opinion

Opinion | Amid Nashville's affordable housing crisis, a hungering for home

The other night, a father named Carlos and his 5-year-old autistic son came to a church where I was running a shelter.

“I need to talk to you,” he said. He handed me a letter from the real estate company who had just sold the West Nashville trailer park where he and his family live.

“Under the lease and the law,” the letter reads, “we are required to give 30 days’ notice for you to move out.”

“I work hard,” Carlos said. “but I have no way to afford moving costs. And there are 15 other units where we live, some with elderly folks and some with kids. Where are they going to go?”

What is happening right now in Nashville in terms of displacement is not just a local crisis. It is a national and global crisis with deep roots and a racial edge. When land is seen as a commodity for possession and profit and not as a common good to protect and share, people suffer.

Read More: As Nashville booms, its homeless fall through the cracks from fragmented leadership

In the modern era, the commodification and privatization of land has been perpetuated by laws. When early U.S. colonists wanted to expand westward, they pushed Native American tribes off the land by laws — papers drafted and legitimized by men and magistrates, backed by force.

A quote paraphrased from economist Walter Williams reads, “Apartheid was legal. The holocaust was legal. Slavery was legal. Colonialism was legal. Legality is a matter of power, not justice.”

In Nashville, the mass displacement of low-income families like Carlos’ is legal, but it is not right, moral or just. It is a travesty and an outrage that we allow to continue.

“Let us not forget,” said Nashville activist Justin Jones, “that colonization and gentrification have the same roots.”

As long as unjust laws have existed, however, people have challenged them. In Nashville, housing advocates and homeless activists organize and risk arrest to defend homeless encampments and tenants’ rights. We also work on affordable housing policies within existing legislative systems. Two such ordinances that advocates worked for over a year to pass in Metro Council were inclusionary zoning and a housing incentives pilot program.

Read More: Nashville’s new affordable housing policies — slow out the gate — now face budget slash

But The Tennessean recently reported that a year and a half after these ordinances were passed, “not one affordable or workforce unit has been produced under either piece of legislation.”

After being introduced in Council, the inclusionary zoning ordinance was watered down by local politics and then further deadened by state legislators who argued that it violated a state laws prohibiting rent control.

What are we learning? Working within the system and begging for crumbs is not enough. Unjust laws and policies must be challenged and alternatives must be pioneered.

So what will it take to transform our treatment of land, the commons and public goods like affordable housing? What laws and land-use policies need to be challenged? What resources and power need to be redistributed? What institutions and processes needs to crumble? What institutions and processes need to be created? What are we willing to risk?

How will we take a stand with people like Carlos and his neighbors in the meantime?

I can imagine a future where Carlos and his family have affordable, dignified housing that is not threatened by the greed of the wealthy or the whims of capital.

Read More: Affordable housing in Nashville: Not now, not never

I can imagine a future where everyday people across the world have equal access to the commons, to housing, to food, to healthcare, and to living wages. Can you?

The collective hunger of the people for home, for justice and for freedom will not be satisfied by the crumbs that fall from the tables of power.

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way,” says author and activist Arundhati Roy. “On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

Lindsey Krinks is co-founder of Open Table Nashville and is also involved with Homes For All Nashville.