Small Landlords Feel the Effects of Lost Rental Income
While eviction moratoriums helped keep many tenants in their homes during the pandemic, the nation's renters have amassed a collective debt of over $52 billion, and many mom-and-pop landlords are struggling to hold on. April 12, 2021, 6am PDT | Diana Ionescu |
A year after governments across the country implemented eviction moratoriums, some landlords are struggling to pay their own bills as back rent piles up. "Many said they or their clients are dipping into savings to keep properties afloat and delaying maintenance or repairs because they can’t afford them." Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Andrew Khouri reports on the growing crisis.
Fourth Surge May Be a Second Wave
The CDC announced on April 7 that a coronavirus variant first detected in the U.K is now dominant in the U.S. "In some ways, we're almost in a new pandemic," said one prominent public health expert earlier about the more transmissible variant. April 12, 2021, 7am PDT | Irvin Dawid Share
"B117, the coronavirus variant first detected in the United Kingdom in December, is now the most common variant in the United States, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH," reported Stephanie Soucheray for CIDRAP News on Wednesday, April 7.
New York's Street Vendors Fight Back Against Displacement
Despite operating on public right-of-way, food vendors claim that developers are pushing them out of established vending spots. April 11, 2021, 5am PDT | Diana Ionescu |
New York's street vendors are mounting a campaign against displacement by real estate interests, writes Valeria Ricciulli in Curbed. "It is time that the real estate industry stopped running our city and controlling our public space," says Mohamed Attia, executive director of the Street Vendor Project.
Hot dog vendor Mohamed Awad has watched his business in the Hudson Yards get slowly eaten away by real estate interests. When Hudson Yards opened in 2019, "Awad, his partners, and their employees began to face harassment from the police and Hudson Yards security, even though their carts are on a public sidewalk." To make matters worse, property owner Related has added landscaping elements that the vendors see as a purposeful attempt to "push them out of Hudson Yards altogether." Awad explained that since "city regulations explicitly require vendors to leave a 12-foot-wide clear path on the sidewalk in front of their carts," the landscaping additions "effectively built him out of business."
Pandemic Geography: What's Going on in Michigan?
Public health experts may speculate about whether the U.S. is headed for a fourth surge or moderate increase in cases, but the resurgence is well underway in Michigan where the virus was spreading the fastest. Only N.Y. has more daily infections. April 4, 2021, 5am PDT | Irvin Dawid Share
Global coronavirus infections are rising rapidly, 23% in the last two weeks, according to The New York Times database on April 3.
"Steady increases in cases are concentrated in Brazil and surrounding countries, the northern US and Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia," according to the weekly newsletter posted April 2 by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. "These epidemics can be largely attributed to the spread of variants, and in the case of the US, an overly hasty re-opening may be to blame."
Predicting a Comeback for Cities Michael Lewyn James Brasuell James Brasuell Devin Partida
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An argument for the long-term cultural and economic viability of the city, even after the pandemic. April 4, 2021, 11am PDT | James Brasuell |
Highly productive workers and industries will continue to cluster in cities, and remote work can only go so far in reshaping the global economy, according to one leading economics researcher.
One Berkeley Resident's Fight to Desegregate the City
Dorothy Walker has spent decades working to eliminate housing discrimination. In February, the city council finally agreed. April 1, 2021, 9am PDT | Diana Ionescu |
Nathanael Johnson profiles Dorothy Walker, a Berkeley resident who, decades ago, undertook a fight against racist real estate covenants. As a white woman married to a Japanese-American, Walker witnessed the effects of internment and race-based policies in mid-century America, policies which reverberate to this day.
Despite federal efforts to eliminate housing segregation in the early 20th century, writes Johnson, cities found new ways to replace explicitly racist covenants with "ordinances that entrenched segregation by income and wealth instead, reserving certain parts of town for people who could afford their own house and a roomy yard." Walker has proposed eliminating single-family zoning for decades, but her proposals have always fallen on deaf ears. "I was basically a voice in the wilderness crying out for density," she says. "It was just so radical. It fell like a stone."