The Human Toll of High-Cost Housing

Zine project zeros in on South Asian Americans and immigrants in Cambridge

Editor’s note: This is the third story in a series of interviews and articles Sampan is posting over the next several issues that explore the high cost of housing in Greater Boston and beyond. The first story can be found here and the second here. These stories include commentary from experts, activists and others.

As policymakers, politicians and economists talk about housing development and housing affordability, the conversation can often turn into mushy abstractions and mind-numbing numbers.

But behind every statistic about out-of-reach housing prices, obscenely high rents, and the lack of housing in the state, there are stories of people constantly on the move because they’re priced out of their own apartments and of families who can’t save enough to buy a home because so much of their paychecks are handed over to their landlords at the end of the month.

It’s these kinds of real-life stories that are told in a the zine project put together last year by Camberville South Asian Leadership Training (C-SALT), a program hosted by Asian American Resource Workshop.

The project, called “We Deserve a Home: South Asians and the Housing Crisis in Cambridge,” was part of a larger push for rent control in Massachusetts, and showed the hardships faced by the South Asian community living in Cambridge. According to the zine, most South Asian residents surveyed were paying more than 30% of their income on rent, and one asylum seeker from Pakistan said they’re “working 2-3 jobs just to get by.”

Managing the zine project was Kavya Crasta of C-SALT. Crasta lives in Cambridge and moved to the U.S. from India as a child. As part of Sampan’s series of stories about Greater Boston’s housing affordability crisis, we spoke with Crasta about the zine project, the rent control effort and how high rents harm many South Asian residents, especially who are refugees. The following is an edited version of the interview.

Sampan: Let’s start with the effort to end the state’s ban on rent control. What are your thoughts on the current rent control initiative getting set back by a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision in late June?

Crasta: It definitely is an unfortunate setback; I’m sure it feels difficult for a lot of people, especially because there was so much work put into this ballot campaign. But I think we knew that this work was never going to be easy, and I think that we knew the fight was never going to be easy for housing justice.

… But I think (this campaign) really shows the power of our people. It really shows it is still possible to lift the ban on rent control in Massachusetts by taking a legislative approach. … I think the possibility is still there. … It’s difficult, but the fight is not over yet.

Sampan: The zine seemed really inclusive of various Asian communities and gave real-life examples that people could relate to. While working on this project, was there anything that really hit you that you want to talk about?

Crasta: I think what stood out to me, was we interviewed this South Asian asylum seeker who had escaped persecution in their homeland and came to the U.S. to seek safety. I think it’s just really discouraging and sad that this person came to the U.S. to find some sense of stability after being landless for such a long time, but then (telling how), they can’t own too many things, because they have to move so many times. It’s this idea that he crosses oceans and everyone tells him his problems will be solved when he gets to the U.S. but then it’s just a smaller version of the same thing – constantly having to be displaced (because of rising rent costs). That just really struck me.

But what else struck me was my favorite part of the zine, which is where people talked about what is their dream housing? At the end of the zine, we have scans of collages that community members made of what housing justice looks like to people and I think that is beautiful, because I think there is a lot of language around, “It takes a village to raise our children, and, you know, we are meant to be in these communal villages, that we are meant to be surrounded by gardens and the people that we love,” and I think that is such a community value. For South Asians, it’s very normal to live with extended family.

Sampan: I wanted to zero in on those two points, because I think it’s not often talked about how if rents are constantly going up, people are constantly on the move. That can be stressful for single people, but even more so for families…. Do you think there’s enough attention brought to this idea of constantly being on the move in this conversation around housing costs?

Crasta: I think it’s really reflective around how I’ve seen housing talked about in the United States. It’s talked about more as a commodity than a necessity and as a human right. I think there are a lot of human stories about the way that housing impacts us, and our well-being and our happiness and the happiness of our families. We don’t really have that much media that talks about how it impacts us socially, within ourselves and within our psyche – even how it spiritually affects us. I think this zine was created to have a more human perspective on it. There are no narratives that I know of that talk about how the housing crisis affects South Asian community members. Housing really is one of the very basic necessities we need as humans… Front and center (the conversation) needs to be about the people. I hope this zine provides that.

Sampan: I know this is focused on South Asians living in the Cambridge area, but do you think a lot of these topics are universal for most immigrants, and most people who just are not really wealthy living here?

Crasta: For sure. … I think, the South Asian community in Cambridge has this really hard experience of dealing with this tense scarcity of housing, but I’m sure that is the same for literally everyone else who is someone without a lot of money.