affordable housing

The location of affordable housing is driven by land-use planning. My new BankTalk entry puts the context of the Wake County school board decisions in a national context. A new study shows that more and more schools are increasingly constituted as private-public schools. These schools have very few poor children. Those districts exist even when a larger MSA is well-off. Certainly, Boston and San Francisco harbor plenty of wealth. Drilling down, it is easy to see that these are places without enough affordable housing. Wake County is ready to go to "neighborhood schools." Does that mean that soon, we'll witness a community that allows its schools to filter opportunity based on class and race? In 2000, Wake had 25 census tracts where fewer than 3 percent of its school-age children lived in poverty. Elementary schools often draw from just a handful of tracts.

The Southern Coalition for Social Justice is proud to announce that we are now representing the University Apartments Residents Association in their efforts to stop the gentrification of their historic, 71 year old apartment complex in Durham’s West End on West Chapel Hill Street.

At my first job as a community organizer with Maryland ACORN I organized tenants in a number of apartment complexes all owned by the same slumlord.

It was a good organizing opportunity because just about everyone living there (over a thousand families) had the same problems: vermin, flooding on the 1st floor, lack of repairs, and issues with safety and lighting. Also Maryland has some basic laws protecting renters. These weren't sufficient, but there was at least a limit to what renters were expected to tolerate.

A rezoning request that would have forced the mass eviction of 160 Raleigh families will likely be dropped, according to an interview from the developer.

If you have picked up this week's Independent Weekly, you can't help but notice the cover story. Bob Geary has authored "Paradise Lost: Mobile Home Park Residents Caught in a Catch-22." Its a great story, highlighting the plight of 180 families at Homestead Village Mobile Home Park who are destined to lose their homes if the City approves a rezoning of their community.
The back story is that a lot of the credit for this is due to BlueNC! Blogging online leads to print sometimes, and without going into too many details, this is the case here. So, I want to lend a shout-out to BlueNC.

The Raleigh City Council is ready to force 160 low income residents from their homes, in order to make way for more development. Homestead Village Mobile Home Park is off of Capital Boulevard in North Raleigh. This is very affordable housing in an area in an expensive part of town. Will Raleigh replace these units with new affordable housing? Will the residents The park owner is 70, on oxygen, and needs to get out of the business. The prospective buyer wants to rezone for mixed use commercial redevelopment.