Housing Resiliency is a LISC Priority

Resilience as a scholastic theory has been evolving over the past 70-80 years and has enjoyed a renaissance in the past two or three decades. However, I would argue that resilience as a practical form of survival for under-resourced communities and BIPOC people has always been simply a way of life. Under-resourced communities as a whole have never had the luxury of sitting back and waiting for market corrections to change their outcome. They have always had to have a spirit of resiliency if they wanted to survive.

I would offer it is that spirit of resiliency that has helped LISC as a national organization grow to over 35 markets across the country. However, unlike any other time in our country’s history, resiliency has been tested in every form within the last five years. To that end, LISC Jacksonville, like many of our partners, has taken up resiliency as one of the core tenements that guide our work. On the ground, that translates into three fundamental strategies for us in the area of Affordable Housing:

• Production – We view the work associated with Project Boots addresses this. Project Boots is our bold, audacious plan to work with our local CDC’s and for-profit builders to build homes that meet the demands of essential workers (teachers, law enforcement officers, firefighters, etc.). It is my belief that we have to make neighborhoods, particularly those north of downtown, destinations to live for the class of workers previously referenced. 
• Preservation – This includes our work associated with home repair. Indigenous people to a community must be supported because they are the fiber and the back story to all that has happened there. Therefore, as a resiliency strategy, we have made home repair a part of our Affordable Housing work.
• Protection – Our work in this area is probably the work I am most excited about because it addresses the issue of heirs’ property and the residential property appraisals and taxation system within some of our most vulnerable communities. It also affords us an opportunity to partner with the University of Florida’s Shimberg Center for Housing Studies and other key partners. 

Over the next nine months, LISC will invest $25,000 in legal services to preserve title ownership and sustain $1 million of assessed home values, which furthers LISC’s Project 10X goal of generating lasting equity and wealth through homeownership.

While the work of LISC Jacksonville is no panacea relative to affordable housing, it represents one aspect of the work that has to be done in the resiliency space. It represents more than the occasional lip service and scholastic treatment that is often levied upon those who live in under-resourced communities.