Housing

By Cara Bertron

 The City of Oakland is currently considering its billion-dollar budget, including significant resources for meeting critical needs in Oakland for working families. Two specific funding sources include a $1.9 million surplus that was unaccounted for in earlier budget proposals, as well as another $25 million in the General Purpose Reserve. Just Cause Oakland is making specific demands of that surplus to go towards fighting gentrification and the loss of African-Americans from the city, in response to the city’s loss of between 13 and 25% of its African-American population since 2000 – largely due to housing issues.

To focus on this issue, Just Cause held a rally on the steps of City Hall on June 14th, before presenting their case in front of City Council at the hearing scheduled to debate the upcoming budget. Just Cause has developed a menu of several Emergency Housing Service programs that it wants the city to fund with $5.68 million from the budget. These services would help to keep low-income renters and homeowners from losing their homes and potentially leaving Oakland. For more information about this campaign, contact Magdalene Martinez at 510-763-5877or Vanessa Moses at 510-435-0500.

By Kalima Rose

The Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC) has worked for fifteen years to revitalize the lower Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, building affordable housing, rehabbing dilapidated buildings and training residents to own cooperative businesses in the neighborhood. The success of these efforts has forced them into unanticipated arenas, including a Displacement Free Zone campaign—their fierce effort to defend tenants within the 36-block neighborhood from evictions; and a local and state policy campaign with other New York City organizations to give landlords incentives to keep their tenants in place and to require developers to include affordable housing in market-rate developments.

Anti-Displacement Policy Options & Community Response (Vol.9, No.1)

Gentrification, the wrenching process of neighborhood change, was first named in the 1960s.  The name, however did not acknowledge the permanent erasure that takes place when a community loses its memory.  Gentrification, or urban blight were policy terms that carried social and racial values, as well as a political and economic agenda.  The layered meanings of the language of redevelopment has been understood by many communities that have fought to remain intact.  In San Francisco, those communities and their fights for survival are whispered anthems to community struggle; International Hotel, Yerba Buena, Fillmore.

 Public Policy Institute

"Green building" movement to construct offices and homes that use less energy, less water, and more environmentally-friendly materials

 Ask a group of friends to name top sources of energy waste and pollution, and odds are good that no one would answer "my house" or "the place where I work." Yet the fact is that the nation's 5 million commercial facilities and 76 million residential buildings consume more than two-fifths of all our energy. They also account for just over one-third of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions (a chief culprit in climate change), about one-half of sulfur dioxide emissions, one-quarter of nitrous oxide emissions, and one-tenth of particulate emissions (all major contributors to smog and acid rain). The current construction boom is expected to add 38 million new buildings by the end of the decade, compounding the nation's air, waste, and water quality problems. Construction and demolition already generates 136 million tons of waste annually.