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

Thanks for providing the opportunity to work with such an incredible organization here in Boston! It was a long and, at times, tiring process, but we really enjoyed designing the carnival games with CL/VU. We really thought through the ideas presented in the case study to ensure we were accurately translating the complex realities of the housing market into easy-to-understand and fun carnival games. We welcome and appreciate any feedback that would strengthen the games created. Look out for the carnival come spring!

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.

Having returned to the drawing board to gather more game ideas, this week we fleshed these out and considered how each speaks to one of the CLVU campaigns. One of the new game ideas will be tested at the corner of Prospect/Magazine and Mass Ave in Central Square, Cambridge from 3-5 pm on Monday December 2nd. If it works and we get positive feedback, we will incorporate it into the final toolkit along with the Corn Hole game. Our next focus group, which will be held with the CLVU member leadership team, will take up a third game. Our goal is to have 2-3 working games to include in the final toolkit.

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.”

After we did our first project iteration, we realized that we had stepped away from the fundamental reason why we connected carnival games to the housing market: they are both rigged with the appearance of being fair. What we had started to do was to create rigged games that were obviously unfair (see the last post about CLVU). Not only is that no fun, but it does not invite understanding of the rigged nature of the housing market.

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!