Author: Nancy Kwak Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022659825X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 340
Book Description
In Latin America, Scandinavian housing experts explained that "housing is too important a commodity to be subjected to the same general market conditions as other goods", but the Americans ridiculed such a stance. The Cold War was fought with bricks and mortar, not just small, hot wars in poor places and the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Privatisation began in Malaysia in the 1940s; in West Germany, Taiwan, Burma and South Korea in the 1950s; India in 1964; Jordan in 1965; Brazil in 1966; Guatemala and Nigeria in 1967; and the Philippines (again) in 1968. In the 1960s, the US granted loans to expand the private housing sectors in Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. They began housing projects in Rhodesia, Zambia and Mali. They moved into Senegal in 1972, Botswana in 1973, Tanzania in 1974 and Kenya in 1975 - all the while spreading the American dream.
Author: N.D.B. Connolly Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022613525X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 405
Book Description
Many people characterize urban renewal projects and the power of eminent domain as two of the most widely despised and often racist tools for reshaping American cities in the postwar period. In A World More Concrete, N. D. B. Connolly uses the history of South Florida to unearth an older and far more complex story. Connolly captures nearly eighty years of political and land transactions to reveal how real estate and redevelopment created and preserved metropolitan growth and racial peace under white supremacy. Using a materialist approach, he offers a long view of capitalism and the color line, following much of the money that made land taking and Jim Crow segregation profitable and preferred approaches to governing cities throughout the twentieth century. A World More Concrete argues that black and white landlords, entrepreneurs, and even liberal community leaders used tenements and repeated land dispossession to take advantage of the poor and generate remarkable wealth. Through a political culture built on real estate, South Florida’s landlords and homeowners advanced property rights and white property rights, especially, at the expense of more inclusive visions of equality. For black people and many of their white allies, uses of eminent domain helped to harden class and color lines. Yet, for many reformers, confiscating certain kinds of real estate through eminent domain also promised to help improve housing conditions, to undermine the neighborhood influence of powerful slumlords, and to open new opportunities for suburban life for black Floridians. Concerned more with winners and losers than with heroes and villains, A World More Concrete offers a sober assessment of money and power in Jim Crow America. It shows how negotiations between powerful real estate interests on both sides of the color line gave racial segregation a remarkable capacity to evolve, revealing property owners’ power to reshape American cities in ways that can still be seen and felt today.
Author: Jonathan Reckford Publisher: St. Martin's Essentials ISBN: 1250239257 Category : Self-Help Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
Inspiring and insightful, Our Better Angels: Seven Simple Virtues That Will Change Your Life and the World celebrates the shared principles that unite and enable us to overcome life’s challenges together. “When the waters rise, so do our better angels.”—President Jimmy Carter Jonathan Reckford, the CEO of Habitat for Humanity, has seen time and again the powerful benefits that arise when people from all walks of life work together to help one another. In this uplifting book, he shares true stories of people involved with Habitat as volunteers and future homeowners who embody seven timeless virtues—kindness, community, empowerment, joy, respect, generosity, and service—and shows how we can all practice these to improve the quality of our own lives as well as those around us. A Vietnam veteran finds peace where he was once engaged in war. An impoverished single mother offers her family’s time and energy to enrich their neighbors’ lives. A Zambian family of nine living in a makeshift tent makes room to shelter even more. A teenager grieving for his mother honors her love and memory by ensuring other people have a place to call home. A former president of the United States leads by example with a determined work ethic that motivates everyone around him to be the best version of themselves. These stories, and many others, illustrate how virtues become values, how cooperation becomes connection, and how even the smallest act of compassion can encourage actions that transform the world around us. Here are tales that will make readers laugh and cry and embrace with passion the calling of our better angels to change the way we take care of ourselves, our families, our communities, and the world.
Author: Peter Marcuse Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1804294942 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
In every major city in the world there is a housing crisis. How did this happen and what can we do about it? Everyone needs and deserves housing. But today our homes are being transformed into commodities, making the inequalities of the city ever more acute. Profit has become more important than social need. The poor are forced to pay more for worse housing. Communities are faced with the violence of displacement and gentrification. And the benefits of decent housing are only available for those who can afford it. In Defense of Housing is the definitive statement on this crisis from leading urban planner Peter Marcuse and sociologist David Madden. They look at the causes and consequences of the housing problem and detail the need for progressive alternatives. The housing crisis cannot be solved by minor policy shifts, they argue. Rather, the housing crisis has deep political and economic roots—and therefore requires a radical response.
Author: Amy Starecheski Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022640000X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 327
Book Description
“The fascinating and little-known tale of the Lower East Side squatters of the Eighties . . . a radical, European-inspired housing movement” (The Village Voice). Though New York’s Lower East Side today is home to high-end condos and hip restaurants, it was for decades an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict—an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and ’80s Manhattan. Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America. “There are many books about the Lower East Side and its recent transformation, yet none has included engagement or oral history with primary organizers in the way Starecheski has. Ours to Lose is a unique and substantive contribution to our understanding of a most distinct practice in the shaping of urban space.” —Metropolitiques “What is significant is that the author demonstrates how some New Yorkers addressed the housing crisis in an unconventional manner. Recommended.” —Choice
Author: David Crook Publisher: Crown Business ISBN: 0307450236 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
Your Map for a Brave New Real-Estate World The days of real-estate mania—when you really couldn’t go wrong with buying a home, then selling it in a few years for a lot more than you paid for it—are over. Inflated prices and the “subprime” mortgage crisis have finally burst the bubble. Now, more than ever, it’s important for current and prospective home buyers to understand just what they’re getting into when they take that plunge—and to think smarter when it comes to making the most of their biggest asset. The Wall Street Journal. Complete Home Owner’s Guidebook shows readers how to become savvy home buyers—and eventually owners—not only in this new, uncertain era but in any market: • Understand the benefits and pitfalls of owning versus renting • Make sense of the housing market—ask the important questions, factor in the unforeseen costs, and explode the big myths of home ownership • Take advantage of current opportunities if you’re a first-time home buyer • Overcome the challenges if you’re looking to trade up or cash out on your home for retirement • Make the best profit on your home in any market • Understand why your home—your number one asset—really isn’t such a great investment From the Trade Paperback edition.
Author: Aaron Glantz Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0062869558 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 455
Book Description
“[I] can’t recommend this joint enough. ... An illuminating and discomfiting read.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates "Essential reading." —New York Review of Books A shocking, heart-wrenching investigation into America’s housing crisis and the modern-day robber barons who are making a fortune off the backs of the disenfranchised working and middle class—among them, Donald Trump and his inner circle. Two years before the housing market collapsed in 2008, Donald Trump looked forward to a crash: “I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy,” he said. But our future president wasn’t alone. While millions of Americans suffered financial loss, tycoons pounced to heartlessly seize thousands of homes—their profiteering made even easier because, as prize-winning investigative reporter Aaron Glantz reveals in Homewreckers, they often used taxpayer money—and the Obama administration’s promise to cover their losses. In Homewreckers, Glantz recounts the transformation of straightforward lending into a morass of slivered and combined mortgage “products” that could be bought and sold, accompanied by a shift in priorities and a loosening of regulations and laws that made it good business to lend money to those who wouldn’t be able to repay. Among the men who laughed their way to the bank: Trump cabinet members Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, Trump pal and confidant Tom Barrack, and billionaire Republican cash cow Steve Schwarzman. Homewreckers also brilliantly weaves together the stories of those most ravaged by the housing crisis. The result is an eye-opening expose of the greed that decimated millions and enriched a gluttonous few.
Author: Brian J. McCabe Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190270462 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 234
Book Description
In No Place Like Home, Brian McCabe challenges the ideology of homeownership as a tool for building stronger communities and crafting better citizens. McCabe argues that homeowners often engage in their communities as a way to protect their property values, and this participation leads to the politics of exclusion.
Author: Ryan Dezember Publisher: Macmillan + ORM ISBN: 1250241812 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 189
Book Description
Winner of the Bruss Real Estate Book Award His assignment was to write about a real-estate frenzy lighting up the Redneck Riviera. So Ryan Dezember settled in and bought a home nearby himself. Then the market crashed, and he became one of the millions of Americans who suddenly owed more on their homes than they were worth. A flood of foreclosures made it impossible to sell. It didn't help that his quaint neighborhood fell into disrepair and drug-induced despair. He had no choice but to become a reluctant and wildly unprofitable landlord to move on. Meanwhile, his reporting showed how the speculative mania that caused the crash opened the U.S. housing market to a much larger breed of investors. In this deeply personal story, Dezember shows how decisions on Wall Street and in Washington played out on his street in a corner of the Sunbelt that was convulsed by the foreclosure crisis. Readers will witness the housing market collapse from Dezember’s perch as a newspaper reporter. First he’s in the boom-to-bust South where a hot-air balloonist named Bob Shallow becomes one of the world’s top selling real-estate agents arranging condo flips, developers flop in spectacular fashion and the law catches up with a beach-town mayor on the take. Later he’s in New York, among financiers like Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman who are building rental empires out of foreclosures, staking claim to the bastion of middle-class wealth: the single-family home. Through it all, Dezember is an underwater homeowner caught up in the mess. A cautionary tale of Wall Street's push to turn homes into assets, Underwater is a powerful, incisive story that chronicles the crash and its aftermath from a fresh perspective—the forgotten, middle-class homeowner.
Author: Nancy Kwak
Author: N.D.B. Connolly
Author: Jonathan Reckford
Author: Peter Marcuse
Author: Amy Starecheski
Author: Mindy Jensen
Author: David Crook
Author: Aaron Glantz
Author: Brian J. McCabe
Author: Ryan Dezember