Departments

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housing

  • 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. 

  • SOURCE: Platform
    11/1/2021

    How Academia Laid the Groundwork for Redlining

    by Todd Michney and LaDale Winling

    Richard T. Ely and his student Ernest McKinley Fisher pushed the National Association of Real Estate Boards to adopt "the unsupported hypothesis that Black people's very presence inexorably lowered property values," tying the private real estate industry to racial segregation. 

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    10/6/2021

    "No There There": Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the Future of the Left

    "I’m sitting in the car, barreling down the highway, asking myself, 'What happened in my life that has put me in this position where I have to like listen to this &%$*@ nonsense?' I needed to leave. But like most people, I needed the health insurance."

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
    9/28/2021

    When the Real Estate Industry Led the Fight to Defend Segregation

    California's battle over fair housing legislation in the 1960s shows a key development of modern conservatism: raising property rights to an absolute and brooking no infringement on it, particularly for the sake of racial equality, argues Gene Slater, author of a new book on fair housing. 

  • SOURCE: Governing
    9/21/2021

    Redlining Happened, but Not Exactly the Way We've Thought it Did

    New economic research reinforces an argument made by historian Amy Hillier, that federal agencies didn't invent "redlining" but responded to widespread public prejudices that imagined Black residents as threats to neighborhood property value. 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    9/16/2021

    Homelessness and Eviction in the Land of the Free

    by Liz Theoharis

    Homeless activists in the 1980s and 1990s began to push back against the narrative that mass homelessness reflected the defects of individuals instead of a profit-driven housing system. As the Supreme Court has thrown out a federal eviction moratorium, that lesson is more relevant than ever.