housing 
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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?
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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?
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SOURCE: The New Republic
10/19/2022
LA Council Racism Shows Ethnic Politics Covers for War by Landlords on Renters
The recorded remarks in a council meeting show that while Angelenos have been encouraged to vote along ethnic lines, their representatives have been more intersted in catering to politically powerful landlords and developers.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
10/15/2022
The Crossroads: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the Inadequacy of Politics as Usual
"Today, we have lived through two terms of a Black presidency and the highest concentration of Black elected officials in Congress and beyond in American history. So the question of whether we can vote our way into liberation is no longer an abstraction."
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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?
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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.
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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.
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5/1/2022
High Crimes and Lingering Consequences: How Land Sale Contracts Looted Black Wealth and Gutted Chicago Communities
by Tiff Beatty
Chicago artist Tonika Lewis Johnson is creating public installations documenting properties where Black residents were subjected to predatory contract home sales, and connecting the past to the present struggles of the city's south and west sides.
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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.
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SOURCE: Public Books
3/22/2022
Is "Regulation from Below" Possible? Historian Rebecca Marchiel on Community Housing Activism
"Marchiel’s narrative paints the picture of a remarkably powerful national reinvestment campaign against an almost unstoppable force of ever more inventive flows of capital. Perhaps the lesson should have been that capitalism refuses to work for people."
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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.
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SOURCE: NPR
11/17/2021
Unenforceable Racial Covenants are Still Part of Property Deeds Across America
"I'd be surprised to find any city that did not have restrictive covenants," said LaDale Winling, a historian and expert on housing discrimination who teaches at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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