By Deidre Williams
Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.
For only the second time in his 16 years as Buffalo’s mayor, Bryon Brown proposes to increase property taxes.
His $568 million spending plan for 2022-23 recommends increasing residential property taxes by 5% and commercial property taxes by 6.6%.
By Ethan McLeod
Read the full article from City Lab, here.
Housing activists, officials and researchers are deploying new tools to empower tenants, spotlight negligent property owners and curb evictions in U.S. cities.
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.”
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.'”