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Housing

Working Homeless People: Laboring Without A Roof

April 23, 2025 Jocelyn Figueroa, Black Agenda Report. , , , , ,
While homeless and living in a shelter, one of my neighbors was a woman not much older than my Mom. One day, I learned that she was a certified full-time medical assistant. Her husband, disabled, was not able to work. Due to rising rents in New York City, they couldn’t afford to pay their rent anymore. That’s how they eventually landed a few doors down from me. At the time, it just seemed so unbelievable that a medical professional wasn’t able to afford a place to live. Eventually, I realized that most of us in that shelter, aside from those who were disabled or elderly, were working.

Labor Union Lessons In Solidarity Are Fueling Tenant Organizing

April 20, 2025 Fran Quigley, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
When Christina Jackson first started talking with her neighbors living in a Denver apartment building about their shared concerns about elevators not working, water being shut off, and roaches in their apartments, the response was guarded. “A lot of the tenants were scared to complain because they worried they would get evicted if they spoke up,” Jackson said. The worry is not an unreasonable one. My students and I represent low-income tenants facing eviction, and most of our clients have little protection from landlord retaliation. Even if a state’s laws block the landlord from openly citing a tenant’s complaints as the grounds for eviction, landlords can and do find other pretenses for forcing tenants out before their lease expires.

We Need To Completely Rethink Affordable Housing

April 14, 2025 Drew Warshaw, Next City. , , ,
I used to think climate change was the crisis we would solve last, if at all. But seeing the affordable housing crisis up close has changed my mind. Unless we find a reservoir of will to tap the oceans of money we are swimming in and the mountains of land we are sitting on, we may never solve this crisis. Instead, our country will be left with the challenges we at Enterprise Community Partners, the national affordable housing nonprofit that I help lead, push up against every day: Special interests that carve up the already-small pie of public funding into incoherent slices that don’t scale. The technocracy of building codes, zoning and regulation that has vexed basic home construction with a cipher so complex that you need a PhD to make sense of it.

A New Plan To Fix Mexico’s Housing Crisis

April 13, 2025 Ximena González, Jacobin. , , ,
Lined by purple jacaranda trees and lush tepozanes, the walkable streets of Mexico City’s Condesa neighborhood connect a dense urban environment where contemporary apartment towers rise alongside squat multifamily buildings designed in a mix of architectural styles. Surrounded by bustling cafés, creameries, and art galleries, a public park draws passersby who pause to enjoy an impromptu jazz concert. North America’s largest metropolis is an urbanist’s dream — but also a cautionary tale of progressive ideas turned sour. In the early 2000s, the city’s government, under then mayor and future president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), embarked on an ambitious plan to curb urban sprawl by densifying the four central boroughs where employment centers concentrate: Cuauhtémoc, Miguel Hidalgo, Benito Juárez, and Venustiano Carranza.

Tenants On The March: An Interview With Cea Weaver

March 28, 2025 Andrew Elrod, Dissent Magazine. , , , ,
In many parts of the country, rising rents have hit a political limit, as politicians, unions, and community organizations increasingly recognize the centrality of housing to the cost-of-living crisis. New York State’s 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, San Francisco’s 2022 collective bargaining ordinance for tenants, and Los Angeles’s 2022 “mansion tax” represent new forces in local politics—and alternative bases for the struggle over power within our society. These initiatives use the state to reshape the business models and ownership patterns pushing workers and their families further away from their jobs, into smaller, more expensive living situations.

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.
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