Departments

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housing

  • SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
    5/12/2023

    Big Win for Victims of Restrictive Covenants

    by James Gregory

    Restrictive covenants and other housing policies created a housing market defined by racial segregation and locked generations of Black Americans out of wealth-building. Now courts frown on race-aware remedies for past discrimination. Has the state of Washington figured out a way around that to deliver reparations? 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/16/2023

    Black San Franciscans Have Been Leaving—Could Reparations Bring them Back?

    A city commission has issued non-binding advisory recommendations for extensive cash reparations to Black residents and their families who were pushed out of now-valuable property through urban renewal. It's not likely that the local government will implement any of them, so activists are trying to help make housing more affordable.

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
    5/5/2023

    Why a Long-Maligned Housing Style Endures in Leeds

    Once a progressive improvement on court-style housing in working class neighborhoods, then disfavored as cramped and lacking in privacy, urbanists look to Leeds's back-to-back rowhouses as a guide to more efficient and affordable housing for modern cities. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    4/25/2023

    Will the Battle of the Suburbs Play Out Differently This Time?

    by Lily Geismer

    One of the most important failures of the civil rights era was allowing affluent suburbs to block requirements to build affordable housing in their jurisdictions. As housing costs climb higher, is there the political will among Democrats to risk angering suburban voters? 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    3/16/2023

    Don't Bother Looking for a Place to Rent in DC

    by Rebecca Gordon

    New congressman Maxwell Frost's struggles to find an apartment in the capital echoes the "Bourgeois Blues" Leadbelly sang in 1937. What does it say about democracy if representatives of the people can't live in Washington? 

  • SOURCE: Law and Political Economy Project
    2/20/2023

    When the Public University is a Corporate Landlord

    by Charmaine Chua, Desiree Fields and David Stein

    During negotiations with graduate student workers, UCLA administrators claimed that increasing stipends would effectively subsidize local landlords through higher rents and squeeze the poor in the Los Angeles housing market. The reality is that the university is an investor in a huge real estate trust that is hiking rents itself. 

  • SOURCE: The Conversation
    1/25/2023

    Atlanta's BeltLine Project a Case Study in Park-Driven "Green Gentrification"

    by Dan Immergluck

    Although the ambitious combination of multiuse trails and apartment complexes "was designed to connect Atlantans and improve their quality of life, it has driven up housing costs on nearby land and pushed low-income households out to suburbs with fewer services than downtown neighborhoods."

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
    1/19/2023

    Biden Administration Plans Action on Fair Housing

    State and local governments are required under the Fair Housing Act to examine and act to eliminate patterns of discrimination in housing within their boundaries. The federal purse has seldom been used as leverage to ensure they comply. 

  • SOURCE: The Metropole
    11/3/2022

    The Tyranny of the Maps: Rethinking Redlining

    by Robert Gioielli

    The four-color mortgage security maps created by New Deal-era bureaucrats and bankers have become a widely-known symbol of housing discrimination and the racial wealth gap. But does the public familiarity with the maps obscure the history of housing discrimination? And what can historians do about that?

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    8/24/2022

    Are Co-Ops the Lost Solution to the Housing Crisis?

    by Annemarie Sammartino

    At its 1966 opening, New York's Co-Op City was heralded as the solution to the nation's affordable housing crisis. What went right, what went wrong, and can it help guide better housing policy today?

  • SOURCE: CNN
    8/24/2022

    How "Sales Comps" Built Racism Into the Housing Market

    by Elizabeth Korver-Glenn

    The recent ordeal of a Johns Hopkins historian whose house was appraised for more money when he removed pictures of himself and his Black family points to a key finding: the use of sales comparisons to appraise homes enshrines racism in the market. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    5/2/2022

    Is Historic Preservation Ruining American Cities?

    by Jacob Anbinder

    Historic preservation laws often have a loose relationship to the actual historic significance of buildings, and an even looser relationship to the interests of cities in meeting their residents' social needs. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    4/5/2022

    How the "Jewel of Harlem" Became Unlivable

    Opened in 1967, Esplanade Gardens’ co-op apartments were seen as a way for Black families to acquire intergenerational wealth and gnaw away at centuries-long inequality in housing.Then it started falling apart.

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    11/29/2021

    The Invention of America's Most Dangerous Idea

    by Gene Slater

    How did a right-wing conception of "freedom" rooted in the individual's absolute property rights supersede an idea of freedom based in social equality? Blame the real estate industry.