Tagged: economic inequality

Selected Media

Your Home’s Value Is Based on Racism

By Dorothy A. Brown

Read the full article from The New York Times here.

“Black Americans are often unable to build wealth from homeownership in the same way their white peers are, in large part because home prices are generally set by the people who make up the majority of buyers: white Americans. White families typically prefer to live in predominantly white neighborhoods with very few or no Black neighbors. Homes in these neighborhoods tend to have the highest market values because most prospective purchasers — who happen to be white — find them most desirable.”

Selected Media

Renting Is Terrible. Owning Is Worse.

By Shane Phillips

Read the full article from The Atlantic here.

“The housing situation is only getting worse—more expensive, more inequitable, more precarious. As prices have continued their climb in the country’s most economically dynamic regions, it’s no longer feasible for working-class residents to seek out the best opportunities there. Instead, younger and lower-income residents are being pushed out to places where jobs are less plentiful and lucrative, but where housing, at least, is relatively affordable.”

Selected Media

Renting Is Terrible. Owning Is Worse.

By Shane Phillips

Read the full article from The Atlantic here.

“The housing situation is only getting worse—more expensive, more inequitable, more precarious. As prices have continued their climb in the country’s most economically dynamic regions, it’s no longer feasible for working-class residents to seek out the best opportunities there. Instead, younger and lower-income residents are being pushed out to places where jobs are less plentiful and lucrative, but where housing, at least, is relatively affordable.”

Uncategorized

The mirage of the Black middle class

By Anne Helen Petersen

Read the full article from Vox here.

“You buy a place, that place grows in value, and either you trade up to a bigger place or you keep it until you can pass it down to your kids or your kids get the money from its sale. Stability gives birth to even more stability. That’s not what happened with Dee’s family. ‘My grandparents were bludgeoned every time the economy took a downturn,’ Dee recalls, in part because of the legacy of redlining and the devaluation of property in Black neighborhoods.”

Selected Media

Want to visualise inequality? View cities from above

By Sydney Combs, Photographs by Johnny Miller

View the gallery from National Geographic here.

“Stark images from Johnny Miller’s series “Unequal Scenes” highlight the uneven development of cities. Makeshift shacks butt against developments in Mumbai. Lots sit empty in Detroit while an adjoining neighborhood flourishes. An electric fence buzzes around an affluent community in South Africa. The landscape shows how barriers—both man-made and otherwise—reinforce the disparities in urban centers.”

Selected Media

Where in The U.S. Are You Most Likely to Be Audited by the IRS?

By Paul Kiel and Hannah Fresques

Read the full article from ProPublica, here.

“The study estimates that Humphreys, with a median annual household income of just $26,000, is audited at a rate 51 percent higher than Loudoun County, Virginia, which boasts a median income of $130,000, the highest in the country. In a baffling twist of logic, the intense IRS focus on Humphreys County is actually because so many of its taxpayers are poor. More than half of the county’s taxpayers claim the earned income tax credit, a program designed to help boost low-income workers out of poverty.”

Selected Media

Report: PPP loan program shortchanged Buffalo’s Black neighborhoods

By Jerry Zremski

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

“The federal government’s main effort to rescue small businesses during the pandemic tended to benefit wealthier neighborhoods far more than predominantly Black parts of metro Buffalo, according to a new study by a group that researches federal policy and its implications nationwide. The study found that the ZIP code with the largest Black population in Buffalo, on the city’s East Side, received the smallest number of loans. Meanwhile, the most loans locally went to the 14221 ZIP code, which includes Williamsville and parts of Amherst and Clarence.”

Selected Media

Report: PPP loan program shortchanged Buffalo’s Black neighborhoods

By Jerry Zremski

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

“The federal government’s main effort to rescue small businesses during the pandemic tended to benefit wealthier neighborhoods far more than predominantly Black parts of metro Buffalo, according to a new study by a group that researches federal policy and its implications nationwide. The study found that the ZIP code with the largest Black population in Buffalo, on the city’s East Side, received the smallest number of loans. Meanwhile, the most loans locally went to the 14221 ZIP code, which includes Williamsville and parts of Amherst and Clarence.”

Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. / Selected Media

Breonna Taylor’s violent death highlights the dangers of racist gentrification

By Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.

“The callous killing of George Floyd triggered a massive revolt against police violence and brutality against Blacks. Hostile and dangerous action against Black folk by white police has a long history. But African Americans have been demonstrating against violent police since at least the Chicago riots of 1919. In 1951, a group of Black activists, including the scholar W.E.B. DuBois and the singer-activist Paul Robeson, took a petition to the United Nations titled ‘We Charge Genocide,’ arguing, among other things, that ‘the killing of Negroes has become police policy in the United States.'”

Selected Media

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?”

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