Getting Down to Business: Important Guides for Housing Organizing

While we often like to focus on the ideas that critique both capitalism and the state, what is most important is that we actually organize to confront them. Community organizing is critical to housing justice as it provides the method for transforming housing, and a model for how it could work more directly democratic. Housing issues are often very different than other sectors where organizing happens, such as labor, though they take inspiration from many of them. Here are several important organizing guides drawn from several successful organizations, both reformist and radical, that can be used to jump into organizing housing from different angles. Some are broader and can bring in lessons for all types of community organizing, while others are very specific to the unique nature of housing organizing.

We Are Oregon: Economic Emergency Toolkit
We Are Oregon is a community organization started as a joint project between SEIU locals 503 and 49. They have worked on a broad base of issues from anti-foreclosure work to wage theft. Their guide is great for structuring new community organizing campaigns of a broad stripe, but most of it is put in the context of housing.

City Life / Vida Urbana Bank Tenant Association Organizing Manual
City Life / Vida Urbana is a community non-profit that has been a leader in anti-foreclosure work in Boston for forty years. They utilize community solidarity to support people going through foreclosure, and get a great deal of legal support from other places. This is an interesting organizing manual that is a must read for those committed to housing organizing.

Build Your Own Solidarity Network Guide
Solidarity networks have become a popular new way of organizing, and it works across several sectors. The principles are to use direct action casework to combat instances of wage theft, tenant abuse, and other types of economic attacks. It is one of the main ways that tenant issues are targeted, and an easy way to start a new organization from scratch.

Learn more about the recent wage theft campaign of the Portland Solidarity Network!

Tenants Union: Fight Your Landlord and Win (Web page and attached PDF)
A tenants union is a great way to unite a housing division or apartment complex in a model taken from organized labor.

Occupy Our Homes: Organizing At Risk Homeowners
This guide was put together from some people at Occupy Our Homes, a direct action anti-foreclosure movement tied to both the Occupy Together and Take Back the Land movements. It has resources and references for people entering the foreclosure process.

Occupy Our Homes: How to Defend Your Home
Another clear and concise guide from Occupy Our Homes on how to begin a campaign to protect your home from foreclosure using community support and pressure.

An Introduction to Mortgage Securitization and Foreclosures Involving Securitized Trusts
This guide works a little differently as it is a look at how the securitization process works on home mortgages, which is important if you really want to know the inner workings of the system while organizing.

Organizing for Power: Direct Action
Great collection put together to help you broadly organize direct action campaigns, specifically targeted towards the use of non-violent tactics.

Saul Alinsky: Rules for Radicals
PDF link of the classic community organizing guide by Saul Alinsky, and it remains just as relevant today as it did when it was published.

The Housing Crisis and the Working Poor: Problems and Solutions from the Community Level
Great analysis of the housing crisis and who it really affects. It was written by members of the Casas del Pueblo Community Land Trust, a community housing project in the Chicago area. Housing trusts are becoming a new and interesting tool in the housing justice movement since they can legally hold land and create charters that create democratic systems of control. They are still just a tool to aid a social movement, but it can be a good tool.