Tag: displacement

The tenants of Marin Way Court in Oakland have been targeted for displacement. “David Silver and Jamie Clifford of Arroyo & Coates have tried to destroy our community ever since they took over Marin Way Court on May 2, 2011,” Aiyahnna Johnson said.

Bayview Hunters Point is a community not exempt from poverty, violence, racism, police terrorism, gentrification, institutionalized ignorance, displacement and demonizing media coverage. With the Tough House Project, founder Jamal James Modica hopes to give this community a voice.

Just as Hurricane Katrina revealed racial inequalities, the recovery has also been shaped by systemic racism. According to a recent survey of New Orleanians by the Kaiser Foundation, 42 percent of African Americans – versus just 16 percent of whites – said they still have not recovered from Katrina. Thirty-one percent of African-American residents – versus 8 percent of white respondents – said they had trouble paying for food or housing in the last year.

The Right to Return Weekend challenges the forced removal of all public housing residents following Hurricane Katrina and the discriminatory policies of the government to permanently displace low-income Black communities from the “new” New Orleans.

By the 1980s, the largest population of African Americans in the state of California owned homes, property and businesses in the Bayview Hunters Point district of San Francisco. Now, the BVHP Redevelopment Project threatens to deprive them of their land, historical legacy and culture, fulfilling the United Nations definition of a government sponsored genocidal campaign.

The New Orleans Saints won Super Bowl 44. I can’t believe I’m even typing the words. Four and a half years ago, after the levees broke, the concern was not whether there would be a Saints, but whether there would even be a New Orleans.

Public housing and Section 8 tenants appeared at the Jan. 19 Berkeley City Council meeting to protest and speak out against alleged illegal activities of the Berkeley Housing Authority (BHA) and its policies to privatize and sell their 75 public housing units to an unnamed nonprofit housing developer.

When I heard about the revolutionary resistance of our South African brothers and sisters in Abahlai baseMjondolo (The Shack Dwellers Union) in South Africa, who successfully overturned the Slums Act, which would have given South African police the ability to legally demolish, destroy and evict poor people from their shacks without notice, I cried.

A glimpse is a short look, a glance. How do you take a glimpse of an entire neighborhood? It would be hard to take in the whole aspect of a community in a short look. In a glimpse we sometime miss the things that matter. People take glimpses of Bayview and form their own opinion of our community. Without looking at the real Bayview, our community is written off as just another low-income community of color taken over by gang violence and drugs.

I say to those who reproach me: Do you know how many broken homes that shoe that I threw had entered because of the occupation? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? And how many times it had entered homes in which free Iraqi women and their sanctity had been violated? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

Residents of affordable housing developments live in fear that renovation schemes will end up displacing them. To stop a new threat of displacement in Oakland, pack the CEDA meeting Tuesday, March 10, 2-4:30, Oakland City Hall Hearing Room 1, first floor.

Due to the great outpouring of support in Michigan, Rev. Edward Pinkney has become the Green Party candidate in the 6th District Congressional race. He is running against incumbent U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, a political heir to Whirlpool Corp.-Harbor Shores Community Redevelopment Inc.

The U.N. Human Rights Council concluded, "Thousands of Black families would continue to suffer displacement and homelessness if the demolition of 4,500 public housing units is not halted. ... We therefore call on the Federal Government (U.S.) and state and local authorities to immediately halt the demolitions of public housing in New Orleans."

He stressed the need for people to buy property collectively and develop plans that would work as safety nets when people can’t afford to pay their mortgages.