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It's time to end our racist, oppressive housing system.

Can we count on your support?

Housing is the greatest hidden injustice of our time.

It's not on major party platforms.

You won't hear it in any Presidential speeches.

Local leaders still refuse to name the real causes.

Yet for

$500

a month

Everyone in America could afford to have their own comfortable home.

We're going to make it a reality.

So where is all the money going?

Our monthly cost goal:

$500

Actual median monthly costs:

$1,012

Real estate today is incredibly lucrative, with investors all over the world cashing out and buying up property as a way to park money.

The result is an industry that should be meeting a basic need, but is keeping millions in poverty instead.

Costs of homeownership over 30 years.

Based on national construction data from the National Association of Home Builders.

Who's responsible?

Banks

  • Banking should exist to aggregate resources so that big projects, like building homes, can be enjoyed now and paid back over time.
  • Instead, mortgages are heavily subsidized by the government to the tune of billions of dollars a year, while they keep the profits.
  • Financial institutions have crashed the economy, lied to investors, and awarded massive executive bonuses, all while avoiding public scrutiny and oversight.

Developers

  • Wealthy investors gamble with development, seeking quick returns as property values skyrocket, hurting the poor and making our economy ripe for another massive meltdown.
  • 80% of new rental housing built in America is luxury-tier—designed to maximize profits and property values, not take care of needs.
  • Developers complain about taxes and regulation—a small share of the total cost—while driving working people out of key urban areas, promoting segregation, and destroying the character of local neighborhoods.

Government

  • Many elected officials are landlords themselves, and seek laws that make renters modern-day slaves.
  • Local governments prefer the tax dollars that come with obscene development over meeting their citizens’ basic needs.
  • Tax and zoning policies entrench racism, poverty, and homeless, even though we know the solutions to housing crises.

Landlords

  • Landlords now make obscene profits, far and above the cost of providing shelter. The average landlord keeps 50% of the rent before taxes.
  • Public housing has become a major investor profit center, while rents for low income residents double overnight.
  • Baby boomers who squandered the greatest period of prosperity and failed to save for retirement now expect to fund their aging years by owning rentals—essentially stealing from the young and charging them the interest.
  • Meanwhile, renters across America face extreme cost burdens, have zero equity, and no path to homeownership.

So what happened?

Nothing. That's the problem.

We've been using the home as a tool of oppression for over 200 years.

1.8 billion acres stolen. 9 million killed.
From 1775 to 1900, the U.S. Government “purchased” or conquered Native lands and sanctioned systematic killings of Native peoples, securing their permanent compliance by removing them from their homelands and detaining them in concentration camps and reservations. Less than 5% of the population survived.
270 million acres settled for free.
We secured stolen Native lands through the Homestead Acts, promising “opportunity” to millions of poor Americans, but in reality creating harsh conditions that pushed many to become wage slaves to copper kings, oil barons, and railroad magnates.
6 million Africans taken from their homes.
We actively supported the slave trade and kept slaves in servitude by placing them into a foreign world, where they had no common language, no social standing, and no property.
850,000 forced slave relocations
Leading up the Civil War, we forced the migration of hundreds of thousands of slaves in response to slave trade markets. Even what little homes they had on plantations were routinely taken.
33 million immigrants given second-class status
From 1820 to 1920, we segregated and exploited immigrants, whose poverty, desperation, and lack of property forced them into cheap labor building America’s infrastructure. Numerous laws explicitly denied immigrants rights due to race.
The destruction of black wealth through housing
After abolishing slavery, we doomed blacks to generations of poverty by denying them access to housing, credit, and lending, forcing them into disastrous public housing and robbing them of most Americans' only source of wealth–a home. Today black wealth is only 5% of white wealth.
A century of inescapable poor neighborhoods
After formally ending segregation, we pushed minorities and the poor into inescapable poverty traps in urban cities through exclusionary zoning, redlining, discriminatory housing practices, “white flight,” and “urban renewal” planning.
Today, the worst housing reality since the Great Depression.
Young workers now face unprecedented cost burdens and the lowest ownership rate in generations, while incomes plummet and savings rates are at an all time low. And still, minorities deal with these problems many times over.

Housing has been the source of the greatest transfer of wealth in history.

And it's only getting worse.

The zip code you're born in now determines your health, education, and economic well-being more than any other factor.

Housing is now the only remaining source of wealth for most Americans, but the majority may never see it, because they rent or have negative home equity.

There will never be enough education, job opportunities, or healthcare to pull Americans out of poverty because so much of their money goes to landlords and banks.

Addressing housing injustice is the only viable path to prosperity and equality today.

It's going to take the biggest political power in the state to make it happen.

It's a good thing there are

0

renters in Montana. And counting.

We're organizing all of them (and a lot of homeowners, too) to make this the first place in the nation with permanent, cheap housing.

For everyone.

How?

  • By taxing speculation and financial extraction at the source.
  • By creating near-zero-interest banking that rapidly buys existing housing and funds new development, all at cost-of-use pricing.
  • By developing robust public housing that puts the private market to shame.
  • By eliminating renting in favor of schemes that give equity power to every resident.

Check out the plan in detail.

Learn more

The hard truth:

Every one of us allows this system to continue. Often by doing nothing.

We really do have the power. Now let's use it.

Here's what you can do:

  • 1. Put something on the line. Consider giving $5 a month.
  • 2. Stop using language that makes the problem seem normal. No market is good that steals from people's future.
  • 3. If you're a renter, learn your rights and exercise them. We'll teach you.
  • 4. Vote. We'll tell you what issues (and candidates) will fix housing.
  • 5. Organize tenants in your neighborhood. It's easy and we can show you how.

Easiest of all, show your support and stay in the know.

Tenants United

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We're mobilizing serious political power to pioneer a first-of-its-kind, radically generous housing system in Montana.

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