Posts About Affordable Housing
Gail Goldberg - Planning in LA
By Amanda Shaffer
Last May, when the search for a new Planning Director for the City of LA was announced, UEPI, as part of the Alliance for a Livable Los Angeles, helped draft a letter to the new planning director with a vision for a new Los Angeles. A little over a year later, it seems that the vision has a good shot at becoming a reality.
On Saturday, July 22nd, the Alliance for a Livable Los Angeles hosted a community forum with the new planning director, Gail Goldberg. Over 150 residents filled a meeting room at the LAANE office, for a dialogue with Gail about the future of planning in Los Angeles. Community groups presented on a number of issues including affordable housing/gentrification, transportation, fresh & health food access and the impact of new developments on surrounding communities. Overall, Gail’s responses were, as one of the event organizers put it, “music to our ears.”
Continue reading "Gail Goldberg - Planning in LA"
Air Conditioning in the Heat Wave
By Robert Gottlieb
and Peter Dreier
At a community forum this past Saturday with L.A.’s new Planning Director, Gail Goldberg, fifteen community residents that had been brought to the forum by the Korean Resource Center wanted to talk about the desperate need for air conditioning, especially for seniors and anyone else vulnerable to this god awful heat wave. They didn’t get much of a response that day, and, as it turns out, it’s hard to get a response through any of the formal channels to register complaints involving the various housing bureaucracies. This is especially true for renters who have been promised air conditioning in their leases but never had it, or when their air conditioning system breaks down and the landlord doesn’t fix it. Landlords have even denied tenants the right to install their own air conditioning if “no a/c” is part of the lease, including when the tenant pays the electricity bill!
Landlord interests have been successful in preventing any requirements to fix or install air conditioning to be incorporated into the Housing Code. Nor have the Supervisors, or the City Council, or the Mayor and the Housing Department developed approaches that can facilitate action in this area, especially with the kind of crisis we’re experiencing right now.
In 1995, Chicago experienced a heat wave that resulted in more
than 450 deaths; deaths that happened in part because of the failure of
policymakers to create the support mechanisms to allow the most vulnerable to
withstand the heat. Eric Klinenberg, whose compelling study (“Heat Wave”) of
what he called an “environmentally stimulated but socially organized
catastrophe” has important lessons for what’s happening now in L.A. and other parts of the country. Let’s
hope we won’t see a similar catastrophe happen here because the air conditioning
is broke, or a landlord doesn’t allow a tenant to install one, or that the
policies we’ve developed to get air conditioning fixed or installed turn out to
be broken as well.
John Edwards and the Politics of Poverty
By Peter Dreier
In a walnut paneled conference room, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with Georgian chandeliers, Remington-style bronze reproductions, 17th century Flemish art and Persian carpets, including one woven by servants of the Shah of Iran, John Edwards sat in the same chair at a small round table for two days taking copious notes, as panels of policy wonks expounded on new approaches to fight poverty.
In the age of George W., Wal-mart, and free market ideology, few public officials or candidates for office have much to say about the persistence of poverty in the world's wealthiest nation. Yet here was Edwards, calculating whether and how to run for president, at a two-day seminar on poverty that, while attracting 200 people, really had only one student. Read the rest of my article on the Common Dreams website...
Happy MLK Day
By Peter Dreier
Many of you have seen the LA Times' 4-day series last week criticizing the United Farm Workers. In response, I wrote this op-ed, published in the Sunday LA Times (yesterday), criticizing the paper's general coverage of labor and workplace issues.
On a positive note, the NY Times Magazine yesterday ran a great cover story on the growing "living wage" movement around the country, focusing on ACORN staffer Jen Kern.
And Holly Sklar has a great article about Dr. King's views about economic justice and labor on the TomPaine website.
The new (Winter 2006) issue of Dissent has my tribute to Rosa Parks.
CommonSense last week published a tribute to civil liberties and housing activist Frank Wilkinson by Jan Breidenbach and me. It was also published in The Nation as part of Katrina Vanden Heuvel's column.
Also in The Nation, I recommend "A Top Ten List of Bold Ideas" by Gar Alperovitz and Thad Williamson. Even if you don't agree with all of these ideas it is important for progressives to create a positive forward-looking agenda, not just be against things.
Something to be against, though, are the huge tax break for the wealthy, including that part of the homeowner deduction that goes to the richest folks with the biggest homes. My article in the current issue of Shelterforce examines President Bush's tax reform task force and its recent recommendation to reform what I call the "mansion subsidy":
Finally, I recommend a new report by Columbia University economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes, who estimate the cost of the war in Iraq at $2 trillion - four times more than the Bush administration's projections.
Frank Wilkinson's Legacy
By Peter Dreier
The obituaries for Frank Wilkinson, who died January 2 at 91, primarily focused on his role as a leading opponent of McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and government spying on citizens. In 1958, Wilkinson was one of the last people ordered to prison for defying HUAC. He appealed his contempt citation all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled 5 to 4 against him. After spending nine months in federal prison in 1961, Wilkinson through the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, spend more than a decade fighting to dismantle HUAC, which was finally abolished in 1975. Wilkinson also fought the FBI. He sued the FBI to obtain its files on him, eventually getting 132,000 documents, which revealed that the agency had been spying on him for 38 years. A federal judge order the FBI to end its surveillance of Wilkinson.