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Articles by Peter Sabonis
How States Can Build Housing Together: A Proposal to Create Joint Authorities
We dodged the bullet on Donald Trump’s proposed radical dismantling of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a la Project 2025. So far. But these attacks are not going away. It’s time to create a state-based system of housing finance that can withstand future HUD cuts and supplement the federal help that does exist. This can be done by creating new cross-jurisdictional finance authorities through interstate, regional, and even inter-local compacts.
Maui’s STR Phaseout Could Provide Real Economic Benefits
The removal of short-term rentals in West Maui from the Minatoya list is not just a policy change — it’s a chance to reclaim community and secure a sustainable future. Maui County’s plan to phase out short-term rental use from the apartment zone is a critical step in reigning in rampant real estate speculation and extractive tourism policies that have prioritized profits for outside interests over locals’ essential needs.
Peter Sabonis
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How States Can Link Up to Support Human Rights
How can nonprofit leaders and movement activists effectively respond to Trump 2.0, Project 2025, and a right-wing US Supreme Court that appears committed to using federal power to roll back political and economic human rights? Defending against police state weaponization is imperative.
A Political Roadmap to Social Housing: How Do We Win?
It’s becoming increasingly hard to find a housing justice organizer who hasn’t been to Vienna or extolled the virtues of its social housing sector, and wants to do something similar in the United States. What’s harder to find is a political strategy to achieve as much.
The Dirty Little Secret—Rising Property Values Are Incompatible with Affordability
It’s time for some straight talk about rising property values. Yes, they help amass equity for homeowners, provide opportunities for developers, and generate revenue for localities. But they also raise rents, pushing out low-income renters; keep the unhoused, unhoused; and push fixed-income homeowners into fiscal precarity. If community development is about the entire human community, and not just real estate, we must grapple with this tension.
Higher Property Values Are a Mixed Blessing in Baltimore
It’s time for some straight talk about rising property values. Yes, they help amass equity for homeowners, provide opportunities for developers, and generate revenue for localities. But they also raise rents, pushing out low-income renters; keep the unhoused, unhoused; and push fixed-income homeowners into fiscal precarity. If community development is about the entire human community, and not just real estate, we must grapple with this tension.
To Build a Public Safety That Protects Black Women and Girls, Money isn’t the Only Resource We Need
This spring marks two years since Louisville, KY, police killed 26-year-old Breonna Taylor. Officers shot 36 rounds of ammunition into her home in a bungled raid serving a “no-knock” warrant, realizing later that the suspect they were looking for was already in custody.
Advancing Housing Justice: Three Key Steps
As we enter another summer, the goal of affordable housing for all may seem as distant as ever. Expired COVID-related eviction moratoriums and increased inflationary pressure on rents are exacerbating the already precarious existence of low-income renters, disproportionately households of color. Bold and transformative organizing among low-income renters and the homeless is certainly making headway.
The Transformative Potential of Community Land Trusts
Photo by Breno Assis on Unsplash Our country has been struggling with an affordable housing crisis for decades. Simply put, there is not enough housing, and what is available is too expensive for those with limited means. However, there’s an up-and-coming player in the affordable housing world that offers the potential to transform it: community land trusts (CLTs). CLTs—community-controlled rental, cooperative, and homeownership housing on community-owned land—are being created across the country.
How to Make This Year’s Eviction Crisis Our Last
“Stop evictions, every house occupied,” Marco Trovò “The Edge…there is no honest way to explain it, because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” ―Hunter S. Thompson Our housing affordability crisis was well documented long before COVID-19 hit. It is about to get much, much worse. Incomes have dropped to zero for many renters, and the moratorium on evictions in a number of states is expiring.
Addressing Our Real Deficits: Democracy and Human Rights
“Democracy,” Pedro Ribeiro Simões What is essential? The COVID-19 pandemic has been clarifying in that regard. Health care, food, housing, income support, education, water, and energy surely are among the items that top the list. But in a system where so many essential human needs are commodified, this point is so often hidden from view. Instead, we are told that we must risk our health to populate non-essential jobs and activities because the earnings are necessary to buy our fundamental needs.
Redeeming the Promise of the Past for Justice in the Present
As Democratic presidential candidates ponder the practicality of paying reparations for slavery, a new book adds a refreshing, powerful, and radical idea that harkens back to what freed slaves once demanded: collective land ownership. In Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition, Columbia Law School professor Katherine Franke examines past attempts by Union military commanders and northern abolitionists to create models for a new Southern order.
Rebellion Spurs Opportunity and a New Housing Movement
This piece appears in the Spring 2018 edition of Shelterforce magazine. Subscribe here. On the morning of April 27, 2015, Freddie Gray was buried. By mid-afternoon, after two weeks of peaceful protests that began when Gray’s mysterious death in police custody became public, the police department’s silence became too much to bear. The rebellion began.
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