In cities where people are desperate for housing, why are there still empty properties?
Ahead of the first 2020 presidential debates, Dems have released some of the most far-reaching housing plans in decades.
Now they face foreclosure. Urban African American neighborhoods are hardest hit as nearly 100,000 loans have failed.
According to Berkeley author Randy Shaw, skyrocketing prices for all three forms of housing have created a generational divide, with major political implications for progressive city governments and advocates of affordable housing.
It's been an exciting and challenging summer for California tenants. The good news: through our collective power, we are fighting back. Here's just a slice of the work Tenants Together and our members, partners, and allies are doing this summer!
For the first time we have raw data on the magnitude of the eviction crisis that so many people in our communities already know from firsthand experience.
Over the course of their research, they conducted more than 100 interviews with tenants who are essentially renting from Wall Street firms. The report tells the stories of absurd rent increases, dangerous failures in property management, and high eviction rates. And, as the authors note, lower income families and people of color are disproportionately affected by these practices.
Matthew Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard - a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist, and one who has set a new standard for reporting on poverty. In Milwaukee, he moved into a trailer park and then to a rooming house on the -poverty-stricken North Side and diligently took notes on the lives of people who pay 70 to 80 percent of their incomes for homes that are unfit for human habitation.
California cities are being victimized by the latest iteration of Wall Street predation—the purchase in bulk of distressed single-family mortgages and foreclosed homes, so-called Real Estate Owned (REOs) properties—with the intent to rent them. Through this REO to Rental process, investors are muscling out first time homebuyers, displacing tenants, outbidding nonprofit affordable housing developers, and changing the demographics of whole communities.
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