Spirit in Action

A Place to Lay Your Head: Affordable Housing

In Making Housing Happen: Faith-based Affordable Housing Models, Jill Suzanne Shook brings together numerous models for making housing accessible to those in need. From the sweat equity ingredients of organizations like Habitat for Humanity, to adaptive reuse, to tenants taking ownership, community land trusts, and many more approaches, Jill highlights the possibilities and results of creative thoughts and dedicated spirits.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 08 Mar 2015
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along I'm sure almost all of us would define housing as one of the crucial ingredients of a safe and successful life. In particular, being homeless in the city is fraught with challenges and dangers So it's no surprise that folks like Jill Suzanne Shook have felt called to do something To tackle this scourge of too many of our homeless neighbors. In looking for solutions to this fundamental problem, Jill found a wealth of approaches rising out of people of faith, providing love for our society's care for the poor and marginalized. She gathered them in a book called Making Housing Happen, Faith-based Affordable Housing Models. Jill visits a wide range of models from the well-known, like Habitat for Humanity, through less-known approaches like repurposing an old hospital, occupying deserted homes, empowering renters to become owners, and devices like community land trusts. Jill Suzanne Shook walks the walk, following her leading to move to a marginal and shunned neighborhood, finding community and mutual care there, and by gathering ideas and inspirations for those seeking ways to address the plight of those with marginal and non-existent housing. The result is Making Housing Happen, and we'll delve into the subject and possibilities as Jill Shook joins us by phone from Pasadena, California. Jill, it's really great to have you here today for Spirit in Action. Well, it's good to be here. Thank you. Making housing happen. How did you get into concerns about housing? It started with the children. I started an after-school program with a team of amazing folks at Lake Avenue Church, a 5,000-member church that was pretty high-end, well-educated, and quite disconnected from their neighborhood around them. So really looking at the most important commanded scripture to love God and neighbor, but how can you do that if you don't even have a relationship with your neighbor? So we were really trying to figure out how to build that relationship, so it would be mutually beneficial. It's not just this wealthy church being paternalistic and helping the poor people, but how can the church also learn from the neighborhood? And we developed a program called STARS. Hundreds of tutors came out every week and continued to this day. Working with these kids and learning from them, it's really changed the church itself to be much more multiracial. But in the process as the director of that program and picking up these kids and going into their homes and getting to know them, I spent a number of years living in Mexico as a relief and development agency. Work with a relief and development agency. So I felt like I was kind of living back in Mexico and just loved these kids and these families and getting to know them, but I couldn't help but notice it in every case. Housing costs was a huge factor in the success of these kids. We're dropping out of school in order to babysit so parents can have second, third jobs. Kids were dropping out of school to go to work. And so in that particular neighborhood that dropout rate was about 50% of these kids. And I thought if I can work with a housing situation to help minimize that as such a huge dresser, we're well in our way of really seeing long-term success with these kids. That's really where the idea was birthed, working with those children. I think maybe I should have started by asking you what affordable housing means. So explain what it is, why it is. Was this an issue 100 years, 200 years ago? Is it something that only came with our increasing urbanization? Where does this issue come from? There's a long history of experimentation that our government has done in the US for the last 100 years. Our first housing policy started right about 1900 with Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Adams in working to actually create ventilation in the tenements and looking at health hazards. And so once laws were in place to create more ventilation, and after that, as you know, there's many more building standards that have been added which add cost. Initially, homes were affordable as you layer the different building codes that we have today. Just here in Pasadena, just to meet the basic permits to build a home in Pasadena, basic permits for just one unit is over $80,000. Oh my goodness. So that's been one of the issues, just the layer of different regulations, but a lot of those regulations are needed and really important. So there's also been, and I could go into hundreds of reasons why the cost has increased, but in my book, I think the chapter that talks about the housing crisis does a really good job of that. There's been a lot of experiments over the years. The initial investment of the government to actually get involved in this was around 1937 when they started building public housing. Initially, that program was set up to be mixed income so that the rent structure would actually serve and maintain the long term. And then the building industry got involved and said no, we don't want the government to be involved in any market rate housing where it would be mixed income, so they said it needs to be all low income. And as a result, the rent structure wasn't adequate to really maintain long term, a lot of these buildings. And so we've come around full circle almost 75 years later, and the government now recognizes that mixed income is really what works. It's a long history that takes a while to really explain, but we really have created a nightmare because of a number of factors in our nation, skyrocketing grants and nothing that really prevents them from continuing to go up and up and up. But back to the story with these families that I was working with in the STARS program, because of gentrification in skyrocketing rents in Pasadena, landlords were selling the buildings that they were living in, so they were being pushed out. And we wanted to maintain a relationship with these families. We'd really invested in mentoring and tutoring their kids for years. So I was able to move many of them into an affordable housing complex, and all of a sudden the stress was left. And these families were only spending a third of their income on housing, which is the government standard. That was huge, that finally they had time to spend with their kids and really helped them succeed in school. And because it was faith-based, there was a pastor there on staff, there was an after-school program, there was a real sense of community and a place of trust where they could thrive. So that's really why I'm focusing in my book on faith-based models, because I've seen the high success of that. There's about 20 topics that I probably want to ask you about all at once. I think so much of the discourse about it, you take for granted because you're educated, even what mixed income means. So for instance, I'm aware that in the 1960s in particular, they got into building things like the projects, these enormous buildings, thousands of people, all of them poor or low income, and it had some drastic effects. Could you explain what some of those effects were? Because it's part of the motivation why we have to do something different now. That's a good question. Initially, it was a very good idea. It was proposed as mixed income. There was no stigma whatsoever. Glen Campbell, a lot of people we know were raised in those "projects." They weren't seen at that time as projects. They were seen as good, decent housing. A lot of the issues were around racism and segregated housing that began to be unveiling those projects. When a lot of blacks started moving, a huge migration going north in our country, they wanted to live in these units that were built by the government, the public housing, and as they moved in, white moved out, and there were race riots in Chicago. The segregated housing just was in many ways the undoing of what was a really good model of public housing. You have to really consider the segregation and race factor and why they became known as the projects and something that was undesirable. Even within those projects, there's been tremendous amount of... You've asked many of the people that have lived in those places and still live today and they have a sense of community. There's a sense of connectedness, they support each other. There's a lot of good things going on in those projects that you typically don't hear about. The ones that have been well managed, that were more human-scale, but a really huge one, like Cabrini Green, that's now been torn down, and then Pruitt Ego, that was huge in St. Louis, that's been torn down. Inside of those buildings, there were some excellent organizing going on among those residents, but with the property values increasing and those buildings, just such poor management and there's so much neglect by the government that they just ended up becoming a total disaster. What happened in the 70s, actually late 60s, there was a woman named Dorothy Gertrow, an African-American single mom who had a lawsuit against the Chicago Housing Authority, and she said that I need more options for my children than to raise them in an all single and an all African-American low-income community. She actually won, it became a class action lawsuit that took years. She actually died before the lawsuit was completed, but it ended up, there was a settlement that was required that created bits of affordable housing throughout the whole city of Chicago. So a specific number of affordable units had to be built within high-end, within all neighborhoods of Chicago, and they studied those families for over 10 years, the ones that voluntarily moved into those neighborhoods, and in every single case, they improved. So that's when the whole mindset of putting a lot of poor people in one spot started to shift in our country, and we realized that that's just, you know, it's not good to put a lot of wealthy people in one neighborhood without a mix of income, and nor is it good to put a lot of poor people together. They found out through those experiments in those 10 years of study that there needed to be some kind of a private public partnership where the government would no longer build and own public housing, but they would partner with a private sector and begin to use what was later called Section 8 vouchers. My focus is really looking at the church and in the part the church plays. I speak some of that Section 8, but I mostly speak about all different models of how churches are going about creating housing that's affordable. Again, the book is making housing happen faith-based affordable housing models. So let's talk about it. There is this public sector, the Section 8 vouchers and other such programs, and the government often gets involved in affordable housing in one way or another, tax abatements, and there's a whole number of devices that are discussed in the book, but this stems from efforts that are coming out of faith-based groups. Churches, why faith-based? Why do we need faith-based? Why doesn't government just fix it? Why is that inadequate? There's a number of responses to that question. It's a good question. Faith-based housing will never meet the need, but it is almost like the moral conscience. It's what sets a model and brings hope that it can be addressed. Almost all of the good policy in the United States has come out of people's faith. The Quakers started the self-help housing model in the Central Valley of California. That was a model where they just listened. They dreamed of -- or they were helping the migrants who were living in squalor conditions and working the fields and providing the bread basket for the U.S. and providing our food, but their housing was just dismal. There'd be one hose for 30 families living in little shacks and overcrowded in little ravines. The Quakers really started to listen to their dreams, and they were dreaming of having a place that they could have their own garden, and they could have their own home and their own family and drinking water. They started what was called the mutual self-help model, and they would acquire enough land where attendable families would come together. And those families would help each other build their homes. And none of them could move in until the homes were completed. They worked out the financing with loans, and they helped them develop the skills in building their homes. And it was so successful that over 5,000 homes were built in the Central Valley of California using that model. And then the government took notes and began to make that a national model that you can still access to this day under the Rural Housing Department. That's just one example of how the faith community started small, but it began to affect the wider community. One other way that folks that follow Christ and are committed to trying to really look at ways to redistribute wealth, and we distribute land and using that biblical, the early jubilee concepts that are shown in Leviticus 25, a woman named Mary Nelson. She was at a Lutheran church in Chicago, and that church put their building up for collateral five times to be able to buy apartment buildings and take them off the speculative market, making them affordable for people in the community that were losing their homes. She was concerned about how to finance this. So she was able to get on to a presidential commission looking at financing for affordable housing, and she came up with the idea of tax credit. And so that today is the main way that housing, affordable housing is built throughout our nation is through tax credits. Each state is allocated a certain number of tax credits. I think it takes people a phase to have the audacity to believe that it's possible to have a different system and imagine ways to be creative and use the resources that God has given us and our minds to consider what really can be done. But I think too, on a more personal level, the faith element, when I think about those families that I moved into agape court here in Pasadena, they were being pastors. There was a pastor there on staff. There was a sense of love and commitment to them and their success. Because of that faith element and it made all the difference. When the government is the landlord for affordable housing and the big public housing projects, their landlord was in Washington, D.C., or local housing authority. And there wasn't the commitment to a local success of the residents in there like you would have at a church that might have affordable housing. They're intimately involved, typically, in those residents, and they care deeply for their welfare. And that's what I've seen. Like at the church of the Savior in Washington, D.C., they're just a model for the nation of what they've done and really caring for the long-term success of their residents. I just see that it's an example. It's a model to the wider society of what can be done. Or speaking with Jill Suzanne Shook, she is the editor and part author of Making Housing Happened Faith-Based Affordable Housing Models. And I read the second edition, which is just chock-full of all kinds of different models, efforts, groups coming at it from different directions, finding ways to make it so that people have that most basic resource available, a home, from which lives are changed or transformed. You know, I want to grab one of the things that you mentioned before, Jill, that most of the time, when Leviticus is quoted to us these days, it's about why you should stone gaze. And there's a lot of other regulations and parts of Leviticus, which don't look very interesting to me. But you mentioned chapter 25, which is a whole jubilee idea. And I'm afraid that that's one that a lot of churches dropped and don't even seem to realize this part of the Bible that is meant to be revered. Explain what jubilee is for those who didn't bother paying attention in Bible history class. Well, even in all of my seminary education and Bible education and my doctor work, I also got very little education around this. But I've really come to appreciate the way that Jesus interprets scripture. And I like to really consider the Old Testament in light of what Jesus held up as inspired. And so he actually refers to the jubilee in his mission statement. And chapter 4 of Luke, he states his purpose for coming. He says he came to bring good news to the poor. He talks about bringing sight to the blind, and we certainly all have blindness. He talks about setting the captives free from the oppressors. And then he kind of ends that mission statement with a very audacious statement saying that he is proclaiming the favorable year of the Lord. And all scholars agree that refers to jubilee. And even those that were present at the time understood that because as soon as they began to understand the radical nature of what Jesus was saying, they took up stones to one stone him and push him off the cliff. But the early church got it. The early church understood aspects of jubilee. They were selling homes. They had all things in common. And it states in Deuteronomy 15, the purpose of jubilee is that so that there would be no poor among them. It was really to alleviate poverty. And that's exactly what happened in Acts, chapter 4. It says that there was no one poor among them. I think we've often looked at that and said, you know, it's just not possible to live and deal with poverty. But I think that that's not a biblical stance. There is hope. It was done in the early church. And you look at states like Utah and they're well on their way of ending homelessness. But the city of Phoenix has ended all homelessness for veterans. In the past, we've thought of homelessness as something that's going to do with us forever. But little by little, we're actually ending homelessness in different parts of the country. So I think we need to keep our standard high and believe that jubilee is possible. The concept of jubilee, I like to explain it out of Leviticus 25 in a simple way. Essentially, every seven days were to rest. It was all about limits so that we can be more productive and joyful. Every seven years, the land was to rest and we were to forgive the debts. So the land can be more joyful and the land can be more productive. And we won't be living forever with a stress of debts. There's a chance for forgiveness, a chance to have limits. And then every seven times, seven years is when the land would go back to the original owners. And it would essentially come to zero. If you were a very wealthy a person that was really good at acquiring land or real wheel and dealer, you would know that at that 49th year when jubilee was proclaimed that you would have to give some of that up. But then if you were someone like Ruth and Naomi, who was poor, they would come into their homeland again and recognize that at one point, they would have a chance to again acquire some land. So that essentially is how I understand the jubilee. If there's opportunity and there's a limit to the amount of increase in the value of the land, there's a time that it's reset and there's opportunity again for those that are low income. Does this mean if we were practicing jubilee as a nation that Bill Gates and the Koch brothers would have to pay back into the system, they couldn't just become endless billionaires? You know, jubilee, as far as the jubilee concept, my interest in Leviticus 25 is talking more about land. I don't know exactly how that would apply to someone's personal wealth, but I think it's an intriguing idea. So I know that some folks have considered creating a law where there would be a wealth gap limitation between the highest paid workers and the lowest paid workers, not workers, but the company owner and then the workers. There would be, I think it's around 300 or 400 now, the wealth gap in the US in parts of Europe, it's only maybe 40. So if you limited the wealth gap, that may be a tiger jubilee, you know, it's hard to say. Really, there's so much that we could cover in this book. I want to let you know, folks, we're just dipping our toes into the vast lakes of housing options, ways of addressing poverty, of making affordable housing happen. And the title of the book is Making Housing Happened, faith-based affordable housing models by Jill Suzanne Schook. She's editor and there's a lot of number of people who contributed to the making of this book. This is Spirit and Action, which is a Northern Spirit radio production. We're on the web at northernspiritradio.org and on that site you'll find almost 10 years of our programs for free listening and download. You'll find links to information about our guests. You'll be able to find your way to makinghousinghappen.com, which is Jill Suzanne Schook's website for this concern. And there's also a place for comments. We'd love to have your comments when you visit. Please share your input and be part of a community sharing ideas. There's also a place to make donations. Click on support to donate to Northern Spirit radio. That is how this is funded. So please help do your part to make sure that the message for this kind of thing gets out there in the world. And even more so, I want to suggest that you support your local community radio station. They give you a slice of news and of music that you get nowhere else on the American airwaves. And so start please by supporting your local community radio station. Again, Jill Schook is here with us today making housing happen. Since we don't have time to talk about in depth all of the things in the books, Jill, I do have a few aspects of it that probably people haven't thought too much about. One of the things is sweat equity. I became familiar with Habitat during the 1980s, and as I delved more and more into their program, I found the wisdom that they're really living out through the way that they're doing things. We can talk about a couple of aspects, but one of them is sweat equity. Could you talk about sweat equity as a part of affordable housing making it happen? How many of the examples in the book, I read them all, but do you know how many of them includes sweat equity as part of how it comes about? What are the pros and cons of doing things with sweat equity? There's really only two chapters that focus on sweat equity. The introduction to the Habitat model at the very beginning of the book refers to the model I spoke about earlier. It was started by the Quakers in Central Valley, California. That particular model that was set forth by the Quakers is where Millard Fuller, who started Habitat, got his ideas sweat equity. He came and observed what was going on in California, and he really liked the idea. He went back to Cornelia Farms in Georgia, where he was in his family, had lived after a crisis in their family. He essentially gave up as well, like the biblical Zacchaeus. Out of that personal wealth, he was invested into this model of sweat equity and started to experiment both in Africa and in the United States. He's really made the concept of sweat equity thing. Habitat is very well branded. And for those who don't know what sweat equity means? Okay, and what sweat equity means is that the homeowners, it's really a model of homeownership, and it's the future homeowners invest a certain number of hours in the actual construction of the home. And so, depending on the organization that is using the sweat equity model, some may require 200 hours, others up to 500 hours, depending on number of factors. But the model with Habitat that's interesting is that they take very seriously the Deuteronomy mandate to charge no interest for the poor. So in that case, there is no interest. And that enables someone to actually pay off their loan in seven years rather than a 30-year loan in some cases. It's a beautiful model. It really does an excellent job of being able to give someone a chance to get ahead in life and participate in. And not only owning a home that's developing skills in the process of helping to build it, but homeownership is never going to meet the need, and Habitat does a great job that will never build in their homes. Not everyone is ready for homeownership. Not everyone can build. And so we need that plus many other ways to do it. One of the examples you talk about in making housing happen is what Shane Clayborn and his folks did in North Philadelphia. I mean, one of the things is, I don't know if it was in the book or if I just read it in general, there's more empty housing than we have homeless people right now. I mean, if we just took empty homes and put people in them, no homelessness at all. And I think they kind of pioneered trying to take back some of those houses that were not occupied and wouldn't be occupied. Could you talk a little bit about Shane? I've had him on Spirit and Action before. Shane is a dear friend and an amazing man. I'm very grateful for him. And what he did early on in partnership with the welfare rights organization was essentially moving homeless families into abandoned homes. It was not legal, but they had friends in higher places in the city that would help turn on the electricity, the gas, and believed in what they were doing. They were arrested many times for what they were doing. But when they went to the courts, they would always be dismissed. Well, there was one judge that looked at Shane's t-shirt and his t-shirt said, "Jesus was homeless." And he says, "I like your t-shirt. Can I have that t-shirt?" And Shane was carrying a Bible. And he looked at that Bible and he said, "That's a dangerous book." So there's some pretty delightful things that happened early on when Shane got involved in working with a homeless in the Philly area, North Philly. But that idea of moving homeless families into abandoned homes has taken hold. And in some cases, it's been done in a more legal way. There's many places around the country where they're looking very seriously at that idea. I know that the state of Utah, that's part of how they're going about actually ending homelessness in their state. It's a pretty conservative state, republican state. And yet, just financially, when you look at the cost of homelessness, the services they incur through detox programs going to emergency hospital wards. There's a lot of costs just to keep people on the streets with the police and so forth. And so they started looking at that cost and realized that it would actually behoove them to move these homeless families and homeless individuals into housing. And so I wish I could tell you some of the details of how they've actually done that. But I think it's important that the country really follow what's happening in Utah and consider and learn from what they're doing. You also talked about the Jubilee Housing Project in Washington, D.C. from the Church of the Savior. That's an amazing case of church and the way they organize. Could you share a glimpse of the evolution of Jubilee Housing? Yeah, it's pretty fascinating because they had no intention of getting involved in housing. Most of the churches I feature in my book had no intention initially to get involved in housing. It just was the next step in their discipleship. Actually, Church of the Savior no longer exists. It has other churches that follow in that tradition, but the initial Church of the Savior led by Gordon Cosby. He really was committed to seeing a small group of people highly committed to following the principles in the Bible and radical discipleship. What would happen if something was totally, totally committed? He started covenant prayer groups. Through one of the covenant prayer groups, God just really began to speak to them about the housing. It wasn't necessarily something they had on their radar. The Church wanted to start a coffee house. The only place they could afford to purchase land for a coffee house was in a very long-come part of Washington, D.C. and so once they purchased that coffee house and began to just listen to all of those that were losing their housing and the impact people just moving into abandoned apartment buildings and the stories upon stories that were listening to you, that's when this small covenant group said we have to do something. It was just a small group of women that had no experience in housing. One of the women, she got her royalty license. They were able to find the owner of one of these abandoned buildings. He was more than willing to sell to them, and it had no money, but they somehow figured out the financing, but were able to get a holder's building. Their first building was Mozart, the name of the building was Mozart, and it had over 900 code violations. But one by one, they began to gather folks throughout Washington, D.C., who got busy and fixed all of those code violations. The families themselves that lived there even got involved, and it began to really break down the walls of that Church, because as they got involved with these families and working and painting their rooms right around them, the families began to invite them from you, and the families themselves began to open the hearts of that Church to bridge a gap – a huge gap between pretty highly educated white Church and the very low-income community. It was very powerful to see what took place as a result of them getting involved in housing, and today they have all kinds of buildings they've acquired. They've started churches within those buildings, and there's just all kinds of transformation, and families that are now owning homes that have gone through their affordable housing, lived there for years, and have been able to save enough to now own their own homes. They've seen full circle. You know, one of the things I imagine our listeners are thinking, a lot of times churches go out to save souls, to recruit, and it's perhaps less often in the news that we hear about churches who are going out to save houses and make safe families in that way. So, is there a reason that anyone was in Washington, D.C., in the cases you're just talking about with Jubilee Housing, or in other cases, that they should think that there's some kind of a contingency that, you know, you can't be in this housing unless you're part of the Church, or any of the other dangers with someone outside coming in. Paternalism is one that gets brought up repeatedly. Is this just an evangelization method, or is there something else that's being done? That was one of the greatest fears that the Church wanted to make sure they avoided in no way requiring people to go to church activities. It was always an option. They would have, and still do, have wonderful programs for kids. It was really something that the Church had to wrestle with, the whole paternalistic idea. It challenged them in their own faith. And I think, in the end, they actually realized that the people themselves were the ones discipling them and transforming them, the people in these buildings. So, if there was any idea of them going to try to change these people in reality, they were the ones being changed by the people they were serving. I think they thought it was a much more comprehensive process of following Christ and realizing to be surprised by what God was doing in our lives, that indeed they were the ones that needed salvation more than the people that they were serving. If you go to the website, makinghousinghappen.com, you'll find more information about this book and about Jill Suzanne Schook and many of the other people involved in this. This is not a single person organization or effort. It's actually a nationwide effort of people of faith all over the place who really want to do what they feel commanded to by the Bible. There's really transformation happening. And that's an interesting thing that you just said, Jill, because one of the reasons I think any of people of faith or any people of non-faith for that matter should go to these places, these uncomfortable places, places that are different, is because we get transformed in the process. And I think you did that yourself. I didn't you move into a bad neighborhood? What's with you? Well, I'm glad you asked that question because I was at this church Lake Avenue, 5,000 members. In the early 90s, I was really being led by God's spirit and through the encouragement of a man named Bob Luckton, who I also feature as an author in the book. He came from Atlanta had taken a prison and adapted that into affordable housing within a physical priest. It's just an amazing model. He also renevered. He intentionally moved into a community of need. And at that time, I was wanting to buy a home, but my heart was very much in wanting to serve the poor. I just come back from living in Mexico. And that's where my heart was. And yet the church, many of my friends said, "You're crazy. You can't move into that neighborhood. Your property values will go down." And yet that was what God was telling me to do. And so living encouragement of others doing it in other cities across the nation, I was able to find a home. And it was right in the heart of some very large pockets of poverty. I could not afford it. My parents helped me. My dad gave me 20,000. My mom gave me 20,000. And the house was 143,000, which was dirt cheap and fascinating at that time. And as a missionary on missionary salary, all I qualified for was 100,000. And the numbers worked. I was able to get into a home. And it just felt like a miracle to me. My parents, being from Lily White Orange County, when they realized where the home was, they started getting scared. I was right in the heart of African American community. And they thought, "What have we done? What have we done to our dear sweet daughter?" You know. But by them coming and helping me put in a new electrical system and really get this home ready to have roommates, they too were transformed as they ended up being invited to neighbors' homes for lunch. And for the first time, actually entering a home of a black person. The transformation started with my parents. And then with me, as I'm learning to appreciate and love my neighbors and vice versa, I've been here now for 20 years. I've seen this neighborhood change dramatically. It is no longer low income. There's pockets of that, but it's so gentrified. And as a result, I've been highly committed to figuring out how we can have a mixed income community. And we've come a long way with our housing group on working on zoning and all different initiatives to be able to keep a mixed racial and income neighborhood. And my husband, I married an Anthony Manusis three years ago, who is a Quaker. And he's been transformed by moving into this neighborhood, by connecting to our black and Latino neighbors and our neighborhood watch, which has about 80 members. And we still hear gunshots. We have helicopters almost every night to hover over our homes. And so it's higher end. There's many people now with PhDs in my neighborhood, but it still has that element. There's still murders. And he says he wouldn't want to live anywhere else. He loves being part of a transformative effort. Not only are the people being transformed through our small Bible study and through our collaborations, but our house itself has been transformed. I thank God for Anthony and he's very committed with me to make our house an example of green living. Last year, we were able to lower our carbon footprint by 80% through different initiatives. We got solar and we have a bolt and that runs off of the roof. We can go for a whole week and not use any gas. And we took all of our grass out and put in a system for gray water. So we have 17 fruit trees are all being watered by the water that we use in our home, other than our toilets. And so we're recycling everything. It's been very exciting to see not only our neighbors taking note that the city local newspaper has featured our home. We also are built a little back house and we have someone who's almost staying there. So we've been able to figure out how to multiply our land and housing right on our small lot. I did have a quick question about that. You mentioned that Anthony is Quaker and I've known him for a number of years. You are not Quaker and you've never actually said exactly what you are or what you were. And I'm particularly interested in knowing how someone so inspired and dedicated by this, where the roots of their inspiration comes from. How am I? It's a good question. You know, I think that because of my dogged commitment to the Bible and taking very seriously what it says and not just taking it at the surface. When I was in Bible college, we were studying the prophets, the Old Testament prophets and many of my professors were saying things like isn't this beautiful literature. And of course it is, but I kept raising my hand and saying, what about the point? What's the point here? The prophets are talking consistently about caring for the poor and caring for the widow and those that are on the margins of society. And so something innate in me just was even though I was from a very privileged background in Orange County, I just felt drawn. And I think also it came from my dad who was actually not a person of faith. He had a deep love for the Latinos. He was raised on an orange groves among orange groves in Orange County. It was named after all those orange groves and they had many acres of trees. And in order to get those trees harvested, they brought the Mexican day laborers up through the Brazil program during the Second World War. And my dad just fell in love with the Rossettos. He really, they were almost like a family for him. And so with that deep love for the Hispanic population that came and harvested the crops with him, I think that is something that I inherited in some sense of justice was birthed out of that. I think it was birth through those two avenues. So do you have a name for that? Is this like being a Presbyterian, a Methodist, non-denominational Christian, or is this just a Jill Schook religion? Oh gosh, you know, I'm hard to put me in a box. I live in a mission called Mission's Door, which is Baptist. Believe it or not, it has roots in the conservative Baptist movement. And the reason it's called conservative Baptist is because they take the scripture very seriously. I had the privilege of going to Denver Seminary and studying under a man named Dr. Vernon Grounds, who started the Evangelical for Social Action. He had amazing courses at my seminary. He had classes on dealing with different theories of war, including pacifisms. He himself was a pacifist. He had, of course, looking at liberation theology and all the different liberation theologies around the world. He was a very radical thinker. He looked at emotions in the gospel of another course I took, and the whole integration of our emotions with our whole psyche and our intellect. And what that looks like in a biblical paradigm. So I feel like I was blessed with incredible education at this conservative Baptist institution, which is very hard for people to imagine and believe that you could get that kind of education out of a, out of Denver Seminary, but I did. And I think to the conservative Baptist home mission, which is what it was called then before it today is called Missions Door. They had Dr. John Perkins come as a guest speaker for one of our national conferences. And when he came, I thought I was sitting at the feet of Jesus. He has been my mentor for life, and I've been following his ministry for over 30 years. He has been able to really develop the whole nation of people, not nation. It's really a misnomer, a whole group of thinkers, over 4,000 of us now from throughout the nation, who are committed to remade, like I have done, intentionally moving into communities of need. It's what he calls the three R's relocation reconciliation with us and those around us, all the economics race and with God, and then redistribution, the third R, and how do you begin to keep those dollars circulating your community and they don't go to a Walmart or some group outside of the city that's taking that community well. How do you begin to redistribute land? So those rich concepts that are deeply embedded in scripture, I learned from Dr. John Perkins, who has only a third grade education that is brilliant and understands society in a way that people do. He's been given, I think, 15 honorary doctors for his work. Out of that, I really developed this rich theology, and I go to a little church, it's a free Methodist church. I'm not sure if I would call myself free Methodist, but that's the church that I have been attending. But I hang my hat in many places around the community that are committed to these ideals. There's so much that we could cover in the book making housing happen, faith-based, affordable housing models by Jill Suzanne Schook, but we don't have time for all of that. And so, Jill, we're going to have to get down to just one or two more topics at most here. In the book, there's all these different models of how one could go about finding, creating, working together to make affordable housing. And we've just really scratched the surface. But there's both what you call co-housing and there's also community land trusts. So, I want to let you make your choice. Which can you explain to me and to our listeners so that they understand how this can work as an alternative way to produce affordable housing? Well, I'm going to very briefly mention co-housing. It's not inherently affordable. There's many co-housing communities throughout the country. It was started as a Danish model. It's a very intriguing model that creates community. There's typically a large common house and then smaller homes around it. It's typically very green has all the bells and whistles of green living. Typically, the only way that can be made affordable is through some sweat equity or some partnership with an organization that will help bring the affordable piece. There's something also called co-operative housing and that's shared ownership. I feature one place in the book in Detroit where a church reached out to a building across the street that had caught fire and was able to work with those residents and make that into co-operative housing. Now, those residents are actually owners of the building and the elect officers and they're in charge of all the maintenance and their own shares, which is a wonderful model and it needs to be much more developed in this nation is a viable way to create affordability, but that's only affordable if it's limited equity model. And that leads me into the community land trust model. And so what I mean by limited equity is that when you sell your share as an owner within co-operative housing, you are not able to sell that share of full equity. You will be getting some equity because you own it, but not a full share because it needs to stay affordable for future purchasers. And that's called a subsidy retention. So by retaining that subsidy, it allows the permanent affordability to take place. And that's really what a community land trust is. It's a nonprofit that holds land and it holds it affordable and perpetuity through these different devices like subsidy retention. It enables people to purchase homes on that land and the homes are affordable because they're only purchasing the home and not the land. The land is held in the trust. And so if you take the land equation out of home ownership, you typically can make it affordable. So this model of community land trust is actually my favorite model in the whole book. I love it when I married Anthony. Three years ago, I said to him, my dear, we are not going to ever have any real equity out of this home. It will be the first home put into a community land trust for the city of Pasadena. Once the time is right, when we begin to develop a community land trust for our city. So that model, I'm willing to stake mail and home equity on their spend. You really, you're willing to take the risks. That's great. I am indeed. I really believe in it because it fits so well with a Jubilee concept in Leviticus 25. And what Jesus, I think, was really getting at the heart at in Luke 4. But there's now over 200 community land trust. I think 250 or more, maybe closer to 300 of nomination. Some are doing well. Others are just getting started. Others had struggled. The one I feature in the book is struggling, but it's powerful. It's a Catholic model in Maine. They are creating home ownership, believe it or not, for people that are homeless. They are seeing people move from their cars into homes that they're helping to build. They're using some government funding, about $10,000 is all. They're also using sweat equity. Part of what makes their community land trust, they have 12 community land trust. And each one has about 10 to 15 homes on its trust. They have their own forest. They have their own sawmill. The homeless families are learning how to work in the sawmill. They're creating siting and creating doors and cabinetry. So in the process of building their own homes, they're developing these amazing skills. And that's part of the whole flat equity process of the home ownership for them. So I love that model. Every community land trust in the country is different. There are cities now that are helping to actually start any land trust because they're realizing that all the investments they put into creating affordable homes for their community, many times that is now going market rate. HUD funding that's been part of buildings for maybe 20, 30, 40 years is now, those covenants are ending. And those that own those buildings are opting out and not continuing those covenants and they're going market rate. So we are actually losing more affordable housing than we're gaining right now in our country. And cities are realizing unless you have a long term affordability piece connected to the affordable housing you have, you will indeed lose it. So cities are getting smart. They're creating community land trust in partnership with the communities. They're putting their affordable homes into that trust. This is what the city of Irvine has done. They were some of the first in the country to do what's called an inclusionary housing ordinance where in every community a certain percentage of homes in every neighborhood, every block has certain percentage homes are set aside as affordable. And you wouldn't even know it. It's a very high-end community. But they are now putting all of those homes into their community land trust in the city, realizing that they need to retain that long-term affordability. All the frontways that these land trusts are being created, that they're working. And they're working because it's really based in biblical principles that God has laid out and taking land office, decorative market going way back to the Jubilee concepts. Wow. Wow. So much. Again, the book is filled with it. And by the book, I mean making housing happen. Faith-based, affordable housing models, editor, Jill Suzanne Schook here with us today for spirit and action. I really regret that there's so much that we can't talk about. We didn't talk about the prison or the hospital that were converted into affordable housing. We didn't talk about a lot of the factors that go into successful developments, including churches which have worked to make sure there's a daycare there or job placement or tutoring. I think you mentioned. There are so many things that we could talk about, but instead of talking about it, I just want to remind people to go to the website, makinghousinghappen.com. They can find the book there. They can read it. They can learn more about many other models that we haven't even begun to discuss. We haven't discussed any of the intricacies of the financing and the joint efforts, the collaborations, the South Bronx churches, the incredible number of ways that people of faith are working to provide a hand up for the poorest and for the neediest and to make us a nation that pulls forward together. So that having been said, folks, go check out the book, Making Housing Happen. Could I make one final comment? I just want to also mention that many leaders across the nation who are Spanish speaking have asked me if this could be translated into Spanish. And so I'm very excited to announce that this past week, this chapter that looks at housing justice, theology of ownership land and jubilee justice has now been translated into Spanish. It's called Vivien de Ijusticia Unna perseptiva vidmica. And so you can find that as well as my book, Making Housing Happen Online at Amazon. So thank you so much for listening today. And again, Jill, thank you for your lifetime, really, of dedication now. It's obviously going all the way. You and Anthony are not stopping, as I can see. You just keep rolling forward with making these changes, making life better for so many people, and making yourselves better people in doing the work. Thank you so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. And thank you so much. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. You