Today I marched with City Life/Vida Urbana in the Wake Up the Earth Parade from Egleston Square to Stony Brook.  We chanted a broader message to “Stand Up, Fight Back!” while at the same time marching as allies to specific tenants facing eviction near Washington Street. The energy the tenants, activists, and allies was powerful, and as we marched, residents and festival-goers joined the chanting, took pictures, and waved in solidarity. Our part of the march was just a tiny part of the Wake Up the Earth Festival, a vibrant display of the culture of JP and Roxbury, but it seemed to resonate with the entire community. Every chant of “Whose home? OUR HOME!” got louder as the spectators and other marchers joined in.

As we prepared for the parade, I had the fortune of being able to interview three people. I joined Sam and her Nuvu classmate to talk with City Life/Vida Urbana Community Organizer Alex Ponte-Capellan. Though Alex had already completed a much more detailed interview with Kobbie, he was able to provide a passionate introduction to why we were marching and prepare us to talk to other marchers. Alex broke down the word “gentrification”, talking about how that and other words like “more affluent” were coded language trying to hide the fact that white people are coming into neighborhoods and pushing people of color out.

The second personI interviewed was Luis Cotto, Executive Director of Egleston Square Main Street, an organization that helps keep Egleston Square safe and beautiful for its residents and strengthen the businesses and public spaces. He is careful to help the local economy thrive while also trying tokeep rents affordable for community members, but sometimes improving local businesses can mean that landlords think they can charge more, both for commercial and residential property. As Cotto said, “capitalism is funky that way”. However, he tries to start amicable conversations with develops and policy makers to convince them to keep the community’s best interests at heart. “Community gets defined in so many different ways”, he says, and he wants to make sure local business owners who have been at the heart of that community for many years do not get priced out of the neighborhood.

My third interviewee was Rene Bernal, a tenant facing displacement head on. Despite living in his apartment for a decade, he was asked to leave so that developer City Realty could take over the building. He knew that trying to find a home somewhere else would mean being forced to take his children out of their current schools and hurt their chances at a good future. Rather than giving in to their landlord trying to force them to leave, he and the other tenants formed an association and decided to fight back. With the help of City Life/Vida Urbana, they managed to secure a much smaller rent increase, but the real issue, the length of the contract, remained unsolved. But he made sure to emphasize to me that he and his fellow tenants were by nomeans alone in this struggle. He cited the large number of people at City Life meetings, all facing similar issues. And yet, the city government seemed blind to their needs. He said they were spending more and more on police in the neighborhood while neglecting housing and schools. Rather than accepting this fate, heboldly fights back and calls upon the government to change things. He wants the government to stop talking about fixing the city by some abstract date in the future and instead “fix it now”, because there are people from Roxbury to Chinatown who love their city and want to and deserve to stay.

All audio can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/kate-weishaar/sets/wake-up-the-earth-parade-with-city-life

Change the Game

Here is final draft of the case study

Here is the Change the Game toolkit.

Here is the website for the toolkit that we are still working on: www.changethegameproject.com

Case Study: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y0an8-1FLSutN0WJUJbyKq6A6AMil1NWqvdfGm9bzqk/edit

Abstract:This past semester, MIT city planning students and the founder and director of Intelligent Mischief collaborated with City Life/Vida Urbana (CL/VU), a tenant rights organization in Boston, as part of the co-design class within the Media Lab at MIT. The goal of the project was to tie together CL/VU’s three campaigns: Anti-Gentrification, Anti-Foreclosure, and Anti-Investor. To tie the three campaigns together, we came up with the idea of creating a carnival that would help educate people around the complexities and profound flaws of the housing market. The carnival games highlight issues of affordability, displacement, inequitable urban development, gentrification, and foreclosure.

We are still debating what format to use for our website and what, if any, additional media components to include as supplements or complements to the online toolkit.

The toolkit outline, including some draft text and current game ideas, is included below:

Introduction

Who we are
Mike – City Life/Vida Urbana communications coordinator
Terry – community organizer/founder of Intelligent Mischief (a civic media hack lab)
Nene – youth worker/MIT urban planning student
Dara – former legal/housing advocate/MIT urban planning student

Background: The issue
City Life/Vida Urbana has been supporting tenant organizing to preserve housing affordability and resist displacement since their inception in the 1970s. Since the foreclosure crisis post-2007, CLVU has worked with tenants and homeowners facing eviction and foreclosure to help them stay in their homes. As the number of foreclosures has decreased, the narrative that the foreclosure crisis is over has risen. CLVU staff, however, continue to see people suffering foreclosures and evictions. They have seen housing prices rise as private investors buy up vacated homes and flip them for a quick profit. In these trends, CLVU recognizes the formation of a new housing bubble and wants to avoid a return to “bubble economics” by challenging the dominant narrative with one that reflects the experience of its members in Boston, and the working poor nationwide.

We came together in the MIT Media Lab course on Co-Design in the fall of 2013. Our goal was to develop an alternative narrative that addressed the systemic crisis that CLVU was helping households in Greater Boston address. We wanted this narrative to connect CLVU’s campaigns three campaigns, which fight eviction foreclosures, resist gentrification, and shed light on real estate investors who are turning a profit on foreclosed homes. We aimed to situate our project in a broader national economic context because we knew Bostonians weren’t the only ones struggling to stay afloat and retain their homes.

How to use this toolkit
We have created this toolkit with the expectation that it will be adapted, that it will serve as a starting point for activists to bring the issues most pressing to their communities into the public eye. We have designed an interactive model because we believe an engaging, social, tactile experience will enable the synthesis needed to shift how we think about the economic injustices of our times. It isn’t only the housing game that’s rigged. Use this toolkit to investigate the way the systems that most impact your community are structured, and to educate your community about what you learn. Use it to imagine how you would like to change these systems. Use it to connect with people who can help.  Ready? Okay, let’s go and Change the Game!

The Carnival
Carnival games promise a fun time and a big prize. But how many of us have ever won a carnival game? How many have actually gotten that big stuffed animal prize? Very few. Why? Because the carnival games are rigged so that it’s almost impossible to win. Similarly, the housing market promises a coveted reward, while the mortgage-lending practices that led to the 2008 market crash made it impossible for consumers to “win” that game either. However, much more is at stake in the housing “game.” Homebuyers’ and renters’ life savings and hard work go into their homes, whether in rent, mortgages, maintenance or improvements. A fair market is supposed to be fair, not a carnivalesque game of tricks and mirrors, promising rewards it never delivers.

Housing Narrative: three campaigns, related by a story:

ANTI-GENTRIFICATION GAMES

• Cornhole:
• Three holes:
  • Top – $50,000
  • Bottom two – $25,000
  • Board – $10,000
• Goal is to to make $72,150
• Jelly Bean Guess

PRIVATE REAL ESTATE INVESTOR GAME

• Musical Chairs

FORECLOSURE EVICTION GAMES

• Tarot card reader
• Shell Game, or Who’s holding your loan?
• Hot Potato

SOLUTIONS GAMES

• Pop a balloon: show that bubbles — like housing bubbles — do pop
• Communal Mural

Prizes

Format of the Carnival

User-experience

Call to Action/Next Steps

Appendix A:
Process
The group convened under the goals set forth by our community partner City Life/Vida Urbana, and CLVU’s liaison Mike Leyba. We began by meeting with CLVU Executive Director Curdina Hill, who grounded us in a firm understanding of the organization’s history, mission, and current issue areas. Early in our process, Nene and Terry led the group in a “They Say, We Say” exercise in which we responded to dominant problematic arguments about the housing crisis. The counter-arguments we developed in this exercise served as a guide for us to return to throughout the process.

Each step was iterative: we met weekly outside of class to revisit the last steps in our process, determine our next steps, and ground these in the overarching concept, which was itself in constant development. At key points, we integrated the feedback and participation of others. We brought our ideas to the CLVU member leadership team several times, and incorporated their recommendations. The course professors offered criticism. We tested our design in focus groups with the leadership team, our classmates, and the public. We used class time to brainstorm design concepts and ideas, again referring to the points derived from the “They Say, We Say exercise.”

On Thursday, we talked for a while about how we need to not only create a specific narrative around the housing crisis, but also a broader narrative around capitalism so that other individuals/organizations can adapt the games to the justice issues they work on.  The toolkit will address both narratives.

We also started to flesh out how the carnival will be set up — how will people move through the carnival (in groups or not) and if there will be a ‘ringleader’ of sorts navigating people through the current housing market system or just a barker at every game who can tell part of the narrative.

We realized that we were creating the games in isolation of the narrative we were trying to get across, and we need to link them together. So we also worked on fleshing out the overall narrative we are trying to convey, which will combine the three CL/VU campaigns, and are ensuring that the games will fit into that narrative.

For our meeting this Thursday:

CLVU organizer handing a bank tenant association member the sword to fight her foreclosure.

Marshall Cooper shows a poster he used at a recent protest.

A new member shares her story for the first time at CLVU.

We had an amazing class at City Life/ Vida Urbana in which we were able to participate in a portion of the organization’s weekly Boston Bank Tenant Association meeting.  This meeting is open to anyone who is facing foreclosure or eviction or anyone who is supportive of those who are and wants to help with the cause. At the meeting, CLVU organizers discussed with members and new participants next steps for specific cases and appropriate advocacy strategies, which combines direct action and public pressure on the banks (the Sword) and legal defense and advocacy (the Shield).

Halfway through the meeting, our class met separately with two bank tenant association members: Marshall Cooper and Ken Tilton, who generously shared their stories with us. We were touched by how Marshall, Ken, and City Life welcomed our class into their space and treated us as part of the organization.  Reflecting on the experience, students later explained what struck them about it:

• Moving stories of people’s experience at CLVU
• The power of collective intake
• Creative methods for generating and sharing ideas
• The ability of the organization to draw out vulnerabilities and build a supportive group environment
• The facilitation skills of CLVU organizers and their ability to manage such an emotionally-charged space

Photos by Sofia Campos

Lastly, we decided that the narrative of the carnival would be, ‘CHANGE THE GAME.’ Participants will first enter a space that tells the story of our current rigged housing market — where there are few winners and many losers. This space will reflect what an actual carnival is like. After participants play all of the games in the dark carnival space, they will enter a space that provides a vision of what a fair housing system could look like. Participants will get the chance to learn about more radical initiatives taking place, as well as what more moderate initiatives could look like, and think through how those solutions (and new ones they come up with!) could be implemented to CHANGE THE GAME. We are still figuring out how best to convey this — is it through solutions games or focus groups or theatre, or a combination of all three?

On Saturday, we were able to get 50 minutes in CL/VU’s leadership meeting to have members playtest the two games Dave (a carpenter and member) created to get feedback on what worked and didn’t work. It was really helpful to do this because, as we learned, ‘Knockdown the 1%’ did not work as we had hoped — it was too complicated and the message wasn’t very clear. So, back to the drawing board! However, cornhole was a success — players and observers really took to the game and gave us great feedback on how to make it even better. We are continuing to develop new games, so, hopefully, we will be able to playtest the new games that we create soon!

Onward!

So in our second project iteration, we decided to go back to the original idea of regular carnival games and really apply our thinking around how to connect the unfairness of the game to the unfairness of the housing market and capitalism in general. To do this, we decided to connect the games to real statistics and data. As a team we knew that data would play a role in supporting our narrative – the questions was always how. We didn’t want the data to drive our narrative – the facts and data about foreclosures and housing have always been on our side. The dominant narratives that exist in society however make it hard to accept and digest numbers that don’t fit the frames we already believe. For example, you really believe it is the fault of the people who can’t afford their mortgages that they lose their homes, a simply citing a data point that says otherwise – citing predatory lending, the racial disparities, etc., for example, won’t normally change your mind.

We believe, however, that pairing statistics with the experience of the game – will allow for a “psychic break” if you will. When people are confronted with the sad fact that they can’t win the game along with the reality of the statistic, we hope that a deeper understanding of the way the system works can be reached. For example, we thought to assign different holes in the cornhole game with a dollar amount and make the goal to accumulate a certain total dollar value. This will be difficult, as most carnival games tend to be [but, hopefully also really fun!]. At the end, we will reveal that the total amount they should have accumulated is equal to the total amount of rent for a 2-bedroom in Boston. Boom. Shock. & Awe. [+Fun in a way]. The power of the statistic will come from the narrative under which it is presented – i.e., the undeniably difficult, rigged, and unfair, carnival games.

We will update with pictures of our second iteration as soon as possible. Looking forward to feedback from everyone!

Our team met privately on Thursday to present the ideas to each other and pick which ones to use.  We also discussed the possibility of creating a digital game, and Mike showed us a great example one.  We took some time to brainstorm independently before discussing the strengths and weaknesses of different ideas.  Eventually we settled on a list of four live games, and shared some thoughts on possibilities for a digital game.

The team made important progress this week.  We have decided to create a carnival toolkit rather than produce a live carnival.  To test and perfect each game, we will facilitate a series of focus groups.  When the games are finalized we will create supporting graphic material, guidelines and instructions, and make these available online so that the games can be replicated anywhere.  The digital game will serve as a way to popularize and introduce our carnival to a national audience.  It will appear on the CLVU website, along with a link to the carnival toolkit.

At our next meeting we will discuss remaining concerns both about how to engage users and how to effectively demonstrate the key lessons behind each game.

Below are rough models for the four live games.

Strongman:

Cornhole:

Ring Toss:

Knock Down the 1%:  In this game, the goal will be to knock down a stack of milk jugs, the twist being that one or more of them is glued to the table.  Anyone can play, but the 1% will always win this rigged game!

Mike, Terry, and I presented the project idea our team came up with feedback from some of the CL/VU staff – to develop carnival games that reveal the deceptive nature of the market. We were only one agenda item on a long list of items they needed to cover during the meeting, so one major lesson learned in designing feedback activities is to keep in mind the time and stick to the process design! We designed a process for them to give us feedback on the idea – we told them about the project and asked them to record any questions, concerns, and general feedback/suggestions on separate post it notes and put them up on a flip chart. We then gave them space to ask any clarifying questions they had first. When the hands started shooting up, we started answer the questions. It was only later that we realized that we were trying to answer questions that they should should have written down for us to discuss and decide later! It was fine, we just ran out of time and told people to write the rest of their questions and concerns down for us to review later.

Still left to do is discuss these new ideas with our team members and revise our draft project proposal to reflect what we come up with. The feedback we got was really good and raised the point that I think we all considered early in the project but didn’t know quite how to address: could some CL/VU members join our team and therefore move from feedback givers to decision makers on our collaboration spectrum? Fortunately, some BTA leaders were really excited after hearing the project idea and want to contribute as team members – or at least come to some meetings. So, we also need figure out a system that works for including BTA leadership team members into our meetings – a great logistic problem to have!

Terry and I stayed for a bit more of the meeting as the BTA leaders discussed their plans for the National Day of Actions on the housing crisis on October 28th. The major demand nationally from organizations and coalitions working on housing and on the housing crisis is for the replacement of Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) director Ed Demarco. FHFA oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which has for the past six years, refused to do principal reduction, a practice that allows homeowners to pay on the current value of their home. This is ultimately cheaper for banks than foreclosure (1), but more importantly keeps families and family businesses in their homes. A later conversation with a BTA leader revealed to me how little support organizers feel from student organizations on college campuses. He wondered to me: why aren’t students organizing talks and lectures about this? Isn’t this an urban planning program? This issue and this demand is important – students and professors can have so much more influence on issues like this!

This was important to me because, as a new organizer who plans to continue to work in Boston on a range of planning issues, it gave me pause about whether I had some missed opportunities by not focusing more on how students at MIT and in my planning program at DUSP can partner with communities and community organizers to raise the profile of issues like these and increase pressure on targets as part of an organizing strategy. Further, however, it emphasized to me the importance of our codesign project because I think ultimately I want community members and leaders to feel like they have the tools to design projects that tell their stories, weave their own narratives, and win real policy changes – with or without support from people they might feel have more power. I hope this project accomplishes this, or at least encourages dialogue about it.

(1) http://clvu.org/sites/default/files/uploads/fhfa-demarco-letter.pdf

See draft Project Proposal here.