Stephen Watts, 29, works as the cooperative housing developer for the Southeast Center for Cooperative Development.
Previous to his current job, he worked as youth safety and advocacy manager with the Black Mental Health Village and prior to that was the senior manager of social justice and advocacy with the YWCA Nashville & Middle Tennessee. He’s a young Millennial with a Gen Z sensibility.
Watts has as intersectional view of how his generation works in social justice and advocacy.
“There’s that group who sees political advocacy as primarily having to be bottom up,” Watts says about his generation. “We’re not really seeing a lot of opportunities for social mobility that are attractive to us. So instead of thinking about how we get to the top of a system that has already been built and make change, we’re primarily thinking about how we can be in solidarity with the people who we’re already standing beside.”
Do you feel your generation is reflected in the power structure that sets the rules in society?
No, I don’t. But I think the important thing that I remember is that being in the power structure is not the only way or even the best way to wield power. I think we also understand that being in that power structure limits power as well.
Not to get too political, but we see in Washington, D.C., right now where Congress seems powerless. And so one of the things I think about is not so much how do I move up this system to have more access to power? It’s more like, what power do I have access to right now by being in community, and how do I use it well. I think that’s really like the co-op spirit, which is really instead of saying, “Oh, I want to be an owner. I want to be part of this class.” It’s really saying, “Actually, let’s think about how we redistribute power because we are most proximate to what needs to happen.”
You are an upcoming leader and advocate in the low-income housing development arena. What are the biggest hurdles you see in Tennessee when it comes to access to housing for low-income people?
There are so many hurdles. The first one, and maybe even the most important one that comes to mind is this huge power imbalance between landowners and landlords and residents [that] is just so normalized. I think of it as renters are expected to be powerless, and that’s just the way it is. Landlords are expected to be powerful, and that’s just the way it is. And the same for people who own their home. They’re supposed to be powerful, and that’s the way it is, so that you aspire to either be a landowner or a homeowner or a landlord who is renting out space.
One of the things that I’ve encountered is that there are a lot of questions of how we can get people on the right side of this dynamic so that they have more power. There’s not a whole lot of questions about whether this dynamic is right.
One of the ways I’ve seen it recently was [when] I went with Court Watch 615 to Eviction Court at the opening of the winter storm docket. And even with all the work that so many advocates have put in to make sure that there are alternatives to evictions, I was so appalled by what we have normalized of people not being expected to deserve a place to live.
So when we’re thinking about low-income housing, before I’m even thinking about infrastructure, before I’m even thinking about policy, I’m really thinking about beliefs and the beliefs we’ve created around power, safety, who deserves it, who does not, and the things that you are expected to do to earn it.
What is the Southeast Center for Cooperative Development?
At the Southeast Center for Cooperative Development, a lot of our work has been in worker co-ops, thinking about worker-owned, worker-controlled workplaces. Instead of thinking of this idea of nicer bosses, you can think about it either as no bosses or everyone is a boss. So the values are really around transparency, accountability, and shared power.
When we think about cooperative housing, the values are the exact same. And when you think about worker co-ops, we’re talking about one of the most important things that we do in our life, which is labor. How do we spend our days in order to make enough money to provide for our basic needs. When you think about the home, it’s also one of the most important things that we do in our life, which is where do I feel safe? Where do I want to build community? Where do I want to stay?
At the Southeast Center, we’re really interested in working with faith-based partners, especially churches, but also other institutions of other faith traditions as well. They have land that they’re not sure what to do with or how to steward it well. And so the Southeast Center for Cooperative Development, we really want to be proactive in working with faith-based partners and thinking about how we use this land and place them in community land trusts or just make sure that they are long-term committed to public good. That’s something that we’re actively trying to build out.
Prior to working for the Southeast Center for Cooperative Development, you worked with youth around social justice and safety. Tell us a little about your goals and how you present yourself as a young leader in this work? What has gotten you where you are?
I’ll start by saying I’ve done a lot of things, and I do a lot of things. And I think of all of the work that I try to do in this city as community safety work, because it’s all about either making sure that there are systems that can meet people’s basic needs or that the harm that is caused by people’s basic needs not being met can be addressed. So there’s prevention on the front end. There’s harm reduction on the back end.
[When] I worked as the senior manager of social justice and advocacy at the YWCA Nashville, that was really impactful for me. YWCA Nashville runs the largest domestic violence shelter in the region. When people are escaping a bad situation, one of the hardest parts of getting them to a better situation is if there’s no housing in the city, there’s no place for them to go. And so the shelter is often, if not always, full. And when people are ready to go, because they’ve been through the program, there’s often no place for a permanent exit in Nashville.
That taught me a lot about the infrastructure concern. We want to care about folks who have been harmed and women who have been harmed and the most vulnerable in our society. But how can you do that if you don’t have the infrastructure for them to actually have a place to live or a place to leave people who are harming them?
Nashville seems to be focused on more affordable housing development. Is the city doing enough? What can Nashville do to improve its approach to equity, which includes access to affordable housing?
The first thought I have is, of course, we’re not doing enough. We’ve done so many studies about what needs to be done and how many houses need to be built and who they need to be built for. And every time we do a new study, we’re falling farther and farther behind.
We’re not concerned enough about just doing. Part of that is because we are so addicted to weighing institutional concerns [more heavily than] people’s needs that we’re kind of stuck because we’re just moving at the speed of comfort, and we’re moving at the speed that current infrastructure has capacity for instead of increasing that capacity by bringing new people, new voices, into the work, which would require sharing power.
I think we’re limited by the reluctance of people who have benefited from a vacuum of policy, rules, procedures, or accountability to actually share power. It limits the way that we can actually address this work. And because they’re not being harmed by it, I don’t know how that system changes.
What I would say in terms of things that I would like to change, there are a couple of things that immediately come to mind. I really do think there just needs to be more invested in cooperatives and other social housing projects that don’t expire into unaffordability.
When you see LIHTC (Low-Income Housing Tax Credit) properties, they usually have 15- to 30-year affordability restrictions and then quickly become market-based properties. One of the goals needs to be preservation and not just preservation as ideology, but preservation as policy. And the easiest way to do that is to redistribute power to the residents already living in some of these properties, making sure that there are policies that give them either the option to make decisions or run it or to own it and buy it. That’s the cooperative model. There are other social housing models that others know more about.
[Another thing] that immediately comes to mind is, what are we going to do with all this public land that Nashville has? We see it given away to billionaires, but we don’t see it being given away to the people that we’re saying we need to serve or that need it way more badly than Teslas need it.
What else would you like to share?
I just want to say the way we think about economics, traditionally, we look at metrics that tell us how much rich people are accumulating. That’s a lot of the obsession with home prices going up and with the market. I think it’s really important to reevaluate what those metrics are actually measuring. Especially Nashville, that’s a city that is both obsessed with growth and concerned with growth. We don’t have the metrics to measure the actual impact well.
What’s been hard for me is to see decision makers, who are really far from the impact, value only the metrics that impact them. Because what it means for them for the economy to be improving, like stock prices increasing, has no effect on what it means for people on the ground.