August 14, 2021Everything Co-op continues its tribute in honor of the 2023 Cooperative Hall of Fame Inductees, with an interview of co-op housing advocate, Linda Leaks. Linda and Vernon discuss her cooperative journey, and projections for the future.

Linda Leaks, affectionately known as the "Godmother of Housing Co-ops," is a Co-founder of the Ella Jo Baker Intentional Community, and at least 20 other housing co-ops in the Washington DC Metro Area. Linda's’ organizing of tenants for housing justice and housing cooperatives is legendary in the DC Community. She is highly revered and respected as a consummate advocate for addressing housing inequities.

Leaks moved to Washington, DC in 1978, during a period of immense gentrification. As she witnessed the drastic change in the city, and pursued a career that would enable her to address the impact of its transformation. Linda ultimately earned a degree in Community Economic Development from Southern New Hampshire University.

In 1982, Leaks led the founding of a collective house in Northwest DC with three other black women. Known as the “T Street Collective,” it became a hub of Black feminist organizing in a depressed neighborhood still dotted with boarded-up buildings and hardly any businesses.

In 1986, she landed her first job as a tenant organizer with Washington Inner-city Self Help (WISH), whose mission was, in part, to help organize tenants to form limited equity housing co-ops to maintain their homes. Leaks even took her organizing skills to South Africa, where she helped organize in the early 1990s the first housing cooperatives in Johannesburg.

Over the next few decades, Linda became the Executive Director of WISH, and led battles to convert dozens of apartment buildings into housing cooperatives in DC. She did so by coaching frightened tenants on how to manage cooperatives, protest, advocate and otherwise overcome the actions of city officials, landlords, and developers' who were intent on pushing people out in favor of luxury high-rent housing. As Leaks worked to secure co-op ownership for tenants, she developed educational materials and trainings uniquely designed to help renters transition to owners. Many of her mentees are still carrying on her legacy of tenant advocacy.