Recap: NLIHC’s 4/20 Fireside Chat: Continued Conversation on How Art & Research Reimagine Housing Justice
Apr 24, 2026
On April 20, in honor of Fair Housing Month, NLIHC hosted a fireside chat that brought together an artist, a researcher, and an advocate to wrestle with one of the central challenges of housing justice: how do we move from acknowledging harm to repairing it?
Moderated as an intimate conversation, the discussion featured NLIHC President and CEO Renee M. Willis, artist and activist Tonika Lewis Johnson, and housing researcher Amber S. Hendley–three leaders working at the intersection of storytelling, data, and community-led change. Their shared premise was clear from the start: housing injustice is not only a policy failure, but also a narrative one. For decades, harmful stories told about communities, particularly Black communities, have shaped policies that extract wealth, enforce exclusion, and undermine stability. Reimagining housing justice, the speakers argued, means changing those stories alongside changing policy.
Johnson and Hendley grounded the conversation in the lived realities of Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, drawing on their work with UnBlocked Englewood. Together, they traced how predatory land-sale contracts robbed Black families of wealth, locking generations out of homeownership, and showed how combining rigorous research with community storytelling can surface these buried injustices, restore historical truth, and create openings for repair. Their work is a powerful demonstration that data–on its own–is not enough. Humanized and paired with art, it becomes a tool for empathy, accountability, and change.
Willis connected this insight to the national landscape, emphasizing that durable progress requires more than parallel efforts across sectors. Progress demands genuine alignment between advocacy, research, and cultural strategy, so that policy solutions are both evidence-based and rooted in the dignity of people's lived experience. It demands confronting the past honestly, investing in communities deliberately, and telling fuller, truer stories about who those communities are and what they deserve.
As NLIHC continues advancing housing justice, this conversation is a reminder that the path forward is collective. When artists, researchers, advocates, and community members work in concert, they don't just challenge harmful systems; they begin to replace them with something more just.
View a recording of the chat here.
View the “UnBlocked Englewood Project” documentary here.
To hear more about this important discussion, you can listen to “The Common Ground” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Subscribe and join us as we explore our shared commitment to finding common ground in the housing justice movement.