Justine Gonzalez-Berg

Despite a crazy year, the power of collaboration prevails! 

This community continues to amaze. Even in an incredibly challenging year we were able make real strides in opening up new housing opportunities. Community-led, all volunteer Housing Action Teams, which are the heart of Housing Solutions Network, produced phenomenal work this year. Individuals and organizations have responded with overwhelming support of the Community Call to Action and the Community Build Project. These were no small feats. 

HSN’s Housing Action Teams created an incredible body of information to support affordable housing this year. 

One group worked to provide a webinar on the best practices of being a landlord. Another team produced three webinars on how to develop tiny home communities. Our outreach group continued to educate community members about local housing struggles and solutions. Another Housing Action Team gathered community feedback about our local government permitting systems and reached out to work with our city and county toward improving their processes. All of these contents are freely available on our website, housingsolutionsnetwork.org. Thank you to all our Housing Action Team members! 

Community members are also stepping up to sign their support of the Housing Declaration and Community Call to Action. More than 100 people have already signed on, sharing their commitments to support affordable housing in many different ways over the coming year. Thank you for contributing to this critical work.

The Community Build Project began as a mere concept. A group of people were concerned about how unsheltered individuals would survive the winter with no capacity at the shelter and no indoor spaces to warm up in. 

They focused on the concept of building “wooden tent” tiny shelters to form an agency-supported village for unsheltered seniors. Without knowing where the village would go or how many shelters they would be able to fund, the team started building. 

Since then, a wave of people have contributed their resources and labor, and a team of individuals, churches, nonprofits, government, and businesses have all worked together to make the tiny shelter village a reality. This effort has highlighted the incredible power of community to come together with a common purpose to create a solution. 

As we celebrate these accomplishments, we also acknowledge the gravity of this moment. With the eviction moratorium set to expire at the end of December, the stakes could not be higher. If the moratorium is not extended, we will see a wave of evictions at a time when the local shelter is full and services are stretched thin. 

Even with the moratorium in place, many workers and tenants are increasingly vulnerable. As the housing market remains inflated, landlords are more likely to sell and working people are increasingly unable to afford home ownership. This threatens the stability of our local workforce, and by extension, our ability to rebuild local businesses and recover from the pandemic. 

In a small community like ours we can have an impact. Every single unit of housing that is created makes a difference. 

The year ahead will doubtlessly hold many challenges, yet through our ingenuity and collaborative spirits we can rise to the tasks at hand. 

(Justine Gonzalez-Berg is the Network Weaver for Housing Solutions Network and serves as a trustee for Homeward Bound Community Land Trust.)