Departments

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housing

  • 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. 

  • SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
    9/10/2021

    Los Angeles Pioneered American Racial Segregation

    by Gene Slater

    The real estate industry acted as a cartel to limit the free market in housing to preserve racial homogeneity, claiming it was necessary to protect property values. This form of housing segregation was tested in the booming market of 1920s California and spread nationwide. 

  • SOURCE: MSNBC
    9/4/2021

    House Hunting While Black: Racism Sabotages the American Dream

    by Keisha N. Blain

    "The current rate of mortgage denials — and the interrelated patterns of housing discrimination and exclusion — is rooted in American history. Discrimination against Black Americans applying for mortgage loans is not new."