OAKLAND — Noni Session, a third-generation Oakland resident, returned after five years to the city where she was raised only to find it growing increasingly unrecognizable.

Driving out of the Posey Tube from Alameda, she counted the encampments, which seemed to have exploded in number, under the freeways. Each one, it seemed, was now home to a handful of people with makeshift kitchens, furniture, and tents. It reminded her of the Great Depression and pictures of Hoovervilles she had seen in history books. Hoovervilles, which numbered in the hundreds across the country, were shanty towns named after President Herbert Hoover, who many blamed for the depression.

“It felt like we’re living in the past and the future at the same time,” she said. “I thought (Hoovervilles) were a fictional representation that could never happen again, but I was looking at Hoovervilles with my own eyeballs.”

It was 2011, and Oakland and the Bay Area were still reeling from the Great Recession. Session sat in one of the city’s new cafes, feeling powerless.

That feeling was eventually channeled into years of political organizing, a bid for city council in 2016, and now, a radical approach to solving the housing crisis: collective ownership of land and buildings to keep them permanently affordable.

Session is now the director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, or EB PREC, a nascent cooperative corporation that last week launched its first campaign to purchase a four-unit apartment building in North Oakland. While housing cooperatives have long worked to purchase individual properties and retain them as affordable housing stock, EB PREC is hoping its model can grow into a network of properties that can begin to effect lasting change.

There are four types of ownership in the EB PREC model: community-owners, investor-owners, resident-owners and staff-owners. Community-owners shape the direction of the organization and serve as a tool for political organizing. Investors help the cooperative accumulate the money it needs to buy property and receive a 1.5 percent return on a 10-year, up to $1000 investment. Resident-owners have a lease-share in the property, which they sell back to the coop if they want to move. And, staff-owners act as the trustees of the organization.

But how does it all work? Session spoke to this news organization about EB PREC’s vision for the East Bay. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: First, what is EB PREC?

A: It’s a particular model of real estate acquisition based in community investment and organizing. It was conceived very slowly over the course of two years through a collaboration with the Sustainable Economies Law Center and the People of Color Sustainable Housing Network. The People of Color Sustainable Housing Network had formed from a rescue mission, that despite the boom in new residents and the expansion of diverse types of people coming to Oakland and the Bay Area, black and brown people were being excluded from these changes. Many of us weren’t being housed even in collective housing situations; we weren’t the candidates being chosen. So, black and brown people are being pushed out of the Bay Area at a disproportionate rate to other groups. The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative formed into a cooperative corporation in January 2017. It seeks to serve first black, indigenous, people of color and allied, underserved communities. But, it’s a very layered concept, and it’s very unique. It’s never been done before in this form.

Q: What makes it unique?

A: We were trying to figure out a concept that couldn’t be corrupted, that could build wealth from different angles and that could be authentically controlled by community. So, we are an investment co-op. A hedge fund is an investment co-op. This is a way for people to divest their money from Wells Fargo and invest in their community and get a return at about the same rate one might get from their checking account. We are a housing co-op, where we create the conditions for people to live collectively and gain leadership skill sets, problem-solving skill sets, and property management skill sets. We are also a worker co-op. We are in solidarity with workers nationwide. And we are like a land trust in that our core covenant is that property never goes back onto the speculative market. It’s held in trust for the community as a community asset, and it can always be leveraged for another community asset. It’s a way of holding collective wealth for communities that have been dispossessed of individual wealth for generations.

And, finally, we were also looking for a longer-term way to create a pathway to consistent political and civic activation. Land is the answer to all of that. It’s how America was formed. Land is the thing upon which all conflicts, all occupations and all identify hinges. Without land, people don’t have stable identity, they don’t have leverage with city leaders, and they don’t have a place or platform to organize and decide what their vision of the world should be.

Q: So, on a practical, day-to-day level, what does that structure look like?

A: Each situation will be radically different according to the needs of the organizing community we’re working with. For the most part, we look for mixed-use properties. We had the potential of buying a property on 7th Street that had two units upstairs that could each house two tenants, or resident-owners; the potential to build a third floor with two more units; plus it had a commercial unit on the bottom. At the time, there was an Ethiopian restaurant looking to expand in West Oakland that had already been serving in Oakland and teaching healthy-eating classes. We would have been able to amplify the services of the people-of-color business by keeping the commercial rent low, and stabilize the rents of the resident-owners upstairs who would also be people of color serving and working in the East Bay. So, that’s one model.

The model for the building we’re attempting to crowd-fund now is a four-unit building with three tenants in each unit. It has a south-facing roof, so we can put an investment project of solar panels on the roof so we can fulfill our mixed-use vision of always adding revenue streams to support the mission of the resident-owners themselves.

To learn more about EB PREC, visit: www.ebprec.org.