Miami Housing Justice Agenda
Are you tired of slumlords, climate gentrification, LGBTQ Homelessness, terrible housing policy and rent that is just too DAMN high?
We are too.
We’re also tired of failure from Miami’s leadership to think innovatively about solving the affordable housing crisis, and we’re tired of having to fight our own government in order to protect and house the very people who we elected them to protect and defend.
When SMASH began as part of the #SmashTheSlumlords campaign back in 2015, we wanted to accomplish something very simple, and what we thought would be very uncontroversial. We wanted to build some houses, and make them affordable. Since that time, what we have learned is that Miami’s many layers of government, whose permission you need to build any housing of any kind, have very little interest in supporting community controlled affordable housing (unless it’s being built and owned by the same corporate developers who comprise over 50% of local campaign contributions.) The notion that housing should be built because people desperately need it, and that people should come before profits, is a very radical notion indeed.
And that is why, over the last year especially, you have seen us get serious about building people power. No longer are we going to be satisfied building community land trusts and affordable housing projects as ends unto themselves. Rather, they are now part of the power building ecosystem of strategies that we will use to build power for housing justice until housing is a human right in Miami. The ecosystem begins where SMASH began, with the organizing of tenants, fighting slumlords and gentrification to win campaigns. It continues with transformation tools like House of Justice, so that those who believe in property rights over human rights can start to question those beliefs. The ecosystem is investing in the research and development of new housing construction technology using 3D printing to make our housing stronger and up to 30 times more affordable, all the while led by the local labor community and providing opportunity through worker-owned cooperatives. We’re using these strategies to get 1.5 Million Miamians to pledge to the Housing Justice Agenda by the year 2030. With that kind of power, any housing policy we want, will pass without drama. In fact, it will pass just as easily as say defunding the affordable housing trust fund, or passing an anti-camping ordinance was for the opposition this year.
The sun is setting on our racist, sexist, classist and very broken housing system in Miami.
Thank you and onward to housing as a human right.
