Race is more than a category assigned to a person based on physical or social traits. Race is a manufactured idea that deliberately limits people of color.
This is not a revolutionary statement, but it is good to be reminded often, and that’s what Habitat Wake’s leadership and board hoped to do by attending Alexa Broderick’s Equity Paradigm workshop last week.
During a weather emergency, where you live and the condition of your home is critical.
Even though it quickly downgraded, Hurricane Florence has deeply affected the coasts of North and South Carolina and is hitting communities hard. Widespread flooding, debris, loss of power, and downed trees threatened homes, livelihood, and well being.
Check out this recent New York Times article around Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson’s proposals to drastically raise rents in federally subsidized housing. Dr. Carson’s premise is that subsidized housing just promotes families staying in that housing for a lifetime and provides some sort of disincentive for work. I think analysis will show that it is a much more complicated situation than solely that.
On Wednesday, Harvard’s Joint Center on Housing Studies (JCHS) released its annual report on the State of the Nation’s Housing. Each year, the report gives an update on key trends in housing across the country and in select metropolitan areas.
The staff at the North Carolina Housing Coalition (www.nchousing.org) have put together data on the need for affordable housing in each of North Carolina’s 100 counties. The two counties we serve—Wake and Johnston show a need of 106,126 and 19,121 families cost burdened for housing in each county, respectively. That’s 29% of all families in Wake and 31% in Johnston.
Gentrification is certainly a pressing topic in Wake County these days. We like seeing investment in neighborhoods that have lacked investment for decades, but left uncontrolled, the market can quickly price out residents that have called the neighborhood home all their lives.