Peter Dreier

53 Posts

Peter Dreier is professor of politics at Occidental College and has contributed to Shelterforce since the 1970s. He served for many years on the board of the National Housing Institute and was a founder of the Massachusetts Tenants Organization in the 1980s and has worked with housing activist groups since then.
Housing Advocacy

National Work Among Community Organizing Groups Is Growing

Editor’s Note: This is in response to Randy Stoecker’s earlier post on community organizing on the national level. ACORN, PICO, and US Action are among the community organizing groups mobilizing […]

Organizing

The Chicago Sit-in: Has Obama’s Election Spurred a New Mood of Union Activism?

Editor’s Note: This article by Peter Dreier, NHI board member and professor of politics at Occidental College, first appeared in Dissent Magazine Two recent union victories may be harbingers of […]

Policy

Prescription for Progressive Change: Inspire and Mobilize

Barack Obama is going to need all his organizing skills to be an effective leader. As I write in an article in the Huffington Post, Shifting Gears: Transforming Obama’s Campaign […]

Housing

Keeping Hope (And Housing) Alive in LA

Wall Street is in meltdown. Banks are collapsing. Developers can’t get loans to build homes. Housing values are plummeting. Millions of Americans are facing foreclosure. But in Los Angeles late […]

Housing

How to Fix the Mortgage Mess 101

Here’s the problem with the nation’s troubled financial system in a nutshell: Americans don’t have enough money to pay their mortgages. President Bush’s plan to bail-out the banks by having […]

Organizing

Did the GOP Attack on Community Organizing Backfire?

In a column on September 14, titled “Community Organizing Changed Fishery,” John Corrigan, the fishing writer for the Concord Monitor, explained that “anybody who has caught a fish at Sewalls […]

Housing

Section 8 Is Only One Part of Addressing the Housing Crisis

Editor’s Note: The following is a response to a comment posted by Rooflines blogger Nandinee Kutty that points to “serious weaknesses” in Section 8 housing, as well as its “failure […]

Policy

Abolish HUD?

When faced with a serious and persistent problem, it is often tempting to propose dramatic ideas, like blowing up existing programs and starting from scratch. Occasionally that might be useful, […]

Housing

Memphis Murder Mystery? No, Just Mistaken Identity

A group of the nation’s leading scholars and experts on housing and urban policy respond to The Atlantic‘s “American Murder Mystery”

Housing

What is a Housing “Crisis”?

Do we face a housing crisis when home prices are spiraling upward or when they are tumbling downward? Or both? Between 2000 and 2006, the median price of a new […]

Housing

Californians Defend Rent Control

On Tuesday, California voters provided a tremendous victory for tenants’ rights. They defeated Proposition 98, which would have phased out rent control, by a landslide margin of 61 percent to […]

Housing

Will Foreclosures Translate into Votes?

What are the political consequences of the mortgage meltdown? Will the spiraling wave of foreclosures translate into votes in November’s election? And, if so, who will benefit? Democrats? Republicans? Or […]