We're on Inequality.org! A California Coop Tackles Inequality by Reimagining the Future of Housing
This interview originally appeared on Inequality.org. Author Kayla Sorenson interviewed EB PREC's Executive Director Noni Session for the third in a series or articles highlighting grassroots organizations working, or seeking to work, outside a reliance on wealthy donors. It has been edited for length and clarity.
What is East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC)?
EB PREC is a people-of-color-led multi-stakeholder co-operative that supports Black, brown, and allied communities to cooperatively organize, finance, co-steward, and long-term asset manage land and housing in Oakland and the East Bay.
EB PREC staff collective, launch party at Impact Hub Oakland, December 2018. Credit: EB PREC.
What is the short-term vision of EB PREC?
Our short-term goal is to bring in non-extractive capital that supports affordable and sustainable project outcomes. Non-extractive capital is not over-determined by donor interests, and it is deployed at non-extractive rates that are well below the typical six percent and above rates frequently offered to grassroots and community based projects.
We then offer that capital to community members as stake in a collective ownership of land and housing for Black and brown Oaklanders. We offer the owners technical assistance to get their cooperatives running, build their governance systems, and plan and manage their housing and mixed use acquisitions.
What has bloomed out of that modest goal has been a very wide range of possibilities. It’s become clear that EB PREC is not only effective, but it is a critical design for community development, land sovereignty, and economic solidarity among underserved communities.
How are you building community wealth?
First and foremost, we’re working on accumulating land and housing assets that are permanently protected and affordable. But we’re also re-tuning what folks understand as community wealth. The concept of wealth evokes an individualized treasury upon which one sits, like the monopoly man on his pile of gold.
Our concept of wealth extends into providing people with more than just tangible assets. We’re providing the intangibles of which they’ve been dispossessed: information, networks, power, resources for wider visions, and each other. We’re healing, empowering, and redefining the relationship between capital and frontline communities so that they are networks and sources of transformation for folks to take value into their own hands and use it in the ways that they desire.
Lack of wealth is not just an absence of currency. It’s an absence of connection, relationships, and safety nets. We’re addressing this through our organizing model and platforms for project learning, investment, education.
Our work aims to activate our community owners around investing in our communities, not just with their dollars, but with their bodies. People come away with more than just a garden or a rebuild or a repair. They come away with the relationships that define strength in togetherness to build cohesive, collective visions together.
We make our learning open source so that EB PREC doesn’t become the expert bottleneck. This way, our community can scale this conversation with the assumption that real expertise sits in the empirical experience of the everyday. We’re not only creating the bookends that provide legal and technical support, but we’re creating the shelving that gives people the power, sovereignty, networks, and access to capital with or without the existence of EB PREC.
How does creating community controlled housing markets counter market forces that lead to housing injustice?
Instead of protesting in front of city hall, we have decided to become the market and the market actor. For instance, instead of competing with cash bidders when a house goes on the market...Continue reading at Inequality.org
