The places where people live and work are not just physical; they are deeply political. For too long, these places have been deliberately structured through policy, the built environment, and social systems to prevent people of color from securing housing, land, and generational wealth. It’s a common story in this country: a thriving neighborhood is torn apart to make way for a highway or oil pipeline, or an exclusionary zoning law prevents affordable housing from being built. But less commonly heard are the stories of people coming together to right these historic and present injustices.
Over the last year, Black- and Indigenous-led movements to reclaim land and demand reparations have gained national attention. These efforts fall under a broader movement for reparative spatial justice — which aims to reckon with, repair, and transform the historic and ongoing housing inequities experienced by marginalized Black, Indigenous, and Brown communities. From Indigenous land rematriation in Ohlone territory to housing grants addressing the history of redlining in Evanston, Illinois, community members are transmuting the impacts of racist policies and creating a new paradigm for land and housing in the United States that is decoupled from exploitative systems while also putting people and land first.
Generations of discriminatory land and housing policies have baked inequality into the space around us. Centuries of chattel slavery and settler colonialism mean that the very foundation of our housing system is built on stolen land and labor. The scale of Indigenous land theft is staggering: Since the end of the 18th century, Indigenous peoples have lost approximately 1.5 billion acres of ancestral land due to forced removals, broken treaties, and violent displacement. Similarly, the displacement of Indigenous communities and the forced removal of Black communities under the guise of “urban renewal” — or “Negro removal,” according to James Baldwin — have left scars on the landscape.
According to the National Institutes of Health, a person’s ZIP code is among the strongest determinants of educational outcomes, health indicators, access to clean air and water, and even life expectancy. Our present-day infrastructure — from neighborhoods and highways to parks, cities, rural towns, and suburbs — is shaped by compounding histories of redlining, urban renewal, discriminatory lending and zoning practices, disinvestment, and gentrification. For instance, between 1934 and 1962, 98% of the $120 billion in home loans backed by the federal government were issued to White borrowers, effectively locking Black and Brown people out of homeownership opportunities for generations. The reparative spatial justice movement recognizes that we cannot truly achieve equity without repair, without reckoning with this history.
Communities around the country are seeking to rectify past harms that continue today. Some are pursuing direct restitution for theft, like the Shasta Indian Nation, which won the return and restoration of 2,800 acres of ancestral land this year that was seized by California a century ago. This is a significant milestone: It’s the largest land return in the state’s history. Others are demanding compensation for wealth and assets lost due to generations of discriminatory policies. Perhaps most notably, the city of Evanston established the Restorative Housing Program in 2021, making it one of the nation’s first local reparations programs to acknowledge Black residents harmed by 50 years of discriminatory zoning practices. It provides funds to victims or their descendants to support homeownership, home improvement, and mortgage assistance.
However, reparative spatial justice is not just about repairing the harms of the past — it’s about preventing future harm too. In Kentucky, the Louisville Tenants Union grew tired of watching public subsidies fund development projects to gentrify historically Black neighborhoods. The union lobbied for and helped secure passage of an ordinance prohibiting developers from accessing public funding for projects that fuel displacement. And while the ordinance originally focused on historically Black neighborhoods, it eventually expanded to protect other communities across the city.
In a similar effort, the Lahaina Community Land Trust is working to keep Native Hawaiians in their homes after last year’s catastrophic West Maui fires. Their vision is to promote community land ownership by addressing generations of colonization, gentrification, and overtourism, all of which have led to water scarcity and environmental degradation that made the region more vulnerable to fires. The Trust is using Indigenous, place-based knowledge to create a future in which Lahaina is once again a place of abundance.
Reparative spatial justice can also address environmental racism and restore a community’s connections to its land. In Africatown, Alabama — a town founded by a group of West Africans brought here on the last known illegal trafficking ship of enslaved people — decades of industrial development and pollution have led to elevated rates of cancer. Today, environmental justice organizations like Africatown C.H.E.S.S. are working to establish a safe zone prohibiting new industrial developments.
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At the root of this movement is a commitment to be in relationship with the land, to confront a history of dispossession and displacement by redefining collective relationships to housing and community. To some, this may sound idealistic — but there’s a reason why these projects are often attacked. They pose a threat to entrenched corporate power and help people imagine different lives beyond the status quo.
We see this in the attacks on the landmark housing reparations program in Illinois, where a conservative group filed a class-action lawsuit against Evanston, claiming the program was unfair to non-Black residents. Another Seattle program to fight displacement — which financed the construction of cultural and commercial spaces co-located with affordable housing developments — was subject to budget cut threats. Formerly redlined groups who organized to create this program fended off these attacks with public pressure and testimony. But these threats are a reminder to protect this movement, and that our communities have a significant role in expanding and defending these models.
Black, Indigenous, and Brown communities are advancing a new ethic of repair, grounded in the belief that looking to the past will help us to build new futures beyond what’s imaginable in our current systems. From Evanston to Africatown and beyond, they are creating a new paradigm for housing and land in the U.S., one that dismantles exploitative systems and builds new ones that prioritize communities. The seeds of this new paradigm are in the burgeoning reparative spatial justice movement. Now, it’s on all of us to help them grow.
Rasheedah Phillips is director of housing at PolicyLink, a national research institute that works to advance racial and economic equity. Tina Grandinetti is an associate of housing at PolicyLink.
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