Tag: affordable housing
Boston’s Mayor Makes Friends—and Enemies—with Her Focus on Housing
Many voters had seen Wu as the leftmost candidate, but being mayor has complicated this perception. She has declined to call for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza, for example, despite frequent protests. Last year, she increased funding for a gang database that she had previously vowed to dismantle and called “discriminatory.” The decision came after observing reforms under a new police commissioner and “spending time with people in different police units,” she told me. A few months later,
How Freddie Mac Helps Private Equity Profit From Tenant Misery
Mr. Julius Bennett, 86, stately in a long coat and fedora, walked dutifully into a courtroom on the third floor of the Bronx County Housing Court. He and a knot of stubborn neighbors had repeated this ritual several times in a snail-like series of hearings, attempting to use the court to compel their landlord to make repairs. Their case file was thick with notices of housing code violations and affidavits attesting to everything from roach and
A Wave of Evictions Is Devastating California’s Farmworkers
EDITOR’S NOTE: The names of undocumented people in this story have been changed to protect their identities.
Tulare, Calif.—Lidia Torres got scared when the new eligibility clerk at the labor camp knocked on her door. She would have to come to the office, Vanessa Carter told her, and reverify the immigration documents she’d provided when she first moved in six
The Cost of Housing in America Has Become Untenable
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.
Reflections on Vienna’s Social Housing Model From Tenant Advocates
Where Britain went wrong – POLITICO
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LIVERPOOL, England — On the long picket line outside the gates of Liverpool’s Peel Port, rain-soaked dock workers warm themselves with cups of tea as they listen to 1980s pop.
Dozens of buses, cars and trucks honk in solidarity as they pass.
Dockers’ strikes are not new to Liverpool, nor is depravation. But this latest walk-out at Britain’s fourth-largest port is part of something much bigger, a great wave of public and private
Why the Poor People’s Campaign 2022 Matters
EDITOR’S NOTE: On Saturday, June 18, tens of thousands of poor and low-income people gathered with allies on Pennsylvania Avenue to lift the voices of those most directly impacted by poverty, racism, militarism, ecological devastation, the denial of healthcare and the
The Second (and Third) Battle of Lexington
In my tenth year, in 1970, my family—my mom, my dad, my seven-year-old brother Tom, and I—moved to the American suburbs. More precisely, we moved to the town of Lexington, Massachusetts, a community of thirty thousand people a dozen miles northwest of Boston. Our house, which cost thirty thousand dollars, was like a child’s drawing of a suburban home: a square block with a door and a window on the ground floor, and two windows on the story above, one
Community Input Caused the Housing Crisis
Development projects in the United States are subject to a process I like to call “whoever yells the loudest and longest wins.” Some refer to this as participatory democracy.
Across the country, angry residents and neighborhood associations have the power to delay, reshape, and even halt entirely the construction of vital infrastructure. To put a fine point on it: Deference to community input is a big part of why the U.S. is suffering from a nearly 3.8-million-home shortage and has
What Happened When a Single Mom Started Filing Income Taxes Again
A year ago, Gabriela Gallegos was ready to file her income taxes for the first time in nearly a decade. She was thirty-five, the single mother of a fourteen-year-old son, but had been claimed as a dependent by her mother for most of the past ten years, which had been tumultuous ones for her. In 2013, her husband, who had been abusive, was murdered. Gallegos struggled with addiction, and had recurring legal trouble related to a conviction, in 2011, for