Occupied Owner
For decades, the United States government, pushed by its business partners in the financial and real estate world, "marched the nation into a delusion." The fantasy is that we can create wealth for millions of homeowners by enriching investors, brokerage and mortgage companies and Wall Street bankers "to the fullest extent possible with few boundaries."
How Well Did Yonkers Fair Housing Measures Work?
Across the United States since the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, only a handful of lawsuits have challenged systematic racial discrimination...
Ghetto Salvation
How the Other Half Worships, by Camilo Jose Vergara. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2005, 304 pp. $49.95 (clothbound).
Suppose an alien came to...
It’s Not Actually About Ownership
Private Property and Public Power: Eminent Domain in Philadelphia,
by Debbie Becher. Oxford University Press, 2014. 334pp. $30.50 (paper)
Purchase here.
Predatory Bender
Predatory Bender: A Story of Subprime Finance, by Matthew Lee. Inner City Press. 2004. 360 pp. $19.95 (paperback).www.atlasbooks.com or www.innercitypress.org/books.html. I have to...
Public Housing Residents as Activists
In the 1990s, a group I co-founded, the Eviction Defense Network, was asked by public housing residents to organize alongside them during the HOPE...
Advocacy for Social Change: Coalitions and the Organizations that Lead Them
Many books discuss the corrosive effect of money in politics and lobbying organizations, but few are devoted to how those representing the have-nots organize on a national level to fight for laws and regulations that seek to empower communities.
Homes and Hands
How do community land trusts (CLTs) work? Can they be created in small as well as large communities? Do they require building or rehabbing...
Finding a Comprehensive Vision for Neighborhoods and Families
Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America by Lisbeth B. Schorr. Doubleday: New York 1997. 482 pp.
Since Ronald Reagan was elected President,...
Murder, Redlining, and the Fight for Jamaica Plain
Ken Reardon reviews "Redlined: A novel of Boston" by Richard W. Wise, an exciting novel about a community's fight for survival against disinvestment.
The Rules of Engagement
A Voice for Nonprofits, by Jeffrey M. Berry with David F. Arons. Brookings Institution Press, 2003. 210 pp. $26.95 (hardcover). Jeffrey M. Berry...
A Review of The Fight for Fair Housing
The collection of 17 essays captures and explains the dynamism of the fair housing movement with its remarkable contributors.
Small Investments Can Yield Big Returns. Review of A Few Thousand Dollars
Over a dozen stories of how Americans from all different backgrounds have managed to leverage a few thousand dollars to lead lives that have helped thousands of other people, and strategies to reinvigorate a movement to influence asset building policy nationally.
A Voyeur’s View
The author's treatment of race is, at best, contradictory and, at worst, hypocritical and probably the book’s great failing.
This Book Changes Everything
Book Review: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein
The Local-Global Grassroots Connection
Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital, by James DeFilippis. Routledge, 2004. 188 pp. $24.95 (paperback).
Contours of Descent, by Robert Pollin....
When Goliath Comes
Promise and Betrayal: Universities and the Battle for Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods, by John I. Gilderbloom and R.L. Mullins Jr. Albany: State University of New...
Thirty Years of Pablo: In His Own Words
Challenges for Nonprofits and Philanthropy: The Courage to Change – Three Decades of Reflections, by Pablo Eisenberg, edited by Stacy Palmer. Tufts University Press,...
Adding to What We Know
The Rise of Residential Segregation by Income, by Richard Fry and Paul Taylor. Pew Research Center, August 2012.
The Rebirth of Urbanism
City: Urbanism and Its End, by Douglas Rae. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. 432 pp. $30.00 (hardcover).
My reaction to Douglas Rae’s City:...