The following is a transcript of the video above, from NPQ’s joint webinar with Shelterforce: “Housing as a Public Good: The State of Social Housing Today.” View the full webinar and read the full webinar transcript here.

Rae Chen Huang: What’s the opportunity and what is the promise right of what we can do now in this moment? That, I think, really is at the local and state levels. And I’m really excited about this.

And the fact that because the federal government is basically pulling away from their ability to do their job to support the needs for our local and state-level work—what it means is that the local and state-level legislators are in a moment where they are trying to think creatively about what they can possibly do.

There is an opening right now, where people are looking for real solutions, where they’re looking to figure out what to do. And this is the opportunity to really mobilize people to say, “Well, we can change the situation for ourselves.”

It builds out into what we can do on a federal level eventually. And so, the things and opportunities we have right now is that there are local campaigns of organizers who are, for example, reclaiming homes that have been neglected by the state.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of the El Sereno campaign, the Reclaim our Homes campaign here in Los Angeles—and sorry I’m highlighting California so much but this is where I live and this is where I work—but where we had unhoused family members and individuals take over buildings that were for decades left alone because the state had originally planned on building a highway through this area. So, they bought a bunch of homes, properties, and then they just left them vacant. And they haven’t done anything with them.

And so unhoused organizers decided to get together and claim those homes, and say, “Look, the state needs to do something with these homes.” And they’re right now trying to purchase those homes and put it into a community land trust, so that these homes are actually going to be used.

It is at this level—at the local and state level—that we are able to really build the kind of organizing power and movement to push our elected [officials] and to be able to build a case for the level of expectation of what we need and have a larger imagination about what it means for us to have a housing system that actually provides for everybody.