Partners for Dignity & Rights collaborates with community organizations and advocates for the right to participatory development that ensures decent housing, jobs and healthy and thriving communities. We seek to advance models that are non-speculative and ensure community control over the use of land and other natural resources.

Racially motivated zoning, block busing, restrictive covenants, redlining, and discriminatory mortgage insurance practices were key pieces of government policy as cities grew in the 20th century. In cities today, many formerly redlined neighborhoods are still marked with disinvestment. In others, the cumulative impact of neglect makes them ripe for speculation and gentrification. In almost all localities, policy makers allow for-profit forces to drive development, and take little responsibility when poor communities of color are displaced by speculators.

Partners for Dignity & Rights has teamed up with the Baltimore Housing Roundtable and the United Workers to advance a proactive human rights based development vision and policy framework to ensure development without displacement. Centering policy on the community control of land using non-speculative housing models such as Community Land Trusts (CLTs), the Roundtable, in five years, has been able to force Baltimore to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund, fill it with tax revenue by targeting above-market-rate developers, and establish CLTs as the Trust Fund priority.

Partners for Dignity & Rights is also expanding partnerships to other cities to further advance human rights based development and hosts a bi-annual “Affordable for Whom” conference with allies in the field to build movement towards community controlled and permanantly affordable neighborhoods accross the country.

For more information, check out

• Fair Development Roundtable.
• Community + Land + Trust Report.
• Baltimore Rebellion Spurs Opportunity.