Research & Policy Advocacy

Use the extraction metaphor to document and explain how wealth and resources are pulled out of communities.

Research often documents what communities have lost: declining wages, displacement, underfunded services, lost wealth. The extraction metaphor can help explain how those losses happen. Just as mining or drilling removes something valuable from the earth and carries it elsewhere, economic systems can pull wealth from communities and concentrate it in the hands of corporations, investors, and other powerful interests.

See it in action

Instead of:
Residents in the neighborhood experience high housing-cost burdens, with 48 percent spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent.

Try:
Like a drilling operation that pulls valuable resources out of the ground, rising rents are extracting more and more wealth from this neighborhood. Nearly half of renters now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, moving millions of dollars each year from residents’ paychecks to property owners and investors.

For a headline:
How Corporate Landlords Are Drilling Wealth Out of Our Neighborhoods

Use evidence to show how race was constructed to justify exploitation and dispossession and how those systems continue to shape inequality today.

Research often documents racial disparities without explaining how race itself was created and used to justify taking land, exploiting labor, and concentrating wealth and power. Policy research can make this history visible and show how its legacy continues through decisions about land, labor, housing, taxation, public investment, and political power.

See it in action

Instead of:
Black households are significantly less likely than white households to own their homes.

Try:
Race has long been used to justify who could own land, build wealth, and benefit from public investment. Housing policies put those ideas into practice, expanding opportunities for many white families while excluding many Black families. Those choices helped create today’s racial homeownership and wealth gaps, and their effects continue across generations

For a headline:
Racism Shaped Who Could Build Wealth. Policy Can Build Something Different.

Use research to clarify what’s at stake, who has the power to change it, and what communities are fighting to win.

Policy communications can easily slip into the language of neutral “recommendations” or “stakeholder input.” But policy change often happens because organized people fight over how resources, rights, and decision-making power are distributed. Research can help make that contest visible.

See it in action

Instead of:
Residents have expressed concerns about proposed cuts to public transit and should be included in decisions about future service.

Try:
Transit riders and workers are fighting decisions that would cut bus routes while directing public resources toward projects that benefit developers and wealthy areas. They are organizing to keep public dollars working for the people who rely on transit every day—and to win a transportation system built around communities rather than private profit.

For a headline:
The Fight Over Transit Is a Fight Over Who Our Public Resources Serve

Use evidence not only to document injustice, but to demonstrate that policies can work differently.

Research products often devote most of their space to proving the severity of a problem, leaving solutions until the final page. That can unintentionally make injustice seem enormous and entrenched. Evidence can instead help build a sense that systems are changeable because people have changed them before.

See it in action

Instead of:
Community land trusts are one potential policy option for addressing housing affordability.

Try:
Black and indigenous communities across the country are already showing that housing doesn’t have to operate as an engine of extraction. Community land trusts take land out of the speculative market and put communities in control of it, helping preserve affordability over time.

For a headline:
We Know How to Keep Housing Affordable. Communities Are Already Doing It.

Use research to help people see what a different distribution of resources and power could actually produce.

Policy advocacy is often strongest when it doesn’t only establish what should stop, but makes the alternative concrete. Research can help put numbers around the future movements are fighting for.

Go deeper

Model the alternative.

What would happen if wages increased, rents stabilized, land shifted into community ownership, or public investment increased?

See it in action
If the city redirected $X currently spent on developer subsidies, it could fund X permanently affordable homes, X additional teachers, and X new public transit routes.

For a report headline:
What We Could Build With the Wealth Our Community Already Creates