Indigenous Tribe, Exempt from Zoning Laws, Builds 6,000 Affordable Housing Units
Plus, join Jonathan's Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimage
Hi everyone,
This week, we’re talking about:
- Experiments with more robust welfare in the US
- An Indigenous tribe, exempt from zoning laws, building affordable housing
- Ryan Gainer, and police encounters with neurodivergent Black people
- The American lobbying behind homophobic legislation in Africa
- And Jonathan keeps us grounded with a Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimage
If you missed it earlier this week, please read Jonathan’s essay on the barrier to rest that is racism. Or watch Jonathan read it on YouTube below. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel while you’re there!
Jonathan’s Recommendations
No-Strings Cash Aid for New Moms in Flint
In Flint, Michigan, every new mother will receive $1500 while they are pregnant, and $500 per month for their child’s first year of life. Fifty percent of the children there live below the poverty line, and childhood poverty is linked to a wide range of negative outcomes later in life. This extra money will be especially helpful for new parents feeling financial pressure to return to work, but who cannot afford childcare. In 2021, the short-lived expanded child tax credit nearly cut the child poverty rate in half and credit scores rose to the highest levels they’ve ever been. That tax credit expired when pandemic aid ended. Localities across the country are now experimenting with new cash assistance programs that are common in wealthy countries globally, but outliers in the US. Research consistently shows this kind of cash aid works, and this program is an answer to the prayers of many.
Indigenous Tribe, Exempt from Zoning Laws, Builds 6,000 Affordable Housing Units
The United States isn’t the only country with an affordable housing crisis. Many cities in our neighbor to the North, Canada, also suffer from the zoning laws that restrict the development of affordable housing. But an unlikely landlord is stepping in to construct 11 towers with 6000 affordable apartments in Vancouver. The Squamish, a First Nations people, owns land right in the middle of the city that is under their authority and therefore exempt from the city’s zoning laws. In the linked article, Ilya Somin, a libertarian law professor from George Mason University, pushes back against the “not in my back yard” critics, as well as the mostly White and liberal people in Vancouver arguing that building high rises is not an “indigenous” way of doing things. If the descendants of Europeans get to develop land as they see fit, so too should its original inhabitants. Leaving the idols of the White church includes rejecting entrenched stereotypes that anything built by indigenous people must involve “‘rewinding the tape of history to some museum-diorama past.’” What the Squamish have envisioned is one decolonial possibility and I’m excited to see how it goes.
- Read about First Nations Developers in Canada
Sy’s Recommendations
Race, Neurodivergence, and the Police
(content warning: racist and ableist police violence) You may have heard that recently, a Deputy Sheriff in California shot and killed Ryan Gainer, a Black, autistic, 15-year-old boy. Instances of police brutality like this are, for me, enraging in such a specific way because there are so many overlapping institutional failures at play. On the rare occasions that police get any training on encountering people in mental health crises, the training has no demonstrable impact on police violence. Police often consider many autistic behaviors suspicious. Plus, mental health conditions can make comprehending and following orders difficult, or cause people to be overwhelmed when they are close to flashing lights and loud noises or voices. Compound these factors with police officers’ racial bias and their license to kill anyone who makes them feel threatened, and you have a recipe for constant, repeated tragedies. On top of all this, as I’ve noted before in this newsletter, there are existing alternatives to police for responding to mental health crises. I hope we all can pray and work with renewed urgency toward getting law enforcement out of our mental health responses in order to save lives.
- Read about police encounters with Black, neurodivergent people
American Lobbying behind Homophobic Legislation in Africa
Legislators in several African countries have recently passed a wave of homophobic laws, the most extreme of which make all same-sex relationships punishable by death. Behind these efforts are conservative American lobbyists, largely evangelicals, who have spent tens of millions of dollars getting the laws passed. This is important to understand because the forces behind the laws often portray themselves as fighting westerners who are pushing queerness on Africans. But as one Ugandan activist put it, “Ugandan society has always lived … with LGBTQ persons … The homophobia, the transphobia we are seeing … is from the West.” And unsurprisingly, an increase in violence against queer people has accompanied the legislation. I don’t pretend to be an expert in the social or political nuances here, but we need to know there is a very different narrative coming from queer Africans themselves on these issues than what we may hear from American Christians.
- Read about homophobic, Western lobbying in Africa
Staying Grounded with Jonathan
Amidst the suffering we see all around us, I need practices that keep me focused on the reality that the kingdom of God is still coming. One of those practices is embodied solidarity—being present to the needs of others. So this is how I’ve been trying to approach the genocide in Palestine. My family and I watched Rev. Munther Isaac’s powerful Christmas address from Bethlehem, and we responded to his call for Christians globally to take action by going to a rally for Palestine in Washington D.C. Then last week I attended one of the many Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimages run by church groups around the world. Followers of Jesus walked around the UN Building in New York City 25 times to represent the 25-mile Gaza Strip. Now, I am organizing my own Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimage on Good Friday, March 29 in New York City and I hope you will join us in person at Columbus Circle at 10:30 a.m. so we can practice embodied solidarity together. OR you can follow me on Instagram where I will stream some of the pilgrimage live.
- Get details for the pilgrimage and RSVP
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
Jonathan and Sy