Land Without Landlords (with Noni Session)

York after that, mostly Brooklyn another twelve years. And in every one of these places, the neighborhoods I lived and the ones that felt so much like my childhood neighborhood, there was something changing. I couldn't put my finger on it until I revisited my hometown, my home block, and Chocolate City didn't feel so chocolate e anymore had more

of a Caramelfuly. My mother had to sell our home before we fully left d C. Not because she really wanted to, not because we couldn't afford the payments, but because it was just too dangerous. This was the peak of the crack Wars, and she was worried about the safety of her baby for good reason. So when I went back to look at our family home, my childhood home. We weren't there. The residents were a nice white couple

from Iowa. Sometimes I torture myself to this day looking up the real estate value of that childhood home and seeing how much wealth is not in my family, and it creates a little bit of a conflict in me because I've been a part of that change in so many neighborhoods. I've been the new money coming in, And to be honest, I like some of the new stuff. I am a sucker for an over priced cocktail from the school of mixology. I love fancy coffee, more foam,

more happy baritune day. That's my jam. But I'm also troubled by the idea that new folks coming into a culturally rich environment are part of the destruction of that very culture. That all this nice new stuff is not for the people who held it down for so long in their neighborhoods, and that's not right. We've got to have a different way of letting people own their community,

determine that future, and have the benefits for themselves. I believe we can improve neighborhoods for the people already there, and I know someone who has an idea of how to do it, who believes that nice things, including good coffee, shouldn't mean displacing long term residents because it's all about ownership. And she's at the epicenter of gentrification in the US Oakland, California. You ask how Oakland could get into the condition it's in now. No one has had a moment to stop

and build a future for themselves. You better believe these hedge funds have hundred and five hundred year plans for themselves. After the break my conversation with third generation West Oaklander Noni Session, let me fix my hair. Oh, your hair looks great coming out. I mean, you know, the messy afro is a look, but it's very messy, so I

have to work on bad. Noni Session is the executive director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative eb PREC fights gentrification in West Oakland by buying up real estate and historically black and brown communities and then collectively owning and managing those properties within the community. Alright, so can you introduce yourself? Say your name and what it

is you do. My name is Nony Session. Um I am an accidental community led movement builder, real estate developer, and impact investment galvanizer when in my actual professional training, I'm trained as a cultural anthropologist who stumbled into grass roots organizing. And here we are today. Okay, wow, we are clearly going to go on a journey with you, because that was a lot of nouns. You know, we

got organizer, galvanizer, developer, anthropologists, woo woo. Okay, why do you use the word accidental to describe so many of your jobs? Well, I'm essentially just this little kid from West Oakland who was raised on Sesame Street and Nature TV shows and read lots of sci fi before it was cool to read side Hi. And then I majored in Black studies and cultural anthropology, and then did my doctoral work at Cornell in Nairobi on the United Nations

Development Program. And um, when I came home after ten years away for grad school, the city was just crazy. West Oakland has been a hot spot for local artists and musicians. Jessica Florida shows us as gentrification transforms the neighborhood, the people who have long called it home are getting pushed out. High rents not only forced out families, but mom and pop shops. He and his companies have issued

at least three thousand eviction notices. Prostitution, crime, poverty, the illegal duppling, the homelessness were like second class citizens here. And it was quite accidental because it started with me just volunteering because I wanted to meet some people, you know, and talk about really interesting things I had learned in grad school. And ten years later it's culminated in this work that is actually shocks me every day when I wake up. It's it's it's quite powerful for me to

be involved in it. So where do you live now? I live in West Oakland. I actually live in the house that I was raised in. I'm speaking to you from there right now, which is radically unusual given the extreme and accelerated racialized displacement that's taken place in my city and cities like it. So I'm pretty proud of that accelerated racialized displacement. Can you define that term please. We've lost over fifty of Oakland's black and legacy population

in the last ten years. With a boom in our population, the ratio of people of color has dropped to such an extreme degree that you can't help but call it racialized displacement. Your family has been in West Oakland for how many generations? My grandparents migrated here in the early nineteen forty, So my grandparents, my cousins, my aunt's mincles, my dad, my my mom, my sisters, my brothers, and then I have another generation after me as I was a teenage mother. So I now have a very very

very adult daughter living her life here as well. So what does it mean to you to have so many generations from your family be based in West Oakland? I think prior to this tenure arc, it didn't mean a lot. I did not understand the privilege of being grounded in

a place for generations. And when I compare myself to my counterparts who have moved a lot, or who have had to live squarely in white dominated situations, I realized it was almost as if I was raised in a royal or cloistered or a situation where my identity was

reinforced on a daily basis. We were well known, our life was stable and predictable, and it it really gives you this grounding to both claim and imagine a future for yourself that I think a lot of people around me haven't had the privilege to capture in their life trajectory. You use the word wealth to describe what your family gave you, and I suspect you don't mean buried chests of gold or stock certificates. How do you define this wealth that your family left for you in West Oakland? Um?

I think I define it as identity right, as a well from which I can gather new creative material. I think that it really drives a lot of the underlying mission and political philosophy of my work now, and that that is the definition of culture and Black Americans as one of the clear landless people on this planet. It's one reason that we've had such complications with getting a foothold here and that we don't have a firm place to retire ourselves, to to define and build for the

next generation. We are in a constant state of rebuilding, not just generation to generation, I mean day to day, month to month, year to year. So that is really the definition of wealth. Can you describe your West Oakland? What does it look like, what does it smell like? Who's in it? Lots of oak trees and big, wide empty streets. You know, I think as a kid, and as Black Americans, we still thought we were living in

a place that would show up for us and rescue us. So, despite Oakland being empty, washed out city, we at least we're left alone to our um class identities and our daily goings on. Um. My parents were small business owners. My mother ran a board and care home for development lee disabled adults, and so I was really safe on the same streets that most people were not safe on. Nobody bothered this little black kid. I would go to

bookstores and hang out for hours. I would go to West Oakland Public Library to that like quiet, warm, muted space and lay on the floor and read book after book, and then skip down these wide, empty, silent boulevards. It was open space for me. It was a super quiet, safe space. And describe your West Oakland today, my poor babies. You could call that stretch of road homeless Lane. It's an encampment that has grown so large you can see

it's spilling out onto the roadway. There are hundreds of similar tense cities across Silicon Valley, all within a few miles of the world's most profitable tech companies. All of those wide open boulevards. They're stacked neck high with tents and lots of discarded hoarded goods. But it's sporadic. Right. If you don't know West Oakland, Google with its racialized and class algorithms, will direct you right around those hot

spots of neglect. The funny thing is the boulevards are still wide open, the skies are still huge, so there's still this hopefulness. Um, while we stand next to start poverty. How do you explain the change in the West Oakland of your youth versus your description of the West Oakland of today. What happened? You know? It was it was a ghost town when I was growing up because it was in the middle of of the Reagan years and

benign neglect. For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. When what is benign neglect? That was an economic policy of the Reagan years. That was when you started to see a lot of money and resources pulled out of urban cities. And that is really what accelerated urban decline and the loss of value in

urban communities which could then be preyed on by speculators. Right, um, folks had a plan for Oakland that most of us were not privy to. It's a hot market, and um, there's very little care and forethought in planning for lives that have been led here for generations. So it's a fearful, insecure place under the surface of these bride white boulevards.

What's a hot market? What does that mean? That means that after I watched my neighbors across the street be removed by the share of the house with two tiny eight by eight bedrooms, the house immediately sold for one point four million. That's a hot market. So what's what's your home ownership situation? Are you renting? Are you owning in this home that you're living in yourself? Well? Interesting enough, in the subprime lending of the late eighties and early nineties,

my mother also lost this house. My amazing maternal uncle bought it to keep it from going back on the speculative market, and we paid all the expenses, but he maintained it as the owner of record until someone could get another mortgage, and that has just been recently. Me and I closed escrow on my childhood home September three of twenty The whole family breathed a sigh of relief. I'm breathing it for you. I can feel the stability under your feet. What do you mean when you say

speculative market? You were able to keep your family home out of the speculative market. Well, you know, we're currently living under a financial game that's been in development for a long time but is really accelerated, and that everything around you is a commodity, the air you breathe, the water you drink, and so how currency is currently traded is on a speculative basis of its future value. It is a gamble or a bet on the future price of a commodity item. It's actually meant to drive up

the value. It's the artificial creation of scarcity in order to create excess capital. And so when you speculate on housing, you're buying something, you're holding it in reserve from the market, right, Meaning you're keeping housing away from people often empty and wait for the rise in its value to create excess profit for yourself. And through that speculation, you're raising the costs and making it inaccessible. Um, it sounds to me like what's happened in your area, and it's not limited

to West Oakland for sure. I'm from d C. I used to live in Brooklyn, Boston, like everywhere you look in many parts of the world, housing is not being treated as a place for people to live, but rather as a place for people to park their money and make the money grow, raising money rather than kids inside of these homes. Uh Is that is that a fair rephrasing of what you just said? Yes you could. You could name them bread and Chad and it would really

be reflective of what's going on. So, so what is the impact on people when housing is withheld from the market for those who want to live in it to those who want to profit from the value of the

increasing you know, financial worth of that housing. Well, I mean you circled us back around to accelerated racialized displacement, because not only does speculation become this increasingly tight loop of accelerating the cost of land and housing, but it means that a very specific class and group of people are not only going to be pushed out of their current housing and access to future housing, they then have to lay on the sidewalk as they watch that housing

being either held in reserve or in some manner developed for new populations that are the demand of the current labor market, which focuses in on tech. So as seven thousand people scrape and scrabble for a living, they watch new folks have fifty dollar branches right outside of where their children used to play and eat their meals with the landscape of affordable housing right now in Oakland? What

is the landscape of affordable housing? Well, it's the I It eats me inside out when people use the language of affordable housing, tell me why you made. As of two thousand and seventeen, the average Black Oaklanders salary was thirty six thousand dollars. That same year, the average White Oaklanders salary as eighty thousand dollars. Almost all affordable housing as it exists right now is not for the very folks who are rent burdened or on the actual sidewalk

sleeping every night. And those affordable housing developers who are trying to produce affordable housing that serves those at that median income of thirty six thousand dollars are finding that they are hog tied in terms of leveraging state and federal subsidies and bond money, and so all of that capital that comes from state, federal money bonds still gets cloistered among those who are not from the very populations affected by rent burden and rent blight. It's a game.

It's a game. It's a game. It's a shell game, if you will. My understanding of shell game is there's some trickery involved, that you're covering up the fact that something's not really under those shells. There's some deception of So bring me to the moment, because I can. I can feel the energy. You got me all fired up. I'm like, yo, they're not telling this story the right way, but it's emotional. This has had significant impacts on people's lives and their ability to live, and you took some

steps to end that game. So what does the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative do around housing? The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative is a democratically lad people of color, multi stakeholder cooperative that supports Black, Brown and Indigenous Oaklanders in collectively organizing, financing, stewarding long term land

and housing in Oakland in the East Bay. Although we are not an affordable housing developer, we develop permanent and affordable land and housing for people to live in dip back into generation after generation, and through our by laws, we restrict ourselves from ever selling it or using it exploitatively. So there's a guarantee of permanence and the future for people who invest in our revision. So you have created a different way for people in a community two own

land and buildings and housing in their community. And the results is what what's different? The result is the rebuilding

of a community. What is happening in Oakland and cities like it is unchecked speculation, where the city is allowing folks who actually don't understand community development to stick buildings in arbitrary open spaces and then sell off the fractions to people who are unconnected to the outcome of the place in which they buy the item, the idea even and so there is a weird disconnection between where and how you build what and who and what it's built for.

After the break, what happens when instead of a corporate developer owning the real estate and the community, it's owned by the people. What actually changes? Hi, I'm no need and I'm Greg. We're part of b B pre Per real Estate Cooperative. First, we get local residents, You me, Greg, your mom, your neighbor, to invest a thousand dollars apiece into our collective fund with a lot of people that's a lot of money. Then EB prec uses that money to buy up properties in Oakland and the East Bay.

We've already picked out properties where long term tenants are in danger of being pushed out, and once we buy the property, the people who are already live and work there get to stay. I think I understand how your approach is different. It is grounded in the community. It is collective with the community. The ownership sounds like it's distributed among the community, not just in the single hand of one rich corporation or maybe even one very wealthy individual,

as is the case with many a building. Why did you choose the co op model not the nonprofit model for this land and housing need. Well, well, there's a couple of reasons. One is sort of a core underlying philosophical and political reason. Folks like W. E. B. Dubois, Fanny lew Hammer, we just thought, you know, if we had land to grow some stuff, only then it would be a help too. They were not civil rights activists first and then coopers. They were co operas first and

then became civil rights activists. So we founded Freedom Bombs in nineteen nine. The plan of the thing is that it didn't grow to produce enough. The people just won't know what. From the date the change dropped off of us after emancipation, we knew that cooperative and collective economics for our answer. On the North Carolina Coast, we had over a hundred hectares of cooperative land for which over the next hundred years we were judicially an extra judicially

dispossessed of that land. But we've always known the solution. And what I try to communicate to people is that we work on this sort of individualistic rhetoric. But even if you look at hedge funds, you look at speculative development, those are collectives of people combining their economic and political power to create an outcome. So that's number one. Collective economics is the way of the world. Just those of us who are on the ground scrabbling don't understand that.

That's an important point because I think a lot of folks here collective economics, cooperative economics, that's communist MAO with socialist, leftist. But a corporation is a collection of people's interests, aligned boards of directors, shareholders. So we're all operating as a part of some collective, whether we name it that or not exactly exactly, So tell me what it looks like on the ground. What have you accomplished, what have you done? So we're very new and we're have a grand vision.

So right now we are the owners of two land and housing acquisitions. So our first is a multi unit building that has teachers and lawyers and activists and gardeners who live there. Multiple gardeners. You have multiple gardeners. Gardeners. Yeah, yeah, we're in Oakland, Like urban gardening is the deal right now, don't play um. And they're very busy, active people. One of them is the founder of Community Democracy Project, which is working to change the city charter in Oakland so

that Oaklanders can participate in defining the city budget. Another is a founder of the first People of Color Cooperative coffee roaster in Berkeley. Right, these are folks who are working in and for our community, and now they pay rent at about eight hundred and twenty bucks when most people are paying fifteen hundred to twenty hundred for the

same square footage. Our second acquisition is a single family home in Berkeley, League, California that has a detached dance studio and there were housing two black women artists, one who's formerly homeless with a daughter, and the interview was really about their vision as opposed to them being able to pass the credit check and show us that they hadn't been a victim of other predatory housing situations which

often result in evictions. Right. And in addition, those two women who are now living in this amazing, beautiful shingled house in Berkeley, they are now launching a business out of the dance studio for an additional stream of income because they are active members of the arts community. Right, this is transforming people's futures. And so our current acquisition and this is this is our biggest one yet, and we're we're really going out on a lamb to really

show the proof of concept for this motto. It's on historic Seventh Street, which has been the heart of the gutting of Oakland. And so we're take in this historic corridor that used to be called the Harlem of the West, right, some of the greatest acts in Black history, and it was a bustling black business district. It's been a ghost town for thirty years and people have tried over and

over again to restart that corridor. And so we're acquiring Esther's Orbit Room Jazz and supper club, and we're creating three footprints of commercial ground floor space for a co op where one part is intended to be a performance venue and a bar, the middle part is a cafe and coffee shop where the young can come do spoken word and open mic and open jam. And the far

right spaces of fine arts and movement arts gallery. Above it, there are three units of cooperative co housing where we will be grounding black arts housing cooperatives in to start to ground the community back into the actual physical space of the street. And we have a back parking lot that's part of this acquisition and really wide, like a seven ft wide sidewalks were going to be grounding the

Freedom Farmers Market, which is a black farmers market. It's been displaced again and again over the last like nine years. So Esther's Orbit Room Cultural Revival Project is the first acquisition among many for what we have named the Seventh Street Cooperative Cultural Corride or revitalization Plan. It is a site specific plan that thinks about the people and the places that exists for which you build the thing the commodity object. You described people who are living in these

cooperatively owned units as resident owners. Why is ownership important to them? Uh, and to you and to West Oakland. I mean, in the most literal sense, land is the ground upon which we define our past and our future. Without land, without permanence, the past in the future go up and smoke, they disappear. There's nothing to connect you from before, and there's there's very little the ground YouTube after. So ownership permanence is critical for culture building, identity building,

the building of futures. You ask how Oakland could get into the condition it's in now. No one has had a moment to stop and build a future for themselves. You better believe these hedge funds have hundred and five hundred year plans for themselves. How long out do you think the arcis for Black Oaklanders plan for themselves. So this is a model for how to cement ourselves as citizens. Structurally, identity wise, we are here, we are part but in terms of having to pick up our bags and move

every generation. That is the key to this nation continuing to deny our right to the benefits of citizenship. And it's a losing battle actually, because if you actually look across nationwide, it's not just black communities that are being eaten alive by this impermanence. We took a southern trip and a couple of years ago when we were really ideating and building out this project, and we looked at Midwest cities, we looked at southern cities. There are ghost

towns Baritune day. No one is thinking about this widening gap of impermanence and and corporate ownership of people's homes, of their histories, of their stories, of their cultures. So this is a model for folks who want to use their money in a more ethical manner, to divest from extractive industries, to invest in models that can assure them their modest return. Our return is only one right, but it's enough to build hope and a future for people. You shared a bit about what it felt like to

reclaim your family home. For a member of the West Oakland community, how do they respond with this new possibility from being unable to afford any living in the community they grew up in to now having a chance to own and define the future of that community they know and love. I think there are stages to it, if you think of like the stages of grief or healing. So the first response for the most underserved is kind of like disbelief, right, like you've you've heard it before.

So many organizations, so many nonprofits coming through doing a focus group, putting butcher paper on the walls and like saying like we want your ideas, We're here to support you, and you really never hear from them again, or maybe you see them sort of in the distance, supporting someone who's not you and probably not as brown as you. And then the next stage, when they see that we're actually doing the things we say we're doing, it's hope

and excitement and investment. And then the next stage is kind of a stage of dismay, because the arc of a real estate project is a long, gritty arc, and it's slow, and we're moving into the next stage where we're starting to be able to share why this thing takes so long, why it's taken us four years to get to the place where we can have the capacity to raise fifty million dollars of non extractive capital, and so all of the emotions are there because all of

us want to stay here. Well, that leads me to you know, this is not a problem unique to West Oakland. Are you in conversations with people in other cities. Is there a way for them to pick up this model and work on it themselves. What is the plan? Absolutely, we have UM so far shared in great detail with probably were fifteen and thirty nascent organizations UM nationwide, two

or three international. So, for example, an organization called Brick by Brick and quebec UM the year before last that really hit a wall and they flew me out there and I spent a week with them and sort of like took the project apart. And now they're launching their first project in partnership with the City of Montreal. You're very busy, a lot of cities depending on you to save them, including the one you are a part of. However, I gotta ask you this, how do you define what

a citizen is? A citizen is one who takes ownership and responsibility over their space. But I think a better way to define citizen is how the Quakers define citizen. The Quakers are friends. We're a friend to everyone. We're a friend to our neighbors, We're a friend to our enemies, We're a friend to our land. Collective care over a joint space, pick up trash on your street, and be nice to the old lady on the bus, you gotta

be nice, and old lady on the bus. I mean, who's being mean to the old lady on the bus? Gotta be um. This has been so wonderful. Thank you. I appreciate it so much. What's exciting about this to me is that I've seen what the world looks like

when we let money take over our neighborhoods. It looks like abandoned apartment buildings that are old and crumbling, or empty and abandoned apartment buildings that are new and unaffordable to anyone, Or it just looks like the same strip mall everywhere, or the same furniture shop everywhere, the same yogurt stand everywhere. That's not culture. That's financially rich, but culturally poor. And I'm excited for our neighborhoods to feel different again, to be rooted not just in money, but

in people again. I want to live in this world where we can preserve the culture of a community and have it be owned by the people who've lived in that community. So how do we protect that and make sure that the wealth built there benefits the many and doesn't just fall into a few hands or a few corporations. Next week, I'm talking to someone who's doing just that, protecting our communities from big business, and she's taken on

perhaps the biggest business of them all. We're gonna have a real fight on our hands as citizens about whether we live in a country that we control, that we set the rules for, or a country where Amazon decides how our economy works. Next week, my interview with Stacy Mitchell and now our Prentice Sam with some actions you can do where for you is home? Take a moment to reflect on where you live. How did you end up there? Was it based on real estate speculation, rental prices,

family history, relationship ties, or something else. Really consider the role privilege has played in determining your place of residence. Learn more about gentrification. Gentrification is a buzzword, but there's a lot more to it. To learn more, check out the podcast There Goes the Neighborhood, watch the documentary City Rising, or read the book The Color of Law. Lastly, invest

in communities not commodities. Check out eb PreK dot org that's e B p R e C dot org to find out ways you can invest in community based real estate, or start this model where you live. If you're in the Oakland area, you could join the cooperative and become a community owner for just ten dollars a month. Or if you want to make a non extractive but savvy real estate investment, you could also invest in one of

e b prex projects. And we know there are more new models like this emerging to deal with our housing and ownership crisis. So if you know any other groups, let us know. Email us at comments at how to citizen dot com. If you take into these actions, please brag about yourself online using the hashtag how to Citizen. Visit how to citizen dot com to sign up for our newsletter or learn about upcoming events or even more stuff than that. And if you like the show, spread

the word tell somebody. If you don't, definitely just keep it to yourself. Appreciate you. How does Citizen with Bartune Day is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts and Dust Like Productions. Our executive producers are me barrattun Day, Thursty, Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha you Said. Our producers are Stephanie Cone and Ali Kilts. Kelly Prime is our editor, Valentino Rivera is our engineer, and Sam Paulson is Our Apprentice. Original music by Andrew Eaping. This episode was produced and

sound designed by Stephanie Cone. Special thanks to Joel Smith from I Heart Radio.