Tag Archives | Housing

Simply building new homes isn’t enough to solve the housing crisis—what we build and for whom matters a lot more.

Many people now live in homes and rely on infrastructure that are owned by pension funds, insurance companies, and banks.

Pierre Trudeau made housing an instrument of economic justice. Fifty years later his son remade it as an engine of inequality.

Vice President Kamala Harris promises to build three million affordable houses if elected president.

New York State’s Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974 permits the regulation of residential rents  (“rent stabilization”) on the declaration of a housing emergency in New York City when the vacancy rate falls below 5%, or by similar declarations in municipalities in the suburban New York City counties of Nassau, Westchester and Rockland.

Setting limits on how much landlords can increase rents, as Councilmember Kshama Sawant’s legislation would do the moment the unjust state rent control ban is lifted, is a commonsense response to this sick profiteering.

Spend less, work longer or get another job, move in with your parents or get a flatmate. But whatever you do, don’t push for a pay rise to compensate for inflation.

The characterization of landlords as struggling families is central to the prevailing depoliticized view of housing.

A grassroots tenant-organizing victory comes after Orlando and several cities across CA adopted rent control on Tuesday.

The Cost of Living (Tenant Protection) Act allows ministers to temporarily freeze rent increases for private and social tenants and for student accommodation.

As landlords continue their relentless pursuit of profits, and politicians allow pandemic-era eviction moratoriums to expire, the human toll of a fundamentally brutal housing system is arguably more visible than ever—particularly in America’s largest cities.

Only 3.6 million eviction cases were filed in the entire year of 2018. The looming eviction crisis reflects the catastrophic failure of the U.S. government.

A June poll reveals American citizens’ anxieties on paying for housing in the coming year.

Recently on December 15 Eli Saslow wrote a very important feature in The Washington Post on the daily routine life of an elderly police constable Lennie who has been charged with the responsibility of evicting those families or persons from their homes who have not been able to pay their rent.

The new eviction moratorium was put in place amid protests at the federal capital led by progressive legislator Cori Bush, along with various social movements in the U.S.

On Saturday, Biden’s half-hearted, last-minute plea for Congress to extend the federal eviction moratorium failed and the measure expired.

During the pandemic, landlords have filed for 284,490 evictions–and that’s just in five states and 27 cities. But how could this be? After all, a moratorium shouldn’t allow for hundreds of thousands of households to fall through the cracks.

Yves here. Get a cup of coffee. This is another meaty talk with Michael Hudson, this time focusing on his classic Super Imperialism. Hudson has an updated and expanded version set to go to print soon.

“I had like $500 left in my account,” my friend Jordan excitedly tells me. “I was seriously fucked for rent.” Like millions of others, Jordan had entered his final few weeks of eligibility for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), the government’s $2,000 per month unemployment program.

The existing alphabet soup of possible recoveries—V, U, W, and so on (which I discussed back in April)—is clearly inadequate to describe what has been taking place in the United States in recent months.