New Money, Same Currency

By Junia Howell | February 11, 2025

3 minute read

I glanced out the window to check on the neighbor’s stout evergreen swaying in the brisk wind. It wasn’t particularly picturesque, but it was there after 20 years and two house fires. I took a deep breath.

It sounds silly, but lately I’ve needed that tree. It is my grounding reminder that some things, many things, are still standing, unchanged.

The last few weeks have been full of change—personally, organizationally, nationally. Even when change is needed, it can be unsettling. When change is unanticipated or undesired, it feels all the more disorienting.

As I attempt to stay rooted amidst the gusting winds of change, I find myself looking to other historical moments of transition.

New King, Same Royalty: Colonial Revolutionaries

Over the years, my research on the foundations of our nation’s housing inequality has taken me on some deep dives into colonial times and early U.S. property law.

Before I started looking at this history more closely, I conceptualized the American revolutionaries as radical changemakers who desired new political and economic systems. What I learned is that they did a lot more copying than creating.

They weren’t interested in a completely different equitable system. They liked the royal customs of land domination, peasant serfdom, and wealth accumulation. In fact, the impetus for the tax revolts was the settlers' frustration that the British Crown would not allow them to continue to violently invade and settle Indigenous nations.

The revolutionaries simply wanted to recast the hierarchical feudalism so that they were in charge. They were looking for a new king—one of their choosing, who would allow them to continue to conquer and dominate.

This is why most of the Indigenous and African peoples who fought in the Revolutionary War fought for the British: they knew the colonists weren’t interested in their liberation.

Recognizing this helped me reconceptualize U.S. property law. Inequities were not abnormalities—they are the law’s bedrock. This has freed me to be more creative as I have imagined truly transformative solutions. Likewise, recent political changes have revealed the true intentions of this country’s exploitative economic systems.

New Lyrics, Same Melody: Economic and Political Conditions

Some of the recent political and economic changes feel quite drastic–and in some ways they are–but they are sprouting from the same system. The threats of tariffs to force our agenda on other nations, the use of crypto currencies to further concentrate wealth, and the presumption sovereign lands can be “bought” are all new instances of our nation’s founding principles.

These principles aren’t liberating, equitable, or life-giving, so the stability isn’t particularly comforting. Nevertheless, we must remember  that this is the same system we have been working to transform.

Cultivating an equitable economy requires much more than a few adjustments on the margins. To get to equity, we need to rethink how we invest our money, how we value our land, how we pay for labor, and how we respect one another.

Each economic decision we make is a part of the collective. It can either reinforce hierarchies or move us towards equity. At eruka, we strive to design and build the infrastructure that will enable everyone to make equitable economic decisions.

Although the road towards our goal is still long, we are hoping to roll out some interventions this year. Stay tuned for ways you can join in with your friends and neighbors to build towards a new economic currency of equity.