Housing After Dark Episode 10: Maeve Elise Brown on Remembering the Foreclosure Crisis and Debt's Radioactive Half-life
Description
Maeve Elise Brown came into my housing life in 2017. I was working with Steve King at Oakland Community Land Trust and Anna Cash, who is now at the City of Berkeley, on what we called Housing Vulnerability Analysis. This was our attempt to develop a way of seeing housing in a city through a simple question: how vulnerable was any given resident to being displaced (for whatever reason). One thing we discovered in this analysis was that low income homeowners were some of the most vulnerable people in Oakland. They had, and still have, few specific legal protections, or outside sources of financial support and even fewer advocates. We knew this in part because Maeve, and the organization she helped found and now directs, HERA (Housing and Economic Rights Advocates) is one of those rare advocates. Since that time, Maeve has always been one of the people that I could count on being clear eyed on the challenges that low income and BIPOC folks face when it comes to holding onto their housing, whether they rent, own, or somewhere in between. I hope you enjoy our conversation, which ranges from remembering the foreclosure crisis to why credit has become so important to housing of all kinds.
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