What's Happening Elsewhere

This article does a good service of covering how gentrification is happening systematically all across the country. The article addresses the issue in Miami, but it links the 'redevelopment' in Detroit to the same corporations that are 'redeveloping' Miami. A good read.

via colorlines.com

A UN report was released yesterday says that starting in 2008 a majority of the world's population will live in cities rather than rural areas for the first time ever in history. The report states that cities, especially smaller cities, are not planning for the shift. Services for the majority of city dwellers are not being created or maintained. Instead, city policytends to try to keep the poorout of cities through lack of affordable housing and public transportation. Read a story about the report below:

Following is from the New York Times:

By MELODY SIMMONS Published: June 17, 2007

BALTIMORE, June 16 — For nearly three decades, Charlotte Johnson witnessed the drug dealing and violence on the streets in front of her modest row house in East Baltimore. She rode it out only to face a new challenge today — the community' transformation under the largest planned urban renewal in the country, which could soon drive her out of the neighborhood.

here is a message from some friends:

do you think philly's "success with blight" should be exported to new orleans? if not, here's an easy way to speak out against gentrification in philly AND in new orleans. ray nagin, the mayor of new orleans, recently visited philadelphia in order to learn from our city’s “success with blight” and is now hoping to emulate some of the programs which many of us have organized against. penn alexander (the private/public school near upenn) and the brewerytown condos are named explictly as the kind of projects nagin wants to see happen in new orleans. here’s the link to the article in the Times-Picayune:

full article

This article takes about the city trying to prevent blight in the suburbs of Cleveland.It tells of sub-prime mortgages that low income folks are unable to pay back and the city's foreclosure prevention program. Many interviewed in the story tell of confusion and frustration of losing homes they have lived in much of their lives or homes they bought and expected to live out the rest of their lives in, similar to stories we have heard here in Philly.

By ERIK ECKHOLM

SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio — In a sign of the spreading economic fallout of mortgage foreclosures, several suburbs of Cleveland, one of the nation' hardest-hit cities, are spending millions of dollars to maintain vacant houses as they try to contain blight and real-estate panic.

The Newsweek article below tells us the story of rising housing prices in the major cities around the world and sites those who say the international housing market in the super wealthy center cities of the world looks nowhere near coming to an end. Though the authors set the piece in Manhattan, they tell readers that the international housing boom is not limited to traditionally wealthy countries. The fastest growing housing markets are in rapidly urbanizing places like Shanghai and Mumbai, where "prime-real-estate prices shot up by 90 percent in 2006".

People's Hurricane Relief Fund makes a breakthrough on price gouging and tenants rights in New Orleans! How did they do it?

Miami's poverty a grim backdrop to Super Bowl glitz

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-orl-superbowl2807 jan28,0,6832206.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines

By Maya Bell Sentinel Staff Writer

January 28, 2007, 3:00 PM EST

MIAMI -- The bomb-sniffing dogs are training. Fleets of limos are on the way. The ink is dry on anti-gouging pledges. Thousands of volunteers are on the march. Concierges are hustling to fill every VIP whim.

And Miami's newest homeless camp, a plywood and pallet shantytown, is gussying up to take center stage, if only for a moment.