United States of America

Fixing the mortgage game: Hill vs. Goliath battle in Bronzeville

Published in Monday September 9th, 2013 In Social movement news

About five years later, Hill’s monthly statement from Saxon Mortgage Services Inc. increased by $500. According to Hill, Saxon explained it covered homeowner’s insurance, which her carrier confirmed she already had. Hill said Saxon led her to believe it would make the correction. Saxon subsequently returned her third payment of the usual amount, warning her account was now in arrears.

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The New Flood Insurance Disaster

Published in Friday August 30th, 2013 In Opinion

There was no question that the nation’s troubled flood insurance program needed an overhaul when Congress passed legislation last year to eliminate many of the subsidies that had put the program about $25 billion into debt. But these reforms offered too much tough love and too little compassion for flood-prone homeowners.

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South Carolina City Takes Steps to Evict Homeless From Downtown

Published in Monday August 26th, 2013 In In the media

With business owners sounding increasingly worried about the threat they believe the homeless pose to Columbia’s economic surge, the City Council approved a plan this month that will essentially evict them from downtown streets.

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Thousands of Marylanders are losing homes in second wave of foreclosures

Published in Monday August 12th, 2013 In In the media

Maryland is getting a second dose of the housing crisis — a sequel that foreclosure experts and state officials knew was coming but no one wanted to see.

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One Vermont Town Fights a Farm to Improve Housing for Migrant Workers

Published in Thursday July 11th, 2013 In In the media

In Salisbury, town officials have made the unusual choice to intervene in a case of second-rate worker housing. At a dairy farm owned by Randy and Jean Quesnel, two Latino farmworkers have been living in filth for years. The laborers, who are in the country illegally, live in a small bunkhouse affixed to the barn where they milk cows. The two-room dwelling has an open wastewater drain in the middle of the concrete floor. There’s no indoor toilet; the workers must walk past the cow stanchions to a Porta-Potty outside the barn.

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Financial Crisis Just a Symptom of Detroit’s Woes

Published in Wednesday July 10th, 2013 In In the media

As officials negotiate urgently with creditors and unions in a last-ditch effort to spare Detroit from plunging into the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation’s history, residents say the city has worse problems than its estimated $18 billion debt.

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Group says foreclosure crisis still alive in West Seattle

Published in Thursday July 4th, 2013 In In the media

“Foreclosure isn’t a sexy topic anymore and the media doesn’t really want to talk about it anymore,” Johnson said. “They think the economy is fixing itself, and everything is getting sorted out and everybody is getting better and let’s all pretend this isn’t happening.”

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Dream home resource center – Hammer Museum

Published in Tuesday June 25th, 2013 In Mobilisation and agenda

Dream Home Resource Center, Olga Koumoundouros’s most recent investigation of home ownership, addresses the immateriality of real estate transactions and the shift from home as emblem of the American dream to house as commodity.

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The Death and Life of Chicago

Published in Tuesday June 4th, 2013 In In the media

On a 100-degree day last summer, on Chicago’s southernmost edge, Willie Fleming, who goes by J. R. (“It stands for Just Righteousness”), crept up to an abandoned ranch house shrouded in overgrown weeds. The overwhelmingly poor and black neighborhood sits beside a 150-acre, 1,500-unit public-housing complex and is about as far — literally and figuratively — from the Loop as you can get and still be in Chicago. Nearly a quarter of the homes in the area had been empty for at least two years.

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Deadly Storms in Oklahoma Bring Flooding and More Tornadoes

Published in Monday June 3rd, 2013 In In the media

Twelve days after a tornado killed 24 people and destroyed hundreds of homes, this battered city and its surrounding suburbs awoke Saturday morning to the aftermath of Round 2. A storm on Friday set off tornadoes and severe flooding, causing widespread damage around the region and claiming at least nine victims, including two children.

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