The connection between home ownership and environmental justice is crucial.

Question: What policy recommendations do you have for Obama?

Kari Fulton: Well, the brother is moving really hard like, he's being, like, working non-stop since day one. So, I'm really inspired by that but I think... I think they are some bills which I need to look into around housing rights and around tenants' rights and around home ownership, the rights for homeowners. Especially with all these foreclosures going on and quiet as it is kept, EJ plays a lot and environmental justice movement has a lot to do with home ownership because if you don't own your home, you don't have the same rights to the land, to the places that you live in, you have slum lords who let allow apartment buildings to dilapidate and that is a really huge problem because people will be living with lead in their homes and lead in... all these different things that are going on.

So home ownership is important and so there is so many people who lost their homes. Right now, you know, my landlord is losing all four of his homes so we are just trying to figure out our tenant rights at this moment, and I think that, the more that we support people when they buy homes and we don't just set them up for failure, the better. The more that we support helping people, especially in urban communities, and supporting them to build co-ops and to really get that I think that will good, more tax breaks for co-ops for intentional communities for home ownership in general because, the more people who own their homes in the neighborhood, the more that you can... the more people will be engaged and active and the more invested they'll feel in their community. So that's to me is where I think is a really strong connection to environmental justice and where I would like to see more work being done.

Recorded on: May 9, 2009