Homes for All has three core ‘trans-local’ tracks of work — each guided by a committee of partner groups engaged in the work and member groups who anchor the tracks.
Trans-local tracks provide for local groups to share & learn from each other and develop coordinated campaigns and strategies at the local level to have regional and national impact.
We have developed this graphic to illustrate the way in which our translocal strategy weaves together a set of campaigns, across the country and toward a national scope, which advance our ability to remain in, reclaim and rebuild our communities:
Translocal Track 1: Renters Rights
The Renters Rights translocal track entails the fight for renters rights ordinances across a city/county/state or contracts with individual landlords and approaches that organize mass numbers of renters into renters rights formations to fight displacement and advance the political power of the renter nation.
The fight for renters rights are code enforcement, ban the box sweeping the country; they include campaigns for rent control, just cause eviction, and other rights included in the Homes For All Renters Bill of Rights. With corporate landlords on the rise, Homes For All partners are also fighting for and winning renters rights landlord by landlord even in cities and states that restrict the passing of citywide ordinances. They are forming tenant unions and taking on landlords to agree to contracts and terms for all their tenants including set rent prices and increases, just cause eviction and more. Our Blackstone campaign is a corporate landlord campaign that spans across 3 countries and 15 cities. Utility justice is our newest area of work. These campaigns take on two critical renters rights, our right to affordability including affordable utility fees and our right to sustainable and healthy forms of energy.
The Renters Rights track represents short and midterm campaigns that can impact significant numbers of tenants and low income homeowners in a city, county or state. This track is critical both to address the immediate and expansive need of over half of all renters in the country who pay too much in rent and the millions facing displacement and in jeopardy of or currently experiencing their entire community being gentrified.
There are 3 core workgroups within this track:
Tenant Union Organizing Workgroup
Rent Control / Just Cause Eviction Campaign Workgroup
Utility Justice
Translocal Track 2: Our Homes Our Land – Building Alternative Models of Land & Housing for People Not Profit
This track represents transformative solutions that seek to create the new world we seek now. These campaigns center on acquiring collective community ownership of land and establishing democratic Community Land Trusts as an essential first step in taking land off the speculative market and establishing permanent community control. Collective ownership of the housing, cultural space, green space and worker cooperatives are also essential to the establishment of our holistic vision of community control, not in just one arena but all those that are critical for our communities to thrive and each of us reach our full potential.
Collective ownership does not automatically mean democratic control. Community Land Trusts, housing cooperative and worker cooperatives are not inherently democratic. Democratic control must be a practice and a discipline we exercise and learn more about through each of our interactions, every activity and every day.
Translocal Track 3: Development Without Displacement
The Development Without Displacement track unites campaigns across the country in which communities are fighting big developers and gentrifiers to ensure that all current residents (predominantly people of color) in communities facing gentrification win agreements and guarantees to ensure that they can stay in their community and help shape and benefit from the development.
