Departments

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housing

  • SOURCE: Black Perspectives
    3/9/2021

    The Roots of Racial and Spatial Inequality

    by Kimberley S. Johnson

    As part of the AAIHS's roundtable on Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's "Race For Profit," urban studies scholar Kimberley Johnson looks at the ways that generations of housing policy enabled banks to write predatory loans to Black buyers, profiting first by high interest, then by foreclosure, while blaming outcomes on the individual irresponsibility of Black borrowers. 

  • SOURCE: Black Perspectives
    3/3/2021

    Online Roundtable: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s ‘Race for Profit’

    Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, will sponsor a virtual roundtable on the award-winning "Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership" with new essays being released beginning March 8. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    1/2/2021

    The Pandemic Disproved Urban Progressives’ Theory About Gentrification

    by Jacob Ambinder

    Anti-gentrification activists portray themselves as champions of the poor, but they generally represent a coalition of property owners who benefit from keeping the supply of a resource – housing – scarce. How can the political and economic incentives of land and housing be realigned?

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    10/1/2020

    With Evictions Looming, Cities Revisit a Housing Experiment From the ’70s (video)

    by Retro Report

    The looming evictions crisis is prompting housing policy experts to reconsider government programs that would enable the tenants of a building to secure loans to purchase their buildings cooperatively. A video from Retro Report explores how the battle to save the International Hotel in San Francisco for its low-income tenants prefigured today's policy debates.

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
    9/21/2020

    A Neighborhood’s Race Affects Home Values More Now Than in 1980

    by Brentin Mock

    The real estate industry has adopted appraisal standards in response to fair housing laws that are, on the surface, race-neutral. But they don't account for the ways that racism has lowered the sale value in diverse neighborhoods, and still penalize Black and Latino homeowners. 

  • SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
    9/10/2020

    History and Gentrification Clash in a Gilded Age Resort

    A proposal to redevelop a section of Newport, Rhode Island far from the city's typical tourist destinations has generated an unlikely alliance of low-income residents who fear displacement and affluent historic preservation advocates. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
    9/4/2020

    The Depression-Era Lessons That Can Solve Today’s Evictions Crisis

    by Anya Jabour

    Social workers and researchers Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge conducted an important study of evictions in Chicago during the Great Depression and advocated for federal support for a minimum standard of living including housing. The looming eviction crisis demands similar big thinking. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    8/25/2020

    The Burning House: How Federal Housing Programs Failed Black America (Review)

    by Marcia Chatelain

    "As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor shows in Race for Profit, we are also only beginning to reckon with the complex network of bankers, real estate agents, and federal agencies that used the rhetoric of equality to obscure a set of race-to-the-bottom schemes that sought to extract as much wealth as possible from poor Black Americans."

  • SOURCE: Black Perspectives
    8/20/2020

    The Black Freedom Struggle of the North (Review)

    "'The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North' is a major milestone in the growing historical literature on racial discrimination and the civil rights struggle outside the South," writes Joshua Clark Davis.

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    8/14/2020

    The Black Lives Next Door

    by Richard Rothstein

    Activism for racial justice will not succeed until activists recognize how residential segregation has been made into a normal feature of the American landscape and pressure the developers and banks who have profited from it to take restorative action. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    7/22/2020

    Tearing Down Black America

    by Brent Cebul

    Ensuring that Black Lives Matter doesn't just require police reform. The history of urban renewal shows that governments have worked to dismantle and destabilize Black communities in the name of progress.