“Where’s the house?” Trisha James asked, leaning forward eagerly. She couldn’t contain her urgency; living each day house-to-house in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods had taken its toll. The shelters. The overcrowding. The uncertainty of whether anyone would even open the door.

The friend’s small house where James was staying that day, during a record-breaking heat wave, had 10 adult occupants, a rotating cast of their children and no indoor plumbing.

Martha Biggs smiled at her friend knowingly. Both women had been evicted from Cabrini Green, the city’s now-demolished housing complex, and spent years as homeless mothers. She knew that James would like the house, a modest Bank of NY Mellon-owned home on the South Side that had yet to be completely stripped for parts and trashed by gangs. The team had already secured it....

Originally published in the Baltimore Sun, Movement Catalyst's grassroots partners who have been working with Occupy Our

Homes Baltimore argue for a human right to housing framework in this June 2012 article.

Movement Catalyst has been globetrotting this spring! South Africa, New York, Baltimore, Madison, Chicago: we taught, learned, and came home inspired...