News related to zoning, cities, gentrification and urban development.
David Carbajal Torres organizes with Tenants United Santa Ana (Tú Santa Ana). shows how rent hikes and gentrification displace immigrant communities. David also discussed the community resistance to displacement through organizing, culture, and community ties.
read moreVasudha Kumar is a resident of California’s Silicon Valley. After playing a leading role in a multi-year campaign to stop a new Google megacampus, Vasudha now studies the dynamics of economic displacement in cities around the U.S.
read moreNoni Session is the Executive Director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative in Oakland, California. In a city with a deep Black radical history and some of the most pronounced modern-day displacement, EB PREC is building shared economic and community power by preserving land without landlords.
read moreAs the completion date of Line 3 nears, there’s still much to be done to protect Indigenous activists and their land.
read morePeople are taking action along the supply chain from the coffee fields to neighborhood coffee shops to make sure coffee can be suitable for all of us.
read moreIn his article “Return the National Parks to the Tribes” David Treuer reminds us that national parks are the result of Indigenous dispossession. Everglades National Park is Seminole land. Olympic National Park was created by a violation of a treaty with the Quinault tribe. The first white people to ever see what is now Yosemite National Park were members of a California militia, intent on slaughtering and driving Miwok people off the land and into reservations. “Native people need permanent, unencumbered access to our homelands,” wrote Treuer, an Ojibwe author and historian. “All 85 million acres of national-park sites should be turned over to a consortium of federally recognized tribes in the United States” (The Atlantic).
read moreNeighborhoods of color affected by redlining, historic bank and government-sponsored housing discrimination, are five degrees hotter than non-redlined neighborhoods since they have dramatically less tree cover. In Portland, OR, they’re a shocking 13 degrees warmer (NPR). Communities of color are where state and business elites dump toxic chemicals, coal-fired power plants, and chemical factories across the country. “The climate emergency will have a disproportionate impact on Black and Brown communities” (Guardian) since “the lack of equitable investment in low-income communities leaves people even more at risk for climate change impacts” (NRDC).
read moreThe recent ban on swimcaps for Black hair submerged the Olympics into the deep history of racist policies at the pool.
read moreThis San José flea market is threatened by the construction of a “transit village” around a new light-rail station.
read moreAristotle said, “Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime” (Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality). But in the wake of violence in impoverished Black communities, we often only hear the same refrain: “Why is no one doing anything about this?” The idea that nobody in Black communities works to stop community violence is racist, classist, and false.
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