‘Mass evictions’ on the horizon as US confronts coronavirus housing crisis: Advocates
The pandemic is exacerbating a brewing crisis in low-income communities.
By Deena Zaru
Author: Henry Taylor
Stop Blaming Black People for Dying of the Coronavirus
By Ibram X. Kendi
Read the full article from The Atlantic, here.
“There is nothing wrong with begging all Americans to take this vicious virus seriously. There is nothing wrong with begging one’s black grandfather or white daughter or Latina sister or Asian father or Native friend to social distance. There is everything wrong with lecturing a racial group to behave better as a solution to racial disparities, as U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams did on Friday during a White House press conference.”
Buffalo’s Tax Assessment to Exacerbate Eviction Problem
By Ian Stern
“The question boils down to who has the right to a neighborhood? Is it the people who are living and have been living in their home and community for decades, with strong social and spatial ties? Or is it the people who want to live in the new up and coming neighborhood or the hospitals and medical research facilities and the people they employ?”
A Green Stimulus Plan for a Post-Coronavirus Economy
By Brentin Mock
Read the full article from CityLab, here.
“Congress is already deep in the throes of constructing a large economic recovery bill, to help workers losing income and businesses and governments losing revenue due to the novel coronavirus crisis. But the U.S. Senate is stuck in a debate between Republicans who want to dedicate a quarter of its $1.8 trillion stimulus plan to bailing out corporations, and Democrats who want to ensure strict transparency and oversight over how that $500 billion corporate bailout would be registered.”
Tomorrow is Here
By Henry Louis Taylor Jr.
“We are now in unchartered waters. The world we knew yesterday no longer exists. The surreal is the new reality. This pandemic conjures up images of the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918. It is way too early to compare COVID-19 to that tragedy, but already this pandemic has generated a response the world has never seen before.”
Evicted in Buffalo: the High Costs of Involuntary Mobility
From Partnership for the Public Good and PUSH Buffalo
Read the full report here.
“For this report, we spoke to tenants, judges, attorneys, and community organizations, observed eviction cases, and analyzed data from the city, county and courts. The report discusses the scale of the problem, determines who is impacted the most, and presents solutions from across the country to improve housing stability for our city’s tenants.”
A Golden Opportunity for a Green Stimulus
By Kate Aronoff
Read the full article from The New Republic, here.
“Providing both Democratic and Republican talking points—about government waste and excess, for instance—Data for Progress found at least 60 percent of respondents supported the idea of green industrial policy to boost a number of concrete technologies: smart grids, electric buses, renewable energy, battery technology, and building retrofits with a focus on low-income housing. Investments toward underground high-voltage transmission lines and electric minivans and pickup trucks also polled well.”
Scammer isn’t the real source of blight on Buffalo’s East Side
By Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.
“According to The News, HouHou and his investors littered and left the city’s communities with boarded-up and vacant, deteriorating, demolished, burned-down and vandalized houses. First and foremost, these neighborhoods were blighted long before HouHou came to Buffalo. Blight does not happen overnight or even in a few years. Neighborhood decline takes decades.”
Urban Planning and the Building of a New Society
By Henry Louis Taylor Jr.
“[Our] world was a deeply flawed one characterized by racism, classism, misogyny, homophobia, hyper-privatization and the maldistribution of wealth, needless poverty, unnecessary hardship, ghetto-slums, mass incarceration, premature death and injustice. The type of cities, suburbs and economy built for inhabitation played a critical role in shaping the differential existence that produce exclusivity, inequity, inequality and injustice among the people.”
Reflections of an Activist Scholar: Henry Louis Taylor, Jr.
Remarks by Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.
“I am an activist turned scholar, not a scholar turned activist. I started my professional career as a clinical audiologist. My father, who received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1954, always challenged me to use my skills and talents in service of black people and to help build a better, more just and humane world. So, I obtained a Master’s Degree in clinical audiology, and became director of audiology at a small Speech and Hearing Clinic in Newport News, Virginia. In the late 60s, like many of my peers, I was radicalized, moved my clinical operations to near-by Hampton Institute, a historically black college, and joined a militant organization modeled after the Black Panther Party.”