Ventura County is turning former farmland into affordable housing for farmworkers

S.U.C.C.E.S.S. is an immigrant services agency that connects immigrants with the resources they need to adjust to life in Canada. The group helps an average of 73,000 people each year from more than 150 countries and provides assistance in finding affordable housing, English language training, career and social services and accessing care for seniors.

Iranian families are sidestepping the U.S. Muslim ban inside a library. The Haskell Free Library and Opera House is located in both Derby Line, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec. Dozens of Iranian families have briefly reunited in the library, which acts as unofficial political gray zone. “You don’t need your passport. You park on your side, I’ll park on my side, but we’re all going to walk in the same door.”

Over 20 U.S. cities have passed municipal I.D. laws, which provide a form of identification to undocumented immigrants. “Municipal IDs are one of the most effective measures that cities can implement to protect and empower undocumented people.” Poughkeepsie, New York, is the latest city to pass such a law, and several others are in the process of doing so.

To help increase housing stock, New Rochelle, NY streamlined the development approval process and made it easier to approve many housing units at once, allowing the city to add roughly 4,500 new housing units over the last decade. However, local residents worry about being priced out of the area as people move from Manhattan in search of more affordable housing.

After their landlord refused to make repairs and hiked rent, tenants in Oakland, California, staged the longest rent strike in the city’s history to decommodify their housing and begin transitioning to a tenant-controlled building.

Queeraspora was founded in Bremen as a safe space for immigrant and refugee LGBTQ+ people to find social and emotional support, as well as access to information. Around twenty people make up the nucleus of the group, and they come from all over the world including Turkey, Taiwan, India, Bosnia, and South America. The meetings focus on personal empowerment, as well as political organizing and educational workshops. The mix of social and educational activities provides a network for people who experience homophobia among refugee and migrant communities and racism among mainstream LGBTQ+ communities.

As the struggles of refugees and immigrants drudges on, a number of cities across the US are gathering funding for their legal defense. One strategy, a legal counsel program called New York Family Immigrant Unity Project, has proven so successful that it now has 19 other counties in states like Colorado and Georgia participating in their network. Beyond that, these public defense projects often comprise of both public and private dollars and are all working for the right (not guaranteed by the US Constitution) to have access to legal counsel during immigration proceedings.

For migrant detainees in San Diego County's Otay Mesa Detention Center, a recent letter writing campaign from participants at nearby San Diego State University has brought a small form of hope and courage. The university library released hundreds of letters between detainees and university participants, which served to humanize the immigration debate. “In the U.S. our tendency is to really dehumanize migrants,” said Kate Swanson, another geography professor at San Diego State. “We put them in these concrete boxes. This helps them become visible.”

An initiative in St. Petersburg has reduced the number of vacant houses while increasing access to affordable housing. The city takes ownership of vacant lots and abandoned homes, then sells the properties to affordable housing developers or auctions them off. The initiative helps make land cheap enough to build affordable housing.

When local policy initiatives fail, it is often because they are not meeting local needs in a way that residents want. The Boston Housing Innovation Lab, know as the iLab, seeks to combat this challenge. So far, it has used creative approaches to let residents “experience” a policy- such as walking through an example compact house to give feedback on its design. This process informed feedback that otherwise would have been difficult to glean. By constantly seeking to understand users, the iLab and local Boston housing groups will be better equipped to create policies that actually help community members.