“There are a lot of basic things that America has still not accepted in terms of how to live a happy urban life.”
Tag: Housing
Why Renters Fought NYC’s Push for Ownership
“Doesn’t every New Yorker really want to own a co-op?,” a realtor asked a crowd of tenants in 1972. But this provoked only “a chorus of noes.”
Public Thinker: Sophie Gonick on Housing Justice and Mass Movements
“As often the most vulnerable in our cities, immigrants face struggles that reflect the wider landscape of housing precarity.”
Is “Regulation from Below” Possible?
A powerful grassroots movement campaigned in the ’70s and ’80s for banks to reinvest equitably in red-lined urban communities. It failed—but why?
The US Arrested Her—Then She Changed Chicago
In the 1960s, Chicago’s white neighborhoods didn’t want Mexican Americans moving in. But one determined real estate broker changed everything.
“Redlining Does Not End”: Talking with Rebecca Marchiel on Housing and Racism
“They all wanted to imagine a different possibility of an integrated neighborhood, where folks worked together.”
“There’s No There There”: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the Future of the Left
“We don't have a party. That doesn't mean we need one big organization. We may need a few big organizations. But we need organizations!”
Prison Tech Comes Home
Landlords’, bosses’ and schools’ intrusion of surveillance technologies into the home extends the carceral state into domestic space.
Emergency Urbanism
Housing-justice movements ask: How can unhoused people be considered trespassers on state-owned land?
What Would a Feminist City Look Like? Talking with Leslie Kern
“What we build and how we build influences the kinds of families and relationships that we can have or can even imagine.”
How to House America
Fixing the American housing crisis will require constructing more houses, but also increasing subsidies and protections for existing tenants.
Urban Renewal and Its Discontents
Unless inequality and segregation are broken, wealthy white communities can always abandon everyone else.
What Can Big Data Teach Us about Eviction?
Big data shows that those fighting eviction today need not be constrained by today’s ideas or laws of property.
The False Hopes of Homeownership
The American Dream of private home ownership has fueled a system that preys on Black people for profit.
Cities Run by Real Estate
After decades confined to the desk drawer of important but boring things, the minutiae of urban planning policy are now attracting some popular attention. Transit-oriented development might come up ...
Chicago Yesterday and Today: A Conversation with Carlo Rotella
Carlo Rotella is a professor of American studies, English, and journalism at Boston College; he’s also one of the most talented writers in the humanities ...
Global Cities and Their Discontents: Saskia Sassen and Teresa Caldeira in Conversation
In a moment in which the populist right wing is ascendant globally, cities can serve as beacons of hope ...
Uploading Housing Inequality, Digitizing Housing Justice?
Advances in digital technology that some analysts ascribe to a “Tech Boom 2.0” ...
“Our Emancipation Day”: Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago
Chicago’s strategies to keep African American movement limited throughout the city . . .
Who Segregated America?
Recently long-listed for the National Book Award for nonfiction, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law is an accessible and powerful account of how metropolitan America became racially segregated ...