If you care about social justice, you have to care about zoning. Taking on exclusionary zoning also begins to address two other challenges the Biden administration has identified: the housing affordability crisis and climate change.
Such a plan, said Rep. Jamaal Bowman, "would allow people to live with dignity and respect, to know that our federal government cares about their well-being and their health."
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The failure of Hudson Yards should be both an object lesson and an opportunity. Grotesque hyper-luxury, with taxpayer subsidy no less, has had its day. Let’s build for regular people. Hudson Yards could be a monument to what was, and could still be.
“Rent strikers and people at risk of losing their shelter are doing all they can to stop the violence of evictions and promote a vision of collective and community ownership of housing for everyone.”
We must see real estate market for what it truly is: an institution rooted in settler colonialism that allows land (and the housing that sits atop it) to be distributed and controlled by those who have enough money for their preferences to matter.
After months of organizing that included the establishment of two protest encampments, Philadelphia’s unhoused people successfully pushed the city to agree to provide housing on a community land trust on October 14.
With fortunes inflated by corporate welfare, wealthy real estate owners can afford to cancel housing-related expenses and debts for millions of struggling American families.
The upward redistribution of income has cost Americans workers $50 trillion over the past several decades. On average, extreme inequality is costing the median income full-time worker about $42,000 a year.
The fight for housing security has already become a part of the general struggle against inequality made possible by the epochal rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
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