Renter Nation!
Right To The City
A conversation with Tony Romano of the Right to the City Alliance. What are the systemic challenges to democratic and equitable control over public space? What kind of popular mobilizations can build towards systemic alternatives guaranteeing the human right to housing? To help answer these questions, we spoke with Tony Romano, Organizing Director for the Right to City Alliance. Our conversation is below.
California leads the nation in having the most severely rent-burdened households, as well as having the largest shortage of affordable rental homes. (The U.S. Department Housing and Urban Development and other agencies consider families that spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent as rent-burdened.)
Isabelle Lopez, her husband and their dog live in a tiny room, perhaps 130 square feet, in the impoverished Lacy neighborhood in the Orange County city of Santa Ana. The room has cardboard walls, which Lopez’s husband painted white to provide at least an illusion they were solid. On those walls, she has tacked family photos and a large reproduction of a painting titled Angel de la Guarda, surrounded by cutout paper butterflies.
On February 22, Capital & Main launched a week-long series on California’s increasingly severe affordable housing crisis. “No Direction Home” explores how escalating housing prices are undermining the state’s already embattled middle class and exerting intense economic pressure on millions of poor and working-class residents.
Blackstone is one of the world's largest private equity firms. Blackstone made big money in the last housing bubble and now is cashing in again to make lots more. It is buying up housing and real estate all over the world and quickly becoming one of the largest landlord's in our cities. They are raking in the profits. But at the expense of our families and communities.
More New Yorkers than ever are struggling to keep up with rising rents, leaving less and less of their paychecks for food and healthcare.
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