The recent Affordability Impact Statement produced by city housing staffers for the proposed “Phase 1” of single family lot use modifications (Case Number C20-2023-024) furnishes useful insight into current thinking inside the city’s housing department. While the document proclaims that the proposed resolution would produce “mixed results” and that “market driven” solutions grounded in dogmatic […]
Continue ReadingHarvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies released its 2019 State of the Nation’s Housing report, and it makes for interesting reading. Once you get past the standard neoliberal fare about how “there isn’t enough housing” or not enough “choice” or “opportunity,” you can unearth some nuggets. Two Austin findings stand out: 1.) Real home prices […]
Continue ReadingOn January 15, 2018 — Martin Luther King Day — I was privileged to help spearhead the unveiling of what has since become known as the Austin “People’s Plan” to fight displacement and to help mitigate gentrification. We called ourselves the Austin Poor People’s Campaign and held our press conference at the Montopolis Negro School, […]
Continue ReadingConventional wisdom holds that gentrification is something that a lot of people “feel” but rarely take the time to actually document. Studies about gentrification are often too wonky to influence policymakers, who want a nice, clean definition of the term “gentrification” served to them on a silver platter. Accordingly, allow me to take you through […]
Continue ReadingThe word “gentrification” does not appear in Imagine Austin or in CodeNEXT. This seems odd, given that Austin has had multiple commissions over the past seventeen years meant to study and address the issue. The policy analyses and recommendations made by these task forces and commissions have been sitting on the shelf gathering dust. So […]
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