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Housing

Tenants Confront Landlord Disruption

The struggle over who controls the roof over a worker’s head erupted into open confrontation on the steps of New Haven City Hall last Thursday, as a newly formed public tenants union at Sunset Ridge Apartments faced down a landlord-backed “counter-demonstration.” The response by the landlord, Capital Reality, which included counter-protestors, police presence, and a union-busting law firm, highlights the growing battle between private equity and working-class renters in a national tenant organizing drive.

Fueling The Future Of Community Ownership

An enduring vision for many people across the country is to collectively own local land and buildings, thus controlling how those properties are used and who benefits from them. It’s a way for people to not only care for their neighborhoods and neighbors, but to also push back against outside influences that are exploiting and extracting value from communities. While there are some forms of community ownership—like community land trusts, limited-equity co-ops, and resident-owned manufactured housing parks—that are fairly well-known, there are new ones being developed as well to serve communities in new ways.

Santa Fe’s Plan For A Real Minimum Wage Offers Lessons For California

California has in recent years turned up its effort to establish minimum wages that allow workers to afford life in the Golden State. But the most daring experiment may well be coming not from particularly high-cost Los Angeles or San Francisco, but from a couple of states east. On Nov. 13, the City Council in Santa Fe, New Mexico, voted to integrate the cost of housing in its calculation of the citywide minimum wage going forward. According to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, this marks the first time in the U.S. that a city has factored local housing costs directly into setting its minimum.

Own The Hell Out Of It

There’s a point in every crisis; housing, labour, democracy, take your pick – where you realise the system isn’t just broken, it’s working exactly as designed. And usually, that realisation can happen as early as taking your first step on soil that’s already borrowed, bought and broken before you ever arrived. For me, that understanding started in Salford. Not the glossy council-brouchure Salford of waterfront apartments and artisan dog biscuits, but the Salford Walter Greenwood sketched in Love on the Dole. A place where “poverty was an unwelcome lodger in every home”, where whole streets lived under the shadow of the slum clearances and where, by the 1960s, some of the worst housing in Western Europe was still being swept under municipal carpet.

Eviction By ICE?

Rodrick Johnson, 67, had just returned home from a trip to the hospital and was trying to get some rest. But in the early hours of September 30, bright lights suddenly flooded his apartment. A fleet of Black Hawk helicopters descended on his five-story building — a 130-unit apartment complex at 7500 South Shore Drive — shortly before armed, masked men stormed past the doors of the ground floor. “The next thing I knew, they were kicking my door in,” Johnson says. He and dozens of his neighbors were marched outside at gunpoint during the multiagency raid carried out by some 300 federal agents in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. Black and Latino residents were zip-tied, separated by race and detained inside cargo vans, as South Side Weekly reported in the raid’s aftermath.

Closing The Gap Between Housing And Home With Upcycled Furniture

Homelessness in Chicago has surged in recent years, with the number of unhoused Chicagoans tripling last year. As housing costs climb and public funding shrinks, more families are cycling in and out of shelters without the resources to make a new place feel like home. One local nonprofit is tackling that gap, offering support that social service agencies aren’t able to provide. By collecting and upcycling donated furniture, the Chicago-based nonprofit Digs With Dignity designs and furnishes homes for families transitioning out of homelessness, creating spaces that feel comfortable, functional and dignified.

LA Tenants’ Strikes Forced A Major Landlord To Refund Opaque Utility Fees

When Joe Porter, a 29-year-old video editor, moved into his 400-square-foot studio apartment in Los Angeles four years ago, his bills for water, trash removal and pest control were bundled together into one monthly payment that came out to about $60. After the first few years, Porter said, his bill increased to about $200. When he asked his landlord – the giant real estate investment trust Equity Residential — for an explanation, he was told billing was done by a third party and that Equity could not provide a more detailed breakdown. Like many landlords of multifamily buildings, Equity uses a billing method called ratio utility billing systems (RUBS). Landlords who use this system divvy up the costs of the building’s total utilities usage according to each unit’s square footage and number of tenants.

These Tenants Are Going On Strike Against ‘Rent Debt’

Nine former tenants of Equity Residential, the nation’s fifth-largest apartment owner, announced this week that they’re going on a new kind of strike. According to the company, the former tenants still owe amounts ranging from $195 to more than $50,000 — but in order to spotlight what they say are predatory practices by corporate landlords, the tenants will collectively refuse to pay up. For sisters Tay’Laur and Tai’Leah Paige, one missed rent payment triggered a chain of events that left them homeless and tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Two years ago, when the Paige sisters came up short on rent for their North Hollywood apartment, they say Equity Residential moved rapidly to lock them out of their online payment portal and file for eviction.

Trump Plan Accelerates Assault On Section 8 Housing

The Trump administration is escalating its efforts to dismantle federal rental assistance, targeting the Housing Choice Voucher Program—commonly known as Section 8—through budget cuts, new eligibility requirements, and sweeping administrative directives. The changes could displace millions of households, including families with children, seniors, disabled tenants, and low-wage workers. The Housing Choice Voucher Program is the largest federal rental assistance initiative, serving approximately 2.3 million low-income households across the country. According to data cited by USAFacts, the program provides stable housing to 2.7 percent of U.S. residents. Nearly a quarter of those living in subsidized housing have a disability, 33 percent of households include minor children, 74 percent are headed by women, 41 percent are headed by people over the age of 62, and 66 percent are headed by people of color.

Elderly Public Housing Residents In Chelsea Ordered To Move Out

Last Saturday, roughly 15 to 20 Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea [FEC] public housing tenants fighting the impending destruction of their homes intercepted Council Member Erik Bottcher outside a Manhattan deli at W. 26th Street and 9th Avenue demanding a meeting with him and challenging his support of the demolition plan Community Board 4 has already rejected. They got the meeting with him that afternoon—but didn’t like what they heard. According to Midtown South Community Council President John Mudd, who was also at the Sept. 20 meeting, Council Member Bottcher listened to the elderly FEC tenants express their opposition to the demolition plan “with no filters or anyone to run interference” for about 45 minutes.

New York City Housing Authority Needs Money; Stock Transfer Tax Delivers It

A couple of very important things came out of Community Board 4's September 3 meeting, in which members officially rejected NYCHA’s plan to turn over the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses to private developers for demolition and reconstruction. One is that the public housing residents actually living there do not want to see their homes and community torn down in the name of “redevelopment.” The other is that there has got to be a better way for the City of New York to take care of public housing than handing over the keys to profit-driven private developers looking to make a killing. Well, it turns out there is—but no one has the guts to do it. And that’s because in New York City, kicking senior citizens out of their homes is much easier than demanding the wealthy pay their fair share.

Have Private Equity Landlords Met Their Match?

The most Gerene Freeman saw of her landlord on August 6 were several pairs of eyes peeking out between the blinds of a dark office building. That Wednesday was the day Freeman, a 76-year-old retired creative writing teacher, and her neighbors — all tenants of a New Haven, Conn. apartment complex for elderly and disabled residents called Park Ridge — had formally launched a tenants’ union. They had driven more than two hours to their landlord’s office in Rockland County, N.Y., to deliver a letter announcing the creation of the Park Ridge Tenant Union and demanding to negotiate for better conditions. But they found themselves completely stonewalled: first misdirected to a seemingly vacant building in New Jersey, and then returned to find people clearly visible inside the New York office who would not open the door to receive their letter.

Wall Street Is Killing The Housing Market

There are few things more important than our homes. Alongside providing our shelter, homes are where we make memories with friends and family — where bonds are formed and strengthened. Unfortunately, the right to a home in America is under threat. Rents have skyrocketed, homelessness is rising, and home ownership is increasingly unattainable for most Americans. There are multiple causes, but one culprit stands out: classic Wall Street greed. Massive private equity corporations and hedge funds are buying up homes by the thousands — houses, apartment buildings, and mobile home parks alike — and then jacking up rents. This trend accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis, when investment firms snatched up homes in foreclosure and began renting them to the growing number of people locked out of ownership.

Amid Local Failures And Federal Cuts, Advocates For Unhoused Step Up

It’s been more than half a year since the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation spent four days clearing out an encampment near the BU Bridge in Cambridge, and Gemma Byrne has yet to see any of the people who were displaced by what one witness described as “the most inhumane sweep she has seen in her approximately 10 years of being unhoused.” Byrne is an organizer for the material aid and harm reduction program Warm Up Boston, which distributes supplies to encampments and has developed connections with their residents. Homelessness and fringe housing get more attention in the bitter cold months, but the work continues in the heat, as do haunting memories of what came last December.

Trump’s Invasion Of Washington DC Costs Over $1 Million A Day

President Trump mobilized the D.C. National Guard under the guise of restoring security in the nation’s capital — despite D.C.’s crime rate being at a 30-year low. What began as a deployment of 800 D.C. National Guard troops has grown to encompass 2,091 as of this writing, as Republican governors send hundreds more. Trump hasn’t just complained about alleged crime in the district — he’s placed a target on people experiencing poverty and homelessness. Claiming that we’re “getting rid of the slums,” Trump has called on troops and police to forcibly remove unhoused people from the city. Federal law prohibits deploying the military on U.S. soil, except under certain extraordinary circumstances.
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