Flint Taylor's, 'The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago,' is one of those remarkable works that won't fit under any one category. It's at once a history of a civil and human rights battles in Chicago with national and global reach
The world’s real estate is worth an estimated $217 trillion, making up more than 60 percent of global assets. Even though three-quarters of that amount is tied up in housing, it hasn’t translated to secure shelter or prosperity for many...
In the cities where the most refugees per capita were settled since 2005, newcomers helped stem or reverse population loss. Donald Trump lowered the maximum number of refugees it takes in for the third year in a row—to 30,000, lowest in three decade
Vacant storefronts are becoming more noticeable in the capital of consumption, as small retailers are being pushed out by wealthy investors
The so-called gig-economy is celebrated, maligned, fetishized, and qualified by analysts. Whether it is called the collaborative, platform, crowd-sourcing, or sharing-economy, the rise of peer-to-peer exchanges does raise important questions for workers. Do emerging ‘sharing-economy’ platforms such as Uber and Airbnb mark a significant shift in production and distribution systems? Are they emancipatory or exploitive?
Half of all new jobs in Washington, DC will require at least a bachelor's degree, although only 12.3 percent of Black residents in 2014 had graduated from college. And, now that wealthier residents have moved back to cities, rent increases have left longtime residents unable to afford their homes.
In the summer of 1967, the streets of Newark exploded in violence. Here is a first-hand account of the tragic events that changed the city, and the country forever. Newark’s population is still exceedingly low income. Crime, gang warfare, drugs, joblessness and failing schools are still facts of life in some Newark neighborhoods. But the cultures of many ethnic groups continue to lift the spirit of its many peoples. Increasingly, Newark is a good place to call home.
If anyone doubted Black Americans still today suffer unfairly from incarceration rates and other horrific inequities out of all proportion to their numbers in the population, the case was closed by Michelle Alexander in her masterly The New Jim Crow (2010). Comes now James Forman Jr., to argue convincingly that key sections of the black community themselves abetted the criminalizing of black youths in a misguided effort to make so-called law and order work for them.
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.
Systemic problems require systemic solutions. Police alone cannot stop urban violence; it requires action on every front. Rising poverty in the nation's capital has been experienced primarily by black and Latino residents. The average white family's income is $110,757, according to Census estimates. For black families it's $39,081. There's a growing income gap nationwide. This kind of disparity breeds hopelessness, which drives people to acts of desperation and violence.
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