We got tired of watching our towns get sold out from under us.

Kinship began the way a lot of good things do: a group of neighbors who were fed up. We are a collective of local property owners and renters who watched gentrification price out our friends, watched relationships turn into transactions, and watched big real estate quietly take over the places we grew up in. So we decided to work together and change how renting works in our city.

We are owned by the people who actually do the work and live in the homes. Workers, tenants, and small local property owners can become member-owners after two years of being part of the community. We chose the cooperative form on purpose, because it's how people who have been kept out of property wealth for generations, through redlining, denied loans, and displacement, get to build some of their own. The wealth stays with the people who built the neighborhood instead of being siphoned off to whoever happened to be holding cash at the right moment.

Day to day, that looks ordinary and practical. We make sure rent gets paid and homes get cared for. We teach people to fix the small things themselves. We take the stress out of subletting. We help tenants and owners talk to each other like neighbors. And we connect people to help when a hard month hits, before a hard month becomes an eviction.

We're rooted in Somerville and Greater Boston, among the Brazilian and Central American families, the working-class homeowners, the students, and the recent grads who make these neighborhoods what they are. Over time, we're working to buy property and hold it in community trust, to partner with Indigenous-led landback efforts, and to build a network that keeps the people around us housed and fed, whatever is happening in the wider economy.

We start small. We grow in spirals. We do it together.