Growing up in Flint, Keishaun Wade shared a common experience with many in the city: housing insecurity.
Wade, a 2019 Flint Southwestern graduate who grew up primarily on the city’s southside, began to immerse himself in discovering why unstable housing is a reality for so many people here.
“I grew up in a time where a lot of the narrative about Flint, what Flint was or used to be, kind of didn’t exist for me or other people within my generation,” Wade said. “And so my question was always, ‘Why?’ And that really started a journey for me of trying to discover that ‘why,’ which led me to be really involved in the community and seek out different community engagement opportunities. I think the common answer to that question is very surface level and doesn’t really go into the context and the nuance the way that I desired it to.”
After high school, his pursuit of answers to that question about housing conditions and challenges in Flint eventually led him to the Ivy League. He received an award from Yale University for his community engagement work as a teenager and eventually applied and was accepted to Cornell University to study urban and regional planning.
“At Cornell, my specific focus was urban and regional planning with a concentration in inequality in urban life, as well as real estate, housing and urban economics,” Wade said. “So my scholarship always focused on Flint and always focused on issues pertaining to Flint. I was definitely looking for a way to bring that back home, because that was always my mission: to go and come back with some skills and some knowledge and resources to make change in this community.”
The Flint Housing Union and Flint Neighborhood Stabilization Collaborative
There are abundant issues in Flint related to housing: blight and condemned properties combined with inconsistent enforcement, landlords who are not always responsive, longtime property owners who risk losing homes because of water liens or property tax foreclosures with limited mechanisms to help them keep their property, and high rent among other challenges.
“The housing issues in Flint are multi-faceted, they’re not one-dimensional,” Wade said. “Often within urban planning and community development, the residents, the public are generally regarded as the antithesis of progress or looked at as not helpful or to be included in that process. And so my thought and my mission is to try to incorporate people as much as possible into the process of developing their community and the process of deciding how resources are used within our community and create a better environment for us all to live in.”
Since graduating from Cornell, Wade has been able to bring knowledge and resources from his experience there back into the community. He received a research and creative work grant from the Cornell College of Architecture, Art, and Planning that supports collaborative work with community partners. He also received a grant from the Einhorn Center for Community Engagement at Cornell, which provides funding to alumni, students, and faculty who want to implement community projects.
That funding helped support the creation of the Flint Housing Union (FHU) and the Flint Neighborhood Stabilization Collaborative (FNSC). The FNSC is a nonprofit organization that will be led by members of the FHU.
The FHU was formed to create a collective voice for all Flint tenants, homeowners, and unhoused residents facing issues like foreclosure, homelessness, or living in unsafe or substandard housing. They are hoping to collaborate with existing groups or associations with similar goals to elevate voices and concerns of residents in support of safe, stable housing in the city.
The FHU is also laying the groundwork for what the FNSC will do – centering needs of residents to ensure long-term neighborhood stability and equitable development.
Wade’s time at Cornell provided more than just academic knowledge and opportunities for grant funding. He also found expertise. Frankie Reed, who is also a Cornell graduate, met Wade during the program and is working with him to build FHU and FNSC. Reed is not connected to Flint, but has experienced similar housing issues in other places she’s lived, including North Carolina, New York, and the Philippines.
“I think the main issue with the housing crisis in Flint is all of the blight that’s been happening there and all the properties getting condemned and developers buying up properties,” Reed said. “Almost half of Flint is composed of tenants, but there’s no tenant union or tenant association. All of the associations are neighborhood associations that are mostly just homeowners. And what we’ve seen from those associations is that they just spread news about what’s happening in the community, but not really mobilizing in terms of solidarity or building collective power. We wanted to kind of bring a new energy that does just that. So starting not just the tenants union, but also more than that, representing people who are facing housing insecurity no matter who they are. So tenants, but also homeowners who are struggling with water or tax liens on their properties, or foreclosure and so on. Some of our unhoused neighbors might be struggling too so we can also support them. It’s more of a collective housing justice mission beyond just a tenants union.”
The group launched a website and social media presence on Facebook and Instagram and has been holding monthly meetings at the Gloria Coles Flint Public Library and on Zoom for those unable to attend in person. For now, Wade and Reed say they’re simply hoping people begin attending their meetings to learn more about the group and their goals. But over time, they hope to help rethink and reframe housing and housing-related policy in the city in a way that is truly resident-led.
Assisting Residents on the Ground
Last year, more than 200 foreclosed properties in Genesee County, many of them in Flint, were bundled and sold to the same company. Many of those houses had people living in them, paying rent to a landlord and unaware that the house was even in foreclosure. Other renters have issues when, for example, a landlord doesn’t stay current on water bills and water is shut off even when they’ve stayed current on their rent and met the terms of their lease agreement. Those are the types of issues Flint Housing Union aims to help provide support for.
“With these two entities (FHU and FNSC) we have begun to think about and really think through some of the issues as it pertains to the history of urban planning here in the city as well as the history and current iteration of community development practices in the city,” Wade said. “How that looks to me is through decommodifying the housing industry here in Flint, and really searching for solutions that exist outside of the parameters of market-driven solutions. We’re trying to explore what it means to have all these different factors contribute to the state of housing here in the city and try to provide some solutions.”
“It’s very rare to hear about a union-led nonprofit that’s doing community development work,” Reed said. “And this is our kind of strategy to go against the developers who are buying up properties and displacing people. So we’d like to reinvest in those, reverse the blight, and try our best to reverse the displacement of people or prevent it.”
FHU was also able to recently help with residents who were displaced at Village Shores Apartments on Lippincott Road on the city’s southside. The building was condemned by the city, and water was shut off and residents who had still been paying rent were told they had to move out in December of 2025.
“We’ve been helping out our neighbors at Village Shores Apartments,” Wade said. “We helped sound the alarm on the situation. We’ve been doing advocacy for building residents. They were living in a situation where the building that they were living in had been condemned for a year. Their landlord was still collecting rent on that building. It led to a situation where in the middle winter their water got cut off. We had been working with different organizations getting water drives. Trying to get some relocation assistance. Now I think we’re heading down a path where maybe there are some retaliatory actions that the landlord is taking against the residents. So we are thinking about how best to advocate for that resident facing that threat.”
Flint Housing Union has also reached out to other organizations to begin discussing ways to work together or partner. They just had a town hall with the Michigan Poverty Law Program and Black Lives Matter Flint. Some current members of the organization are also members of the Flint Democracy Defense League.
Maiya Mashack, a Flint resident, decided to get involved with the group and attend meetings based on her own experiences with housing inequality growing up.
“Everyone should have access to housing no matter their background or where they come from,” Mashack said. “In places like Flint where we’ve experienced crisis after crisis, it just seems like the people that are empowered, they don’t do a lot to support Flint. And we have to help each other in the end. And we have to support ourselves through community outreach, community building, and mutual aid and things of that nature. We have to rely on one another because that’s the future. Community based resources. Community based everything.”
Wade said a key to the organization’s growth is simple: people. They can better respond to the needs of different people in the city if the organization has a good representation of the different issues faced by residents. They’re also interested in learning more about organizations doing similar work so that, as they grow, their work can be complementary rather than competitive. The best way for people to get involved is simply visit the website for more information about upcoming meetings (the next one is March 14 at 11 a.m.) or reach out to them at flinthousingunion@gmail.com.
“We definitely need to be growing our membership in order to have a variety of residents who have expertise in their lived experiences to join and guide our mission,” Wade said. “We are looking for partnerships with organizations that already exist. We are not trying to totally reinvent the wheel. We share some missions and some visions with different community organizations and we would love to come together and think and fight on how we move forward together.”
As the organization continues to build its membership and relationships with people and organizations across Flint, Wade also points out a unique attribute the city has when it comes to trying to build collective action: historical roots.
“We are a city that literally is on the world map because of our ability to come together,” Wade said. “We’re the first big union town in the world. We set the stage for a lot of wins within labor union history. Why not transfer that over and be able to do that for housing?”
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