is as much a part of the picture as the land in the frame.

Chavis says food justice goes beyond building gardens in so-called food deserts, which the USDA defines as areas where fresh and healthful foods are inaccessible. It means having conversations about the history of why and how power has been stripped from communities.

To understand the relationship between urban agriculture, gentrification, and food sovereignty, we have to step back to the 1930s, when redlining effectively made it impossible for Black families to get home loans and amass wealth. As a result, few could afford to purchase, rehabilitate or repair their home, explains Brian Koziol, Director of Research and Policy at Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia. Even after the Fair Housing Act made housing discrimination illegal in 1968, white flight and systemic racism served to perpetuate the wealth gap that exists today between whites and people of color.

Due to the increase in wealth disparities, explains Koziol, “people in poverty aren’t able to maintain property. And without access to credit, there’s no ability to maintain and reinvest in property.”

This was further exacerbated by the years leading up to the housing crisis, when the percentage of subprime loans to African American households was 28 percent higher than those to white households, says Koziol.

In 2009, the wealth gap between white and African American households was $236,000, according to a longitudinal study conducted at the Brandeis University Institute on Assets and Social Policy. Researchers found that years of home ownership were the foremost contributor to a racial wealth gap that had increased by 178% since 1989. Per the study, “Residential segregation by government design has a long legacy in this country and underpins many of the challenges African-American families face in buying homes and increasing equity.”

In Richmond, 86 percent of communities redlined with the label “hazardous” by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s remain low-to-moderate income; 90 percent of these neighborhoods have majority-minority populations, according to researchers at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

“Historically, over time, people of color in this country have been a vehicle for wealth extraction, either through labor or paying rent,” Koziol explains. “Systemically, it’s an issue of keeping people in a state of poverty through wealth extraction and resource extraction.”

“In terms of property values, what we’re seeing now is gentrification in a number of neighborhoods that have historically been redlined and disinvested,” he adds. “Those property values are going up so, without really beating around the bush, property values are, by and large, tied to whiteness.”

Chavis says this history is ignored by many white-run non-profits operating in communities of color.

“Right now in Richmond we don’t have food justice,” he says. “We have a lot of representatives of communities that are not from those areas making a lot of money off of increasing access to healthy food… none of them are doing work around racial equity, explicitly or intentionally.”

Food justice goes beyond food

In order for change to be realized, there has to be a shift in narrative, says Art Burton, founder of Kinfolk Community Empowerment Center and the Food Justice Corridor. “Food justice is about opportunities, not problems,” he offers.

Since 2015 Burton has overseen the Food Justice Corridor, a stretch of land that encompasses four public housing communities in the East End and an expanse running northwest between Mechanicsville Turnpike and Creighton Road. The corridor operates in a space that some would label a food desert, but Burton, who’s been farming since childhood, takes issue with that term.

“Maybe we have an issue with people not knowing the importance of eating healthy. Maybe we have an issue with people not knowing how to access healthy foods. But we don’t have a food desert,” said Burton in a TED Talk.

The term ‘food desert’ “implies that nothing can grow there and that it’s a recurring problem, and that’s not what these spaces are,” adds Victoria Lynn, of the Richmond Food Justice Alliance, a partner organization within the Food Justice Corridor. The resources are often there, say Lynn and Burton — sometimes it’s just a matter of making those connections.

That’s what the Food Justice Corridor has set out to do: facilitate access for food in a way that goes beyond putting vegetables in the refrigerator. The idea is to promote a “culture of health” by helping people connect with resources that can alleviate inequities deeply rooted in systemic racism. That includes access to housing, alternatives to youth incarceration, and means for reentry after incarceration.

“This is about ownership,” says Burton. “It’s not about all that’s wrong.”

Urban agriculture, says Burton, is just one mechanism used to facilitate an equitable food system. “It’s a community engagement tool,” he explains.

Burton acknowledges competition for funding in the field of urban agriculture non-profits. Larger, well connected organizations make it difficult for grassroots non-profits like Kinfolk to compete for funding. “The money is running laterally to well funded white organizations,” he explains. That’s why Burton, who has worked as a community organizer for decades, is working to streamline a coalition of Black-run non-profits across the city. “We have to get all of the organizations [to spread] the same message of what we’re doing and why.”

Dr. Leonard Githinji on VSU’s Randolph Farm.

What will it take to realize a food-just Richmond?

Chavis is excited about the opportunities flourishing across the region. He points to Burton and Lynn’s work, as well as that unfolding at Virginia State University, where Dr. Leonard Githinji runs a Sustainable Urban Agriculture Certificate Program on the university’s Randolph Farm.

“Food justice is a situation where everybody should have access to affordable, fresh food wherever they are,” says Githinji in a greenhouse. Under that hot roof, students will learn permaculture fundamentals like aquaculture. They’ll raise chickens and orchards. And, if Githinji has his druthers, they’ll take away skills that they can use to promote food access and security in their communities.

“This is how you build community,” says Chavis. “Give people access to the resources and work with them, support them, and watch them figure it out on their own.”

All photos by Cat Modlin-Jackson. Top Photo: Food growing in a greenhouse on Randolph Farm.

“Elephant in the Room”: Community Advocates Discuss Race, Gentrification

VCU CNS | February 14, 2019

Topics: church hill, Duron Chavis, gentrification, Housing Opportunities Made Equal, Housing Virginia, Kinfolk Community Empowerment Center, Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens, richmond

One of Shekinah Mitchell’s favorite memories in Richmond is walking out of her favorite corner store 10 years ago and serendipitously meeting the man who would become her husband.

Today, that corner store no longer exists.

Mitchell’s story is part of a larger pattern that policy experts said is becoming increasingly common in Richmond and around the nation: gentrification.

“Gentrification is not just physical displacement; it’s cultural displacement,” Mitchell said during a panel Friday afternoon. “In the same way we have to be vigilant in preserving housing that is affordable for all people in our community, we have to do the same with culture.”

Two seats away from her, Arthur Burton, the executive director of Kinfolk Community Empowerment Center, said gentrification is often discussed in a way to keep white people comfortable.

“We tend not to talk about the elephant in the room, and that’s the elephant of race,” Burton said.

According to an analysis by panel member Jonathan Knopf, with Housing Virginia, about 90 percent of households in the Church Hill area were black in 2000, including renters. By 2015, that number fell to about 70 percent.

While the number of black homeowners in Church Hill decreased by almost 25 percent in that same period, the number of white homeowners increased by nearly 160 percent.

Duron Chavis, the community engagement manager at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, said the trend is not new.

“The narrative of Virginia is one where some were given privilege over land and its use, while others were marginalized from its use,” Chavis said. He said displacement “is engrained in the very fabric of this country.”

When a wealthier person moves into a neighborhood and purchases a home at a higher price than its assessed value, Chavis explained, people already living in that area must now pay higher taxes on their homes.

For some families, Mitchell noted, the increasing home value is a wonderful thing, as having more equity can mean building wealth. But that’s not the case for everyone.

“In some cases, it can go from $200 to, maybe, $1,600 in taxes a year,” Chavis said. “If you as a homeowner become delinquent on your taxes, then you’re at threat of losing your home.”

For renters, as home values in an area increase, so does their monthly rent – until, sometimes, they can no longer afford to live there.

It’s a process that some people link to eviction.  

According to a report published in April, Richmond has one of the highest eviction rates in the nation. Research by VCU’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis shows that eviction rates are higher in areas with a higher population of black residents. In fact, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney just introduced a pilot program to help combat high eviction rates. In a 2010 report, the Center for Responsible Lending found that black families also disproportionately lose their homes to foreclosures.

“It’s a modern-day land grab,” said Brian Koziol, the director of research and policy at Housing Opportunities Made Equal, a nonprofit advocacy group. “The result is the same: It took wealth and land from brown and black families.”

For Mitchell, a word that comes to mind when discussing gentrification is colonization. She read in a newspaper article years ago that a local housing official saw a need for urban pioneers – people who will move into areas considered distressed and pioneer to live there.

“A pioneer is someone who goes to an undiscovered place where nothing exists. But our communities are places that already have people and culture,” Mitchell said. “That mentality of coming in and not acknowledging what already exists, not acknowledging the culture in a community – it feels like colonization again.”

Words and Photos by Maryum Elnasseh, Capital News Service

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