Construction Maison

Every metropolitan area in the nation is racially segregated, and Los Angeles is no exception. We tolerate residential segregation because we’re convinced that it happened informally — because of personal choices and private discrimination. But what cemented our separate neighborhoods is something most of us have forgotten — government’s unconstitutional and systematic insistence on segregated housing in the mid-20th century, establishing patterns that persist to this day. The 2010 census data show that 60% of Los Angeles’s African Americans live in neighborhoods where few whites are present. The exposure of blacks to whites is as minimal as it is in Chicago or Newark; concentrated African American poverty is as common in L.A. as in New York or Pittsburgh. The New Deal created the nation’s first civilian public housing in the 1930s, segregated not only in the South, but nationwide. In his autobiography, the African American poet Langston Hughes recounted his adolescence in Worl...

Is NYC going through an affordable housing crisis ? To get a better understanding of the city’s rental market, RentHop compared median rents for a two-bedroom apartment in various parts of the city to the most recent median income data available at the neighborhood level. It turns out that just nine out of the 139 neighborhoods included in the study had median asking rents that could be afforded with 35 percent of the neighborhood’s median income. RentHop added an additional 5 percent to the recommended affordability of 30 percent to make room for the income growth that has taken place since the Census data was released. The map above shows the median asking rent of two-bedroom apartments in neighborhood tabulation areas (NTAs) across New York City and how that relates to the income of those neighborhoods. Darker shades of red indicate lower affordability , while the few green areas indicate that median asking rents are within reach for the neighborhood’s median household income . M...

Malik paused. “Did it ever occur to you that people from my neighborhood are scared about rollin’ up on your neighborhood?” “Whatever,” Jim replied. “When’s the last time someone has had their head bashed in by some thugs in Stone Brook? When’s the last time someone had their car stolen at gunpoint when they were filling up their tank?” “Robbery and thugs ain’t the only things to fear. There are other things people like me gotta worry about. Stuff you wouldn’t understand.” Most people enter discussions of racial injustice like they’re entering a gun fight: heavily armed. Their weapons are statistics, experience, and a bevy of opinions and solutions. A new novel titled  Meals from Mars: A Parable of Prejudice and Providence  helps to de-escalate the conflict. Written by educator Ben Sciacca , this book will benefit not only his high school students in Fairfield, Alabama, but also suburbanites and those in between. Meals from Mars  opens with guns drawn on the two protagonists, Jim and...

As teachers, cooks, cashiers, and bus drivers are being priced out of Charlotte, one question looms: How does a growing, thriving city in modern America keep housing affordable for its working-class citizens? By RACHEL JONES Published: 2017.08.23 06:21 AM Jacqueline Ingram (middle) works full-time at the Ross Dress For Less distribution center in Rock Hill. But in this booming region, her salary isn’t enough to comfortably buy a home for her and her kids, 12-year-old Nya and five-year-old Rejonee. PHOTOS BY ANDY MCMILLAN ONE RECENT SUNDAY AFTERNOON , Jacqueline Ingram and her two daughters explore an empty four-bedroom house for sale on a Brianna Way cul-de-sac in southwest Charlotte , filling it with their dreams along the way. “This one is mine,” 12-year-old Nya says of an upstairs bedroom with a view of the Clanton Park neighborhood . “I could put my chest over there, and my table there.” As five-year-old Rejonee sprawls out on the carpet in the room across the hall, In...

Take a walk east from the gold-plated cupola of San Francisco City Hall and the landscape transforms into the Tenderloin, a patchwork of residential hotels, small delis and social service clinics that cater to the poor. It winds into the city’s main tourist corridor , and, farther along, a glossy cluster of condominium towers where upper- story penthouses cost millions . These symbols of extreme poverty and prosperity are wedged together in District Six, which serves both as a portal for visitors and a cauldron where San Francisco ’s most pressing political issues simmer . For 20 years, District Six voters have reliably concluded that the solutions to those issues come from the progressive viewpoint. And while it’s more than a year until the next election for supervisor, the contest is already shaping up as a test of whether that is still true. From the Tenderloin to the Mission Bay waterfront , District Six has seen a rush of development over the past two decades, and residents are ...