Laying Strong Foundations

By Junia Howell | August 27, 2024

4 minute read

I love me some summer—the long, bright days and warm, humid air alongside the break in routine that invites reflection. As is my custom, I took time this summer to reflect on what eruka has accomplished this year and where we are going next.

Here are some highlights.

Sketching Plans

Like the process of building homes themselves, eruka’s work of building a new housing market began with plans. Even before we officially founded the organization, we spent months designing our long-term vision and a plan to achieve it.

After months of research and conversations, we decided we would begin by developing four services: eppraiser (equitable appraisals), evance (interest-free home loans), ebonds (community-centric investments), and essessments (sustainable tax assessments).

Laying Foundations

With lengthy plans for each service in hand, we began laying foundations for the services to come to life. This required digging–a lot of digging–through historical and legal documentation to better understand our current systems and what is required for change.

Our investigations unearthed unexpected treasures that required adjustments. For example, in June, we completed our nine-month in-depth study on Cincinnati’s property tax system. This investigation revealed property taxes are far more racially and economically unequal than had previously been acknowledged, and addressing the inequity will require revamping entire local taxation approaches. However, this research and our corresponding meetings with dozens of local elected officials and community organizations also inspired us to see just how needed and feasible the changes are.

Likewise, our technical team created a systematic appraisal algorithm, which has uncovered some of the numerous complexities of digitizing historical property records. This has led us to find completely unexpected but extremely useful information on cost estimation approaches.

If I’m honest, these discoveries and corresponding divergences often felt disheartening in the moment. They slowed the work down and introduced new challenges to be solved. Yet, anytime I sit back and reflect on what has been gained and completed, I am extremely grateful for what we have learned, where it has enabled us to go, and the strong foundation we are laying.

Framing Walls

Although there is still some foundational work to be completed, this fall we are starting to build our initial services. Specifically, we are hoping to have a beta version of our appraisal application that can begin collecting housing data to improve our estimating algorithm. With it, we plan to launch an initial local campaign aimed at transforming local taxation approaches.

As with every other stage, we know we will run into unexpected challenges that will have to be solved. Yet, as summer comes to a close, we are thrilled to be starting a new phase of construction and working towards a more just housing market.

Pick Up A Hammer

We are currently looking for people to assist with coding the user interface of our appraisal application and individuals to join our political campaign to make school funding models more equitable. If you are interested in actively taking part in some of our work, reach out—we would love to partner with you.