Like All Building Projects, California’s Housing Bill Is Behind Schedule and Causing Headaches
Richard Vogel/AP images Earlier this month, it looked like California’s hotly contested housing legislation, Senate Bill 50, might fail yet again. As it was nearing a fatal deadline, bill author state Sen. Scott Wiener caught a break: Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins moved the bill out of the Appropriations Committee, where it was held…
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Movement Is About a Lot More Than Just Congress
Gabriel Hernández Solano For years, tenants in New York’s public housing residences had complained about the black mold breeding on the walls, the brown liquid dripping from the ceilings, and the cold water flowing from the faucets. But the city hadn’t made repairs. One white-skied Saturday this past November, neither New York City Housing Authority head…
For Black Americans, It’s Not a Housing Crisis. It’s a Chronic Condition.
Donte Bruce holds the US flag during a 2000 march in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles to demand fair housing for low-income communities.Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Redlining is widely seen as the source of the vast disparities in housing and homeownership between white and Black Americans. Denied access to government-backed mortgages,…
Ben Carson Shows He’s Not Actually Interested in Making Cities Affordable
Jeff Malet/ZUMA Last summer, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson sparked a glimmer of hope among (still-skeptical) housing advocates when he spoke in support of creating federal incentives for local governments to loosen restrictive zoning codes that make housing less affordable. On Friday, he extinguished it. HUD is preparing to release a new…
Monsters of the 2010s: Your Landlord
Mother Jones illustration; Heritage Images/Getty The staff of Mother Jones is rounding up the decade’s heroes and monsters. Find them all here. Landlords. Where do you start? Do you start with the property company evicting two unhoused mothers and their kids for moving into a home that the “distressed” housing brokers preferred empty, for getting in the way…
Michael Bloomberg Has a Toxic Legacy on Lead
Democratic presidential candidate former New York City mayor.Justin Sullivan/Getty This piece was originally published in HuffPost and appears here as part of our Climate Desk Partnership. When Cordell Cleare went to meet the mayor of New York City for the first time in winter 2003, she expected to be disappointed. The Harlem mother had spent…