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Housing

Fuel Poverty Action, Corbyn, Others Launch Retrofit For The Future

March 19, 2025 Hannah Sharland, The Canary. , , ,
A coalition of groups is launching a new campaign that joins together the dots on the climate, housing, and fuel poverty crises. Retrofit For the Future plans to put renters’ rights and a green and just transition for workers at the heart of the retrofit debate. Retrofit For The Future Fuel Poverty Action, ACORN, Greener Jobs Alliance, Medact, and the Peace & Justice Project will be officially launching the new initiative on Wednesday 19 March. You can join them online for this at 7.30pm if you sign up here. The campaign will call on the government to direct its attention to retrofit-upgrading and improving existing homes. It will set out the compelling case that doing so is a key to tackling both the climate emergency and the housing crisis.

Building Solidarity Around Survival: A Seattle Example

March 8, 2025 Patrick Mazza, Resilience. , , , , ,
We are in for a long hard time in the U.S. and the world as a whole. The divisions between people have grown too deep. The concentration of power in individuals and institutions that care little about the common good, pursuing their own interests at its expense, is too great. The buildup of problems either unaddressed or insufficiently addressed has mounted to an overwhelming extent. The ascendancy of Trump and Musk has intensified the situation, but the trends were going the wrong way for a long time before. It is enough to make people throw up their hands in despair, wondering what they can do, or retreating entirely into personal life.

Don’t Let Insurance Companies Fleece Homeowners

March 4, 2025 Kelsey Condon, Counter Punch. , , ,
As climate-fueled disasters escalate, insurers are getting richer while leaving Americans in the lurch. Citing climate-related losses, many insurance companies are exorbitantly inflating rates, refusing to renew policies, and delaying, denying, or underpaying claims. The latest of many examples is Los Angeles, where wildfires devoured over 40,000 acres and left thousands unhoused and unemployed. Many families were dropped by their insurers or struggled to find affordable options before the fires. Some turned to the state’s coverage plan, which costs more and covers less.

Activists Win Excessive Compensation Tax To Fund Social Housing

February 23, 2025 John Burbank, Inequality.org. , , , , , ,
Seattle voters have just beaten the oligarchs, Amazon, Microsoft, the local Chamber of Commerce, the real estate industry, the coup makers and backers, the Muskites, and the Trumpiphiles. How? Through a ballot measure, the people in Seattle have just approved a tax on excessive executive compensation to fund affordable housing. The vote wasn’t even close. The proposal, Proposition 1A, won by a 26-point margin. The advocacy group House Our Neighbors led the ballot campaign. Their leaders and leafletters and canvassers prevailed over a conservative and obstructing city council, a mayor focused on toadying to Seattle-based Amazon, a half-million-dollar opposition campaign, and the overlords of the Trump/Musk dictatorship.

The Big Idea: Social Housing

February 20, 2025 J. Patrick Patterson, In These Times. , , ,
Affordable housing — which typically involves giving tax breaks to real estate developers — isn’t working so well. The open secret is that, all too often, it isn’t actually ​“affordable.” Nearly 40% of tenants using the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, for example — the largest federal program subsidizing affordable housing — are still rent-burdened, and the subsidy doesn’t require homes to be permanently ​“affordable,” leaving renters vulnerable to eviction. As Peter Dreier explains in The American Prospect: ​“The quest to provide what has come to be called ​‘affordable housing’ in America is hobbled by one fundamental reality.

Could A New Housing Cooperative Help Create Affordable Homes?

February 16, 2025 Noelle Fujii-Oride, Next City. , , ,
For the last year and a half, Chase Hasegawa and a few of his neighbors at the Courtyards at Waipouli have been trying to preserve their Kaua‘i apartment complex as a much-needed source of workforce housing. The tenants have been working with a Honolulu nonprofit with the hope of buying the property and turning it into an affordable housing cooperative. If their Waipouli Housing Cooperative is successfully established, it would be the first affordable housing cooperative to be created on Kaua‘i and the first in decades for the state. But the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL) is planning to acquire the property for Native Hawaiian beneficiaries soon.

The Latest Plot To Privatize Public Lands

February 10, 2025 Joseph Bullington, In These Times. , , ,
On a recent visit to see old friends in Livingston, Mont., I found myself downtown, drinking the free art-walk wine, spearing the free cocktail weenies and admiring the fine skin of the expensively dressed couples bobbing in and out of the galleries that have proliferated here like some aggressive breed of plant. The light was retreating up the peaks of the Absaroka Range, and the summer evening’s golden stillness settled over town. Then a rip formed in this tranquility, and through it a ramshackle Subaru station wagon with local plates came trundling up Main Street, piled floor to ceiling with belongings. ​“Fuck!” shrieked the driver, as he pounded the steering wheel. ​“I fucking hate this!”

The New Yorkers Standing Behind Migrants

February 9, 2025 Luis Feliz Leon, In These Times. , , ,
Flatbush, New York — Shelves of weathered shoes line the purple basement walls of the Bridge, a nonprofit, on Dec. 14, 2024. Used coats hang from rolling racks. Residents of Floyd Bennett Field, a remote former airport-turned-migrant-shelter in Brooklyn, queue up with slips of paper in their hands, listing the ages and genders of their children. Kids weave among parents’ legs before moving to the second floor for childcare. Waiting is part of the ordeal for migrant families in shelters. But now the stakes have increased. The 2,000 Floyd Bennett Field residents will soon be moved to other shelters, and questions loom: Do other shelters have space?

Vote On ‘Social Housing’ Could Break Stranglehold Of Private Landlords

January 29, 2025 Rebecca Burns, In These Times. , , , , ,
On a once-vacant plot of public land in Seattle, a cluster of mid-rise buildings surrounds a tree-filled courtyard. Children play on swings while adults run laps and chat on shared stoops. Some neighbors live in dorm-style rooms with common kitchens, others in family-sized townhomes — but all benefit from access to parks and transit, affordable rents and a democratic say in how their buildings run. None of this exists yet, to be clear. But it’s the vision, laid out in proof-of-concept sketches and during door-to-door canvassing conversations, that Seattle housing activists are hoping to make tangible to voters.

Abolish Rent, Yes, For Real

January 28, 2025 Fran Quigley, Waging Nonviolence. , , , ,
The largest tenant union in the country is responding quickly and passionately to the devastation of the Los Angeles fires. The LA Tenants Union is demanding not just enforcement of existing California protections against price gouging of rental homes, but a moratorium on evictions and a rent freeze, all while tenants are coming together with heroic levels of mutual aid. But these steps will only mitigate a perpetual struggle, as union co-founders Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis write in their new book “Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis.” “Why do tenants wake up every month and have to pay rent?” they ask.

Biden’s Legacy: Genocide Abroad, Economic Despair At Home

January 20, 2025 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. , , , , , , , , , , , ,
46th US President Joe Biden officially leaves office Monday, January 20, to be succeeded by former President Donald Trump. Trump’s promises in the name of “saving American workers” have raised alarm for people across sectors of society, including migrant workers who are gearing up for mass deportations, and unionized workers who are preparing for Trump’s attacks on labor rights. Trump’s loyalty to multi-billionaires has also given the working class of the US great cause for concern. Meanwhile, in contrast, the Democrats have attempted to position themselves as the real defenders of working people.

A Public Model For Home Insurance

January 20, 2025 Moira Birss and MacKenzie Marcelin, Dissent Magazine. , , , ,
With every extreme weather event, housing is damaged and belongings are lost. Insurance is supposed to be the safety net that helps people to recover and restart their lives. But as major disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, and hailstorms increase in frequency and severity thanks to climate change, more insurance companies are cutting back on policies, jacking up premium rates, or refusing to cover whole areas of the country. This change is leaving people who live in affected homes—including everything from single-family houses to multifamily rental buildings—facing financial hardship and even homelessness, among other ruinous consequences.

How Federal Disaster Funding Can Slow Rent Increases

January 20, 2025 Robert Davis, Next City. , , , , , , ,
Coloradans often welcome rain storms with the refrain, “We need the moisture.” After the deadly floods in September 2013, many Coloradans sang a different tune. Over five days, a slow-moving storm covered some areas of the Front Range with up to 20 inches of rain. Overall, the floods killed 10 people, displaced 18,000, and caused more than $4 billion in damage to more than 17,000 structures, of which 1,882 were completely destroyed, according to the Colorado Division of Homeland Security & Emergency Management’s after-action report.

Kansas City’s Striking Tenants Want Biden To Act Fast On Rent Cap

January 12, 2025 Roshan Abraham, Next City. , , , , ,
On Oct. 1, 2024, tenants at two Kansas City, Missouri, apartment complexes started a rent strike. Residents of Independence Towers and Quality Hill Towers, organized under KC Tenants and a newly formed national coalition known as the Tenant Union Federation, had been asking their landlords to fix their dilapidated buildings for two years. They demanded repairs, called for collectively bargained leases, and agitated for the federal government to force the sale of the apartment complexes to more responsible owners.

Justice Department Sues Six Of The Nation’s Largest Landlords

January 9, 2025 Heather Vogell, ProPublica. , , , ,
The Department of Justice on Tuesday sued six of the nation’s largest landlords, accusing them of using a pricing algorithm to improperly work together to raise rents across the country. The lawsuit expands an antitrust complaint the department filed in August that accused property management software-maker RealPage of engaging in illegal price-fixing to reduce competition among landlords so prices — and profits — would soar. Officials conducted a two-year investigation into the scheme following a 2022 ProPublica story that showed how RealPage was helping landlords set rents across the country in a way that legal experts said could result in cartel-like behavior.
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