As a community organizer and then as executive director of the Washington Inner-City Self Help organization, Linda Leaks helped protect affordable housing in DC by helping residents organize limited equity housing cooperatives. (Photo by Sam Levitan courtesy of Cooperative Development Foundation)

jonetta rose barras: DC housing co-op warrior Linda Leaks receives well-deserved national honor

By jonetta rose barras On Oct 6, 2023 Last updated Oct 13, 2023

When Linda Leaks first got word that she would be inducted into the Cooperative Hall of Fame this week, she told me: “I did what Harriet Tubman did when she crossed the border into freedom. I [pinched] myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.”

Interestingly, Leaks has lived much of her professional life as a dreamer and maybe even has emulated Tubman by leading DC residents, mostly the poor and working class, away from rental housing into homeownership.

Leaks is one of the first DC housing organizers to be inducted into the Hall of Fame during the award’s 50-year history. Its sponsor, the Cooperative Development Foundation, “promotes self-help and mutual aid in community, economic, and social development through cooperative enterprise” and “is a thought leader in the use of cooperatives to create resilient communities.” It is the nonprofit affiliate of the National Cooperative Business Association.

Leaks took on her co-op building assignment in the 1980s, first as a community organizer and then as executive director of the Washington Inner-City Self Help organization. A nonprofit created by a collaboration of 40 churches, WISH was headquartered inside an administrative building of St. Augustine Catholic Church at 15th and V streets NW. Under Leaks’ leadership, WISH was at the vanguard of the city’s affordable housing movement for decades.

She and her colleague, Benito Diaz, have been credited with helping provide over 400 units of affordable housing through the creation of more than 30 limited equity housing cooperatives. The majority — though not all — of the cooperatives have survived. It remains an extraordinary feat.

What is also remarkable is that certain members of the DC Council’s far-left wing and I agree that Leaks deserves special recognition — talk about pinching oneself! This week the legislature unanimously approved a resolution jointly introduced by Charles Allen, Brianne Nadeau, Anita Bonds, Janeese Lewis George, Matthew Frumin, Christina Henderson, Zachary Parker, Robert White and Trayon White, declaring Oct. 5 Linda Leaks Day in DC.

That was an auspicious day for a few other folks: Civic leader and political activist Philip Pannell was honored by the Anacostia Coordinating Council for his 30 years of working in and later leading the organization. The late Amiri Baraka, co-founder of the Black Arts Movement, was celebrated at George Washington University’s Gelman Library Special Collections Research Center, where his papers are housed. That event was organized by the staff there and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller.

While DC currently is in a quasi-state of chaos with the government floundering — or, as one council member put it, there is anarchy in the streets — there are still many ordinary citizens doing extraordinary things. In the coming months, I hope to bring some of those stories to you in this space.

If Baraka were still alive, I am certain he would declare Leaks and the work in which she was engaged from 1978 to 2003, very cool and extremely important in the fight of the working class.

I met Leaks back in the late 1980s as I was joining the local staff of daily reporters at The Washington Times newspaper. My beat was housing and economic development. She and Diaz were ubiquitous; together they were goliaths, attempting to slay early gentrification and aggressive speculators who were swallowing whole communities when the available housing stock in the nation’s capital was cheap and somewhat plentiful.

Leaks was a tough fighter. She helped her members inject their concerns and voices into critical policy debates about everything from reforming rent control laws to the use of the Housing Production Trust Fund, the creation of Inclusionary Zoning and a more strategic deployment of the city’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA).

The work could be exhausting, especially since some landlords were not interested in following the TOPA law and the city, as is the case now, only half-heartedly enforced housing codes and regulations. While others were working with tenant associations to sell their rights to seemingly friendly developers, Leaks spent her time trying to persuade renters that the better route, the one that had the greatest chance of ensuring their longevity as residents in a changing nation’s capital, was to purchase their buildings and turn them into limited equity housing cooperatives.

The first building Leaks converted was the one in which she lived near 9th and L streets NW, where construction of the Washington Convention Center — the original one, to the south of the current facility — was already uprooting residents. She and five other tenants fought to stay put, but their landlord used the usual tactics to try to persuade them to move. Thankfully, the chicanery such as refusing to make critical repairs or turning off heat in the building didn’t work in this case.

Leaks’ work expanded from there. “It was a lot of work. I had to teach people and convince people they could become owners — [that] they could work collectively so they could stay in their housing, so they could stay in the city,” she told me last month in a telephone interview, during which we recalled those early years when I was the reporter and she and her crew were a frequent subject.

While I didn’t always agree with them — their focus, their tactics — I confess to being impressed then and now by Leaks’ work, skill and commitment. As a former professional community organizer trained in the Saul Alinsky model, I knew what it took to get five people together, to get them to select a leader, and to get them to agree on an agenda and an action plan. Tempers could get heated, and nights were frequently too long.

More than a few times, Leaks told me, she’d be up in the wee hours of the morning preparing residents for testimony the next day before the DC Council. She remembered particular difficulty turning the building at 14th and Kenyon streets NW. She stayed up until 1 a.m. “working with one of the residents who didn’t have a certain education to help her prepare her testimony before the council the next day.”

“The work was like that: late at night and weekends,” she added.

There were times when I wasn’t certain that victory was ahead for Leaks. I remember following the effort to convert the Champlain Court Cooperative in Adams Morgan. That went on for years. Then there was the Capitol View Town Homes, which was actually public housing.

The latter fight may have started during a like-minded national movement led by Jack Kemp — a former football quarterback, turned Republican politician, turned secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, turned conservative anti-poverty crusader — in collaboration with Robert Woodson Sr., an African American Republican and founder of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (which later became the Woodson Center). The concept of public housing residents owning or at least managing their own developments was revolutionary. For a time, Bertha Gilkey, a Black woman in St. Louis, Missouri, gained national attention for her work transforming Cochran Gardens. In DC, Kimi Gray was the legend at Kenilworth-Parkside.

While they and others were able to change the lives of hundreds of public housing residents, their vision of full ownership never was realized — except for Leaks and WISH.

She and her team wrestled control of Capitol View. I remember meeting repeatedly with residents, hearing their stories and feeling their determination — determination nurtured in no small part by Leaks.

In this week’s ceremonial resolution, the council noted the battle over Capitol View: “…[One] of Leaks’ most significant achievements was her assistance with the formation of Southern Homes and Gardens Cooperative on Southern Avenue, S.E., formerly [Capitol] View Town Homes, where public housing residents had been promised ownership of their homes under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Turnkey III program, only to have to fight for those ownership rights for over two decades … .”

Ultimately, WISH ran out of funding, causing it to close. Its legacy remains, however. “What I am excited about is that [the cooperatives] are still there,” said Leaks, who lives in a Columbia Heights co-op. She told me she gets calls all the time from tenants seeking help. “I send them to the DC Office of the Tenant Advocate or EmpowerDC” — the former an independent government agency, and the latter a nonprofit housing organizing group that has picked up where WISH left off.

In other words, Leaks may not be organizing, but the quest for affordable housing remains. In organizer lingo: A luta continua.

jonetta rose barras is an author and freelance journalist, covering national and local issues including politics, childhood trauma, public education, economic development and urban public policies. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.