A few years ago, the Delaware Housing Coalition added an important sentence to its mission statement. It is this one:

This sentence reflected the conclusion of the board of directors of DHC that the limitations of advocacy by itself prevented the organization and its membership from having the kind of effect on affordable housing which they hoped to have. Much of our effort, as a group of people dedicated to improving the housing prospects of the most vulnerable, leans in the direction of fulfilling this part of the mission statement, because it is the keystone of our work, as we now understand it.

One of the marks of a good organizer is the ability to listen, to invite the people that she is hoping to help organize, to think and to speak. A recent article in The Catholic Worker, remembering Father Rutilio Grande, one of the first priests to be murdered by the death squads in El Salvador, spoke of this quality. A woman who had known him said that he asked her what she thought. And this was the first time that such a thing had every happened to her.

By listening and by inviting those most affected by the lack of affordable housing to think and investigate and speak about the situation, we do not just become better advocates. Nor do we do it just because they do, indeed, have many good things to say. Most of all, we make this invitation because, otherwise, we will not understand and will not make the changes that we need to make within ourselves.

We make such an effort not just to struggle with others whom we consider wrong, but in order to struggle with what we find wrong within us. We know that we must continually do the work that will allow us to be intimate with the reality of those on the bottom of the housing market and the underside of the power curve. If we do not do this work, then we are liable to the oppressive attitude which sees the poor and powerless as "objects of assistance," problems for us to solve. Once we succumb to this mentality, we have given up treating oppressed people as human beings and abandoned the attempt to understand.

This invitation to those on the margins to identify their problems for themselves and to conceive of ways to act upon them is often misconstrued by some in the community who find the words and actions to be harsh and unfair. This is a theme which runs through our relations with some housing officials, management professionals, and others. We seem to them, they say, to be sponsoring reckless and hurtful thoughts, words, and deeds.

But embedded in these criticisms often lie a number of unspoken themes.

One of the most prevalent of these themes is that those who possess and control, those who represent property and power should have a latitude that the poor should not. This is sometimes expressed directly, by a "public servant," for instance, telling a tenant that she has no reason to need to know a particular fact or to understand a particular regulation, even in the face of the tenant’s having already demonstrated her understanding.

It is also expressed by default in the behavior of a management company representative, for example, who tells a group of elderly tenants who are trying to organize a democratic resident organization, that they need to be thinking about moving.

So, this theme, albeit unspoken, is that those without power need to be kept quiescent. The theme is dominance. The implication is that the tenant with the inquiring mind or the elders with a desire to organize are living precariously and ought to remain passive objects of other people’s agency, not becoming agents on their own behalf. As Paulo Freire puts it: "The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time – everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal."

This social, political, and cultural dominance leads to situations in which elected officials think it is alright to hold public hearings on housing issues at which they speak and do not listen.

This dominant mentality leads to situations in which an owner can walk away from a public contract that leaves one hundred more families without permanency in their affordable housing. And in the process of being "helped," the tenants are subjected to criminal background checks, sudden mandatory interviews, and suggestions from those "helping" that they should just move.

This mentality of dominance leads to situations in which it is acceptable to create "mixed income" housing in Wilmington where a very-low-income housing development is demolished and finds it equally acceptable to balk at creating similar "mixed income" communities in the outlying, more affluent county.

This mentality of dominance leads to situations in which managers of manufactured home parks have sometimes acted with impunity to create new park rules and levy new park fees at their whim.

This mentality of dominance seeks, when a disabled, homeless woman speaks up about her inability to find suitable housing, to find reasons why she is at fault for her plight. Yet this mentality does not seek with equal zeal to investigate the management company with empty, subsidized units, for which she is qualified, to which she has applied, and from which she has been denied access for almost a year.

This mentality of dominance sees the solution to blighted neighborhoods and mistreated renters in disciplining people to become traditional homeowners, taking the individualistic route to salvation. It sees no hope in other, social forms of ownership that are modeled after the school of thought that begins from the recognition that salvation must be collective or not at all. It sees landlords, truly as Land Lords, with the individual’s only hope being to become his or her own little Lord.

The actions which arise from such a mentality are often received by the vulnerable people who are their object, as dis-empowering, arbitrary, dictatorial, and alienating. They are felt by them as class and race prejudice, often overlaid with professional condescension. As Sadie Nance, President of the Delaware State Wide Association of Tenants, says: "It’s social bigotry."

At DHC we respect the capacity of human beings to know and to change their own reality. We recognize that this is true of all people, and that the poor, powerless, and precarious are not devoid of this capacity and can work together to change the conditions which prevent them from obtaining safe, decent, and affordable housing. While the mentality of dominance, composed of the effluents of our collective existence, permeates our way of life; we heartily seek to be free of this state of mind. For we know that it will not lead to housing solutions, because it does not embrace and nurture human liberation.