In the new Poverty & Race: Abolition applied to housing policy; COVID and evictions; New Deal lessons; “Monopolizing Whiteness”; and social housing history in Liverpool. Read the new issue here (or wait till it arrives in your other mailbox!)
Civil rights history – Buffalo: 30 years ago, legal services advocates in upstate New York (joined by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund) brought one of a nationwide series of public housing desegregation cases, but this time the claims included not just public housing segregation but also segregation and discrimination in the Section 8 voucher program. The history of this case is all the more important today, because after the housing mobility remedy expired, the Housing Choice Voucher program in Erie County gradually became almost as concentrated as it was before the case was filed. Enter Enterprise Community Partners, who last year provided funding to get the Buffalo housing mobility program up and running again, operated by the local fair housing group HOME, with the cooperation of the three PHAs operating in Erie County. Local fair housing advocate Scott Gehl tells the story in our latest civil rights history report, “The Legacy of Buffalo’s Landmark Housing Desegregation Case, Comer v. Kemp.”
Welcome to the newest members of PRRAC’s Social Science Advisory Board: Jamila Michener, Cornell University, Dept. of Government; Michael Lens, UCLA, Luskin School of Public Affairs; John Robinson, Washington University in STL, Dept. of Sociology; Vincent Reina, UPenn, Dept. of City & Regional Planning; Jacob Faber, NYU, Wagner School of Public Service; Ana V. Diaz Roux, Drexel University, Dornsife School of Public Health; and Willow Lung-Amam, University of Maryland, School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation. See all of our SSAB members here.
Other resources
“Trumpism and its Discontents”: The Othering and Belonging Institute has published this series of essays on the ideological origins of Trumpism, and how democratic institutions should respond.
