Housing

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.

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.

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