Have innovative ideas to solve housing crisis? This group wants to hear them
A Holyoke housing cooperative will host a strategic conversation on Monday evening in an effort to create solutions to the ongoing crisis.
Sawna Caradwyn, director of finance and operations for Willow Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, said the group's goal is to leverage community assets to fashion housing in innovative ways.
"It's experimental," Caradwyn said, explaining the housing cooperative is only the second in the country after East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, based in Oakland, California.
The group is fiscally sponsored by Arise for Social Justice , an advocacy rights organization based in Springfield.
Monday's session will be the third for the group in the last few months. The goal, she said, is to find out where people are and to educate them on how to keep housing affordable.
This session will be co-hosted with Springfield No One Leaves, a grassroots housing group that is holding a rally on rent stabilization over the weekend.
"This is our way of re-indigenization," Caradwyn said. "Housing is a human right and shouldn't be for profit." The session will focus on community members' relationships with housing entities in the region.
The previous meetings have been more focused on what kinds of projects residents want to see come out of the cooperative.
Examples include using old shipping containers to build housing or to convert old building spaces to community housing and a garden space.
The cooperative's first project, a house and plot of land in Holyoke known as Paradise Lot, is an "urban food forest," she said. That project came together in 2022.
Willow Permanent Real Estate Cooperative is run by two queer Black women in Western Massachusetts who believe housing is for everyone.
"We want to center people who have traditionally be disenfranchised by the system, but in order for solutions to work, we have to be cross-racial and cross-generational," she said.
The Monday meeting will be held at El Mercado at 413 Main St. in Holyoke from 6-8:30 p.m. The event will include food, community and strategizing.
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