A Home of Our Own

Tara Raghuveer:
Almost every single way that the federal government thinks about housing policy today is reliant on the private market. We actually need to interrogate the role of the federal government in guaranteeing that every person in this country has a home.
Solana Rice:
Hello. Welcome to Racism Is Profitable, a podcast about race, racism, and our economy. Hi Jeremie. Hi.
Jeremie Greer:
Hey, Solana. I’m here, y’all.
Solana Rice:
We are headed into the holiday season, and the holiday season for me, I really love the food. I love the food of the holiday season. We don’t have it all the time. Do you eat well during the holiday season?
Jeremie Greer:
Do I eat well? Of course, I eat well. My wife is a wizard in the kitchen, and I am there with her chopping while she’s making the magic happen. So, yes, I’m looking forward to the holiday that we give thanks for, not the colonial part, but the family getting together part.
Solana Rice:
No.
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah.
Solana Rice:
The family getting together and showing gratitude, and something just inspired me to chat with my aunt the other day. So, I gave her a call. This was just two days ago or so. Gave her a call and see how she’s doing.
Jeremie Greer:
What’s your aunt’s name?
Solana Rice:
She’s making food for other…
Jeremie Greer:
What’s your aunt’s name?
Solana Rice:
My Aunt Debbie, my aunt’s Debbie.
Jeremie Greer:
Debbie.
Solana Rice:
She actually-
Jeremie Greer:
See, I was going to guess Barbara or-
Solana Rice:
She helped me learn-
Jeremie Greer:
… something, but Debbie. Got it.
Solana Rice:
My Aunt Debbie, she taught me how to-
Jeremie Greer:
Sharon, Sharon, maybe Cheryl, but Debbie. Got it.
Solana Rice:
No, it’s Debbie, Debbie, Debbie. She taught me how to tie my shoes, and I just remember having… She was fairly young when I was born, and so she’s just been like a… Taught me a lot, and I was just checking in on her, seeing how she’s doing. She cooks a lot. She is a cook. Her and her husband cook at their church. They cook for weddings. They cook a lot, and we always joke because when I was growing up, and still to this day, I love all of her food, her mac and cheese, her collar greens, her green beans, the stuffing, the cornbread stuffing, all of it. I love all of it, except for this one little part of the plate. I just can’t bring myself to scoop out of the bin the chitlins.
Jeremie Greer:
The chitlins?
Solana Rice:
I just never could do it, and so our joke, our running joke is, “Oh, Solana-”
Jeremie Greer:
I know.
Solana Rice:
“… I made some chitlins. I made some chitlins.” Now, last year, she bought, I think she said 70 buckets. One, I didn’t know they came in buckets.
Jeremie Greer:
70 buckets? Those are like 10-pound buckets.
Solana Rice:
Yeah, she bought 70 buckets. Those are 10-pound buckets. She cleaned all these buckets. So, I don’t know-
Jeremie Greer:
They come in the same buckets that you carry paint in. They’re the big buckets.
Solana Rice:
Yeah, yeah, like that.
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah, yeah.
Solana Rice:
Like that.
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah, yeah.
Solana Rice:
Like that, 10-pound buckets. I guess they come with some water on the top. You got to pour out the water. Then you got to really clean them because these are-
Jeremie Greer:
You got to clean them.
Solana Rice:
… pig intestines.
Jeremie Greer:
Oh, it’s smells bad.
Solana Rice:
You have to clean them.
Jeremie Greer:
Oh, and if you don’t clean them right-
Solana Rice:
You have to clean them.
Jeremie Greer:
… you’ll get run out the house. People will be like, “What are you doing here?” Yeah.
Solana Rice:
Bad, bad, bad, bad, because these are pig intestines, so you really got to clean them, and it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. So, people really, really, really appreciate it when she goes to the store and she buys them-
Jeremie Greer:
Because she do it right. They do it right.
Solana Rice:
… cleans them.
Jeremie Greer:
She does it right.
Solana Rice:
She does it right. You do it right. When you find a chitlin person, you just stick with that chitlin person.
Jeremie Greer:
Now, I am not a chitlin person. I’m with you. I’m on that side of things, and I know that Black Twitter might pull my Black card, but I don’t… Yeah. I’m with you. I looked at it. It was like, ain’t no amount of hot sauce going to make that go down right. But my fam, same thing. My grandmother was the same way. She was the one that made all the chitlins.
Solana Rice:
Wow.
Jeremie Greer:
She was the only person in the family that made chitlins, and nobody else ate anyone else’s chitlins by hers. Yeah, I’m with you.
Solana Rice:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I had a conversation with her. She said, “Oh, I was only able to buy 17 buckets of chitlins,” which again, sounds like a lot to me either way, and I said, “Auntie Debbie-”
Jeremie Greer:
She’s cooking for a lot of… Is she cooking for all of Northeast Ohio? Man. [inaudible 00:04:57].
Solana Rice:
She said, “But they get really expensive,” that they’re really expensive and they’re hard to find, and they’re hard to find. She said she talked to a friend who lives down in Atlanta. She’s in Ohio. She talked to a friend who lives down in Atlanta, hard to find the chitlins in the store too, and they’re mad expensive. They went up twofold or something like that, something ridiculous. I said, “Now, Auntie Debbie, you know this conversation might land on the pod because this sounds like… Now, let me just… I don’t know, but it sounds like racism is profitable because I don’t know the food culture of everybody in the US, but look, I haven’t met other folks whose food cultures depend on chitlins as a mainstay of their holiday meal like Black people. I mean, I just don’t-
Jeremie Greer:
Only white people I’ve met that have eaten chitlins are white people who either have dated or are married to a Black person, and they went to their house to eat, and their partner didn’t tell them, “You don’t have to eat that.” So, everyone was looking at-
Solana Rice:
Oh, God.
Jeremie Greer:
That’s the only white people I know that have eaten chitlins, but yeah. Yeah.
Solana Rice:
White folks need to know, you don’t have to eat the chitlins.
Jeremie Greer:
No, no. You won’t offend if-
Solana Rice:
Yeah, but I don’t know any other food cultures… I mean, if you’re listening [inaudible 00:06:21]-
Jeremie Greer:
I mean, tripe, you know about Latin cultures and tripe-
Solana Rice:
Had tripe, yep.
Jeremie Greer:
… and stuff like that.
Solana Rice:
That’s true.
Jeremie Greer:
But you’re right. Black folks, though… Yeah. They know. They know who’s buying chitlins. Let’s just put it that way. They know exactly who’s buying chitlins. Yeah.
Solana Rice:
They know [inaudible 00:06:38] the 17 [inaudible 00:06:38]. So, I thought, let me do just a little bit. I was like, “Auntie Debbie, tell me, where do you buy the chitlins? Who manufactures these chitlins?” Smithfield. Smithfield is the brand that she buys on a regular, and I’m just confused. I’m like, “Why are there so…” It sounds like, and I read some reviews online, it sounds like this is nationwide, less supply, more expensive, and worse quality. I just don’t… It sounds suspicious.
Jeremie Greer:
That triggered me. So, Smithfield is one of the largest poultry producers in the country. They’re one of the largest slaughterhouses. They own all the slaughterhouses. They own all these processing plants. Now, it’s interesting you mention Smithfield because they are currently wound up in a lawsuit where they have been sued by restaurants and caterers for price gouging.
Solana Rice:
Uh-oh.
Jeremie Greer:
So, they were raising the prices on their product, and they’re being sued at the tune of $42 million by caterers and restaurants for price gouging. So, it sounds like Debbie is on to something. It sounds like Aunt Debbie is a ground-level economist in the-
Solana Rice:
Economist?
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah, in the chitlin market here. Yeah.
Solana Rice:
I think this is the point of the pod, right?
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah.
Solana Rice:
This is the point of the pod. But we are having everyday conversations with each other. We’re going to talk to Tara Raghuveer about housing. We’ve all experienced some kind of crisis of housing in the last couple of years. The point of this and this conversation is that we are experts in our lived experiences and we are not making up things. Don’t let the economists gaslight you. Don’t let the big companies gaslight you. This is actually happening. They are deciding, because this company knows that Black people will buy chitlins, and she has people that says-
Jeremie Greer:
She knows.
Solana Rice:
… “Debbie, I just need these chitlins, just whatever they cost.”
Jeremie Greer:
She knows the price that she usually pays, right?
Solana Rice:
Yep.
Jeremie Greer:
She knows how much. She has a plan. I’m going to go into the holiday season and will buy this. It’s going to cost me this much.
Solana Rice:
[inaudible 00:09:14].
Jeremie Greer:
So, she knows when it goes up, and she made the call. She made the call, “I can only do 17 this year, not the 70,” and so we have to listen to that. The thing is, again, what is clear too is those are… They know, but what we also know is that companies like Smithfield if it’s poultry, I mean if it’s pork, if it’s poultry, it’s companies like Tyson Foods, that they are gouging. They’re price gouging, and that increased price, the inflation is created by them. So, it’s one thing to laugh and joke about chitlins during the holidays, but what about bread and milk and chicken-
Solana Rice:
I know.
Jeremie Greer:
… and things that we consume and people consume on a day-to-day basis?
Solana Rice:
[inaudible 00:10:09].
Jeremie Greer:
You have these companies jacking up these prices, and it’s hurting Black folks. It’s hurting Latinx folks. It’s hurting people of color across the country, and it’s all driven by the profit motives of other people. Then you talk about, as we’re going to talk about Tara in a moment, housing, the roof over your head, and we’re really at a place where people can say, “Well, it’s inflation, so we’re going to raise the prices. Don’t blame us. It’s this thing called inflation that you don’t understand or no one else really understands. That’s what’s doing it.” Yeah. [inaudible 00:10:49]-
Solana Rice:
I am so excited to talk to-
Jeremie Greer:
Well, tell Aunt Debbie she is on it, that she is on the chitlin case, and that we are going to get down to the bottom of this.
Solana Rice:
We’re going to get down to the bottom of these chitlins. I’m not going to eat any, but we’re going to get… I’m going to hold my position, but yes, yes. We are so delighted to have Tara Raghuveer, the campaign director for the Homes Guarantee, the National People’s Action Homes Guarantee, and also the executive director of KC Tenants, breaking down why housing is not a commodity. Housing is not a commodity. It is a right, and all we need to do is keep our eyes on the win, win, win, win, win.
Jeremie Greer:
All right. Yep.
Solana Rice:
So, hello, Tara. It’s good seeing you.
Tara Raghuveer:
Hi, Solana.
Jeremie Greer:
Hey.
Tara Raghuveer:
Hey, Jeremie. Great to see you both.
Jeremie Greer:
‘Sup?
Solana Rice:
We’re going to have a conversation, of course, about the Homes Guarantee. It’s how we know you and how we’re working with you. But before that, I have to say… We’re headed into the holiday season. People are getting festive. I do see that you got your nails did. What’s your inspiration for your nail choice?
Tara Raghuveer:
For my nail choice? This is a great question.
Solana Rice:
Yep.
Tara Raghuveer:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:12:22]-
Jeremie Greer:
They’re like gold right now.
Solana Rice:
Oh, okay. What do we got? What is the…
Tara Raghuveer:
They’re gold right now, but they’re different colors in different light. It’s this powder that the lady uses on top of my acrylic, not to give away all my secrets, but the inspo for these nails, basically, I got this set done before we were in D.C. with the Homes Guarantee campaign last week, and I wanted to feel fierce, so I got fiercest possible color in the options offered to me, but in general, the inspiration for my nails is that I tend to dress like a little boy, so I like to balance it out by being like hyper femme at the ends of my fingers.
Jeremie Greer:
What goes into the thinking when you’re in the salon or you have all the choices, the world of choices in front of you? What [inaudible 00:13:16]?
Solana Rice:
Yeah, because I get overwhelmed.
Tara Raghuveer:
Yeah. I get overwhelmed, too. I mean, I could do a whole hour on my self-expression. I’m sure you all have noticed on our multitude of Zoom calls, but I had this realization a year-and-a-half ago or something where I was like, “I’m an organizer. No one cares what I wear any of the time, so I might as well have some fun with it,” and that theory definitely translates to my nails where I will often go, and I’m so overwhelmed by the number of choices that I’ll pick three different colors and mix up which nails the colors are on. The woman who does my nails is so kind and patient with me, considering that I’m literally always pulling the weirdest stuff at the nail salon, but she indulges me, which I love.
Jeremie Greer:
This is great. So, what was the-
Tara Raghuveer:
I hope this [inaudible 00:14:12] podcast.
Jeremie Greer:
This is exactly what’s going in the podcast.
Solana Rice:
This is totally part of the pod.
Tara Raghuveer:
Perfect.
Jeremie Greer:
That’s the point. But you mentioned last week, so before we get… We want to talk in deep about what you all did last week because I think it was historical and monumental. But before that, just tell our listeners about yourself, about the Homes Guarantee campaign, about KC Tenants and all the badass work you’re doing before we dive into so-and-so.
Tara Raghuveer:
Yeah, awesome. I’m so excited to talk to you two about this, by the way. It feels very full circle. We met almost exactly two years ago in a very similar meeting, actually, but so much has happened. So, the Homes Guarantee is a national campaign. It is led by tenants who are directly impacted by housing and security and racial capitalism in its many forms, and the Homes Guarantee is a simple premise. We live in the richest country in the history of the world. We can and we must guarantee that everyone has a home, and we’ve been building tenant unions across the country, organized with that premise as the sort of North Star, and we’ve been running a federal campaign, which I’m sure we’ll get into more detail about, but that’s the Homes Guarantee.
I also organize with an amazing group in Kansas City, Missouri where I live called KC Tenants, which is the citywide tenant union in Kansas City. We’re almost four years old, not quite. We were founded in February 2019 by three women, all of whom had been impacted by housing insecurity and decided that they were fed up, they were fed up of letting their city be a sort of playground for profiteers while they paid the price, and they felt some urgency around organizing that spring because they knew that they didn’t have a long time left in this city if they didn’t fight for it.
We’ve fought really hard in the last four years, and we’ve built a ton of power. Our union now includes 4,300 members. We’ve got building-wide unions. We’ve got neighborhood unions. We’ve won a bunch of issue campaigns. We’ve snatched back money from landlords who are hurting our people. We’ve gotten the air conditioning turned back on. We’ve won restoration for trailer home residents who are being displaced so a county could build a jail. Most recently, we just launched a 501(c)(4) sibling organization called KC Tenants Power, and some leaders in our base may or may not be running for City Council in the spring.
Jeremie Greer:
We got to have them on the pod when they’re ready.
Tara Raghuveer:
So, the Homes Guarantee is this premise, some say radical, we say relatively simple, that we can guarantee that everyone in this country has a safe, accessible, truly and permanently affordable home. This is the richest country in the history of the world. We can guarantee that. That is a premise that’s complicated by what we like to call a conspiracy of the profiteers, basically, what we were talking about before. They’ve convinced us that we cannot guarantee that everyone has their home and that the private market is the only way to deliver housing for the people. We disagree, and the Homes Guarantee is about transforming our economy from one that treats housing as a commodity to one that guarantees it as a public good. More specifically, the policy framework around the Homes Guarantee calls for a massive investment in millions of units of social housing. That’s housing that is built, constructed, managed forever off of the private market, not available for speculation or investment, where the rents are truly and permanently affordable for people to live.
The Homes Guarantee also calls for a national tenant’s bill of rights. It’s not enough just to have an abundance of truly affordable housing that’s off the market. We also need to make sure that tenants, both in social housing and in what remains of private housing, if any remains in this world, are protected, their rights are protected, and that they have power relative to the people who control their homes. We want universal rent control, good cause eviction. We want tenants to have the right to renew their lease, that type of thing. We want a nationwide ban on source of income discrimination, which is one of the key racial equity issues of our time. The Homes Guarantee also calls for sustainable investment. Our homes are some of the biggest drivers of climate catastrophe, and so we know that this kind of infusion of supply of social housing can’t come without protections that actually drive for climate resiliency in our communities.
The Homes Guarantee also calls for taxing the gentrifiers, naming the enemies, the profiteers who have commodified our housing market and taxing them, costing them money, actually taking from their business model that has been so profitable for so many decades and taking that wealth and putting it back into housing of the people. Then importantly, the Homes Guarantee also calls for land and housing reparations, and this is actually where we need to do more work with you all and other people who have joined our Homes Guarantee fam in the recent years, because I think we really struggle to imagine what exactly reparations look like that could be part of a Homes Guarantee because the problem we’re solving for is so vast. It is so profound, the way that land and housing has been central to disinvestment and designed impoverishment of Black and brown communities in this country. So, to think about repairing that is actually so challenging because wrapping our arms around all of the harm is nearly impossible. Right?
Solana Rice:
Mm-hmm.
Tara Raghuveer:
So, that’s some of what’s in the Homes Guarantee, and then I think the last thing I’ll say about it is that for us it’s also become just a very useful policy framework that helps us understand on a local issue or a state issue, are we moving in a step towards the Homes Guarantee, or are we taking a step back? This is where we’ve learned a lot from the abolition movement, for example. There’s this incredible tool produced by Critical Resistance that helps us understand local justice measures that are taking us towards abolition versus reformist reforms. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
Mm-hmm.
Tara Raghuveer:
In the housing space, I think the Homes Guarantee has been really useful for us in helping us articulate that North Star that then helps us determine, okay, what’s the step that we take today that’s a step towards that versus a step in the wrong direction? Because there’s a lot of local housing policy that might sound good, but is actually entrenching us in this world as it is that we’re trying to move away from.
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah. As an organizer, there’s so many things to focus on. What drew you towards housing justice?
Tara Raghuveer:
Yeah. That’s a good question. My family are immigrants. We landed in the US around 1995 and moved a lot when I was younger. My parents had to do a pretty standard thing that a lot of immigrants have to do, which is re-credential, retrain in their professions, and that led to us moving a lot for the first decade that we lived in the US. We landed in Kansas in 2001, and that was actually my parents’ first opportunity to buy a home, and they bought the cheapest home on the block that would send me to the best public school. There’s a lot in that, right?
Jeremie Greer:
Mm-hmm.
Tara Raghuveer:
But I did end up going to this amazing public school, had an incredible community that really invested in me and told me I could do anything I wanted to and be anything I wanted to be, and I ended up in college studying housing. I got interested in it through an internship that I did at the New York City Mayor’s Office when the mayor was Mayor Bloomberg, interestingly. There’s lots to say about that.
But being in New York City and going to public housing developments in New York City in particular got me fascinated by housing as a meeting place of market and social dynamics. I went back to school really energized around studying housing, but the literature about housing was really boring, I thought, and now I know it to be mostly neoliberal propaganda. That’s why it was boring. All they were saying over and over again was, “The public programs have failed,” and I was like, “This feels, A, not super relevant to what’s going on in the housing market today, and B…” I mean, it’s relevant in all sorts of ways, but they weren’t speaking to the sort of ways that people are harmed the most when it comes to their housing right now. Then B, it was just kind of boring.
Then I read what was then Matthew Desmond’s dissertation on evictions in Milwaukee and I was like, “Oh, the private market.” That is actually where most of the most vulnerable people are forced to rent their homes now. Those are some of the most interesting dynamics to study. So, I studied evictions in Kansas City as my senior thesis project, and it brought me back to my hometown, and it brought me, frankly, face to face with the privilege that I had grown up with in the community that my parents had had the opportunity to choose to raise me in, and it put me in touch with people who lived 10 minutes away, but were afforded none of the same opportunities and were actually on the receiving end of a lot of this structural violence in our hometown.
That took this thing that had been an intellectual interest and it made it something that I really felt in my gut. Some of the people that I met during that time I still think about almost daily, and those are the people that shaped, I think, a lot of my early politics and brought me to organizing. But I started organizing in the immigrant rights movement, and for a lot of reasons, I think on paper that makes more sense for me, given me and my family’s story, but I was always obsessed with housing. I think the power dynamic between the landlord and the tenant, the role of the government, some of these questions have always just obsessed… I’ve been obsessed with them since I started asking them.
Solana Rice:
What were you hearing from folks as you were talking, and what led you and others to the Homes Guarantee?
Tara Raghuveer:
Yeah. I mean, some of those early stories I was hearing were stories about what felt like nonsensical, unexplainable injustice. I remember meeting this older couple. Their names were Chuck and Ivy, and I sat down with them at a McDonald’s that I used to drive by all the time when I was growing up in Kansas City, and I was meeting with them in early December 2013, and it was just getting really cold. They told me a story about a lifetime of hard work and doing all the right things the right way as they had been told, and then ending up in a position in their seventies where they had no control over where they were living. The landlord had started tacking on fees for the cat, for the trash, for the garbage, for cable, extra utility fees, and they just couldn’t make it work. They were living on a fixed income at the time, Social Security and veterans’ benefits.
They had no family that they could go live with or that could help them out, and they just couldn’t make sense of the fact that they had woken up one day to an eviction notice on their door. I couldn’t make sense of that, it doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t make sense that Chuck and Ivy’s lives were reduced to their ability to pay for their home, and their home was actually reduced to a commodity rather than a place where they planned to live out the rest of their days. So, I think it’s like that power imbalance that allowed a profiteer to displace Chuck and Ivy that’s been stuck in my head and my heart and my gut ever since, and we encounter that same distorted, disgusting power dynamic all the time, every day, in every story that we hear from tenants.
Jeremie Greer:
I wonder if you could, just for those who are unfamiliar with the Homes Guarantee, just talk about what it is and how it came together, because I think it’s this beautiful coming together of the story you just told about Chuck and Ivy, and how it could move into policy that could really change people’s lives. So, I wonder if you could give that background, that story of how that came together.
Tara Raghuveer:
Yeah. So, the Homes Guarantee was officially born in 2018. I took on this job organizing a national housing campaign at People’s Action in 2017, and at the time… People’s Action has a long history working on housing. A lot of the neighborhood organizers that founded our organization were some of the people who fought for and won things like the Community Reinvestment Act and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and even in the last financial crisis, they were some of the folks leading the fight for principal reduction. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah.
Tara Raghuveer:
People’s Action has a long history working on these issues, and our groups, our member organizations do as well. When I came on in 2017, there hadn’t really been a national thrust to the work in a hot minute, and my charge was to figure out what that could look like. I was talking to the member organizations that were still doing really powerful local organizing. Some of them were working on public housing. Some of them were working on lifting the ban on rent control in their state. Others were working on other sorts of local policies. None of it really felt like it knit into something that was going to be bigger than the sum of its parts, and I think there was a lot of, frankly, skepticism among organizers at that time about whether there was a need for a national campaign, because I think a lot of us had taken for granted after many, many years of being told this by the federal government and by policy makers, a lot of us were taking for granted that housing is a local issue.
There’s actually not a federal or national fight to pick on this issue. That never really sat well with me, and I think there were people who were building this campaign with me who knew that this wasn’t possibly just a local fight. Those public housing organizers knew that public housing is a federal program, and actually, there’s a fight to pick at the federal level, there’s a fight to pick about money, there’s a fight to pick about public resources and how they’re spent and which types of programs [inaudible 00:30:12] or not.
So, we started trying to figure out what that national fight was, and ultimately, we brought the tenant leaders together for a convening in the summer of 2018, and this is where the Homes Guarantee was really born because the organizers, we came having done a bunch of research about issue cuts, these little campaigns that we could run that could maybe unite us across all these lines, and we brought issue cuts like let’s toxify developer money in local elections. Let’s work on this slice of public housing across these different locations across the country. The leaders basically saw these options, and they were like, “Nah. None of this is it. None of this is big enough or bold enough to really change this issue that impacts our lives in so many ways.” They also said, “The 2020 election is around the corner, and none of these candidates on the Democratic side, or the Republican side for that matter, are going to have housing platforms that actually speak to us.”
That’s because no one has really defined a North Star for housing. We know there’s Medicare For All. We know there’s a Green New Deal. We know all these big North Stars for progressives. There’s no such thing on the housing side. What is the Medicare For All of housing? What’s the Fight for $15 of housing? They said, “We need to articulate that.” Furthermore, they said, “When we chant housing is a human right in the streets, we don’t understand what that means. What does that mean in terms of American housing?” So, then we left that retreat, honestly, with a big headache because we were like, “What does that even mean? What are you telling us to do?” But this is the first evidence of what it means to run, or this is the first time I really felt what it means to trust the brilliance of a collective of impacted leaders over the nice, neat solution that organizers or experts might come up with. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
Mm-hmm.
Tara Raghuveer:
We basically made a mess in that convening. We did not come to any conclusions. We did not hit any of our desired outcomes. We made a mess, and out of that mess came this magic, which is now the Homes Guarantee. So, we spend the next couple of months articulating this vision with the leaders. That spring or the next spring in 2019, we had a big congressional briefing, and it felt like it was formulating even further, and then we had to really write this stuff down. We were like, “Oh, shit. This is kind of a thing. We’ve got to actually write it down and figure out what it is.” So, then we wrote a briefing book with a lot of the partners that are now still supporting us on policy. We put that out into the world in 2019 in September, and then we were off to the races.
Three weeks later, that platform was a lot of Bernie Sanders’ housing platform when he was running for president. We moved Elizabeth Warren on a couple of key issues. We started working with members of Congress, honestly, of bills that we introduced in January 2020, and ever since then, the Homes Guarantee has sort of aspired to define what that North Star is, and it’s evolved over time, and we’ve certainly encountered a lot of challenges through the pandemic and much more. But yeah, I love that origin story because it’s that same brilliance that we encounter at every turn that’s helped us get sharper and clearer because of our leaders and who they are and the fact that they genuinely lead this campaign.
Solana Rice:
Tara, we’ve had this conversation about not everybody believes that a Homes Guarantee is politically viable. I mean, Jeremie and I have been in the housing justice world for a long time.
Jeremie Greer:
Oh, have we.
Solana Rice:
I mean, even Jeremie and I were like, “Really? A guarantee? Okay,” until we really sat in it. We were like, “No, this is it.” I’m curious about… What it seems like, and maybe you can affirm or deny, but what it seems like is actually, the fact that this guarantee proposal and campaign is generated from those directly impacted is actually part of the reason why it is politically viable. What do you think?
Tara Raghuveer:
Absolutely, and I actually think the political viability of a Homes Guarantee has changed dramatically in the two years that I’ve known you two, since we started talking, actually, and I think a lot of that, some of the credit is due to concerted organizing around this issue that, by the way, completely has existed for decades, for generations, longer than I’ve been in this fight or this campaign has existed. The tenant movement has been building power and building strength, and tenants, even the movement not withstanding, have been organizing in their homes since tenants have lived in homes. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
Mm-hmm.
Tara Raghuveer:
So, we’re building our campaign on the shoulders of giants, and we’re experimenting with this kind of art and science of tenant organizing that has existed for a really long time. So, I think there’s some credit to the changing political viability around a Homes Guarantee goes to tenant organizing. Some definitely goes to the scale, depth, and breadth of the crisis that we’re experiencing as tenants today.
Solana Rice:
[inaudible 00:35:58].
Tara Raghuveer:
There’s no more clarifying a moment than the last couple of years living through a global pandemic and an economic crisis, and the ways that we all had to shift our thinking during especially the early months of the pandemic related to some of our basic needs like housing have created space for political viability that did not exist before. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
Mm-hmm.
Tara Raghuveer:
It was a fact taken for granted, assumed to be true in perpetuity, that the government wasn’t responsible for our homes, that the private market was the only places we could get homes, and landlords got to set rent based on whatever the market allowed, and people could get evicted at any time if they couldn’t make the rent. These were just assumed to be cornerstones of the American housing situation, and then the pandemic hit, and we all had to question everything because before a vaccine, before a widespread vaccine, our homes were our only protection. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
Mm-hmm.
Tara Raghuveer:
Housing was the vaccine. We were told to stay home in order to keep ourselves and our neighbors safe. So, we started to question, “Okay, how do people stay home if they can’t afford to stay home?” and there we started to question the very premise of a society that we’ve bought into that says our homes are commodities rather than guaranteed public goods. That questioning led to eviction moratoriums. It led to a federal eviction moratorium. It led to billions and billions of dollars of rental assistance. We would’ve preferred a different solution. We wanted to cancel the rent.
Nonetheless, billions and billions of dollars were unlocked to make sure that people could stay in their homes in the form of a bailout to their landlords, which I completely and totally disagree with that as the vehicle, and the political viability that has built during that period of time when money got unlocked, when people were kept in their homes by policy, by eviction moratoriums, by judges just simply not opening their courts back up, and also by people organizing and taking direct action to stop those types of violent evictions from occurring, all of that has changed the game.
I think we’re closer to a Homes Guarantee now than we ever have been before, and I’m under no illusions that this is a 10-year fight. The fight for a Homes Guarantee is a 40-year or 50-year fight, and I believe that we will win. I believe that the world as it is untenable, it is violent, it’s harmful, it treats people as disposable, it’s racist, and it’s making money for a powerful few, and our job as organizers is to figure out how their inevitability becomes impossible and our inevitability of the Homes Guarantee becomes the only possibility.
Jeremie Greer:
I love the problem analysis because historically, it’s [inaudible 00:39:15]. We’ve been in this mess of discussion about housing affordability for a long time, and it’s always the assumed has been, well, the market just does what it does and people are harmed by that, and our job as advocates is to ease their pain rather than… But your analysis starts like, no, the market, it just does what it does. There’s something driving it, and you mentioned COVID, inflation, and that there’s real people at the center of this moving the things that make the market move. Yeah. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, how that fits into the politics of what you all are trying to do, or we’re trying to do, because we’re doing it with you. I shouldn’t say y’all.
Tara Raghuveer:
[inaudible 00:40:03]. We all. What’s the right slang for we all?
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah, yeah. We all.
Tara Raghuveer:
Yeah.
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah.
Tara Raghuveer:
We all. We all are doing this. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry. Now I totally lost my train of thought because I’m thinking of-
Jeremie Greer:
With the we all, yeah.
Tara Raghuveer:
… we all. It’s pronounced we all.
Jeremie Greer:
The market, who’s driving the market? Inflation, COVID.
Tara Raghuveer:
Yeah, who’s driving it?
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah, yeah.
Tara Raghuveer:
Exactly, exactly, exactly. So, when we train our tenant leaders on racial capitalism, and we train on racial capitalism all the time, first of all, when we do trainings in our campaign, we’re very explicit about the fact that the trainer in the front of the room is not teaching some people a lesson about some shit they don’t know. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
Right. Yeah.
Tara Raghuveer:
When we train, what we’re doing is posing questions, and actually drawing out that collective [inaudible 00:40:55]-
Jeremie Greer:
They watch the rent go up. They know what’s going on, right? Yeah, yeah.
Tara Raghuveer:
Our tenant leaders are living, breathing survivors of racial capitalism in a lot of ways. They do the training on racial capitalism. They’ve had to live it. We’ve all had to endure it, just to start there. When we talk about racial capitalism, when we talk about the market, we’re very explicit about the fact that the market is not some abstract thing. It too is living, breathing. There are people who control the market. There are institutions that control the market, and today they are interested in a market that’s good for their bottom line.
The profiteers are holding all the rest of us hostage and setting the parameters of that market. They’re making the rules for their own game where they are making money. The most interesting thing in all of this to me right now is thinking about the role of the federal government in enabling this behavior. The role of the federal government in particular related to housing I think is such an interesting case of how the profiteers are holding all of us hostage, and in particular, holding our government hostage, holding our dollars hostage for their ends. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
Mm-hmm.
Tara Raghuveer:
There are so many examples of this across the government, but in so many ways, American housing policy is designed to subsidize and incentivize home ownership, and not just single-family home ownership, and not just home ownership of your first home, but your second home and your third home. Right?
Solana Rice:
Mm-hmm.
Tara Raghuveer:
It’s also designed to subsidize and finance the business of profiteering off of providing other people homes. So, there’s financing through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-backed loans. There’s all sorts of subsidies and tax credits through HUD and the Treasury Department and the Department of Agriculture, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Almost every single way that the federal government thinks about housing policy today is predicated on, is reliant on the private market. The federal government has all but abdicated its responsibility to guarantee that our people have homes. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
Mm-hmm.
Tara Raghuveer:
So, that means that when we’re designing policy, priority number one is always, how do we make this make sense for the moneymakers? Priority number one, no matter how you slice it, is profit. Priority number two, maybe, is house the people. What we’re saying, which we do not think is a radical premise, is let’s flip that. I actually am not concerned with the moneymaking enterprise at all. Priority number one when we make policy needs to be house the people.
Jeremie Greer:
People.
Tara Raghuveer:
House the people, and we need to acknowledge that there’s no Homes Guarantee that is a Homes Guarantee reliant on the private market. That just doesn’t work. We actually need to interrogate the role of the federal government in guaranteeing that every person in this country has a home.
Jeremie Greer:
One thing I love about the work of the Homes Guarantee campaign that I think it’s so different and unique from a lot of what’s happening now around in progressive spaces right now, is there’s a lot, I think, comfort in identifying the problem, coming up with a vision for how it should be different, and then just shouting from the outside of the arena about the problem and what the solution should be. What I love about what you all are doing, and I wonder if you could walk into this by talking about what you all have done most recently and we’ve done together most recently, is you’re not shouting from the outside of the arena. You’re getting in the arena politics and getting into the arena policymaking, and not just Utah, but the tenants are in the arena of politics and policymaking in Washington, in the administration. I wonder if you could talk about that because I think that is so unique compared to a lot of what’s happening in progressive space right now.
Tara Raghuveer:
Yeah. It is unique. It’s unfortunately unique, I think.
Jeremie Greer:
Really? Yeah.
Tara Raghuveer:
It really has everything to do with our leaders. Our leaders, the tenant leaders in the Homes Guarantee, refuse to be marginal. They refuse to be advocated for, talked about when they’re not in the room. They refuse to be patronized, and they’ve told us at every turn they’re not interested in symbolism. They’re interested in winning. The anthem of our campaign right now is the song WIN by Jay Rock, win, win, win, win. Excuse my language, but fuck everything else. Win, win, win, win. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
[inaudible 00:46:09]. Yeah.
Tara Raghuveer:
It’s our leaders who brought that energy from the beginning and continue bringing it, and now that’s the spirit of our campaign, and it means that we’re just recruiting even more leaders of that ideology and methodology into our fold. Our leaders refuse to be marginal to their own liberation. They will be at the center of it, and they’ve told us that time and time again. A recent example of this is we came out of the cancel rent fight in the early months of the pandemic with a couple bruises. We lost handily. The establishment class, the advocacy circles, the DC Beltway organized around rental assistance, which we knew from the outset was a bailout to landlords that came with no strings attached. We could see into the future what was going to play out, and then it did with millions of people not being able to access the relief, getting delayed relief, maybe getting the relief only to then be kicked out by their landlord anyway.
Jeremie Greer:
Anyway.
Tara Raghuveer:
We knew all this shit was going to happen. Nonetheless, rental assistance was the winner. We had to study our own power coming out of that, and what we acknowledged was we didn’t have much. We didn’t have much at all. We didn’t have much outside power, if we’re being really honest with ourselves. We had a couple of groups with some good organizing, but we needed to build up our ability to build a base among tenants and organize powerful collectives of tenants, and then wield that power powerfully. We didn’t have that kind of power.
We also didn’t have any of the kind of inside power that you’re talking about, Jeremie. We just didn’t know the people on the inside who were calling shots. We didn’t know how to organize any kind of campaign that would be relevant and resonant to those people, and it felt so intense at that time… When so much had felt possible in the early months of the pandemic, it felt like such an intense failure to not have our shit together in that moment of possibility to be able to win something like cancel rent that would’ve materially changed so many of our people’s lives, and never a failure, always a lesson.
Undoubtedly, people were harmed in deep ways, and that is terrible. It’s terrible, the amount of harm, the depth of harm that came out of some of these policy decisions, and in some ways, came out of the fact that we didn’t have the power that we needed at that moment as a tenant movement to win what we needed. On the other side of that, we are so clear about that power, which we must build, and that’s the power of tenant organization locally. We are so deeply invested in building tenant unions and experimenting with this art and science of tenant unionizing, and then we’re also very clear about the need to run very sharp campaigns that put us at the table to win. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
Right.
Tara Raghuveer:
Our leaders refuse to be marginal, and that drives me to figure out how we get our people to those tables, not me. It’s not interesting to me. It’s not important to me for me to be at the table. It is interesting and important for our leaders to be at the table and for their expertise to be taken seriously as what it is, which is expertise about their own damn lives. So, we’ve picked an issue campaign now where we’re basically trying to win federal rent regulations, especially in light of the rent inflation crisis this summer and this fall. The rent is too damn high.
Our leaders know that better than anyone, and we know that there are things that the president can do in his executive authority, and he can direct agency and department-level action to actually regulate our rents. We’ve done the work with you all and with many other policy and legal partners to identify what some of those actions could be, and you’re right. I mean, we’ve now had sustained engagement with this White House and this administration for about 14 months, and some of it’s been great, some of it’s been tough. We’re in a moment of tension right now, and tension is good, and leaning in to tension is how we grow and how we get shit done.
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah. I love… Because I remember just on Twitter just last week after the meeting, Brian Deese, who’s the head of the National Economic Council, Susan Rice, are retweeting each other’s tweet about how great it was to meet with tenants and hear from them about as they deal with this, and that was… I don’t think I remember seeing something like that, knowing that it happened at the level it did, and with the tenants and the way it did. There’s a lot of photo ops with tenants, but to… They sat and listened to tenants, and that I don’t… That’s why I say I believe it was historic, because that doesn’t happen a lot in Washington.
Tara Raghuveer:
It doesn’t happen a lot, and even now, it’s happening to a certain extent. I’m proud of the work we’ve done to push for much more than I believe ever in history, much more engagement between that level of decision maker and tenants, people who rent their homes, and it is still very much my belief and I think our analysis that while there’s space for storytelling, there’s not necessarily the respect for the expertise that these leaders are bringing-
Jeremie Greer:
That’s right. That’s right.
Tara Raghuveer:
… and for their policy prescriptions. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
Right.
Tara Raghuveer:
Our leaders are [inaudible 00:52:08]-
Solana Rice:
On their policymaking, yeah.
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah.
Tara Raghuveer:
Right. Our leaders feel this.
Jeremie Greer:
They’re not there to tell stories. They’re there to make an ask about assistant policy.
Solana Rice:
Yeah.
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah.
Tara Raghuveer:
Our leaders feel this in these meetings where they’re asked to perform their pain, but when they’re there with policy, they’re not listened to. They’re instead patronized. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
Yep.
Tara Raghuveer:
They’re asked 17 more follow-up questions than anyone would be asked, any advocate who’s a Beltway advocate would be asked if they’re in the room with a document of policy. Right?
Jeremie Greer:
Mm-hmm.
Tara Raghuveer:
That to me is the central challenge that we’re facing right now, is breaking through a really long-held problematic belief that the people don’t know what’s best for them, and our people absolutely know what’s best for them, and they’re coming correct. They’re coming prepared with exactly what they know they need and being told by people who have never spent a day in their life that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Solana Rice:
Yeah. Tara, this is so inspiring. We are so honored to walk and be with you on this journey and with the tenants, and it’s just monumental. I want to know where folks should join your effort. If they’re in their local space, in their community, how do they find out more?
Tara Raghuveer:
Yeah. You can go to damnhighrent.com and read the memos that we’ve been producing on rent inflation. You can submit your story if you’re a tenant, especially one who’s faced a recent rent hike, and if you’re a local organizer or just curious to learn more about the Homes Guarantee, you can also reach out on that platform. So, that’s damnhighrent.com. We can also, for now, be found on Twitter with the hashtag #HomesGuarantee. Yeah. We’re out here. Whether or not this is a good thing, our contact info is very easily findable on the internet, so definitely include all of that in the notes for this piece. I do just want to, before we close out, and I hope you don’t clip this out of the final recording, just want to shout you all out.
I think your thinking about a liberation economy has been so transformative for me as we’ve grown and clarified our analysis about the Homes Guarantee campaign, and more than just your thinking. I think your steadfast partnership for the last two years has completely transformed our campaign for the better, and I feel so proud and honored to be doing this work with people like you, and frankly, just to arrive on the other side of two really hard years with friends like you all in this struggle. It’s awesome, and none of this stuff would be worth it if we weren’t building this kind of depth of relationship with people like you. So, just want to appreciate you and send you some love.
Jeremie Greer:
Thank you. No, all that back at you, Tara. It’s the same for us. This is the work we should be doing. We’re so fortunate to have found each other.
Solana Rice:
Exactly. I’m going to go get my nails done, drink my water, and win, win, win, win, win.
Tara Raghuveer:
Yes. Win, win, win, win.
Jeremie Greer:
Fuck everything else. Win, win, win, win.
Tara Raghuveer:
Just win.
Solana Rice:
Win, win, win, win.
Jeremie Greer:
All right. Bye, Tara.
Tara Raghuveer:
Thank you all. Bye.
Solana Rice:
Thank you.
Jeremie Greer:
Peace.
Solana Rice:
Bye. Thanks for listening. For more information, check out our list of episode resources and visit us at liberationinagenerationaction.org. Shout out to our producer and audio editor, Nino Fernandez, the design team at [inaudible 00:56:31], and the LibGen Action communications team. Like what you heard? Help us make some noise by telling two friends about the Racism Is Profitable podcast. Until next time, y’all, peace.