Housing

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.

Radical Municipalism Is Paving The Way For Direct Democracy In LA

August 24, 2024 Justin A. Davis, Waging Nonviolence. Organize! California, Class Struggle, Democracy, Grassroots, Homelessness, Housing, Los Angeles, Municipalism

Home to almost 10 million residents in 2022, Los Angeles County can sometimes seem like a vast political paradox. Known as a quintessential example of urban sprawl, it is also the most overcrowded county in America. Over the past 20 years, robust grassroots organizing built multiracial movements for organized labor, immigrant rights and housing justice while electing multiple self-identified leftists to L.A. City Council. At the same time, brutal overpolicing, ethics scandals and rising gentrification have been constant challenges for organizers and activists there. This summer, L.A.’s controversial efforts to reduce homelessness have reentered the national spotlight.

Solving The Housing Crisis Via The Commons

August 23, 2024 Dil Green, Resilience. Create! Housing, The Commons, United Kingdom (UK)

In Stroud Commons, we’re looking to find ways to speed up the building of the commons – especially the housing commons, which we were talking about in terms of ‘the rock on which the commons can be built’ before we’d even formed the core group in Stroud. Dil Green of Mutual Credit Services (MCS – who design models for the commons in all sectors), posted a message in our chat group, giving his take on the housing crisis, and how we might speed up the housing commons by allowing / helping / encouraging people to put their house into the commons, and carry on living in it for the rest of their life – and pass it on to their family, too.

Los Angeles Has A Climate Crisis And A Housing Crisis

August 22, 2024 Awoenam Mauna-Woanya, Christopher Rhie and Christopher K. Tokita, Next City. Create! climate crisis, Housing, infill housing, Los Angeles

Since taking office, Mayor Karen Bass has rightly focused on housing and homelessness in Los Angeles. But given the growing climate crisis, it’s crucial to maintain this focus while empowering our city to take effective climate action. Already, the City and County of Los Angeles have committed to an ambitious goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. To reach this critical target, we must make serious changes — especially in how we build our cities and suburbs. This fundamental factor in our carbon footprint is so often overlooked in climate action plans. It’s also the key to tackling both our environmental challenges and our city’s housing affordability crisis simultaneously: infill housing, or the practice of building new housing on vacant or underused land in cities.

Supreme Court’s Grants Pass Decision Fired Up Homeless Advocacy Groups

August 9, 2024 Roshan Abraham, Next City. Strategize! Homelessness, Housing, State Legislatures, Supreme Court

The Supreme Court’s momentous June ruling in the Grants Pass v. Johnson case removed a key protection for unhoused people, allowing criminalization even when there is no available shelter. While some Democrats condemned the decision, several leaders on the West Coast, where unsheltered homeless encampments are more pronounced, quickly moved to embrace it. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has issued an order for “hazardous” encampments to be dismantled, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed has declared that she will launch “aggressive” homeless sweeps that could include criminal penalties.

A National Tenants Union Has Arrived

August 7, 2024 Rebecca Burns, In These Times. Organize! Affordable Housing, Housing, Tenant Unions, Unions

Five tenants unions from around the country convened Tuesday to announce the launch of a new national organization to take on the power of multistate real-estate capital. The Tenant Union Federation marks the first major national effort at tenant organizing in 40 years. “Every tenant deserves a union — everyone deserves to move with the kind of power I found here,” said Donna Goldsmith, an organizer with the Louisville Tenants Union (one of the federation’s founding members) to a virtual audience of renters from around the country. Goldsmith moved to a senior-living community in Louisville looking for a fresh start after the murder of her daughter and two grandchildren more than a decade ago.

Social Housing Isn’t Just A Vienna Thing

August 2, 2024 Leo Miranda, Next City. Create! Austria, Housing, New York (NY), Social Housing, Vienna

When it comes to housing people for highly affordable and highly livable homes for the long term, Vienna, Austria has no equal. The average Viennese pays a quarter or less of their post-tax income on rent and utilities and half of the city lives in public or subsidized housing. These buildings aren’t shabby or poorly-maintained either. “It looks like the housing we can’t afford in New York,” says Samuel Stein, housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society. Vienna prioritizes housing supply, subsidizing the construction of 7,000 subsidized units a year while maintaining over 220,000 city-owned units. As Vienna grows its social housing stock, it suppresses housing costs overall.

A Bold Vision On Housing Is Needed To Win Big Change

August 1, 2024 Fran Quigley, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Affordable Housing, Housing, Public Housing, Tenant Rights

The law school clinic that I direct at Indiana University represents tenants in local eviction courts. Our client Tanya needed pay-up-front emergency dental surgery, so she did not have enough money left for her rent. James’ family has endured feces-filled water backing up in their laundry room, mold on the walls and a caved-in ceiling, while their corporate landlord has ignored their maintenance calls. Beatrice’s family wants to keep her daughter in the school district they like, but the landlord who just bought her building has announced a $300 per month rent hike. All of these households, and virtually all of the people we see in eviction court, qualify for federally-subsidized housing.

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).

Migrants And Homeless Expelled From Paris Ahead Of Olympic Games

July 25, 2024 Ana Vračar, People's Dispatch. Educate! Evictions, Forced evictions, France, Homelessness, Housing, Human Rights, Migrants, Olympics, Paris, Right to housing

One of the latest communities at risk of forced displacement is a Roma encampment in La Courneuve, Seine-Saint-Denis, located on the route of the Paralympic marathon scheduled for September. About 200 people, most of whom moved from worse living conditions in a nearby camp, now live in fear of eviction, with no clear relocation plan proposed by the local authorities.

The Future Of Housing Organizing: Tenant Unions

July 25, 2024 Rose Lenehan, In These Times. Organize! Affordable Housing, Housing, Tenant Unions, Unions

Daniel Tyson had 15 days to find a place he could afford. For several years, Tyson lived at a hotel in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he paid $125 weekly. His rent would have been slightly less if he paid monthly, but the full-time warehouse shipping clerk couldn’t save enough. Then, developers decided to kick everyone out to demolish the building and expand a luxury hotel. It was October, and the snowbirds were beginning their trips south, a migration that makes the rental market even tighter. Daniel had nowhere to go. Celia Williams had lived in her building in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago for a little under a year when she began to see bed bugs.

New Green Bank Is Powering A Net-Zero Development With Affordable Housing

July 21, 2024 Cinnamon Janzer, Next City. Create! Affordable Housing, Energy, Housing, Minnesota, net zero, St. Paul, Urban Design

For nearly a century, Hillcrest Golf Club was home for golf aficionados in St. Paul, Minnesota. Opened in 1921 on land that was originally home to the Dakota people, the 110-acre course was designed by the brother of pro golfer Harry Vardon, grandfather of the modern golf swing. Over the course of its storied existence, the property was bought by Jewish businessmen as a haven for Jewish golfers facing antisemitism and survived challenges from caddy strikes to a fire that engulfed its clubhouse. In 2017, its owners sold the property. Two years later, as owners struggled to find a buyer due to soil contamination issues that would complicate redevelopment, it was purchased by St. Paul’s Port Authority.

Canada Makes An Unprecedented Push For Multifamily Housing

July 19, 2024 Akielly Hu, Scheer Post. Create! Canada, Housing, Sustainability, Urban Design

For more than a century, zoning ordinances rooted in segregation have encouraged the construction of single-family homes, often at the expense of apartment buildings and other structures that promote urban density. Beyond contributing to a mounting housing shortage and spiraling prices, such policies have contributed to sprawl and dependence upon automobiles. Canada has decided to try something different. The government has taken the unprecedented step of offering provincial governments billions of dollars in infrastructure funds with one catch: To receive it, they must require cities to abandon single-family zoning laws and allow the construction of fourplexes.

‘People’s Cooling Army’ Is Giving Tenants Free Air Conditioners

July 18, 2024 'Lucas Frisancho, Next City. Create! Air Conditioning, Chicago, Heat, Housing, Tenant Union, Unions

Perhaps the most basic demand of a tenant is that the living space they pay for is, in fact, livable. Yet as extreme heat becomes the norm, organizers claim that for many low-income Chicago renters, this basic condition is not being met. An initiative called the People’s Cooling Army, launched by the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance, aims to provide and install free repaired air conditioning units for low-income tenants in Chicago’s Humboldt Park, Garfield Park and Hermosa. “Tenants across the city have been left to bake in hot apartments,” organizers announced at a July 8 press conference. “Tenants across the city have been asked to live in apartments where they could not sleep, where they were always covered in sweat, where their children were unsafe.”

‘Keep Public Housing Public’: Texas Dispute Reflects National Tensions

July 10, 2024 Jared Brey, Governing. Resist! Gentrification, Housing, Public Housing, San Antonio, Texas

Even with low-cost housing harder than ever to find in most American cities, the stock of public housing is shrinking. The number of families living in public housing shrank 6.5 percent during a recent five-year period, according to the Urban Institute — not a huge decline, but a decline nonetheless. Several federal initiatives to redevelop public-housing towers with lower-density, mixed-income projects have helped improve the image of public housing from its nadir in the mid-to-late 20th century. But they have also changed the mission of public housing authorities. Once focused solely on building and maintaining public units for poor people, housing authorities now engage in a wide variety of housing-related activities, sometimes partnering with private developers to build apartments for people who make barely less than the median income.

«1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 »

Daily movement news and resources