[Excerpt]
In the early 1980s, when I was a tenant organizer in Brooklyn’s predominantly Black East Flatbush neighborhood, a local minister told me about a plan to build single-family homes in nearby Brownsville. I stifled my disbelief. Only a few weeks earlier, a tenant leader and I had stood on the roof of her building and looked eastward toward Brownsville, watching as a fire consumed an apartment building—an arsonist had set it alight....
I was too pessimistic. A few years earlier, a group of ministers had met in a church basement in Brownsville with Edward Chambers, an organizer from the Industrial Areas Foundation. Based in Chicago, the IAF had been started in the 1940s by the tough-talking activist Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s approach to organizing became axiomatic for IAF branches around the country: Teach people to wield power, and never do for others what they could do for themselves....
The IAF has seeded fraternal organizations in other borough that have helped build 2,800 more Nehemiah homes in New York, along with schools. In each residential development, prospective homeowners are required to have good credit and must be able to make a down payment. During the foreclosure crisis brought on by the 2008 recession, Black and Latino neighborhoods in the city were particularly affected, and deed theft was rife. But little of that sadness was visited upon Nehemiah homes. Their foreclosure rate remained below 1 percent.
Over more than four decades, residents of the various Nehemiah developments have acquired something precious...
[Photo Credit: Christopher Khani / The Atlantic]
The Left Shouldn't Demonize Homeowners, The Atlantic [pdf]
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Industrial Areas Foundation published this page in Updates 2026-03-09 12:30:55 -0500