In 2016, a small church in Washington, D.C. called the Community of Christ decided to give away the building it had owned since 1974. Known as “La Casa,” the building had over the decades become a central neighborhood gathering and organizing space.

I grew up in the Community of Christ. In “How to Give Away Your Church — and Fight Gentrification at the Same Time” — I tell the story of how the church figured out how to give La Casa away in the midst of a hyper-gentrifying city and neighborhood (published in Sojourners, 2021).

Pictured: La Casa.

In 1964, a group of teenagers in D.C.’s Adams Morgan neighborhood took over a vacant lot because they needed a place to play. Over the next ten years, with the support and involvement of hundreds of neighbors, they built and maintained an autonomous community park, which they dubbed “Community Park West.” When the speculators who owned the land finally went to sell it for luxury housing development in 1974, the community fought back — and won. Today, the park, which is now public property, has been renamed for Walter Pierce, one of the original teenagers who claimed the space in the ‘60s, and who dedicated much of his life to the cause of the park. My piece on this history, “Caring in Public: The Struggle for Community Park West,” is out now from Washington History.

Pictured is a baseball game in the park in the summer of 1974. Photo from The Washington Post.

In 1919, Washington, D.C. became the first city in the U.S. to get rent control — in part because of how the housing crisis of the 1910s intersected with the global “Spanish flu” pandemic. Read my short piece on this history, “Defending Tenants in the Midst of Plague,” in a special issue of Washington History dedicated to a historical analysis of the year 2020.

At right: 1919 article from the Washington Post, lambasting the rapacity of landlords in the midst of the pandemic.

My book Carving out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C., out now from the University of Minnesota Press, examines limited-equity housing cooperatives in Washington, D.C. I am interested in how co-op members collectively self-manage these non-commodified housing spaces, particularly given the pressures of a hot real estate market.  I think of these co-ops as a manifestation of the urban commons, and theorize the work required by commons more broadly. Pictured is the grand opening of a co-op in the Shaw neighborhood, 1992. Read my 2014 paper in Washington History, "Creating a Commons in the Capital: The Emergence of Limited-Equity Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C."

Read an exchange I had with U.K. author and tenant activist Neil Gray, Tenant and Resident Militancy for Housing Justice, in a 2019 issue of Radical Housing Journal.

My book Carving out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C., out now from the University of Minnesota Press, delves into the theory and practice of the urban commons. The commons are spaces that are both non-commodifed and collectively owned and regulated. Since commons rely on collective labor, a commons is best understood as a social practice, rather than an inert resource. Most of what is known about the commons comes from studies of rural areas -- places with relatively sparse populations and cultural homogeneity. But what happens when we try to common in cities? For some thoughts on this, read my 2015 paper in Antipode, "Working with Strangers in Saturated Space: Reclaiming and Maintaining the Urban Commons." For an overview of recent literature on the urban commons, read my 2017 essay in Urban Studies, "Theorising the Urban Commons: New Thoughts, Tensions, and Paths Forward." Pictured is another instance of the urban commons: the BAT cultural center in Durban, South Africa. 

One of my current research projects examines the years that C.L.R. James -- one of the most important black Marxists of the 20th century, author of Black Jacobins, among many other works -- spent teaching first at Federal City College (founded in 1968 as the public college for Washington, D.C.), and later at the University of the District of Columbia (created in 1976 as the successor to FCC). James taught at these these two institutions from 1969 until 1980. He's pictured here in a Washington Post article from 1981, "Cyril James: Marxist with a Mission.

Listen to a panel I organized with poet and activist E. Ethelbert Miller in October 2019 on C.L.R. James’ impact on D.C. activists. You can also watch the panel here.

In this project, I examined fundraising and organizing efforts of parent teacher organizations (PTOs) at public schools in Washington, D.C. The map I've made, pictured here, shows a) locations of all the city's public schools (black symbols), b) the PTOs that are registered as tax-exempt organizations with the IRS (orange circles on top of their respective schools), and c) 2016 median household income for Washington, D.C. (the darker blue is higher income; the darker green is lower income). The size of the orange circles reflects the amount of PTO revenue for the 2014-15 school year. See my blog for an updated version of this map, which reflects data from the 2016-17 school year, along with some analysis of the issue.

This project examines the history of Washington Inner-city Self Help (WISH) in South Africa. WISH was a grassroots organization that organized among poor and moderate-income people in Washington, D.C., 1978-2003. In the early 1990s, several WISH members traveled to South Africa to help poor black tenants become cooperative homeowners in previously all-white Johannesburg. The building pictured is one of seven rental buildings in Johannesburg that became cooperatively owned by their tenants with the help of WISH. To learn more about this story, check out my chapter, “Struggling for Housing, from D.C. to Johannesburg: Washington Innercity Self Help Goes to South Africa,” now available in the 2016 volume, Capital Dilemma: Growth and Inequality in Washington, D.C., edited by Derek Hyra and Sabiyha Prince, and published by Routledge Press. 

For my masters degree in city and regional planning, I researched the experiences of a group of people in Berlin who collectively purchased their previously squatted apartment building and turned it into a housing cooperative. My research examined the tensions between their external anti-gentrification work in their neighborhood, and their internal work of fixing up their home -- they completed repairs in early 2002, after several years of hard labor. Pictured is a photo from the collective's archives, documenting their work repairing their roof in the spring of 2000.