While home ownership is the most iconic symbol of the American Dream (Oliver), the reality is that traditional home ownership is out of reach for the average American. The housing crisis isn’t just about affordable ownership; it’s also about people’s ability to rent affordable apartments. “Currently there is no state in the nation where someone working full-time at the federal minimum wage can afford a affair market one-bedroom rental unit” (Sullivan). Even that statistic of working full-time implies that the person is employable. Many people may be unemployable for various reasons including immigration status, access to reliable transportation, and lack of necessary education, skills or training. Another major barrier to employment is having a criminal record, because racial discrimination is illegal in the United States, it remains legal and a commonly accepted practice to discriminate against people with a felony record. Even lower on the proverbial totem pole are persons whose criminal conviction is for sexual offense. For those unfortunate peons, even if they are able to find entry-level employment that can pay rent, they still face lifetime registration and onerous proximity restrictions placed on where they can and cannot reside. Journalist Matt Taibbi recalls in his book The Divide, “It’s about fucking with people.’ Specifically, it’s about what kinds of people get fucked with” (Williams). The people most often targeted for this discrimination are “particular groups of people, especially communities of color, poor, and working-class people, youth, immigrants, women, people with learning disabilities, and mental health issues, as well as queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people, who are increasingly forced into greater cycles of poverty, criminalization, incarceration, and violence” (Lamble). This paper will explore affordable housing options from the perspective of past and present discrimination and conclude with suggested solutions to address systemic discrimination and oppression.
Historical Discrimination through Racism, Redlining, and Housing Covenants
The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) came about during FDR’s first hundred days in office and was designed to stabilize the housing market by purchasing and refinancing underwater mortgages from banks (Thurston). While the intention was to help the economy by bailing out banks and encouraging home ownership, the brutal fact is the HOLC established an accepted practice of racial exclusion and discrimination that was adopted by subsequent federal programs such as the Federal Housing Association (FHA) and the GI Bill that are still in place today (Faber). The FHA came about in 1934 and ”…helped institutionalize a racially separate and unequal system of home financing that favored suburban building for whites while precluding insurance for homes in racially mixed and non-white neighborhoods in the inner city” (Gotham). Since the FHA was backing these mortgages, their number one concern wasn’t promoting affordable home ownership for minorities as much a fear of property values dropping if White-Black segregation was not maintained (Oliver). This led to many minority people being forced into Black neighborhoods with older and smaller homes, which then were assigned higher risks of default with accompanying higher interest rates (if a mortgage was approved at all). Within these Black neighborhoods, the lower valued smaller size houses generated less tax revenue for the city, thus affecting the quality of neighborhood amenities, services, schools and parks; thus, furthering the cycle of reducing the demand for houses in those areas (Pattillo). Since houses are the largest asset that can be transferred from generation to generation, the lower size, desirability and value of these properties meant less asset appreciation for the next generations, thus maintaining the wealth gap for the less wealth. Potential solutions like the evolution of Black Banks such as OneUnited weren’t enough to solve these discriminatory issues, because despite their mission, they were still a business that needed to be concerned about their bottom line (Baradaran). Housing insecurity isn’t restricted to home ownership, it also affects renters, and the governments building of subsidized housing projects that focused on housing large numbers of poor and minorities in highly concentrated areas without supportive services created high tensions and pockets of crime focused in low-income neighborhoods. If the government rent subsidy is low and the number of affordable rental units available at that price depleted, it causes further housing insecurity and forces multi-family occupation in violation of codes and the inability to afford repairs and maintenance, further adding to the cycle of insecure housing.
Whether it be rental or home ownership, secure housing creates social stability whereas when housing is insecure, people experience “deep and pervasive vulnerability” and “a diminished sense of one’s own dignity and full personhood” (Sullivan). As I’ve learned in 10 years of treatment, hurt people hurt people. It doesn’t matter why, if people are afraid, they may be evicted or fearful about drugs and crime the safety of their children, they are not going to be able to live their best life. In America, one of our last existing affordable housing options are mobile home parks. According toa. 2016 study, “Mobile homes provide the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing the United States” but they combine the expenses of home ownership with the instability of renting/leasing land (Sullivan). While mobile homes may seem a step up from an apartment, the fact is that mobile home owners are often trapped into expensive leases, able to be evicted with a 30-day notice, and then unlike a renter, they have the added expense of trying to sell or move their entire house. I spoke to my friend Jeff T. this week and asked him how much he pays for his mobile home and was amazed to discover he pays $1000 a month just for the lot with the only utility being garbage. Meanwhile, my PITI payment was $812 for my newly build one-bedroom townhouse.
Current Discrimination (SOR Laws, Spatial Restrictions)
Jeff T. is a member of that aforementioned minority of fourth-class citizens who have been convicted of a sexual offense, which has adversely affected his ability to work (he had been a union electrician) and thus limiting his choices of residential options. Luckily, hes been a resident of his mobile home park for some time and gets along with his neighbors, but many mobile home parks explicitly prohibit anyone with a sexual offense of their record from renting or living at their park. Even if a person with a sexual offense on their record was to legally purchase a mobile home, they may not be allowed to live in that park and would be required to pay to move the trailer to another location. Although racially based restrictive covenants got outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1948 in Shelly v. Kraemer, discrimination against those with criminal records, especially sexually based offenses, remains accepted and encouraged (Oliver). In 2020, Bob O’Dekirk, then mayor of Joliet Illinois created a scheme to evict several residents with a registerable sexual offense who were peacefully living at a NewDay apartment complex. His first attempt was to evoke a 205 law that no more than one person with a sex offense could register using the same address, but a federal court rightfully declared the law unconstitutional. He then tried to use a different 2010 Illinois law prohibiting people on the sexual offense registry from living withing 500 feet of schools, parts, and daycares. The problem was there was no school, park, or daycare, within 500 feet of the apartment building, so he decided to make one. He purchased an empty house a block away from the apartment building for $83,000 and then paid additional money to have the house torn down and the lot seeded. The next mayor then continued this quest by getting the city council to approve $100,000 to create a “park” in the vacant lot with the full acknowledgement that “the sole reason for establishing this park is to get “rid of” the people who are quietly living in the NewDay building…”(Sandy and Adele). Instead of investing in affordable housing, two mayors and the majority of their city council spent $200,000 to create a “pocket park” for the explicit purpose of making tax-paying, law-abiding citizens homeless. “Escalating housing and employment prohibitions make life difficult for those convicted of sex offenses and, most centrally, do nothing to make our communities safer or better” (Meiners). I would suggest the social science research indicates it actually has the opposite effect. Secure housing is a locus of social stability while housing insecurity causes a diminished sense of human value and dignity (Sullivan). The problem is this type of discrimination isn’t new, it’s a legal version of redlining with the same intent: to keep “others” of the neighborhood. In 1944 the federal government passed Megan’s Law, establishing a public national sex-offender registry (SOR) and the situation has only gotten worse (Meiners). “SOR’s are expanding. Civil commitment laws, passed in a dozen states by 2006 and upheld by the Supreme Court in a 2005 decision, aim to geographically detain and segregate certain categories of sex offenders, indefinitely, after release” (Meiners; Feuer). Angela Davis questions, “Why criminals have been constituted as a class and, indeed, a class of human beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to others.” I would point to recent reformative legislation such as “Ban the Box” which prevents companies from asking about criminal records on initial job applications as an indication of progress. Unfortunately, there is often a “carve-out” in criminal justice reform legislation that excludes those convicted of a sexual crime. Even last summer in Minnesota during a heated debate on the House floor about restoring voting rights to felons, there was. A strong partisan pushback, specifically citing sex offenders as the people that should never be allowed to vote. Those with sexual offenses in their past are the new Black people on the block, suffering legalized discrimination. Unfortunately if history has taught us anything it’s that we won’t be the last group discriminated against.
Solutions: Compassion and Community
Leonard Peltier said it best, “We don’t need more prisons. We need more compassion. That compassion is our own highest possibility.” It’s generally accepted that anti-violence and anti-prison work are closely related. Prisons perpetuate the problem by isolating people from their community, removing their support and keeping them out of mind and preventing accountability. The problem is those people eventually return and when they do, they’re in worse shape than when they went into prison. People are less likely to harm others when they feel included and part of their community, so solutions include developing welcoming community-based affordable housing and living wages for all. Building another prison creates temporary jobs, but in the long run, “…does not assist with collective healing processes nor does it work to prevent harms from recurring in the future. Effective anti-violence work means developing alternative, community-based processes that prioritize the needs of those who were harmed, address underlying issues that lead to harm, and work to prevent future violence” (Lamble). When we address the underlying issues, then these people can return to their communities where they are welcomed back and helped to understand the root causes of how they became part of the PIC system (McDonald). That’s how the cycle is broken.
As far as specific housing issues, there seems to be an intermediate step that needs to be taken before people are fully accepted. We need to be seen before we can be accepted. While most Black people never had the luxury of passing for white, the relatively recent laws prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals didn’t really come about until more people came out of the closet. It’s much easier to hate and fear an “other” that you don’t know. In 1953 Eisenhower barred all gays and lesbians from holding federal employment and we just had an openly gay man run for president of the United States (and settle for a cabinet position) (Meiner). When I was in college, being homosexual was illegal (or at least engaging in the activity that defines one as homosexual). Gays weren’t even allowed in the military and not long ago there was a federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) to ensure sexual others wouldn’t corrupt the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. Only after a Vice President acknowledged their lesbian daughter without apology and after many co-workers (who were always gay) were ablet o be open and honest about their same-sex partner does the “other” become known. But the coming out of those first gay people was as difficult and dangerous as it was for the Black students after the 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision.
Now the same has to happen for felons, and specifically, for those convicted of a sexual offense. The hatred and discrimination is real (and dangerous). But creating special housing complexes, mobile home parks or half-way houses to “deal with the problem” is a temporary fix at best because it still supports an “us” versus “them” mentality. The real solution is for people to become aware that we are more alike than different and a person’s criminal history shouldn’t detract from their future opportunities or determine where they live. It seems painfully obvious to say, “Black people are real people too” or that discovering someone is gay doesn’t change them – they’re still the same person you knew before. Yet there’s still an uproar when a registered sex offender moves into your neighborhood. It literally makes the evening news, they hold town-hall meetings, and somewhere in the back of the mind is the idea that the neighborhood will become less safe resulting property values going down. How is the 500’ living restriction from a park for one class of people any different from redlining or racial covenants? The stigma of being a convicted and registered sex offender creates a rift in housing and jobs that only exacerbates the problem of reintegration. Even an open-armed community that says YIMBY runs the risk of blockbusting by being the only viable living option and thus becoming overrun with people with sexual offenses on their records.
I have researched community land trusts as a possible solution, but creating such an open and affirming community of tiny homes will require larger community support for zoning and licensing issues, lest they decide to build a “pocket park” a block away. Even if I were to go outstate and manage to obtain 40 acres of rural property where I could create a self-sufficient tiny homes community, the question needs to be asked – aren’t we just separating and isolating ourselves into a different, albeit self-imposed, cage? The only way such a community housing project could work would be to become actively involved with the neighbors, to become an active party of their larger community and to show the world that we’re all normal people just trying to live a simple life. This would bring together the best of both worlds, for Goetz noted that “Even in the most notorious public housing developments, residents created strong bonds of mutual support, and self-governance” – I would expect the same benefits would develop within a rural tiny home community of former felons. I would also see a time where non-justice impacted individuals might see an advantage to living in such a community, just as some members would grow enough in their self-confidence and acceptance of themselves to warrant their moving to other housing in other communities.
Conclusion
The last solutions section might seem Pollyanna and naïve in believing a world where a community could come to accept and welcome former felons, especially those with a sexual offense. Williams said it best, “It is a bad habit of mind, a form of power-worship, to assume that things must be as they are, that they will continue to be as they have been. It sooths the conscience of the privileged, dulls the will of the oppressed. The first step toward change is the understanding that things can be different” (Williams). I really do believe that things can (and will) be different. I used to think that progress is slow and all it takes is time, until I read Martin Luther King’s calling that a “strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills.” He goes on to remind us that “…human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work tie itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation” (King Jr.). I am but one man locked in a dark prison, what can I possible do to make any difference against the PIC’s oppression? I too have a dream: I will work tirelessly towards creating and building a non-profit community land trust that helps provided affordable housing, education, support, and trade skills to citizens returning from a temporary trip to prison. I may not be much, but as Leonard Peltier wrote, “One good man or one good woman can change the world, can push back evil, and their work can be a beacon for millions, for billions. Are you that man or woman? If so, may the Great Spirit bless you. If not, why not? We must each of us be that person. That will transform the world overnight. That would be a miracle, yest but a miracle within our power, our healing power” (Peltier). I believe in miracles, but they don’t just happen, it takes people who believe they can make a difference and invest their blood, sweat and tears into bringing about that change. I share Nelson Mandela’s belief that “The world we left was long gone. The danger was that our ideas had become frozen in time. Prison is still a point in a turning world, and it is very easy to remain in the same place in jail while the world moves on” (Mandela).
Things may have slowed down a little, but I refuse to let my mind remain in the same place in jail while the world moves on. I recently obtained my Master’s degree from California State University while incarcerated, which has thawed my frozen spirit and kept my mind moving. Before my Humanities course readings, I am embarrassed to say I had never heard of Leonard Peltier, I had never read anything longer than a poster quotation of Martin Luther King’s and all I knew about Nelson Mandela could fill a headline. Yet here I am, inspired to use these revolutionary new thoughts as a foundation to build my future dreams.
And that’s my solution.
Works Cited
Baradaran, Mehrsa. The Colour of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. Belknap Press, 2017.
Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003
Faber, Jacob W. “We Built This: Consequences of New Deal Era Intervention in America’s Racial Geography” American Sociological Review 2020: 730-775
Feuer, A. “Pataki Uses State Law to Hold Sex Offenders After Prison.” The New York Times 4 October 2005: B4.
Gotham, Kevin Fox. “Separate and Unequal: The Housing Act of 1968 and the Section 235 Program.” Sociological Forum 15.1 (2000): 13-37
King, Jr., Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The Atlantic Monthly August 1963: 78-88
Lamble, S. “Transforming Carceral Logistics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Using a Queer/Trans Analysis.” Captive Genders. Ed. Nat Smith and Eric A. Stanley. Chico: AK Press, 2015. 269-300
Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. Back Bay Books, 1995
McDonald, CeCe. “Foreword.” Captive Genders. Ed. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith. Expanded Second Edition. Chico: AK Press, 2015
Oliver Melvin L. Black Wealth/white wealth: A new perspective on racial inequality. 2nd edition. 2013.
Pattillo, Mary. “Housing: Commodity versus Right.” The Annual Review of Sociology 39(2013): 509- 31
Peltier, Leonard. Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance. Ed. Harvey Arden. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999
Sandy and Adele. “Why are ‘fiscally responsible’ politicians spending taxpayer money to make people homeless?” the NARSOL Digest Dec/Jan 2025:9.
Sullivan, Esther. Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place. University of California Press, 2018
Thurston, Chloe N. At the boundaries of homeownership: credit, discrimination and the American State. Cambridge University Press, 2018
Williams, Kristian. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Third Edition: Oakland: AK Press 2015.
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