Why We Do What We Do at Contact

Contact is an organization that supports affordable resident-owned housing and strong worker-owned businesses. We connect like-minded people together who want a world with more housing and work of this variety.

Let’s start with housing. The average home in the United States is over $400,000. This price is unaffordable for many Americans. Housing in the U.S. and in many other countries work based on investment and appreciation. For example, if you bought a house in the 1970s at $60,000 in San Francisco, the value of that house could balloon to $1 million. What was once an affordable home becomes unaffordable due to appreciation. It doesn’t have to be this way. At Contact, we largely believe that homes should be based on consumption rather than investment. We want the price of a home to reflect materials and labor cost, not appreciation because of location and market rates. One way we get to this economic reality is through community land trusts (CLT). CLTs lock the prices of land and housing to keep them permanently affordable so that home and land ownership is widely available for classes other than the upper middle class and the rich.

The other major housing issue is landlordism. Contact believes that we should all own our own homes, labor, time, and bodies. Having other people own and make money off things that are inextricably linked to your labor and personhood breeds conflict – verbal and physical. Relationships where people are treated as objects instead of subjects leads to crisis after crisis, rebellion after rebellion. Therefore, Contact supports housing that severs this relationship. On our website, we publicize housing cooperatives, social housing, and single-family home CLTs for this very reason.

You may be thinking, “How will I gain wealth if not through housing?” It’s a great question since much of the middle class has their wealth tied to homeownership, and the upper class and rich gain wealth through rent extraction. If massive wealth is what you want, you will have to gain it through other means. That is, direct labor or passive income that isn’t exploitative. This is not to say that owning a home will not be a part of wealth management. It still will be. Buying a home for $40K means you will get $40K back after the sale. Just as buying a home for $1 million will get you $1 million back post-sale. Prices will only slightly increase during the selling process because of inflation or the homeowner decided to add on to the property.

Owning a single-family home, even at an affordable price, is still a responsibility, however. Staying on top of mortgage payments, maintenance issues, and property taxes are a reality. Contact’s financial division offers counsel on this front, but we receive more questions about housing cooperatives and social housing in terms of their financial solvency since larger groups of people are owning the property together. In this vein, we only back housing cooperatives and social housing that are financially solvent. The models that we currently advertise reach this level of financial health just like any ethical business venture – through either a balanced budget or one that runs on a surplus, preferably the latter. To reach this level, the cooperatives have rainy day and capital funds that residents pay into.

In addition, our site publicizes shelters and transitional housing. The shelters we recommend must have private rooms/baths, and they must treat their residents with dignity and respect. Many of our neighbors experiencing homelessness deny shelter services because of privacy issues and strict stipulations. “You must be sober. You can only stay at the shelter at these specific times of the day. You can’t have an animal.” At Contact, we endorse shelters with less restrictions to meet more of the needs of our houseless population. Just like transitional housing, these models work best when support is privileged over stipulation. This includes mental health, domestic violence, and drug abuse support from dedicated professionals, otherwise known as wraparound services. And monetary support is just as key. Contact embraces these housing models that are consistently funded either through government, nonprofit, private donation, or a mix of all three.

Another common concern about some of these housing models is the developer question. In other words, which developers are willing to build housing where they cannot achieve maximum profit? Don’t worry. They exist and we work with them. They’re incentivized to build properties of this type not just through altruism but through, yes, profit. These developers have the opportunity to gain double (this is the norm), triple, or even quadruple the profit after the build, but the profit is capped. It won’t stretch into infinitude.

One last thing about housing. On our website, you will often see posts about land and duplex conversions. We sometimes have contributors who will ask us to post their home for sale because they are selling below their home’s current value for affordability purposes. We post these homes if they meet our affordability threshold, but this is not a sustainable practice. There’s no stopping the next buyer from selling the property at a much more expensive price. To keep prices affordable, we ask for CLT conversions, where buyers purchase land or a home and convert said property into a CLT. 

Our other major website section is about work. Contact’s housing philosophy is similar to our work philosophy. Workers are doing most of the work to maintain and sustain businesses, so they should own and run the business. This means democratic decision-making at the workplace. We are sometimes asked why Contact doesn’t post Hi Nabor jobs. Aren’t they worker-owned? They are not. The business is marketed as employee-owned, but even this description is a misnomer. Workers owning a fractional stock ownership at their place of employment is not worker ownership. Hi Nabor workers have no control over financial, architectural, scheduling, or inventory decisions.

One of the major misconceptions about worker-owned businesses is that all workers are paid the same. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Worker salaries are based on how much work they put into the company, and those pay schedules are decided through democratic decision-making. The major questions that people often have about this model are “How do you avoid in-fighting? How do you avoid workers running the business into the ground over conflicts related to pay or any other important parts involved in running a business?” First, workers have a rational self-interest in wanting their place of work to succeed. Otherwise, they’re out of a job to support themselves and their families. Second, businesses have limits. Workers can’t vote on having $1 million each in salaries if the business’s market cap is $3 million. Third, to answer these questions in another way, it’s important that we speak from experience. In the past and at present, Contact has advertised jobs at worker-owned businesses from various fields: restaurant, coffee, hospitality, medicine, entertainment, banking, and trades. They have all addressed the in-fighting and financial solvency questions in not very dissimilar ways. Their strategies have been a mixed bag of contractual obligations, strict hiring vetting, and leadership delegation. 

Comparable to the way we approach housing cooperatives and social housing, Contact only supports worker-owned businesses that are financially healthy. Many of the businesses we back reach financial health through innovation, community support (because of how well they take care of their customers and clients), balanced budgets, and a maintained surpluses. There is more crossover between our housing and work pages. Under the housing tab, one will sometimes see retail/commercial property for sale. Contact takes ownership seriously in all domains. Put another way, it is not enough for workers to own their labor and the business itself; they must also own the building and land where the business operates. So, a worker-owned business can buy the building or land itself, or a non-worker-owned business would need to transfer the property to a worker-owned business.

To be clear, what we do at Contact is not a political endgame. The amount of people who will participate in CLT conversions, build co-ops and social housing, and start worker-owned businesses in our current political and economic climate will not be enough to largely address affordable housing and workplace exploitation in the U.S. Contact is as much an educational service, informing the public about alternative housing and work models, as it is a puzzle piece, serving as an essential part of a housing and work justice whole. Currently, the country is in crisis mode. People live on the street. Slumlords refuse to make property livable. Tenants are rent-burdened. Many owners are mortgage-burdened themselves. In terms of work, the federal minimum wage is still $7.25. Wage theft runs rampant. And U.S. residents are having to take on two to three jobs to make ends meet. During moments of crisis, a few things tend to happen based on human history. First, we turn to government and laws. Seen from this vantage point, to fix this crisis, we could see housing price controls and landlord abolition. Likewise, we could also see an increase in the minimum wage and private property abolition. Second, mistreatment of the working class could reach such a fever pitch that workers violently revolt. If the powers at be want less government intervention and violence in the future, the option is still open to start the switch now to worker and resident ownership. But we know this is a large ask. Capital without fetters embraces cheap labor; it clings to an ownership structure that does little, passing all of the work to the workers while the owner receives most of the fruits of worker labor. 

Here, I think it’s best that we put things as simply as possible, lest there is any misunderstanding. Contact and organizations like us are, first and foremost, trying to create a world where people are not seen as things and property, objects that are primarily meant to produce capital and value for an ownership class. We’ve read the anarcho-capitalist and right-libertarian arguments about how what we have now is the best of all possible worlds because human greed and competition lifts all boats. We disagree with this argument because it leaves out that alternative systems to capitalism, especially ones that we are proposing, still have elements of competition, markets, profit motives, and capital -- they just don't use these elements with exploitation as its central aim. 

Contact is not in its final form. We focus now on affordable housing and worker-owned businesses, but later we plan to expand the website to address food insecurity and the skills gap. To address food insecurity issues, you will see locations for and opportunities to create community fridges, community gardens, food banks, Food Not Bombs, and Free the Food networks. For the skills gaps, you will find language-learning exchange co-ops, repair cafes, neighborhood trades workshops, and adult-learning programs at community colleges and four-year universities. Contact will get there in expanding its website, but at this time, we’re proud of the work we’ve done so far. Since Contact’s inception, we have, in many U.S. cities, towns, and states, exponentially increased affordable housing ownership and participation in worker-owned businesses.