By: Amy Peltier, COALITION AND ADVOCACY DIRECTOR
After years of a professional focus on community based economic and workforce development, I am thrilled to bring my expertise to the dynamic world of housing. I have always identified as an advocate. Growing up with parents who were educators and administrators in special education, I knew early on that public institutions and the systems they operate within did not work for everyone. I also came to realize that building coalition is vital when trying to make significant changes to entrenched and inequitable systems.
Coalition building leverages the strength of diverse groups, enhances legitimacy, creates a sense of shared solidarity and shared purpose and provides a support network to sustain long-term efforts of systems change. My professional career began in community organizing and has included decades of experience in community and economic development, navigating the complexities of coalition building among a diverse array of stakeholders.
As a community organizer in San Francisco, California, I worked with public housing tenants and criminal justice stakeholders, to have violence in areas with a concentration of public housing recognized as a public health crisis. In early 2000, I organized in public housing complexes in the Bayview and Hunter’s Point neighborhoods, a community boxed in on all sides by 4 dramatic boundaries: the iconic Pacific Coast Highway 101, the now-demolished Candlestick Park stadium that was home to million dollar Super Bowls and NFL teams, a United States Naval Shipyard toxic Superfund site, and the beautiful tidal estuaries of the San Francisco Bay. Hundreds of people resided in densely packed complexes with federal HOPE IV and then SF HOPE federal housing vouchers. Unjust race and class-based city planning could not have been more evident. Outdated homes that were made for temporary World War II factory workers now sheltered families. Forty percent of residents lived below the federal poverty line and the majority were Black, relegated to what has become known as the “last Black neighborhood in San Francisco”. More recently, the crime rates in those neighborhoods were reported to be 161% higher than the national average and households need to earn at least $116,400 to afford the average monthly rent and taxes of $4,000.
Continued disinvestment and historic toxic patterns (both literal and otherwise) of systemic racism has made it impossible for families of color to survive in these communities. Even so, these neighborhoods, in 2016, had some of the highest black homeownership rates in the state. Though those rates have since declined, the community is coalescing to build thousands of new homes. The dense confluence of paths to prosperity and dire poverty next door to each other are illustrative of the deep disparities and the uneasy coexistence of communities across the country, including here in CT, where some can afford a sustainable or even prosperous living situation, in a community of their choice, but many cannot.
My experience in California showed me there were diverse ways to advocate for change, and I returned to New England to attend law school. As a systems thinker, I know that events and components of communities are interconnected parts of a larger, complex, dynamic system. During law school I worked on projects supporting residents after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans who needed access and accountability regarding temporary housing and other services from FEMA. I took survivor statements from Liberians for the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address human rights abuses. I wrote briefs and memos trying to establish more advantageous guidelines for minor youth accused of criminal behavior and domestic violence victims. Post law school, I spent almost 10 years as a public defender with the state of Massachusetts seeking criminal justice for indigent and most frequently young Black men. Examining broad systems that contribute to an ecosystem requires understanding that there is interdependency among legal precedent, lived experiences of marginalization or oppression, and power dynamics and accountability. This interdependency is historically and intentionally rooted in injustice, and must be torn out if we are to develop more effective, equitable and sustainable solutions.
About five years ago, I was asked to be part of the CT TwoGen Advisory Board by CT State Representative Jeff Currey. My role on the Advisory Board was to Co-Chair the Family Economic Mobility work group. In this role I have convened dozens of private, public and community partners, researched and testified about public benefits and the benefit cliff landscape, and recommended policy changes that would shift incentives and increase economic well-being, mobility and social impact for working families. That team is currently working with federal and local stakeholders in developing a benefit cliff pilot initiative, which aims to create economic mobility for low wage earners, while they maintain any public assets. Through this work, a coalition of parent leaders with lived experience has been critical in elevating the message that housing subsidies and choice are a priority to be maintained, despite minimal rising incomes.
In my position as the Director of East Hartford Works for the town of East Hartford (a municipal economic and workforce development initiative), I worked with a broad range of regional stakeholders on solutions to address the challenges that our current workforce system and labor market created for low wage earners. My team successfully piloted innovations in the field including design and implementation of a place-based “learn and earn” program for the town and beginning a “Basic Needs Support” Fund (BNSF). Our research showed that a main barrier to sustainable and wage increasing employment is the lack of access to affordable and sustainable housing. Over half of the BNSF will support low-income residents’ housing needs from eviction avoidance to rental supports and fund a partnership with Habitat for Humanity to cover closing costs for new homes being built in East Hartford. None of those successes would have been possible without those committed coalitions among partners that did not always have the same mission, but those that aligned and worked together toward a shared outcome.
I believe that the systemic change needed to affect housing affordability and choice in Connecticut will require persistent direction from multiple lenses: challenging the systems that have institutionalized inequality, intentionally and genuinely engaging diverse leadership, building coalitions that share space and power among those with lived experience and marginalization, and communicating progress accurately so efforts are responsive and transparent to all. I am excited to share and hone my experience and passion with the Partnership’s strategic efforts to advance housing opportunities for all CT residents.