Tag: Berkeley Housing Authority

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Ben Carson as the next secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and, former disgraced HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson supports and vouches for Ben Carson to take his old job, according to the Dallas Morning News. Having Jackson endorse Carson is troubling. In May 2004, as secretary of HUD, Alphonso Jackson made headlines across the nation when he stated “being poor is a state of mind, not a condition.”

Eviction attorney Charles Tillman Ramsey is in the race to be Richmond’s next mayor. Competing candidates include Mike Parker of the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA), City Councilman Nat Bates, and Uche Uwahemu, CEO of Cal Bay Consulting Group LLC. Voters will choose when they go to the polls in November for the next general election.

The plan to privatize and sell our public housing projects in San Francisco and across the nation is harmful to the poor, elderly and disabled, including the thousands of union workers who have spent years maintaining our public housing units. Thousands of union workers are presently facing job losses due to public housing privatization schemes.

The attack on low-income families in the Section 8 voucher program (Housing Choice Voucher Program) in Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco and across the nation intensified Sept. 27 when the U.S. Senate voted to continue with the catastrophic across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration with their vote for the Reid-Mikulski Amendment No. 1974 to House Joint Resolution 59.

It’s hard times for Berkeley’s poor in the Section 8 (Housing Choice) voucher program, and it’s been very difficult for the low-income households that have recently been pushed out of public housing and out of town. Their homes in public housing are being sold to out-of-state billionaires Stephen M. Ross and Jorge M. Perez.

Berkeley is on a trend of gentrification and class genocide, making all of their so-called affordable housing, such as the University Avenue Cooperative Homes, unaffordable, discriminating against low-income communities of color with forced displacement through draconian policies to profiteer on, such as the recently proposed sit/lie law.