LYNN — The Essex County Community Organization (ECCO) received a $100,000 grant to be used over three years from the Cummings Foundation’s 2022 grant cycle. The funds will be going toward a campaign on affordable housing that ECCO, a multi-faith network of 59 congregations and the North Shore Labor Council, is spearheading.
“We are doubling down on fighting for affordable housing in Lynn and across the North Shore,” ECCO Executive Director Rabbi Margie Klein Ronkin said. “As our leaders of color told us during the pandemic and after, that lack of housing is the number one challenge in their lives.”
When ECCO members researched this, they learned of historic racist housing policies in the North Shore and nationally. Those polices, Klein Ronkin said, have “been a driver of the racial wealth gap.”
For the campaign, the organization will bring together people from different faith communities, racial backgrounds, and income levels to advocate for affordable housing. Klein Ronkin said there are three main ways ECCO will be doing this.
“First is that we are working to get national ARPA, or American Rescue Plan Act, funds that are coming to cities and towns to be allocated toward affordable housing, and especially in ways that the community has a say in how that money is spent,” Klein Ronkin said.
Secondly, the campaign will focus on rent-stabilization measures.
“Rents are just skyrocketing and the cost of living is going up, but incomes are not going up at the same rate,” Klein Ronkin said. “We’re also calling for an increase in vouchers for extremely low-income families to live in market-rate apartments and we’re explicitly advocating that those vouchers be available to residents, regardless of immigration status.”
The third sector of the campaign is geared toward changing local zoning laws to prioritize affordable housing and inclusion. This, she said, is the biggest and hardest part of the campaign.
The Commonwealth’s Housing Choice Initiative allows for more multifamily housing to be built in MBTA towns and cities, which in turn creates more affordable housing, Klein Ronkin said.
“People are fighting hard to stop it, because they don’t want low-income people and people of color to move into their town, so we are working for that and also for other zoning changes that would make it possible for there to be more affordable housing or to explicitly require affordable housing,” Klein Ronkin said.
ECCO has already made progress with the campaign, she said.
“Our biggest win so far is that we were able to get the Lynn mayor and City Council to allocate $15 million of ARPA funds to affordable housing and to designate $5 million of those funds to be community-guided,” Klein Ronkin said.
Cummings Foundation Grants Manager Andrew Bishop said they are honored to work with ECCO, along with the other 139 organizations that received a grant for the 2022 cycle.
“We’re delighted to also have awarded over the years many, many grants to the city of Lynn, and we believe that’s a community with so much vibrancy and potential, and we’re happy to be invested in the city,” Bishop said.
