People Power Media builds power for housing justice and equity in land use

Mission

People Power Media’s mission is to build power for housing justice and equity in land use. We do this through multimedia popular education, policy innovation, and organizing.

Our work builds equity at the city planning level by strengthening communities’ expertise in all aspects of land use. Race and class inequality in the U.S. is driven by how land is controlled. Grassroots groups struggle to win on critical issues such as affordable housing, gentrification, and communities’ self-determination. We build the broad-based understanding, narrative change, and urgency necessary to empower a groundswell of people to take action for systemic change.

To achieve housing justice and equity in land use, we must recognize that land is life and home, and not a commodity. Land has been a tool of power. Knowledge is power too.

We are based in San Francisco, California and we acknowledge that we occupy the ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula.

People Power Media is a non-profit organization and is a federally registered 501(c)(3). We are funded by individual donations and a grant from the San Francisco Foundation. Our work for the Race & Equity in all Planning Coalition is funded by a grant from PolicyLink. Be part of the housing justice movement and consider contributing a tax-deductible donation today.

How cities are planned, how land is used, affects every aspect of your life- from where you live, to what you see when you walk outside your house, to how affordable your rent is. City planning decisions are complicated, using technical language that’s hard to understand and it’s intimidating for most people to engage in these decisions.
Meanwhile, the real estate industry and their lobbyists put a ton of money and time into setting up policies that make sure city planning decisions continue to benefit them and their high-end customers. Low-income and communities of color are often ignored, disparaged, and considered expendable when new zoning or development decisions are made. Mainstream media corporations often have a vested interest in supporting the supply-side, “build, build, build” narrative of developers, reporting on housing and other land use issues within the lens of business, overlooking the racial and social impacts. This is all despite the fact that historically marginalized communities have borne the brunt of the negative impacts of gentrification, rising housing costs, and racist policies.
[people. power. media] believes that housing justice is achieved when low-income and communities of color have expertise in equitable city planning. We believe that lasting change is rooted in both a culture shift and structural change. Since we founded [people. power. media] in 2012 focusing on movement journalism, we have centered communities efforts to impact public policy. We’ve since expanded our mandate to include multimedia popular education, organizing, and policy development.
Our popular education, workshops and media production create the culture shift and narrative change towards housing justice, as well as decommodifying and decolonizing land use. For example our award-winning animated short, “Priced Out”, explains why can’t afford a place in the city, and our forthcoming documentary “Sa Amin: Our Place” chronicles the untold story of Filipinos’ displacement and placemaking in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood.
Our organizing and public policy innovation build collective power towards systemic change. In 2020, we founded the Race and Equity in all Planning Coalition (REP-SF), which we staff and facilitate, enabling collective action and solidarity among the over 40 grassroots and community based organizations, cultural districts, neighborhood groups, and affordable housing developers throughout San Francisco. REP-SF came out of our articles on Equity in Land Use, [people. power. media]’s revolutionary framework for equitable city planning.
Equity to us means having historically marginalized communities lead and be prioritized. Together, we envision and are building a world where planning and land use are in the hands of the people to create cities that are truly equitable, stable, and diverse.
Find out more about our work:
- Our Multimedia Content
- Organizing
- Workshops
- Policy
- Media Production