About Linda

In the District of Columbia, Linda Leaks is known as the “Godmother of Cooperative Housing.”

 She was a tenant rights expert and organizer of housing cooperative development for 45 years.  Leaks first started community organizing as an 18-year-old, helping garment workers in St. Petersburg, Florida, where she had moved from her hometown of Barnesville, Georgia.

She has 55 years of grassroots organizing experience that includes organizing to free Dessie Woods, a black woman in Georgia who was imprisoned in the late 1970s for killing a white man with his own gun who pulled it to try to rape her and another woman.

After moving to DC in 1978, Leaks helped to organize a group house in 1982, known as the T Street Collective, which became a center of black feminist organizing in DC.

She moved a few years later into a downtown apartment. She started her housing organizing career as a tenant-activist in DC, becoming involved in housing issues through her efforts to hold her own slum landlord in that apartment building accountable. That building was one of 16-19 apartment buildings that she helped form into housing cooperatives while she was an organizer for Washington Innercity Self Help (WISH).

Linda worked at WISH for 18 years, starting out as a tenant organizer.

As cooperative organizing intensified, she became one of two staff cooperative housing developers and the sole staff cooperative educator (where she pioneered education materials for 34 WISH cooperatives).  Later Leaks was promoted to Executive Director.

WISH worked to form cooperatives to maintain housing to stem the effect of gentrification. Many black and brown people were being forced out of their apartments by developers wanting to make money from those who were moving back to the District after “white flight” due to the riots of the late 1960s.

In the early 90’s Leaks spent 16 years helping residents of a 92-unit public housing development, Southern Homes and Gardens, fight for and win ownership of their property as a limited equity housing cooperative. It is believed Leaks organized the first conversion of a HUD public housing project into a housing cooperative.

Leaks also helped to organize what is believed to be the first housing cooperative in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1992.

Leaks was the leading co-founder of a 15-unit housing cooperative for social justice activists, called the Ella Jo Baker Intentional Community Cooperative.

It is believed to be the only cooperative named for the famed civil rights activist and early black cooperator, Ella Jo Baker. Located in the Columbia Heights neighborhood, EJBICC is an oasis of affordable housing in a neighborhood where housing costs have skyrocketed beyond the reach of low-to-moderate income residents.

WISH was dissolved in 2003. Leaks co-founded Empower D.C. that year, and continued her work to organize low- and moderate-income tenants. Her work strengthened DC’s tenants’ rights laws, which were some of the more progressive in the country.

She also was responsible for the grassroots organizing effort that led to the initial victories in the battle to fund affordable housing through the District’s Housing Production Trust Fund and the adoption of the Inclusionary Zoning Policy which contributed to maintaining affordable housing in the District. Before retiring, she formed the Justice Advocacy Alliance to continue helping residents maintain housing.

Leaks earned a Master of Science degree in Community Economic Development from New Hampshire College (now known as Southern New Hampshire University) in Manchester. She also earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mass Media Arts from the University of the District of Columbia. Leaks also became a registered housing cooperative manager with the National Association of Housing Cooperatives.

Bio researched and written by Ajowa Ifateyo