How Habitat for Humanity Went to Brooklyn…

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“How Habitat for Humanity Went to Brooklyn and Poor Families Lost Their Homes

“The charity paid millions in federal stimulus funds to developers shortly after longtime tenants were pushed out.

“We are spending federal money to throw low-income New Yorkers out of buildings,” wrote a Habitat whistleblower.

https://www.propublica.org/article/habitat-for-humanity-brooklyn-bedford-stuyvesant-poor-lose-homes

“What our expensive cities need now is not upgrades to housing. They need more places where poor people can afford to live — and that calls for driving prices and rents down.”

“It’s a difficult situation We have an affordable…

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“It’s a difficult situation: We have an affordable housing crisis in the city right now, and the priority isn’t on social justice; it’s about this aesthetic economy.”

Deborah Leslie, a geographer professor at U of T, has studied the city’s transformation as manufacturing gave way to industries in line with the “creative city” agenda. Artists, she fears, end up as a symbolic salve to nefarious process. “While Artscape is doing important work, I think it is often being used to paper over and gather support for broader processes of gentrification and real estate development in the city,”

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/visualarts/2013/11/23/artscape_youngplace_school_is_now_in_session.html