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Housing

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.

In Albuquerque, Developers Turn Old Motels Into Affordable Housing

As a housing crisis pummels the West, from Sun Valley, Idaho, to Tucson, Arizona, there’s a dull irony in the number of abandoned houses and old hotels. Some of them cluster around former mining boomtowns; Bannack, Montana, for instance, was briefly the state’s capital before the veins of gold ran dry and the 10,000 residents moved on. Today, some 60 buildings still stand, including the handsome red-brick Hotel Meade. Two Guns, Arizona, once served Dust Bowl migrants and other travelers along Route 66, but when the interstate highway passed it by, the town collapsed. Today, its ruins include homes and motels as well as campgrounds for travelers and the remnants of a zoo that once housed mountain lions and Gila monsters.

Corporate Landlords Are Taking Over Society, Making Life Unaffordable

Landlords are taking over society. For many average working people, it has become impossible to buy a house. And the cost of renting housing has become prohibitively expensive. This problem is especially bad in the United States. But it’s not only a problem in the US; it’s a problem in many countries around the world — especially in Western countries in North America and Europe, whose economies have become financialized. In the United States, for instance, the largest landlord is not an individual; it’s a massive Wall Street investment firm: Blackstone, the private equity fund. Blackstone owned more than 300,000 rental housing units in the US as of 2023. The number has only increased since then. Blackstone and other Wall Street investment funds have been gobbling up residential housing. Then they ratchet up the cost of rent, which has fueled homelessness, as many people are being evicted from their homes.

What The World Can Learn From Uruguay’s Housing Co-Ops

More than 1.8 billion people lack access to adequate and affordable housing. Yet too few countries have taken meaningful steps to ensure dignified housing for their most vulnerable citizens. We research how cooperative housing can serve as one solution to the affordable housing crisis. There are a variety of cooperative housing models. But they generally involve residents collectively owning and managing their apartment complexes, sharing responsibilities, costs and decision-making through a democratic process. Some countries have embraced cooperatives. In Zurich, Switzerland, almost one-fifth of the city’s total housing stock is cooperative housing.

America Should Sprawl? Not If We Want Strong Towns

There’s been a lot of buzz around Conor Dougherty’s recent New York Times piece, “Why America Should Sprawl.” The article argues that the country’s housing crisis is so severe—and infill development so insufficient—that we need to embrace aggressive outward expansion of our metro regions, what many would call sprawl, to build the millions of homes America needs. It’s a compelling, well-written piece, and it’s struck a chord with a lot of readers. But from a Strong Towns perspective, the core argument is fatally flawed. Because sprawl doesn’t solve the underlying problem. It is the underlying problem.

UHAB Launches National Map Of Limited-Equity Housing Cooperatives

UHAB is thrilled to announce the launch of the National Co-op Map, the most comprehensive online tool tracking limited-equity housing cooperatives across the United States. After years of research, development, and community input, this highly anticipated relaunch features a cleaner design and more detailed, up to date data. Housing organizers, residents, and advocates have consistently expressed the need for a centralized resource like this—one that reflects the true scale and reach of the cooperative housing movement. This interactive, community-powered resource allows users to explore housing co-ops, submit updates, and access resources to support cooperative housing development, preservation, and organizing.

Rebuilding Altadena With Catalog Homes And Collective Action

After News Year’s, Nitti Kaur rounded up a room full of furniture and clothing to donate. “That was on my to-do list for January,” she says. “And the tables turned so fast.” On Jan. 7, Kaur and her partner Mac Perry watched his childhood home in Altadena burn, room by room, in the Eaton Fire. Soon after, Kaur found herself standing frozen at a donation center looking for clothing. “Somebody came and hugged me from the back,” says Kaur, who runs a real estate advisory firm for investors called A360 Capital. “They were like, ‘We’ll take care of you. Don’t worry. We’re all in this together.’ And something in me clicked in that very moment – we’re called City of Angels, and I was seeing angels and actions that just inspired me.”

Unhoused Why? It’s Always About The Land

In 2024, the U.S.’ unhoused population increased by 18%, which translates into approximately 770,000 individuals living on the streets. This is a consistent annual increase over the previous years. (This information was recently removed from HUD’s website.) It is not that the U.S. does not have enough land or buildings to house its people, but that capitalist greed ensures significant segments of the population remain unhoused on purpose. Compounding the current homelessness crisis, also surging in other industrialized countries, is that the ruling class engages in global land grabs, what Marx/Engels dubbed “the clearings.”

Missouri Tenants Suing To Keep Their Homes In Federal Tax Credit Program

Ramona Teeter planned to live at the Rosewood Estates, her home for nearly two decades, for the rest of her life. The 79-year-old is bold, direct, and does not fear asking questions. So six years ago, when the Springfield, Missouri, subdivision became eligible to leave the federal low income housing tax credit program, Teeter asked management if they had plans to opt out. Teeter says she was reassured that her affordable housing was safe. Now, she’s a leader in a Springfield tenants union suing their landlords to keep their homes past 2026, after the properties’ owner quietly left the affordable housing program.

MTST Consolidates Occupation In Rio De Janeiro’s Port Region

In the early hours of Saturday, May 31, the Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST) strengthened an occupation in an area of Rio de Janeiro’s port region that already brought together around 200 families. According to the Movement, the area belongs to Jornal do Brasil and Docas S.A. and had been abandoned for more than two decades. Members of the MTST have been cleaning up the land, preparing the area to organize housing and a community kitchen. “This is an occupation that has been going on for a few days and today we are in the process of consolidating it, guaranteeing more structure for the families,” explains Gabriel Siqueira, national coordinator for the MTST.

Anti-Poverty Experiment From The 1960s Could Inspire Housing Justice

In cities across the U.S., the housing crisis has reached a breaking point. Rents are skyrocketing, homelessness is rising and working-class neighborhoods are threatened by displacement. These challenges might feel unprecedented. But they echo a moment more than half a century ago. In the 1950s and 1960s, housing and urban inequality were at the center of national politics. American cities were grappling with rapid urban decline, segregated and substandard housing, and the fallout of highway construction and urban renewal projects that displaced hundreds of thousands of disproportionately low-income and Black residents.

Why Hasn’t California Enforced Its Post-Wildfire Rent Gouging Ban?

As wildfires raged through Los Angeles early this year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency. The Jan. 7 declaration also triggered a state law enacting price controls on consumer goods in Los Angeles County for 30 days, which have since been extended to July 1. The law, meant to protect displaced Angelenos against price gouging and disaster profiteering, also regulates rental housing costs. This means landlords can’t legally raise rents by more than 10% either for current tenants or for prospective tenants if the unit was advertised in the past year, and can charge no more than 160% of the fair market rent for units that had not been rented or offered for rent in the past year.

Two Housing Crises In One City

I’ve previously written for Canadian Dimension about a housing struggle I am involved in around a vacant site in Toronto’s Downtown East. Our community-based organization, 230 Fightback, is challenging the developer KingSett Capital’s plans to build luxury housing at 214-230 Sherbourne Street, and demanding that social housing be created instead. Faced with relentless community pressure and a faltering housing market, KingSett offered to sell the site to the city but only at a price that would cover the costs of its speculative antics. For its part, city hall adamantly refused to apply the kind of pressure that could compel the company to reduce the price.
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