Our housing sector continues to fail millions of American families producing rising rents, overcrowding, instability and displacement. Families with the lowest incomes, overwhelmingly single mothers of color, are hardest hit through a combination of failed housing policy and gender and race discrimination. NESRI’s policy brief, A New Vision for Gender Justice in Housing: Ensuring the Human Right to Housing through Shared Equity and Community Control details how to address one of the root causes of housing instability affecting single mother households: speculative pressure. Seeking alternatives, women have emerged as key leaders in the growing movement for shared equity housing through Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and/ or Limited Equity Cooperatives. These models reject the economic speculation undergirding rising housing prices, and can instead create permanently affordable housing through empowering marginalized communities—guided by human rights values—to collectively own and manage land with the goal of meeting the housing needs of all in their neighborhoods.

Additional Resources

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