Housing Crisis

Report: Billionaire Investors Are ‘Supercharging’ Housing Crisis

October 23, 2024 Julia Conley, Common Dreams. Educate! Affordable Housing, Billionaires, Housing Crisis, Hyper-Gentrification, Report

A new report out Monday puts "into numbers the trend that ordinary Americans have known to be true for years," said economic justice advocates behind the analysis: "Their everyday struggles of affording a home are made worse by the sweeping influence that billionaires have over the market." The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) joined Popular Democracy in compiling a 71-page report titled Billionaire Blowback on Housing, aiming to get to the bottom of growing concerns in recent years about how Wall Street, as Democratic vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said earlier this month, is "buying up housing and making them less affordable."

Los Angeles Tenant Union Founders’ Call To Action

October 14, 2024 Roshan Abraham, Next City. Organize! Book Review, California, Housing, Housing Crisis, Los Angeles, renter's rights, Tenant Unions

Tracy Rosenthal and Leo Vilchis first met in 2012 through an activist art project in Los Angeles called the School of Echoes. The project took Vilchis, Rosenthal and others to six different L.A. communities on listening tours to hear residents’ concerns. The concerns they encountered were largely about displacement, gentrification and the feeling that people were being pushed from their communities. Their attempt to address these problems led to the creation of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which has a membership of 3000 due-paying households. And over the past 9 years, the pair has worked alongside some of the union’s local chapters to coordinate some of the most public, and often successful, organizing fights on behalf of tenants in the country.

Real Estate Software Aided Price-Fixing ‘Cartel’ Among Property Companies

July 28, 2024 Tyler Walicek, Truthout. Educate! Housing, Housing Crisis, Real Estate, Rent, Rent control

The rent is, infamously, too damn high. That refrain has such staying power because the United States’s noxious rent crisis has shown no signs of abating, with rents rising over 30 percent since 2019. All manner of ill effects have resulted; the rapid simultaneous growth of the homelessness crisis is no coincidence. Obfuscations aside, the correlation there is quite direct. But the origins of the rent and housing crisis itself can seem a bit more diffuse: perhaps some combination of shortages driven by lulls in development (though in truth, we don’t lack housing per se so much as we lack affordable, low-income housing).

Our Housing Crisis Is Literally Killing People

January 31, 2024 Fran Quigley, Scheer Post. Resist! health, Homelessness, Housing, Housing Crisis, Indiana

Last week, my students and I worked with several unhoused persons who had been recently living in dangerous, unhealthy apartments or homes in our community of Indianapolis. One, a young mother of a toddler with another baby soon on the way, had just left a home where eight people across three generations were living. The house had no central heat, so space heaters were the only source of warmth during a month when the temperature dipped below zero for several days. Those heaters and everything else electrical in the house were linked to a complex web of extension cords connected to a solitary working outlet.

The Squatters Asking Why Chicago’s Public Housing Is Filled With Vacancies

October 13, 2023 Roshan Abraham, Next City. Resist! Chicago, Homelessness, Housing, Housing Crisis, Squatting

In late August, a group of Chicago residents were forcibly removed from a building they called home, a longtime-vacant property owned by the Chicago Housing Authority. The residents were part of a rotating group of squatters who had occupied the home for 20 months, a group that included a housing activist and people who had been living in tents in a nearby homeless encampment. For two years prior to the occupation, the home—a picturesque two-story property in the quickly gentrifying Humboldt Park neighborhood—had been vacant. It’s one of more than 2,000 housing units under the Chicago Housing Authority’s ownership that lie empty, according to city data.

The Housing Crisis And Migrant Crisis Are Crises Of Capitalism

September 20, 2023 Mike Pappas, Left Voice. Educate! Capitalism, Housing, Housing Crisis, Migrants

New York City mayor Eric Adams declared in August that there is “no room” in the city for hundreds of migrants being forced to sleep on the street because shelters are already crowded and in disrepair. The mayor initially encouraged those seeking shelter to “consider another city” as they struggled to survive. Adams announced plans to house as many as 2,000 in a tent complex on Randalls Island and later designated space on an airfield to house asylum seekers. These spaces are identified, as the claim goes, that the city simply doesn’t have housing space for those seeking asylum, especially because it is already difficult enough for residents to find adequate, affordable housing.

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