At Making Housing and Community Happen, we work with people of all faiths and anyone who wants to work for housing justice.

As we work with people of faith, we urge everyone to draw deep from their faith tradition for inspiration and motivation and ways to speak to others in their faith community to organize them for the work of housing justice.

Most of us come from various Christian faith traditions, and so we have developed a biblical theology of housing and land justice.

We are seeking those who can provide the same sort of thing from other faith traditions, so if you know of anyone who can help us, please reach out to me at bert@makinghousinghappen.org.

At this point, though, we have a biblical theology of housing and land justice, and that is what I talk about in this episode.

The intersection of racial justice and housing justice in the United States his huge, and a lot of our work highlights and addresses this intersection.

This episode is a short talk that Pastor Len Tang, of Missio Community Church in Pasadena, gave at the May 8, 2024 gathering of the Clergy Community Coalition at First Baptist Church of Pasadena.

This talk is aimed at Christian churches, urging them to do the work of racial justice, including housing justice, looking at the history and the geographical structure of our city.

In this episode, I interview Brendan Poon, an amazing high school student who interned with us to work on Pasadena's rent control campaign, and also Jill Shook, the co-founding ED of MHCH about Pasadena's rent control campaign and other tenant protection campaigns in Pasadena.

We are very thankful to the Pasadena Tenants Union who led the campaign for Rent Control in Pasadena and feel privileged and honored to have been able to contribute to it and finally to celebrate this amazing victory!

Rent Control Resources

1. http://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control/ (From an economist showing that supply and demand does not work much in housing (compares to minimum wage)

2. https://shelterforce.org/2018/03/28/rent-control-works/ (counters Stanford study)

3. https://www.tenantstogether.org/paper-challenges-misguided-stanford-rent-control-study

4. Zillow principal economist links high rent burden to rising homelessness: https://www.housinghumanright.org/corporate-landlords-excessive-rents-fuel-homelessness-rent-control-will-save-lives/