Housing

Housing Cooperatives: Preserving Affordable Community Ownership

November 23, 2024 North Missoula CDC, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Affordable Housing, Cooperatives, Housing

With affordable housing becoming increasingly scarce in Montana, innovative solutions are more important than ever. This documentary short highlights an inspiring cooperative housing model designed to prevent displacement and create home ownership opportunities for Missoula residents. This initiative, driven by the collaborative efforts of North Missoula Community Development Corporation (NMCDC) and Neighborworks Montana (NWMT), offers a promising blueprint for addressing housing challenges across Montana.

There’s An Abundance Of Housing; Let’s Organize To Take It Over

November 4, 2024 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. Podcast - Clearing The FOG Homelessness, Housing, Human Rights, Occupation, Poverty, Squatting

The Poor People's Army, formerly the Poor People's Economic and Human Rights Campaign, has been leading efforts across the country to place individuals and families who need them into federally-owned housing for a long time. Their position is that housing is a human right and that people in need should not be forced to wait for shelter. They recently published "Takeover: A Human Rights Approach to Housing" on Poor People's Press, a step-by-step guide to occupying empty houses. Clearing the FOG speaks with Cheri Honkala, the lead author, and Galen Tyler, a lead organizer with the Poor People's Army, about the current housing crisis and how people can use the new book to end the crisis of homelessness.

There’s A Severe Housing Crisis In The US: The Work To Make Housing A Right

October 29, 2024 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. Podcast - Clearing The FOG Affordable Housing, Billionaires, Corporatism, Homelessness, Housing, Hyper-Gentrification, Inequality, Social Housing

A new report, Billionaire Blowback on Housing: How concentrated wealth disrupts housing markets and worsens the housing affordability crisis, explains how the United States has entered a state of hyper-gentrification in which the average person has to compete with a large corporation when it comes to buying or renting a home. There are currently 28 vacant homes for every homeless person. Clearing the FOG speaks with Chuck Collins, a co-author of the report, and Mehrdad Azemun of Peoples Action, about the housing crisis, the vision for a homes guarantee and how people are working to make housing a human right.

Working People Place Cost Of Living As Top Concern In US Elections

October 29, 2024 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. Educate! 2024 US Presidential elections, Cost of living, Donald Trump, Finance and the Economy, Housing, Inflation, Kamala Harris, Poverty, Price Gouging, United States

Just eight days remain until the people of the US head to the polls to decide their next president. The economy and inflation continues to be the top issue for voters by far, with eight in ten registered voters saying the economy will be very important to their vote according to the Pew Research Center. According to Gallup, the economy is the most important out of 22 issues voters were polled on, including “terrorism and national security”, immigration, education, healthcare, and crime. If one were to read exclusively the mainstream media, one would get the impression that all is well with the economy, that inflation is falling, and the job market is doing just fine.

Housing Activists In Spain Occupy Vacant Bank-Owned Buildings

October 29, 2024 Ella Fassler, Truthout. Resist! Evictions, Housing, Spain, Squatting

When I first arrived in Spain, a real estate agent told me to avoid Manresa, the working-class city outside of Barcelona where a friend of mine lived. “Don’t go there, it’s not very nice,” he said. “Go to Costa Brava [a vacation site up north] — instead.” Unperturbed, I took a train to Manresa the next day. After seeing hammer and sickle graffiti and anti-capitalist slogans as soon as I exited the station, I began to understand why a real estate agent may not feel comfortable in Manresa. I walked to the center of the city, through some windy, narrow streets and a charming plaza peppered with locals moseying around, to meet my friend at Ateneu La Sèquia, a towering building that was once a nunnery but has been turned into a social center thanks to a group of activists who reclaimed the space by squatting in it.

When Golf Courses Go Wild

October 26, 2024 Josh Kozelj, The Tyee. Create! Canada, Environment, Housing, Public Spaces, Rewilding

In the fields beside a suburban lake on Vancouver Island, relics from a past life are hidden in plain sight. The land, formerly the home of a nine-hole golf course for more than 50 years, is no longer doused with water every day or mowed at 4 a.m. — yet remnants of its former state still exist. A sand trap now serves as a children’s play pit, littered with Tonka trucks and toys. The fairway, once cut to under an inch, has grass up to shin height and rows of flowers. Old golf greens have been turned into campgrounds. The transformation is par for the course, says Jason Cole, co-CEO of Power to Be, a registered charity that took over the property in Saanich, B.C., seven years ago from a couple who wanted to lease their roughly 80 acres of land.

As Corporate Landlords Spread, A Mold Epidemic Takes Root

October 23, 2024 Thomas Birmingham, In These Times. Educate! Corporatism, Health Care, History, Housing, Landlords, Mold, Tenant Rights

Gabriel Caban has had three constant companions in the nine short months he’s been alive. There’s Beatriz Caban, his 27-year-old mom. There’s the black-and-white blanket he refuses to sleep without. And there’s the mold that grows in the floorboards and walls of his apartment — the mold that has sent him three times to the emergency room, the mold he’s been breathing in his entire life. On Nov. 17, 2023, an eight-months-pregnant Beatriz Caban moved into Sunset Ridge Apartments, a 312-unit low-income complex nestled in the northeast corner of New Haven, Conn. She found mold for the first time that day, along with a bucket in the laundry room next door, filled to the brim with water dripping from the ceiling.

West Harlem Pushes Back Against Columbia’s Latest Campus Expansion

October 20, 2024 Eric Santomauro-Stenzel, The Indypendent. Resist! Columbia, Gentrification, Harlem, Housing, New York City (NYC)

Columbia University, New York City’s largest landlord, is facing increased community resistance to its ongoing Manhattanville campus expansion, located between W. 125th and 134th Streets. Since Columbia won a lengthy legal battle in 2010, the campus has grown to include residential, artistic, science, business and gathering spaces. While most of the Manhattanville campus has already been constructed, Columbia plans to further develop over the next two decades. One of the university’s most recent acquisitions, 2.5 acres of land along the Hudson River, is yet to be redeveloped, and community members want to see it serve them.

Housing Discrimination Is Collective, Cumulative, Continuing

October 19, 2024 Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Educate! discrimination, Housing, Injustice, pollution

Some 10 years ago, food delivery service FreshDirect got more than $100 million of incentives to place a warehouse in a populated, poor, largely people of color community in the South Bronx, to bring heavy diesel truck traffic to asthma-inflicted neighborhoods already affected by waste treatment plants and high-traffic highways. Groups like South Bronx Unite, like Good Jobs for NY, opposed these further health harms to the community, as well as the notion that a handful of insecure, poorly waged jobs could serve as compensation. South Bronx Unites’ Mychal Johnson said: “Of course we want jobs, but we should not have to choose between having a job and having clean air. If you can’t breathe, you can’t work.”

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.

Creating A Co-Owned Pocket Community

September 24, 2024 Kirsten Dirksen, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! California, Community, Housing, Intentional Community, Oakland

Phil Levin and Kristen Berman wanted to live with their friends, but they didn’t want to sacrifice their privacy, so they started their own intentional community where you can choose your neighbors and eat together but still have your own home. Today, on their one-third-acre lot in Oakland (California), there are 20 adults and 4 babies living in 6 buildings with 10 units. There's a 4-plex with 5 adults, 2 apartments with 2 or 4 adults upstairs and families downstairs, and 2 houses with families. They started with a group of friends who joined together to create an LLC to buy a lot with 3 buildings, but once California changed the ADU laws, they added 2 extra structures of around 900 square feet each: one now houses a single family, and another is their community house with a kitchen, dining room, living room, and coworking space.

Minneapolis Residents Are Building Yurts To Shelter Homeless Neighbors

September 16, 2024 Lorena Bally, Next City. Create! Homeless encampment, Homelessness, Housing, Minneapolis, Yurts

Christin Crabtree walked out of St. Paul’s Church in Southern Minneapolis feeling hope on the morning of July 24. An organizer with the local unhoused resident outreach project Camp Nenookaasi, she left the community meeting believing that locals would work together with the 80 people living in Nenookaasi’s three small encampments to help keep each other safe. But at 6:30 a.m. the next day, residents at all three camps woke to police-enforced evictions. Officers arrived with heavy machinery to heave residents’ tents, bikes, blankets, mattresses and clothing into a garbage truck. Within minutes, residents lost access to medical records, identification, cellphones and other belongings.

Takeover! A Human Rights Approach To Housing

September 13, 2024 Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report. Create! Book Review, Homelessness, Housing, Human Rights

Cheri Honkala and the Poor People’s Army, also known as the Poor People’s Campaign for Economic Human Rights, produced their book about how to take over abandoned federal properties. In the City of Philadelphia, where the Poor People’s Army is based, scholar Elsa Noterman reports that there are 10 abandoned properties for every single homeless person. Nevertheless, the wait times to receive public housing are years long. Their neighborhood, Kensington, has been devastated by factory closures since the passage of NAFTA. “Call to Movement: The Politics of Love,” the first section of the introduction to TAKEOVER!, is inspiring, heartrending and, like the rest of the book, beautifully written.

How A New York Landlord Exploited Anti-Immigrant Propaganda

September 11, 2024 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. Educate! Colorado, Eviction, Housing, Immigrant Rights, Immigration, Landlord, New York (NY)

For the past few weeks, right-wing media and politicians have been whipped up into a frenzy over the supposed takeover of an Aurora, Colorado apartment building by a Venezuelan gang after a video went viral depicting armed men in The Edge at Lowry complex. Despite the fact that numerous Aurora city officials, including the Aurora City Police chief and the city’s mayor have said that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has not taken over two troubled apartment complexes in the city, the right-wing media machine continues to spin this narrative and capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiment.

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