Housing

In Seattle, The Rent Is Too Damn High

June 5, 2015 Katie Herzog, www.grist.org Educate! Cost of living, Gentrification, Housing, Seattle

By Katie Herzog in Grist - The median home price in Seattle is now $535,000, a 19 percent increase since March 2014, and the market is so competitive that bidding wars are common. “I would say about 50 percent of homes are going over the asking price in the first week, and 16 percent are cash offers,” says longtime Seattle real estate agent Penny Bolton. “I just had a client who sold her house for a million-five. She paid $30,000 for it in the late ’70s, early ’80s.” With numbers like that, it’s a good time to be a seller in Seattle. A buyer? Not so much. When asked what the market is like for his clients, realtor Christian Nossum says, “Just today I had a buyer win a situation where there were 33 other offers. They were lucky No. 34 and they had to pay over $150,000 more than the asking price. If that doesn’t show how crazy the market is, I don’t know what does.”

Fighting Against Foreclosure Fraud & Courts’ Abuse Of Power

June 5, 2015 Senka Huskic, www.occupy.com Educate! Banking, Foreclosure, Housing, Law

By Senka Huskic in Occupy - Our Constitution contemplates a federal system of governing where states share in power that limits the federal government’s powers. Those powers which are not given to the federal government are reserved to the states. The Constitution contemplates each state will have sovereignty over its own territory. There is no core sovereignty more fundamental than that of the state to control the distribution of land within its borders. Typically, the federal Constitution and federal laws trump state constitutions and statutes. But state laws governing the distribution of land within the state are within the core sovereignty of the states and beyond the authority of Congress to regulate. The Supremacy Clause is very specific that only federal law, i.e. statutes and treaties enacted pursuant to the Constitution’s enumerated powers, are supreme.

Renewal Vs. Gentrification

June 4, 2015 John Urquiza, www.communitybeaconnews.com Create! Displacement, Education, Gentrification, Housing, Nieghborhoods

By John Urquiza in Community Beacon News - About 26 activists, students and teachers gathered on the corner of Griffin Avenue and Broadway in Lincoln heights. The backdrop was the old abandoned Bi-Rite supermarket and weed covered parking lot. More than half were students from Abraham Lincoln High School who came together to voice their thoughts and dissatisfaction with the state of their neighborhood through their action, “Bye Bye Bi Rite.” 12 students organized this action as part of their internship with the Roots for Peace Program of American Friends Service Committee. This action was their strategic response to counter the effects of gentrification and their final class project. Their study, revealed 44% of the businesses were fast food, while 25% were liquor and convenience stores.

David Harvey: Reclaiming The City From Kobane To Baltimore

May 28, 2015 Sardar Saadi, www.roarmag.org Educate! Housing, Türkiye, Wars and Militarism

One of the big difficulties, I think, is going to be facing the existing property rights to a degree that the existing population can re-establish itself. They probably want to build their property rights in the way things were before, so they will get back to old-style urbanization, and that is maybe what will happen — in which case the question will be where the resources will come from. Still I think the opportunity exists to explore anti-capitalist alternatives. Whether this opportunity has been taken, I don’t know. But to the extent that Kurdish thinking has been influenced by somebody like Murray Bookchin, I think there is a possibility for the population to explore something different. I was told there are assembly-based forms of governance in place in Rojava, but I haven’t seen anything yet. I worry a little bit, you know, the left sometime has this romanticism. The Zapatistas said “revolution” and everybody got romantic about what they were doing.

Malcolm X, Gentrification & Housing As A Human Right

May 28, 2015 John Bartlett, www.truth-out.org Educate! Gentrification, History, Housing, Human Rights, Malcolm X

Every day the Metropolitan Tenants Organization works with renters who are facing the negative effects of gentrification and other economic forces that threaten their housing. Thousands of low-income renters and homeowners are displaced every year by a property law system with misplaced priorities. As a society, we all pay when people are involuntarily displaced because of increased crime, skyrocketing medical costs and a failing educational system. It is imperative that as a nation we confront this housing crisis and ensure that everyone has a home. The insights of visionary Black leader Malcolm X, who would have been 90 this year, are key to the discussion around gentrification and housing. Malcolm X championed a new vision, reframing the character of the struggle for equality from civil rights to one of human rights.

Matt Taibbi: Why Baltimore Blew Up

May 27, 2015 Matt Taibbi, www.rollingstone.com Educate! Baltimore, Housing, police brutality, Poverty, Racial Justice, Social Change

When Baltimore exploded in protests a few weeks ago following the unexplained paddy-wagon death of a young African-American man named Freddie Gray, America responded the way it usually does in a race crisis: It changed the subject. Instead of using the incident to talk about a campaign of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal searches and arrests across decades of discriminatory policing policies, the debate revolved around whether or not the teenagers who set fire to two West Baltimore CVS stores after Gray's death were "thugs," or merely wrongheaded criminals. From Eric Garner to Michael Brown to Akai Gurley to Tamir Rice to Walter Scott and now Freddie Gray, there have now been so many police killings of African-American men and boys in the past calendar year or so that it's been easy for both the media and the political mainstream to sell us on the idea that the killings are the whole story.

The Recipe For A Municipal Movement

May 26, 2015 Guerilla Translation, www.guerrillatranslation.org Create! Grassroots, Housing, Municipal, Politics, Power, Social Change

Municipal Recipes is a documentary about how we’ve gotten to this point, where citizens from new political subjectivities are experimenting with organisational models in order to manage institutions. The documentary features people linked to various social movements and the new municipal “confluence platforms” that are taking root in Spain. They include: Gala Pin, from the Mortgage Victims Platform(PAH) and the municipal candidacy Barcelona En Comú; Pablo Carmona, from the Fundación de los Comunes and Ahora Madrid; Marta Cruells, from Barcelona en Comú; Francisco Jurado, fromDemocracia 4.0 and Open Euribor; and Guillermo Zapata, from the Patio Maravillas social center and Ahora Madrid. As they share a meal together, they discuss the various questions and issues that frame the historical moment, trying to push forward a new world that is opening up.

Montreal Police Dismantle Downtown ‘Right To Housing’ Camp

May 23, 2015 Presse Canadienne, www.montrealgazette.com Resist! Housing, Montreal, Police

The camp had been set up in a park next to the headquarters of the Montreal police department close to Place des Arts, following a march through downtown streets. The goal of the demonstration was to alert the public to the lack of affordable housing and the plight of the homeless. FRAPRU blames the Quebec government of lowering the number of new social housing units to 1,500 from 3,000 in its latest budget. The group blames Ottawa for progressively reducing the budget geared toward social housing. Police had issued an ultimatum soon after the arrival of the protesters, asking for the removal of the tents. About 15 tents remained up and police moved in to remove them. The removal was not met by resistance but three people were arrested for obstructing police.

Foreclosure Victims Occupy Senate Stump Speech Of Kamala Harris

May 22, 2015 Occupy Fights Foreclosure, www.la.indymedia.org Resist! Capitalism, Foreclosure, Housing, Law

Homeowners frustrated at being denied a meeting with California Attorney General Kamala Harris for over four years attended this weekend’s California Democrats State Convention at the Anaheim Convention Center. Harris, who is running for the Senate seat that will be vacated upon Barbara Boxer’s retirement at the end of 2016, was scheduled to deliver a stump speech to the LA County Young Democrats in the Grand Plaza on Saturday afternoon. Some of the foreclosure victims at Saturday’s protest were present for the much-heralded May 2011 launch of the Mortgage Fraud Strike Force. At that press conference, after identifying themselves as homeowner stakeholders, the foreclosure fighters were directed to a side room that Harris never addressed.

Homeless Jump By 44,000 In LA County In Two Years

May 14, 2015 Al JAzeera, www.facebook.com Educate! California, Employment, Homelessness, Housing, Los Angeles, Poverty

he number of homeless people in Los Angeles County jumped 12 percent in the past two years, to more than 44,000, amid a sluggish economic recovery that has left the poorest residents of the second-largest U.S. metropolitan area falling farther behind, a study released on Monday found. Most of those counted weren’t staying in homeless shelters. The study also found that the number of tents, makeshift encampments and vehicles with people living in them jumped by 85 percent, to about 9,500. “California was one of the hardest-hit states in the country during the economic recession, suffering high unemployment and high job losses,” the housing authority said in a news release. “There is a lag in rebound, and the working poor and low-income individuals have been hit particularly hard, with the trifecta of unemployment, stagnant wages and a lack of affordable housing.”

Banks Did More Damage To Baltimore Than So-Called Rioters

May 13, 2015 Emily Foster, www.ourfuture.org Educate! Baltimore, Banking, Housing, Structural Violence

The death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore is not just a story of police brutality or the lack of socioeconomic mobility for the urban poor. It’s also a story of how deregulation allowed corporate banks to strip middle-class families of their financial stability and walk away, leaving behind payday lenders and check-cashing stores to plunder low-income and minority communities. To better understand and communicate that story, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Economic Policy, and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform took their Middle Class Prosperity Project to Baltimore on Monday. It was the latest in a series of forums that started in February to focus “congressional and public attention on challenges faced by the middle class.”

43% Of Detroit Homes Could Lose Water Service

May 12, 2015 Curt Guyette, www.aclumich.org Educate! Detroit, Housing, Water

Last August, after Detroit's mass water shutoffs had attracted international condemnation, Mayor Mike Duggan implemented a 10-point plan he said would provide significant help. "It's taken a lot of effort to get to this point, but I truly think we're in a situation now where if you want to pay your bill we've made it easier, and if you're truly in need we're going to get you to the right place," Duggan said at the time. "I think for the great majority of people in this town the whole process will get a lot better.” More than nine months later, here’s what “a lot better” looks like: Of the city’s 170,493 residential customers, 73,457 were at least 60 days past due as of the end of February.

A Small Business Homeowner Fights Wells Fargo’s Fraud

May 10, 2015 Senka Huskic, www.occupy.com Resist! Foreclosure, Housing, Mortgage Fraud, Wells Fargo

Los Angeles, CA - The way the mainstream media writes about foreclosure these days gives the uninformed reader the impression that the crisis is over and our country won that unfortunate uphill battle. The reality is different. Foreclosures are still happening all around the country. More importantly, a high percentage of those foreclosures are fraudulent, caused by rampant and systematic fraud on the part of banks, their industry accomplices, and those in office who are now settling with the perpetrators while treating the victims – the homeowners – as bare statistics. One of those homeowners is Lainey Hashorva, a woman who after fighting to keep her home for many years, recently received a foreclosure notice from Wells Fargo. Here is her story, similar to the stories of many who have entered this ring of fire.

1 In 4 Renters Spend Half Their Income On Housing

May 2, 2015 RT, www.rt.com Educate! Housing, Poverty, US

For more than one in four renters in the US, housing and utility costs take up at least half of their family's income, according to a new analysis of Census data. That number is up 26 percent since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007. Rising rents and stagnant wages are pushing more Americans into rental agreements, according to ananalysis by Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable housing advocate. More than 36 percent of Americans rent housing as compared to 31 percent before the recession began. The situation is nearly as dire across the nation. In Ohio, Alabama, Maine, Tennessee, Montana, and South Carolina, about 25 percent of renters dedicate half their income to rent and utilities. In fact, at least 20 percent of renters in every state, excepting Alaska, South Dakota, and Wyoming, face similar situations, according to the nonprofit’s analysis of 2013 Census figures.

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