#oakland 2015 gentrification

[skypalacearchitect]

Sandy Saeteurn grew up in Richmond, California, where Chevron’s massive 3,000-acre oil refinery reigns supreme. She’s no stranger to the refinery’s chemical flares, and she spent many of her childhood days home sick. She’s not the only one who has learned to link the refinery and the presence of illness in her community: A 2008 study (co-authored by Grist board member Rachel Morello-Frosch) found that almost half of all homes in the area had indoor levels of refinery-related particulate matter pollution that exceeded the state’s air quality standards.

Every day for nearly 120 years — longer than the city has existed — the refinery has processed thousands of barrels of oil. Its flares regularly paint the sky burnt orange before thick grey clouds of smoke cover the city. Chevron’s influence stretches beyond its pollution and the 3,500 refinery jobs it provides as the city’s largest employer — it also showers money on local elections and even runs a local newspaper, the Richmond Standard, which has been known to cast a positive light on the company.

Ever since Black residents first arrived in large numbers in the 1940s, people of color have been relegated into low-quality housing surrounding the city’s large industrial zones. Today the city, which is 82 percent non-white and home to large groups of migrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia, has worse air pollution than 94 percent of the country, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency, which has cited the refinery for environmental violations roughly 150 times since 2016. The city’s childhood asthma rate is more than double the national average and, in the immediate aftermath of an explosion at the refinery in 2012, more than 15,000 people were forced to seek medical treatment for respiratory distress.

Chevron funds around one-third of Richmond’s annual budget through taxes and municipal services the company provides, which includes education and workforce development programs. When the company wanted to modernize its facility in 2008, it offered the city $11 million for the Richmond Police Department to “increase the number of police officers on the street,” according to a document outlining Chevron’s community benefits agreements with the city. The modernization project was eventually blocked after community groups sued the city for failing to do a proper environmental impact analysis, but a 2015 agreement between Richmond and Chevron ultimately set aside $2 million for Richmond police. Over the past decade, Richmond police have arrested hundreds for protesting the plant’s emissions.

As a child, Saeteurn and her family didn’t think to connect the Chevron plant and their disposition to illness. “Growing up there was a lot of explosion drills, and we never understood what they meant,” Saeteurn told Grist. “In elementary school, Chevron would come and have certain programs for kids, giving us money for books and school supplies. I left elementary school thinking ‘oh wow, Chevron’s a great company,’ when in reality they were slowly killing us.”

Saeteurn’s lighthearted view of Chevron didn’t last long. By age 14, she was a dedicated organizer and member of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, or APEN, which is based in both Richmond and nearby Oakland. She’s used her struggles against environmental injustices to fuel her work, helping to organize influential campaigns such as the first-ever county-wide multilingual warning system, which now warns Richmond residents of looming chemical flares in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Lao.

In response to questions from Grist, Chevron provided a statement saying that its Richmond workforce “takes its role as good neighbors seriously and continually works to reduce our environmental footprint and to improve reliability.” The statement listed modernization projects, such as a new hydrogen processing unit, which have contributed to reducing the site’s “air emissions by 86 percent over the last 40 years,” according to the company.

Because of the way issues like a growing housing crisis, immigration, and police violence intersect in the San Francisco Bay area — where more than 350 refineries and fossil fuel companies are based — Saeteurn and other organizers at APEN have been at the forefront of reframing the environmental justice movement to incorporate all aspects of residents’ encounters with their lived environments, whether that’s unwanted interactions with the police or gentrification and the displacement of poorer people from their home communities. This is a reimagining of the traditional focuses of environmental organizations that have long prioritized organizing around issues like toxic waste or access to public parks, while leaving issues like housing and criminal justice to different organizations.

“We think of environmental justice as being about how our communities get to be in relationship with our environment,” Alvina Wong, APEN’s campaign and organizing director, told Grist. “That means trees, air, and water — but also our neighborhoods, our homes, and how we get to be in relationship with each other.”

Saeteurn, a local political director with the group, said that this message resonates with the residents APEN serves.

“When the community talks about the environment, they’re not talking about clean air or water — what they’re really talking about is their struggles,” she explained. “So when we talk with the community about how the environment is impacting them, they’re not saying ‘oh yeah, Chevron’s in my backyard.’ They’re saying, ‘I can’t afford my rent. Oh yeah, the energy bill is going up and now I can’t afford food.’”

Besides continuing a long struggle with Chevron in Richmond, APEN has also been a crucial part of recent campaigns to move millions of dollars away from Richmond and Oakland police to do things like building new supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness and mental illness, as well as increasing residents’ access to healthy food through affordable markets. The organization has worked on recent campaigns for rent control and tenant rights in both cities, including mutual aid projects to crowdsource funds for rent and food for community members. It has fought to pass the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, which would grant tenants two months notice and the first opportunity to purchase their home if their landlord plans to put their building on the market.

“Our work is trying to make the connection to a bigger kind of struggle related to racism,” said Saeteurn. “We’re here next to a refinery because of racism, which is the same reason why our members get stopped by the police or harassed on the streets. Environmental justice is about who we can call community, and what access we have to the environment around us.”

APEN came to fruition after a proposal at the First National People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit in 1991, when summit participants noticed that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders were largely underrepresented. The summit was attended by activists from everywhere from Puerto Rico to Vietnam and Laos, as well as other territories struggling with American chemical waste. During and following the American bombing of Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Southeast Asian migrants fled to the Bay area and Richmond in particular. Connecting the dots between environmental injustices in America and the environmental fallout from American firebombing and the use of Agent Orange in their home countries, Bay area delegates decided to form an organization centered on the leadership of Asian immigrant and refugee communities.

“APEN is so successful because our organizing incorporates our cultural heritage and our own legacy fighting aggression and chemical warfare in our homelands,” Wong said. “For us, this memory of how our homelands were affected both physically and culturally by environmental violence and war allows us to really address the root causes of injustice.”

Since 1991, APEN has been an unstoppable organizing force, working to pass bills mitigating pollution, like SB32, which in 2016 laid the foundation for many greenhouse gas emission goals we see today. In 2018, they were part of a coalition that helped push Chevron to pay out a $5 million settlement for its 2012 explosion. Most recently, APEN helped spearhead the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force in Richmond, which just passed a reallocation of $10 million away from Richmond police to fund various community services. (In a short phone interview with Grist, Richmond Mayor Tom Butt acknowledged Chevron’s mighty role in city life and said that the city council is doing everything in its power to act as a counterweight to the fossil fuel giant.)

APEN is hardly alone in its expansive approach to environmental justice. It’s a member of the California Environmental Justice Alliance, which includes Bay area groups like Communities for a Better Environment, or CBE, and People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights, or PODER. Two weeks ago, APEN, CBE, and PODER led Richmond’s participation in the 8th annual Global Anti-Chevron day of protest, drawing more than 100 people who participated in chants and painted murals in front of the refinery to protest the refinery’s emissions and hold it accountable for its alleged commitment to racial justice.

Denny Khamphanthong, an APEN community organizer who worked on the campaign to reallocate funds from Richmond’s police budget, says APEN’s approach to justice is not only about saving the environment around him, but also about building a safer future for his family’s next generations.

“What we’re all trying to do is build a better world so that our community can thrive,” Khamphanthong told Grist, “which requires our community to be funded and resourced in a way that feels most important to us, whether it be less police on our streets or less pollution in our air.”

[citymaus]

“Over the next several weeks, the Community Rejuvenation Project will paint an ambitious mural on the west-facing wall of the Greenlining Institute’s Downtown Oakland headquarters. Anyone who wants to watch the artists sketch the grid, and daringly paint from a swing stage that will dangle from the six-story building’s rooftop, can stop by from roughly 9am to 5pm most days.

The new painting replaces the “Universal Language” mural, which was created in 2014 on the walls of two buildings at the corner of 14th and Alice streets. Universal Language was an homage to Oakland’s rich culture and history. It depicted culture keepers from the city’s diverse communities and occupied a crossroads space on the edge of Chinatown and across the street from the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, along one of the main thoroughfares connecting downtown to Lake Merritt and East Oakland. 

But, shortly after the ribbon cutting for Universal Language, it was announced that a new apartment tower would go up in the parking lot in front of the walls, effectively erasing the painting in a stinging moment that embodied the gentrifying collision of old and new Oakland.

desi mondo.

“Desi Mundo of the Community Rejuvenation Project said the new mural on the Greenlining building is funded in part by a community benefit contribution made by Bay Development, the real estate company whose tower is blocking the old Alice Street wall.

The new painting depicts some of the culture-makers who appeared in the original mural, along with new subjects and themes, including a few scenes of the protest movement that sprang up in 2015 to resist the erasure of the mural on Alice Street.

“As Oakland fights to maintain its identity in the face of gentrification and economic inequality, we hope this mural will not only add beauty to our city, but will also be a source of connection to the history and soul of Oakland,” Greenlining Institute President Debra Gore-Mann said in a statement.

Redlining was a practice used by banks and the real estate industry to enforce residential racial segregation and to determine who could receive mortgage loans, which steered valuable public investments into white neighborhoods while starving Black, Latino and Asian neighborhoods of similar improvements. (Reveal, an investigative reporting outlet based in Emeryville, recently looked into the ongoing problem of “modern-day redlining.”)

Prominent leaders from Bay Area indigenous communities, including Corrina Gould, will appear in the new mural to remind us that these are still native lands.

The new mural’s themes of resistance will blend into images of celebration, and the red line gives way to a bright green ribbon that spirals upward and weaves like a vine through dancers and musicians.”

marina perez-wong, one of the four artists working on the mural.

read more: berkeleyside, 21.05.2020.  and: crproject, 09.05.2020. 

[thekotaroo]

Profiles of Pride: June 4th! 🏳️‍🌈Alicia Garza🏳️‍🌈

Alicia Garza (born January 4, 1981) is an American civil rights activist and editorial writer from Oakland, California. She has organized around the issues of health, student services and rights, rights for domestic workers, ending police brutality, anti-racism, and violence against trans and gender non-conforming people of color. Her editorial writing has been published by The Guardian, The Nation, The Feminist Wire, Rolling Stone, HuffPost and Truthout. She currently directs Special Projects at the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Garza also co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement.

With Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, Garza birthed the Black Lives Matter movement. Garza is credited with inspiring the slogan when, after the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, she posted on Facebook: "Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter, Black Lives Matter" which Cullors then shared with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Garza's organization Black Lives Matter was spurred on by the deaths of black people by police in recent media and racial disparities within the U.S. criminal justice system. She was also struck by the similarities of Trayvon Martin to her younger brother, feeling that it could have been him killed instead. Garza led the 2015 Freedom Ride to Ferguson, organized by Cullors and Darnell Moore that launched the building of BlackLivesMatter chapters across the United States. Garza self-identifies as a queer woman, and her spouse is biracial and transgender; Garza draws on all of these experiences in her organizing and activism.

Previously, Garza had served as the director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights in the San Francisco Bay Area. During her time in the position, she won the right for youth to use public transportation for free in San Francisco and also fought gentrification and exposing police brutality in the area. Garza is an active participant in several Bay Area social movement groups. She is on the board of directors of Forward Together's Oakland California branch and is also involved with Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity. She is also on the board of directors for Oakland's School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL).

[josephbk]

“WHEN I MEET Boots Riley at an art studio in Downtown Oakland, he’s wearing a little bit of everything. On top, a checkered blazer over a cardigan and a white dress shirt open to the fourth button; below, salmon pants and bright white sneakers. His outfit is accented by a pocket square, and by his unruly signature mutton chops and mustache. Trying too hard is frowned upon in Oakland, and Riley was brought up in The Town, so while the first-time filmmaker may be making Hollywood inroads, his mismatched mise-en-scene is pure Bay Area: an overburdened key ring, a wallet straining with business cards and transit passes.

We walk to a café without Wi-Fi and with two distinct styles of iced coffee, a few blocks from what has emerged as the symbol of Oakland's recent tech-fueled gentrification: a block-sized building that Uber paid $123.5 million for in 2015, only to sell two years later without ever moving in. The virtual wealth infusion altered its surroundings, spurring rent hikes, evictions, and development aplenty. Nearby, three nascent high-rises stretch their naked girders upward, though they may be hard to fill without the promised influx of workers. According to a California Housing Partnership Corporation report, an Oakland resident needs to earn almost $50/hour to afford median rent in the city today. It’s right here, right at this unstable moment, that Riley has set his film, a surrealist comedy about his changing hometown.”

[newstfionline]

In East Palo Alto, residents say tech companies have created ‘a semi-feudal society’

By Scott Wilson, Washington Post, November 4, 2018

EAST PALO ALTO, Calif.--This poor city is surrounded by the temples of the new American economy that has, in nearly every way imaginable, passed it by.

Just outside the northern city limit, Facebook is expanding the blocks-long headquarters it built seven years ago. Google’s offices sit just outside the southern edge, and just a few miles to the west, Stanford University stands as the rich proving ground of the economy’s future. Amazon just moved in.

Only a small fraction of jobs in those companies go to those who live in this city of 30,000 people, one of the region’s few whose population is majority minority. That demography is under threat by the one economic force that has not passed East Palo Alto by--rapidly rising rents and home prices.

“Amazon Google Facebook--SOS,” reads a painted bedsheet draped from an RV parked off Pulgas Avenue, one of dozens of trailers where families have come to live rent-free along a gravel path that leads from the city to the San Francisco Bay.

In the past year, John Mahoni, a burly, affable 41-year-old Latino man, has had a dozen visits from real estate speculators looking to buy his small house off Terra-Villa Street in the city’s worn-down southeast side. The most recent doorstep instant offer: $900,000 in cash, almost three times what he paid less than a decade ago. He turned it down.

“They’ve stopped coming because I cussed them out, but I know they were just doing their jobs,” said Mahoni, noting that residents have the right to reject any offer for their property. “... There’s no law against not being greedy.”

Skyrocketing housing costs are accelerating a demographic shift across the progressive Bay Area, pushing out Latinos and African Americans into ever-more-distant suburbs to make room for predominantly white technology workers.

A recent University of California at Berkeley study found that the region has “lost thousands of low-income black households” as the result of rising housing costs. The study found no similar effect on the income of or departures in white neighborhoods.

The process compelling minorities to leave for cheaper cities, caused by Bay Area housing shortages and policies that have cemented those market trends, is in effect resegregating a region that has prided itself on ethnic diversity.

A 30 percent median rent increase from 2000 to 2015 translated into a 21 percent decline in minority households, according to the university’s Urban Displacement Project. While it is hard to pin down the average Bay Area rent, estimates place it above $3,000 a month.

Black neighborhoods in Oakland, Richmond and Berkeley have seen the most precipitous exodus. Most of those leaving are heading east to the less-expensive agricultural valleys, where political resentment toward the coastal elite has been building for years.

The crisis is sharpening as Californians prepare to vote Tuesday on a ballot measure that would make it easier for cities and counties to impose certain forms of rent control.

Proposition 10, as the measure is known, is unlikely to win judging by recent polling. But when surveys ask California voters if they support rent control in general, a majority say yes.

This could mark a turn after decades of unsuccessful attempts to give local governments more authority to control housing costs.

In 2016, five California cities had ballot measures to adopt new rent-control laws. Two were victorious and two more cities, including Santa Cruz in this region, will vote on similar measures Tuesday. Sacramento, the state capital, will have a rent-control initiative on the 2020 ballot.

“We’ve seen a shift in public opinion from rent control being popular to rent control being winnable,” said Dean Preston, executive director of Tenants Together, a nonprofit advocacy group. “People have just had enough of the runaway rents and it’s fair to see this is as a wave happening across the state in response.”

Blessed and cursed by geography, East Palo Alto is the next frontier of Bay Area gentrification.

The city has become a hunting ground for real estate speculators eager to turn even the town’s most decrepit properties into homes and apartments for the tech sector. The offers of cash--and it is often cash--have proved irresistible to some homeowners here who never imagined their tiny two-bedroom bungalows would one day be worth seven figures.

Landlords are using evictions and rent hikes to prepare residential neighborhoods for redevelopment at a time when the city’s wealthy neighbors, from San Jose to Sunnyvale, are in some cases actively opposing affordable housing projects.

The spillover has prompted city leaders here to try to collect some money from the companies building offices with no accompanying housing for the workers.

A measure on the East Palo Alto ballot would impose a tax on each square-foot of large commercial office space, which city leaders say would raise a few million dollars a year for affordable housing and job training. The measure is known colloquially as the “tech tax.”

“The market is fundamentally broken,” said Daniel Saver, senior attorney for the nonprofit Community Legal Services, who after graduating from Harvard Law School six years ago works with low-income tenants and homeowners here. “This is a regional problem, and we can’t solve a regional problem on our own.”

From the early 1980s on, California’s powerful real estate lobby managed to kill every new measure to expand rent control proposed at the state and local levels. The crackdown followed a golden age of tenant rights activism in California when cities such as Berkeley, Santa Monica and East Palo Alto adopted strong rent control measures.

Proposition 10 has revived the long-dormant debate at the state level. If passed, the measure would effectively nullify legislation known as the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which the state legislature passed in 1995.

Costa-Hawkins did not eliminate all local rent control in the state. But it prohibited local jurisdictions from implementing two regulations that affordable housing advocates say would better protect residents of cities such as this one amid the real estate boom.

One allowed local governments to limit rent increases when one tenant leaves an apartment and another tenant moves in, even if the new rent remains below market value.

East Palo Alto had the regulation in place before Costa-Hawkins. Tenant rights advocates say vacancy control, as the regulation is known, removes the financial incentive for landlords to evict tenants and hike the rent.

The other allowed local governments to apply rent-control regulations to single-family homes and condominiums. Proposition 10 opponents have focused on this element, in particular, because of its implications for the rights of individual homeowners.

But its advocates say the idea is to discourage real estate speculators, many of whom are now scouring East Palo Alto for investment homes.

The median home price here is more than $1 million, a mixed-blessing milestone passed just a few months ago that culminated a 25 percent price increase over just the past year. But the median household income of $55,170 remains nearly a third of that of neighboring Palo Alto and half that of adjacent Menlo Park.

“Socially and economically in this area we’re living in a semi-feudal society,” Abrica said.

Those economic conditions make this city particularly vulnerable to the forces of gentrification. Many longtime residents are income poor and property rich. They are the prime targets for real estate speculators and investment companies with cash.

“It’s a gold mine here right now,” said Mahoni, one of those targets, who makes his living trading on eBay.

He bought his house--single-story, a patch of lawn surrounded by a chain-link fence out front--in 2009. That is the era known here as “before Facebook,” whose arrival two years later electrified the property market. He paid $330,000.

Mahoni grew up in San Mateo County in a house his parents bought for about $112,000 in 1985 and is now worth 10 times that. While he has resisted the money, many of his neighbors have not or have been forced out by rent hikes.

His cousin is moving to the East Bay from a home on the next street over. He has several friends who in the past year have sold houses and resettled as far away as Tracy, a city about 60 miles east in the San Joaquin Valley.

“No one wanted any part of us when the crime was high here, and that’s what is also frustrating about all this new interest,” said Mahoni, who intends to leave the home to his seven children. “I tell people only sell if you have to, that you have the character not to sell your soul to the devil. But for some people it’s just too much money not to.”

[intoxicatingimmediacy]

How Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal Got Their Movie 'Blindspotting' Made After 10 Years

Six years before Daveed Diggs made Thomas Jefferson cooler than any history teacher thought possible in the musical  Hamilton, he was huddled over a pirated version of the screenwriting software Final Draft with his best friend, Rafael Casal. A producer had offered Casal a movie after seeing his slam poetry on YouTube and HBO’s  Def Poetry. Casal brought Diggs star on board, and right away they knew what the subject had to be: their city, Oakland, California. In 2009, that topic was weighted with tragedy. “Oscar Grant was murdered at Fruitvale Station, blocks away from where I was living,” says Diggs, referring to the unarmed black man shot by a white police officer on January 1 of that year, an incident dramatized by Ryan Coogler in his 2013 film  Fruitvale Station. At that point, says Diggs, “you couldn’t write about Oakland without talking about that.” But unlike Coogler, Diggs and Casal intended to charge their politics with dark humor. “So many comedies ignore race except when it’s funny,” says Casal. “We wanted to write a buddy comedy without ignoring the world these guys live in.

In January,  Blindspotting debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, starring Diggs and Casal; six months after that, on July 27, it will open nationwide. And that’s exactly eight years after the duo expected the film to be made. Diggs laughs: “As I learned,” he says of their crash course in the film business, “you can have a movie fully green-lit, ready to go, and then it disappears.”

The producers, Jessica and Keith Calder, had originally offered the two a $300,000 budget to shoot on DSLR cameras; they even had a director, Jonathan Levine (50/50), signed on. But the Calders had just launched a production company, Snoot Entertainment, and they kept getting pulled into outside-funded projects. After three false starts, says Casal, the heartbroken writers told the producers, “We don’t even want to talk about this movie anymore. Let’s move on.” The persistent Calders, however, came back to the project in 2015. This time, Diggs was the roadblock. He had just signed on to do  Hamilton, which debuted off-Broadway. He remembers telling the producers, “I’m sure it will only last three months.” A year later, the musical was a record-breaking Broadway hit, earning Diggs a Tony and a Grammy for his two roles (Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette). In February 2017, as  Moonlight won best picture at the Academy Awards for its depiction of a black gay man’s coming-of-age, Casal drunk-texted the Calders something along the lines of: “We could have had a  Moonlight.” The Calders jumped back in. “This was the beginning of Trump’s America,” says Casal, “and we all got reinspired.”

At that point, like many in the original cast, Diggs had left Hamilton, but the rising star’s new management team had to sign off on the script. They did, pending a massive rewrite, due in two months. Diggs was busy with acting—guest roles on TV and the Julia Roberts film  Wonder —so it was left to Casal. The basic plot stayed the same: Collin, a convicted felon with a gentle demeanor (played by Diggs), is determined to get through the last three days of his yearlong probation without incident. Miles, his white, hot-headed best friend (Casal), is eager to stir up trouble. Early on, Collin witnesses a white police officer fatally shoot a black man. He tries to bury what he saw, but it eats away at him. What changed, says Casal, was how the aftermath of the shooting played out. “Over 10 years, that conversation has evolved so much,” he says. “When we started the script, there were protests in the street when something like that would happen. Now, nothing.”

“The momentum behind movements like [Black Lives Matter] has been tough to sustain,” says Diggs. “We thought a lot would change, but it didn’t.” A big protest scene was dropped. “Now, Collin is the only person affected by the shooting,” Diggs says, “with no response from the city. And once word gets out that the black victim was a felon, suddenly he’s not perfect enough to warrant protests.”

Production began in June 2017. Casal chose a friend, Carlos López Estrada, to direct. Casal sent him references for the Oakland he and Diggs wanted to see, “like Whoville: big cars, big hats, big sunglasses, bright shorts.” Casal’s highly stylized vision borders on surreal. “Oakland is a place like nowhere else,” he says, adding wistfully, “Well, that was more true when we were growing up.”

The Bay Area tech boom, which pushed real estate prices into the stratosphere, means the once–predominantly black and Latino city is gentrifying. Collin and Miles resent the young hipsters moving in, but Miles is particularly incensed—as well as desperate to prove that, despite his skin color, he’s not one of them. When he and Collin attend a housewarming party, it’s not the tech-bro host Miles punches in the face but a black Oakland native who accuses Miles of cultural appropriation. “When I’m back home,” says Casal, who lives in Los Angeles now, “I’m aware of the glaring hostility between presumed locals and presumed outsiders—and I say ‘presumed’ because no one is actually checking. We’re just using race as a placeholder for knowing who’s from there and who’s not.” Misinterpretation aside, the screenwriters tend to side with natives. The privileged white newcomers in Collin and Miles’s world serve, in part, as comic relief, but as Diggs notes, in real life, gentrification “is more complicated than painting bad guys.”

He knows because when he moved to New York City for his role in Hamilton, “I lived in Washington Heights and disappointed people every day because I didn’t speak Spanish. That was a moment for me to learn something and be—to the degree that I could—part of a community that had thrived for a long time before I got there and will continue for a long time after I’ve left.” As much as Diggs tried to be sensitive, “it’s hard to walk around thinking that way every day,” he says. Similarly, Blindspotting is attempting to show that “in any given situation there’s something you’re missing, through no fault of your own. We’re not intentionally trying to offend anybody,” adds Diggs, “but if you’re offended, maybe you should ask yourself why."

The first scene the two friends wrote, back in 2009, comes toward the end of the film. Collin challenges Miles to use a racial slur. Miles refuses. It leads to a confrontation that’s been percolating: Miles gets away with his antagonistic behavior because he’s white, while the more cautious Collin is stereotyped as a thug because of his skin color and dreadlocks. For Diggs, it was the hardest day of the shoot. “It’s the only time I thought, Damn, this would be a lot easier if I wasn’t acting with my best friend,” he says. “We’d meet up after each take to hug it out.”

[jfpark]

An Annotated Bibliography of Rent Abolitionist Tactics

At the time of posting this resource was not completed, but will be asap. This page will be updated with the annotations as they are read, and with some improved organization.

to submit to this annotated bibliography email julianfrancispark (at) gmail (dot) com

Friedrich Engels “The Housing Question” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/

research and destroy https://archive.org/details/LandLibertyAgainstTheNewCity

https://libcom.org/library/land-liberty

the indentured tenant https://rentistheft.org/the-indentured-tenant-114b969c8bfa

https://itsgoingdown.org/trouble-13-fighting-back-against-gentrification/

http://www.prole.info/thm.html

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2015/10/01/you-cant-evict-a-movement-strategies-for-housing-justice-in-the-united-states/

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-52129-9_16

http://oaklandschool.ucdavis.edu/resources/

https://www.thenation.com/issue/june-18-25-2018-issue/

http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research-areas/rental-housing

http://www.urbandisplacement.org/

https://www.antievictionmap.com/

https://righttothecity.org/about/member-organizations/

planet of the slums

http://rebels-library.org/files/planet_of_slums.pdf

status of tenants in the us

http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Status-of-Tenants.pdf

tenants movement in the us

http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/The-Tenants-Movement-in-the-US.pdf

http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Organizing-the-New-Tenants-Movement.pdf

social democrat’s positions

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/04/affordable-housing-crisis-peoples-policy-project

https://jacobinmag.com/2017/02/new-york-housing-gentrification-affordability-de-blasio

https://jacobinmag.com/2016/10/housing-crisis-rent-landlords-homeless-affordability

https://jacobinmag.com/2015/11/public-housing-social-welfare-crisis-affordable-gentrification

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/affordable-housing-crisis-minimum-wage

history

https://libcom.org/history/tenant-movement-new-york-city-1904-1984i

http://www.stopdisplacement.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Anti-Imperial-Housing-Forum_READING-PKG.pdf

https://www.pitzer.edu/manifesto/wp-content/uploads/sites/104/2018/02/Ultra-Red_School_of_Echoes_Broadsheet-School-of-Echoes-2017-Anti-Gentrification-Syllabus.pdf

https://homesforall.org/reports/rise-of-the-corporate-landlord/

https://homesforall.org/reports/rise-of-the-renter-nation/

Reports on the crisis

Tenant Unions

“Forming a Tenants Association” by Metropolitan Counicl on Housing — A broad outline, including step by step instructions on how to form a tenants’ association. http://www.metcouncilonhousing.org/help_and_answers/tenants_associations

“Tenant Union Training/Webinar” by Homes For All (Right to the City Alliance)—A video from March and April of monthly trainings you can sign up for.

March https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=867scM6_jFI&t=1s

April - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n41BENBGe30

Origins and Evolution of a Social Movement Strategy: The Rent Strike in New York City, 1904-1980 Ronald Lawson Urban Affairs Quarterly 18 (3), 371-395, 1983

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/004208168301800306

https://roarmag.org/essays/organizing-tenants-rentier-society/

https://roarmag.org/essays/rent-strikes-ucl-san-francisco/

http://www.hamiltontenantssolidarity.ca/resources/

https://itsgoingdown.org/parkdale-vol-2-issue-2-gentrification-tip-iceberg/

https://itsgoingdown.org/no-gentrification-yes-rent-strikes-interview-torontos-parkdale-organize/

https://defendourhoodz.tumblr.com/

Beyond Squat or Rot: Anarchist Approaches to Housing Beyond Squat or RotThis zine from the 1990s looks at anarchist approaches to housing beyond squatting, focuses mainly on cooperatives, collectives, and the idea of anarchist neighborhoods and temporary autonomous zones. It offers some good criticisms and thoughts on the subject.

https://archive.org/download/BeyondSquatOrRotAnarchistApproachesToHousing/beyond_squat_or_rot.pdf

https://itsgoingdown.org/tenant-power-from-below-la-tenants-union/

Neighborhood Assemblies

Short Circuit: Towards an Anarchist Approach to Gentrification By Two Toronto Members of Common Cause Anarchist Association

http://linchpin.ca/short-circuit-towards-an-anarchist-approach-to-gentrification/

Building Communities of Resistance An Anti Capitalist Response to Gentrification

https://rentistheft.org/building-communities-of-resistance-d229d8508bfc

The properties of property Steve Martinot https://popularresistance.org/the-properties-of-property/

https://archive.org/details/Archipelago

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/becky-the-road-to-the-barricades-runs-through-the-neighborhoods

Mutual-aid/Solidarity Networks

https://roarmag.org/essays/us-housing-solidarity-networks/

https://libcom.org/library/solidarity-network-or-solidarity-service-challenges-building-solidarity-network

http://libcom.org/library/you-say-you-want-build-solidarity-network

https://libcom.org/blog/6-practices-build-community-power-intro-solidarity-networks-27122014

Housing Cooperatives

https://homesforall.org/reports/hfacltguide/

https://homesforall.org/reports/communitiesovercommodities/

https://www.shareable.net/blog/how-to-start-a-housing-co-op

https://archive.org/details/CollectivesAnarchyAgainstTheMass

https://itsgoingdown.org/community-self-defense-mobilizes-to-defend-hasta-muerte/

https://coophousing.org/resources/owning-a-cooperative/starting-a-new-cooperative/

http://www.poormagazine.org/homefulness

https://cooperationjackson.org/sustainable-communities-initiative

http://ebprec.org/

Eviction Defense

https://itsgoingdown.org/detroit-eviction-defense-tabloid-3/

http://occupyourhomes.org/blog/category/home-defense/

https://en.squat.net/tag/oakland/

https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/05/a-new-tactic-maybe-a-new-movement-for-fighting-eviction/

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Societies-in-MovementPreventing-Evictions-20141013-0054.html

https://archive.org/details/ItsVacantTakeIt

https://archive.org/details/AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs_759

https://archive.org/details/OursOccupationGuide

https://evictionfreesf.org/about/

http://organizingforpower.org/resources-3/

Slashing land prices

http://defendboyleheights.blogspot.com/?m=1

http://alianzacontraartwashing.org/en/bhaaad/

https://itsgoingdown.org/anarchist-response-to-anti-gentrification-attacks-in-philly-may-day/

http://arcadenw.org/article/san-francisco-tech-bus-stops-displacement-and-architectures-of-racial-capitalism

Land Reclamation

https://en.squat.net/books/

http://takebacktheland.org/

https://www.akpress.org/takebackthelandak.html

Squatters’ Handbook: “Political” Squatting Tips Home » Catalog » Zines » Organizing » Squatters’ Handbook: “Political” Squatting Tips squatters_handbookThis zine from Homes Not Jails explores the idea and process of squatting as a “political” organizing tool. It offers a number of helpful tips on how to squat, the legalities of squatting, how to identify empty homes and other spaces, how to establish utilities, and how to fight evictions.

https://archive.org/download/SquattersHandbookpoliticalSquattingTips/squatters_handbook.pdf

https://archive.org/details/ElementsOfABarricade

https://warzonedistro.noblogs.org/files/2017/09/The-DIY-Occupation-Guide.pdf

https://archive.org/details/ItsVacantTakeIt

https://archive.org/details/AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs_759

http://www.thefullwiki.org/Homes_Not_Jails

https://thevillageinoakland.org/

[drangsaldrangsal]

Discriminatory Housing Practices Tied to Premature Births

A new study suggests that past discriminatory housing practices may play a role in perpetuating the significant disparities in infant and maternal health faced by minorities in the United States.

For decades, banks and other lenders refused loans to people if they lived in an area the lenders deemed to be a poor financial risk. This policy, called redlining, led lenders and banks to create maps marking neighborhoods considered too risky for investment. These maps were first drawn in 1935 by the government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corp. (HOLC), and labeled neighborhoods in one of four colors — from green representing the lowest risk to red representing the highest risk.

These designations were based, in part, on the race and socioeconomic status of each neighborhood’s residents.

To analyze the link between historical redlining and infant and maternal health today, a research team from the University of California (UC), Berkeley obtained birth outcome data for the cities of Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco between 2006 and 2015 and compared them to HOLC redlining maps.

The findings, published online in the journal PLOS ONE, show that adverse birth outcomes — including premature births, low birth weight babies and babies who were small for their gestational age — occurred significantly more often in neighborhoods with worse HOLC ratings.

“Our results highlight how laws and policies that have been abolished can still assert health effects today,” said Rachel Morello-Frosch, a professor of public health and of environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley and senior author of the study.

“This suggests that if we want to target neighborhood-level interventions to improve the social and physical environments where kids are born and grow, neighborhoods that have faced historical forms of discrimination, like redlining, are important places to start.”

Non-Hispanic Black women living in the U.S. are one-and-a-half times more likely to give birth to premature babies than their white counterparts and are more than twice as likely to have babies with a low birth weight. Hispanic women face similar, though less dramatic, disparities, compared to non-Hispanic white women.

While the legacy of public and private disinvestment in redlined neighborhoods has led to well-documented disparities in income level, tree canopy coverage, air pollution and home values in these communities, the long-term health impacts of redlining are just now starting to be explored.

“Children born during the time of our study would be the great-great-grandchildren of those who were alive at the time of redlining, whose options of where to live would have been determined by redlining maps,” said study lead author Anthony Nardone, a medical student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program.

“We chose to look at birth outcomes because of the stark inequities that exist across race in the U.S. today, inequities that we believe are a function of long-standing institutional racism, like historical redlining.”

Previous research led by Nardone showed that residents of neighborhoods with the worst HOLC rating were more than twice as likely to visit the emergency room with asthma than residents of neighborhoods with the highest HOLC rating. And a recent study from the Harvard School of Public Health found a link between redlining and preterm births in New York City.

In the new study, the researchers discovered that neighborhoods with the two worst HOLC ratings — “definitely declining” and “hazardous” — had significantly worse birth outcomes than those with the best HOLC rating.

However, Los Angeles neighborhoods rated “hazardous” showed slightly better birth outcomes than those with the second worst, or “definitely declining,” rating. In San Francisco and Oakland, neighborhoods with these two ratings showed similar birth outcomes.

This pattern might be due to the effects of gentrification on previously redlined neighborhoods, the authors speculated. They added that residents of the hardest hit neighborhoods may also rely more on community support networks, which can help combat the effects of disinvestment.

“We also saw different results by metropolitan area and slightly different results by maternal race,” Morello-Frosch said. “This suggests that maybe the underlying mechanisms of the effect of redlining differ by region and should be investigated further.”

Source: University of California- Berkeley

  from Psych Central News https://ift.tt/3b2JaL6 via IFTTT

[dcprime]

Negative Gentrification

Dallas Crudupt

May 8, 2019

Written Policy

Negative Gentrification

As people here in America, the dream has always been to own a home. Many people here in the California do not really see the possibility of ever buying a home because the cost of living is so high. When cost of living is always a topic, gentrification becomes the centerpiece of the conversation. This paper will observe gentrification and how it has changed many communities and the people in it. As a Bay Area native I have seen it right before my eyes the ongoing changes that have occurred. For a city to fully develop, gentrification must happen to create new growth and development of the economy by displacing residents. 

So, what exactly is Gentrification? According to dictionary.com, gentrification is “The buying and renovation of houses and stores in deteriorated urban neighborhoods by upper-or middle-income families or individuals, raising property values but often displacing low-income families and small business.” Many locally displaced residents never really had a plan to prepare for gentrification. For gentrification, the agents who implement plans are the States, cities, and local government. In plain text, I want to prove that gentrification helps turn cities around, but ultimately hurts residents. Residents are the bread to the sandwich, so there must be a way to keep them around. The enforcement of gentrification is carried out by the local and State government, our real-estate investors and locals who support the need for a change. The cost of the plan is anywhere from millions to billions of dollars. The cost could have such a wide range because the demand of building is based on where you are. For example, in New York city, there is not a lot of land to build on so investors have built up skyscrapers/ high-risers for their residents.  

For this advocacy, one claim being made is that gentrification could be fought off by locals by learning more about gentrification and buying property. If residents just learned what gentrification really is, they would be better prepared for it. The advocacy is the sole cause for the impact because owning property is important. When people do not own their homes, it gives more possibility of being priced out of a city. Gentrification leads to impact because it creates more division of the poor vs the rich which impacts a city’s foundation. Whenever a city’s foundation is impacted it creates high levels of community conflict.

One example is from an interview by the Washington post where it was stated that, “Once people saw what was generally regarded as the first signs of gentrification, it was too late,” Gregory said. It was also mentioned that, “The plans had been in the works for 15, 20 years. They were seeing the tip of the iceberg, but underneath a massive development was already underway.” The quote from the Washington Post, is basically explaining that people are never ready to change until it’s too late to change the time. 

New apartments and condos in wealthy neighborhoods, and low-income areas pay the price. The advocacy keeps low income areas stuck with no new developments because of exclusionary zoning rules. Gentrification increases the cost of rent. Oakland Magazine says “Yet while urbanists are cheering on the current housing construction boom in downtown and Uptown Oakland, they’re also sensitive to the impacts of gentrification. They say it’s unfair that nearly all the new housing is concentrated in certain areas of the city, while higher-income neighborhoods like Rockridge have effectively walled themselves off with special rules that ban large apartments buildings and condo complexes.” People are fed up with lack of housing because of overpopulation. What happened here in Oakland Magazine is a domino effect that is spreading across America. In every city in America right now, we have certain low-income areas that won’t be built up or refurbished because of zoning regulations. However, is it really zoning issues or are we just not seeing cities interested in building on low income areas?

If new apartment and housing are coming to displace locals, what about those new people coming? The NY times reported that tax breaks to mom and pop shops and pass an ordinance to control chain stores will better residential rent regulations. Gentrification creates an efficient class remake of neighborhoods. When people are pushed out of areas it doesn’t just remake the neighborhood it takes away a city’s identity. 

Could Gentrification be considered a race issue? According to Oakland magazine it was 1909 advertisement in the San Francisco Call newspaper for Rock Ridge Park (now commonly known as Upper Rockridge) plainly stated a covenant attached to deeds in the neighborhood at the time: “No negroes, no Chinese, no Japanese can build or lease in Rock Ridge Park.”

Gentrification is an illusion of invulnerability. An example of this is all the Tech jobs in the Bay Area they can sell jobs seekers on how much money you can make, but when have you heard of longevity and retirement spoken? High levels of community conflict only feeds into what gentrification is and not what it could become.  Gentrification may create change but according to Sarah Karlinsky of the urban planning group SPUR.  She stated that “It’s a very common dynamic—of neighborhoods that are well-resourced that work to repel new housing,” said Sarah Karlinsky of the urban planning group SPUR, which advocates dense housing near major transit corridors. The quote proves that gentrification is always going to have revolt of locals to new housing.

Oakland magazine reports that in “1970, the median home price in California’s coastal metros was 50 percent higher than the rest of the country. By 2015, it was 300 percent higher. According to real estate firm Trulia, the median home price in Rockridge as of early April was $1.3 million. The median rent? $5,650 a month.” The passage by Oakland magazine gives a good explanation of just how expensive it is here in the Bay Area. If in 1970 the median home price was 50% higher than the rest of the country, there’s no way a displaced local can obtain a home with inflation. Having rent prices as high as they are, city government must soon get involved as make some changes. One change I believe that should be made is luxury condos and apartments should not even be built. If government docent step in soon the identity of the city and culture will be lost. If all the locals leave and only transplants are around, the culture has already gone and it may take a long time to build the culture. 

Most of the success of Gentrification not only comes from housing and jobs it also comes from new businesses. When there’s a mass surge of people going to an area, that area must supply new jobs and restaurants and businesses. The local history may have left an area but there’s also a new opportunity to maintain reclaim your new resident. Many gnetifers will find themselves restoring the original glory of the city, with their own modifications. Adding a little charm to preserve a community is necessary at times.

To conclude this policy on gentrification you must see the overall picture of a re-investment. Whenever you gentrify something its only to make things better. Property values may increase as do social values. Gentrification is upcycling at best, but with a catch of low-income people catching the short end of the stick. Overall Gentrification maybe great for your city but not in all areas. Most poverty areas will make progressions to stay at a cost of expenses. 

It all comes down to money talks. Most cities want to embrace change because creativity takes center stage to innovate our world through Gentrification. Take a stand of negative gentrification to preserve your residents from vanishing away from the community. Also take a stand to upscale your city to keep residents not price them out.

[sfaioffical]

At SFAI, faculty and staff members are artists too! Faculty and staff shows are a great way for students to connect with the wider community of SFAI-affiliated artists across the globe. Here’s a glimpse of what SFAI faculty and staff are up to this month:

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA:

Rhiannon Alpers — Faculty | Printmaking

Illustrious bookmaker Rhiannon Alpers will be showing work at Long Live the Book! Contemporary Bookbinding as Art and Craft through May 4 at the American Bookbinders Museum.  

Clark Buckner — Faculty | Sculpture + MFA Programs

Check out Clark’s curatorial work at Telematic in Black Cherry Locusts with Sterile Fudge Swirl (Porpetine Charity Heartscape), on view through March 23.

Art Hazelwood — Faculty | Printmaking

See the work of San Francisco Poster Syndicate! Silkscreen political posters by more than 30 local artists-activists at the Immigration Emergency: In Defense and Defiance Exhibition through April 21 at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. 

Charles Hobson — Professor Emeritus | Printmaking

See SFAI Professor Emeritus Charles Hobson’s work on view at the Legion of Honor in Small Inventions: The Artist’s Books of Charles Hobson. The exhibition will run through July 14.

Kerry Laitala — Faculty | Film

Experimental video artist Kerry Laitala will be showing her work at the Ambient Dew Point Group Exhibition, on view through April 5, at the Art Ark Gallery, San Jose. Performances on March 22, from 7pm to 9pm. 

Mads Lynnerup — Faculty | New Genres

See Introspections, the series of five short videos satirizing key moments in the history of American TV and social media curated by video and performance artist Mads Lynnerup, through May 4 at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts.

Taravat Talepasand — Faculty | Painting

You can see Taravat’s work on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts alongside the work of SFAI alumni as part of Bay Area Now 8 (Survey Exhibition), on view through March 24.

Wanxin Zhang — Instructor | Sculpture

See Wanxin Zhang’s work in Richard Shaw and Wanxin Zhang, on view at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art from January 19–April 7. You can also see Wanxin Zhang’s work at the Museum of Craft and Design in Wanxin Zhang: The Long Journey through July 14. 

Jordan Reznick — Faculty | Photography

On view at the Hubbell Street Galleries, through March 22, see Transecologies, the collaborative exhibition that brings together the work of three transgender artists — Craig Calderwood, Nicki Green and Jordan Reznick — with trans scholar Mat Fournier, and traverses themes related to transecologies.

PALM DESERT, CA:

Cristóbal Martínez — Instructor | Art & Technology Department Chair 

If you’re in Southern California, check out the Postcommodity: It Exists in Many Forms, on view through April 21, at Miles C. Bates House in Palm Desert.

SCOTTSDALE, AZ:

Mads Lynnerup — Faculty | New Genres

See Mads Lynnerup’s work in Now Playing: Video 1999–2019, on view at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art through May 12.

LEWISTON, ME:

Timothy Berry — Chair | Printmaking

View Timothy Berry’s work in Anthropocenic: Art about the Natural World in the Human Era (Group Exhibition), on view at Bates College Museum of Art through March 23.

PORTLAND, ME:

Maria Elena González — Faculty | Sculpture + New Genres

If you’re in Portland, check out Maria Elena González’s work in Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, on view at the Portland Museum of Art through May 5.

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK:

Mads Lynnerup — Faculty | New Genres

If you find yourself in Denmark this month, see Mads Lynnerup’s work in the FOKUS 2019 festival, on view at Nikolaj Kunsthal and at various institutions throughout the Copenhagen Cultural District through March 31.

HALLE, GERMANY:

Robin Balliger — Associate Professor | Liberal Arts Department Chair

Robin Balliger will be holding a presentation on: "Painting Over Precarity: Community Public Art and the Optics of Dispossession, Gentrification, and Governance in West Oakland, CA" @ Urban Precarity Workshop. March 27 through 29, at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

OTHER FUN STUFF:

Miah Jeffra — Faculty | Liberal Arts

Liberal Arts faculty Miah Jeffra published a piece entitled “Babies” for the Spring 2019 Issue of The North American Review.

IMAGES: 

(1) Web Image for Postcommodity’s It Exists in Many Forms exhibition, Palm Desert, 2019. 

(2) Nicki Green, Morel Figure with Prosthesis, 2017. Glazed earthenware and felt. 37" x 22" x 21". Web image for Transecologies exhibition, San Francisco, 2019. 

(3) Timothy Berry, Black Rhinoceros, 2015, oil, aspahaltum, inkjet and acrylic pigment on Arches Heavyweight paper, 36 x 32 inches. 

[testinbeta]

#AltWoke Hyper-C

There is no term more ubiquitous, obnoxious, and self-serving in our current lexicon as “woke.” Woke is safety-pin politics, masturbatory symbolism, and virtue signaling of a deflated Left insulated by algorithms, filter bubbles, and browser extensions that replace pictures of Donald Trump with Pinterest recipes.

Woke is a misnomer — it’s actually asleep and myopic. Woke is a safe space for the easily distracted and defensive pop culture inbred. Woke is the Left curled up in a fetal ball scribbling think pieces about Broad City while its rights get trampled by ascendant fascism, domestically and globally.

Woke is the easy button: it combats injustice by sharing videos of police brutality to an echo of outrage.

Woke is bereft of irony: it shares HuffPo articles about gentrification from condos in Flatbush and Oakland.

Woke is alchemy: it transmutes oppressed identities into advertising campaigns, trend reports, and new demographics to market towards.

Woke is poptimstic: it believes Jaden Smith becoming the face of Louis Vuitton is enough to qualify as a win for progress.

Woke is content with the status quo: it would be perfectly content if another economic collapse happened tomorrow, just as long as those who rigged it were sufficiently intersectional.

Woke is a sanctimonious grammar-nazi who critiques the bully’s phrasing of “stop hitting yourself,” through toothless gums. Woke is too ethical for its own good.    

Woke is the gospel truth of the new evangelical Leftist. Woke is the Left’s consolidated failures distilled into a monosyllabic buzzword. A whimper into the digital landscape prefixed with a hashtag, arriving at the same point each time: #Woke is the literal antithesis of progress.

CATALOGUE OF THE WOKE LEFT’S FAILURES

1. Moderate Liberal

The moderate Left misappropriated theoretical terms and concepts, divorced from any actual theory. Identity politics, despite its origins in academia, flourishes best on social media — it’s the most accessible concept for moderate liberals to grasp.

“Well, if identity is only a game, if it is only a procedure to have relations, social and sexual-pleasure relationships that create new friendships, it is useful. But if identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think that they have to ‘uncover’ their ‘own identity,’ and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is ‘Does this thing conform to my identity?’ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. If we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity to our unique selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. We must not exclude identity if people find their pleasure through this identity, but we must not think of this identity as an ethical universal rule.” — Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” (1984)

Identity politics became an albatross, however. Both the moderate and radical were too eager to evangelize oppressed identities. There was no room for discussion, no place for debate. Call outs, clap backs, and other reality tv patois replaced dialectics.

Representation is the de facto litmus of society’s progress for the moderate liberal — society appeared more inclusive and diverse because “Orange is the New Black” has a female lead and a multiethnic supporting cast. They inhabit a never ending, curated echo chamber of think pieces, listicles, notifications, and retweets.

Everyone within their algorithmic ghetto shares their sentiments about society. The algorithm makes their small corner seem far more vast than it actually is, and as a result, the moderate extends this myopia to society at large.

The moderate midwifed the birth of the Alt-Right through bipartisan compromises. Moderate liberals are basically content to vest trust in their vaunted Democratic Party as it slides further to the right, thereby underpinning a level of discourse friendly to the far-right. It’s worth remembering that the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries were a period of diehard cooperation between liberals and conservatives in crafting today’s authoritarianism.

Neoconservatism provided socio-political planning that complemented a neoliberal economic agenda. This is why the radical Left blames liberals as well as conservatives for “command and control policing”, mass surveillance and this century’s rationale for endless warfare.

Moderate liberals provided and adopted theoretical frameworks that explained away structural oppression but retained an appearance of caring about racism and equality across intersecting spectrums of gender and sexuality. This was an obvious farce that mystified progress and the far right took advantage of this because they actually suffered no serious political setbacks. Liberalism provided an incubator for the alt right to form by mollifying actual demands for change.

“If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feeling of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.”  — Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Inventing the Future” (2015)

2. Radical Left

If the liberal is the evangelical, pearl clutching apostle of the woke Left, the radical, then, is St. Augustine — the hierophant, the pedagogue. The radical is the vanguard inhabiting academia & activism, creating the language and atmosphere of critique.

Its ideologies trickle down from intellectuals at universities to moderate liberals on social media, and more recently, the Alt-Right (e.g. culture jamming by way of “meme magic” or the synthesis of identity politics and white nationalism by way of identitarianism).

Radicals scapegoated liberals to absolve themselves of any responsibility by being all critique with no tangible answers. The radical left in its current incarnation is somewhat fossilized in terms of strategies and needs an immediate remodelling.

The radical is too comfortable inhabiting only the periphery of academia & activism. Radical academics and activists are insulated not only by algorithms but also their obsolescence. The radical academic has failed to bridge the gap between intellectuals & larger society.

That is, intellectuals failed to subvert hegemony and normativity. Academics did not do enough to reach beyond universities and make positive reforms to public education. Intellectuals failed to politicize the natural sciences early enough. Intellectuals lost programming and hacker culture to neoliberalism & libertarians. Computer science transitioned from cyberpunk to Silicon Valley venture capitalism.

Had radical academics succeeded, there might’ve been more legitimacy in the fight to combat climate change. Or traditional journalism wouldn’t have been so easily defeated by the post-fact information economy. What we have now is a new Scholasticism of students & professors as clergy dominated by an agitated, anti-intellectual populist bloc.  

“Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory. The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry.” Nick Land, “Meltdown” (1994)

The radical activist lost its sense resistance. There are no radicals in Congress. There are no radical lawmakers. No radical judges. Community organizing is helpful, but it’s not sufficient. To remain relevant radicals have to widen their scope to adapt to the changing global climate.

“The idea that one organisation, tactic or strategy applies equally well to any sort of struggle is one of the most pervasive and damaging beliefs among today’s left. Strategic reflection – on means and ends, enemies and allies – is necessary before approaching any political project. Given the nature of global capitalism, any postcapitalist project will require an ambitious, abstract, mediated, complex and global approach – one that folk-political approaches are incapable of providing.” — Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Inventing the Future” (2015)

WHAT IS #ALTWOKE:

1. Theoria

AltWoke is a new awakening for the post-modern Left to navigate the protean digital era. Altwoke can be categorized as the new New Left. Or Second Wave Neo-Marxism. The Post- Truth Left. Anti-liberal postcapitalist left. AltWoke is antithetical to Silicon Valley techno-neoliberalism. AltWoke is not the cult of Kurzweil. AltWoke is not merely analogous to the Alt-Right. AltWoke injects planning back into left-wing politics. AltWoke supports universal basic income, biotechnology and radical energy reforms to combat climate change, open borders, new forms of urban planning and the liquidation of Western hegemony. AltWoke sees opportunity in disaster. AltWoke is the Left taking futurism away from fascism. David Harvey is #altwoke. Situationist International is #altwoke. Lil B is #altwoke. Jean Baudrillard is #altwoke. Kodwo Eshun is #altwoke, Mark Fisher is #altwoke, Roberto Mangabeira Unger is #altwoke. Edward Snowden is #altwoke. Daniel Keller is #altwoke. Chelsea Manning is #altwoke. Theo Parrish is #altwoke. William Gibson is #altwoke. Holly Herndon is #altwoke. Frantz Fanon is #altwoke. Alvin Toffler is #altwoke.

2. Poiesis

Anti-liberal, Left-accelerationism. Revolution is slow & gradual. Technology, media, the global market, and culture accelerate the process.

Alt-Woke embraces the post-fact information economy as a pedagogical tool.

Culture is more important than policy.

Trickle-down ideology; AltWoke embraces normalization & hyperreality.

Memetic counter-insurrection: culture-jamming is the weapon of choice to tilt normalization in the direction we’d like it to go.

Xenofeminism. Technology is the missing component of intersectional politics. Eurocentrism and phallocentrism are obsolete, despite the Right’s best efforts. Queer is a verb, not a noun. If nature’s oppressive, change nature. Normalize “deviance.”

Reappropriation of globalism as a personal lifestyle.

AltWoke is duplicitous, amoral, & problematic. But also conscientious. The ends always justify the means. The Right hits low, so we hit lower, harder, and without mercy.

AltWoke is cautiously optimistic about the future.

PREFACE TO PRAXIS

Why support Left-Accelerationism?

Accelerationism is a contested and obtuse term among the Left, so in order to understand what accelerationism is, it’s crucial to understand what it isn’t.

Accelerationism doesn’t propose letting capitalism expand and erode to such a degree that its corrosive contradictions become so unbearable that the oppressed and working classes have no choice but to revolt. #Alt-Woke doesn’t and wouldn’t espouse such a simplistic and foolish framework, either.

In its neutral alignment, accelerationism is the idea that neoliberalism facilitates so much growth — economically, technologically, and globally — that its social contradictions continue to expand to such a degree that its “collapse” is not only inevitable, but creates a vacuum for new integrated social platforms. That is, like feudalism before it, late capitalism is transitory and incubates other socioeconomic ideologies that will ultimately replace it, since it’s now reaching its limits.

In its Right alignment, accelerationism is a schism: Neoreaction (NRx) is a radical libertarianism accelerating toward neoliberalism’s ultimate conclusion: plutocratic corporate monarchism (e.g., man as nation). The second is the Alt-Right, which is white identity politics accelerating toward capitalism’s ultimate conclusion: techno-fascism.

Left Accelerationism insists the only way out of capitalism is through it. It’s become apparent that capitalism is reaching its limits, and it can’t sustain itself any longer. The marriage of capitalism and democracy has been a powerful roadblock in the Left’s struggle to combat structural power. In its late phase, this divorce of capitalism and democracy is imminent.

“But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.”  —Karl Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade” (1884)

Left Accelerationism is a vindication of Marxism that synthesizes vertical tektology. It anticipates capitalism’s collapse, repurposing growth and technology against its progenitor and nudges that collapse toward a Leftist counter-hegemony. Capitalism provides the efficiency of integrated networks, it provides the tools to combat the inequalities of its rapacious growth. A post-scarcity, socialist society can sustain itself from the technologies capitalism produces.  

“The paradox of free-market communism is even more dramatic: the terms are strongly charged, ideological polar opposites, designating a kind of Mexican standoff between capitalism, on the one hand, and its archenemy and would-be grave digger, on the other. But the point of combining the terms free market and communism in this way is to deploy selected features of the concept of communism to transform capitalist markets to render them truly free and, at the same time, to deploy selected features of the free market to transform communism and free it from a fatal entanglement with the State.” —Eugene W. Holland, “Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike” (2011)

The process of acceleration is well under way and no one but the most dogmatic and naive beltway libertarian would argue contrary. Left Accelerationism in an alternative to traditional avenues like reform or revolution and attempts to reorganize power from within power. It does this without completely discarding avenues like reform or revolution, either.

Left-Accelerationism is a synthesis of Marxism with vertical-scale tektology. It’s Gramsci by way of Debord and David Harvey by way of Deleuze.

Why embrace a post-facts/post-truth information economy?

As it stands, narrative is more important than facts. Media and communications are so accelerated that both sides of the political spectrum are locked in a battle over consensus. Traditional pedagogy will not work in this instance. The Left hurts itself by not using this to its advantage.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit with the core belief.” —Franz Fannon, “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952)

Why is culture more important than policy? Why weaponize memetics? What is “trickle down ideology”? Why support hyperreality and normalization?

Culture is society’s barometer. From the meme unleashed by Marshall McLuhan’s too-oft repeated phrase “the medium is the message,” author Joshua Meyrowitz seems to have taken it most seriously. “No Sense of Place” is an analysis into how television changed society by altering society’s access to information.

Meyrowitz forms a clear theory on information-power systems and discusses ways in which television breaks those down. At the end of the book, Meyrowitz chooses three specific topics: the merging of childhood and adulthood, the merging of masculinity and femininity, and the lowering of the political hero through the demystification of power.

Meyrowitz fundamentally believes that many social groupings and hostilities exist due to access to and restrictions of information and space. When information and space are separated, then the boundaries between social groups relax. For example, the television show ‘The Jeffersons,’ brought white families in their living rooms to the living room of a black family; and news coverage of the war in Vietnam “brought the war home” in visceral detail.

Memes are ideologies distilled, repackaged, and ready for viral distribution. The internet is something of an AI: a communication network operating as its own sovereign entity. Social media platforms, and other communications technologies accelerate the flow of ideas, bypassing restrictions put in place by traditional media.

A journalist in New York may engage with a senator in Washington over Twitter. A misguided 17-year old from Wisconsin who received their political education from /Pol, Breitbart, or Reddit can also join that same dialogue, and disrupt it. This is the best case scenario, unfortunately. Ideology is a memetic virus. Memes are an insurgent medium. The internet is an insurgent technology.

“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation. The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” —Guy Debord, “Society of the Spectacle”, (1967)

What is xenofeminism?

Xenofeminism is a form of Left-Accelerationism and, by extension, can be read as AltWoke’s answer to identity politics. Or, more accurately, it critiques liberal “privilege”-based identity politics and re-situates Left “critical theory”-based identity politics into a technological framework.

Innovation is a consequence of capitalism’s growth, hence it’s irresponsible not to recognize how power operates not only through structures like capitalism, but also its incarnations like racism, colonialism, and heteronormativity.

When looking at history, it’s imperative to ask questions about how technology changes and affects the ways in which people communicate, disseminate, and process information. This should always be taken into consideration from an intersectional frame of reference.

AltWoke isn’t opposed to identity politics so much as it’s opposed to reductionist, two-dimensional, representation as the crux of liberal identity politics. This mode of thinking lacks nuance and oftentimes devolves into inconsequential arguments over single phrases and who gets to participate. Bad politics comes in all forms of representation.

Hegemony operates in such a way that it permeates every aspect of social life in late capitalism, yet this isn’t always apparent — its existence must be revealed. Culture’s more dubious incarnation tells society who is and isn’t worthy of praise, admiration, and, ultimately, life. The White Man™ is still the dominant conduit through which capitalism operates.

However, there’s a cultural shift happening that is impossible to deny. The chauvinism of Western exceptionalism, essentialism, and the central cornerstone, “whiteness” are sociopoitical dead ends. It confines itself within impossible paradigms, even while, nonwhite, non-Western, non-binary identities are accelerating the process. The West crumbles as China accelerates toward superpower status. It’s no coincidence that pop music is now synonymous with R&B. Hip hop, techno, house, and footwork bridge the gap between the avant garde and pop by accelerating language, form, timbre, and aesthetics to alien plateaus.

Is it any wonder why “cuckold” is the Alt-Right’s pejorative of choice? The old guard justifies oppression and inequality as immutable and “natural.” The deviant Other threatens this “natural” hierarchy. The normalization of deviance is the ultimate culture-jam. Cuckoldry is deviant, and deviance is the vanguard. #BlackPopMatters.

Why embrace and reappropriate globalism?

AltWoke perceives the “nation” as an information network and citizen –> user. The governance structure of the internet creates the subjectivity of power, the user, in the same fashion as the invention of the state created the subjectivity of citizens. Global scale computation has built a new governing rhizomatic architecture. All systems have integrated into platform stacks, and by extension, nations and governments are but another component in the Internet of Things (IoT).

People should be allowed in all physical spaces as a fundamental right. Politics has nothing to do with physical territory. AltWoke accelerationism fully separated land from politics once it realized that political groupings are aspatial networks: informational, cybernetic.

The old paradigm was political grouping by blood, land, and then language. These were all networks. Cyberspace is an artificial network same as blood, land, and language. It’s better, too, as it is instantaneous. Those who hold politics to be the defense of land, nation, ethnicity, or linguistics are the old-guard; they are demonstrably incorrect and stand between people and their liberty.

“Geology is sensible of itself in so much as it has an ordering logic, if it is articulate in its stratifications, reading pebbles, rocks, various kinds of matter, sorting, organizing (Roger Caillois calls this agency ‘computational’), folding, compacting the biological slime of the earth into its various layers.” Kathryn Yusoff, “Anthropogenesis: Origins and Endings in the Anthropocene” (2015)

The American nation was formed by the economic activities of the thirteen colonies as they functioned with common standards, such as shipping timetables and commercial infrastructure, developing into a consciousness of togetherness and assumed similarity between participants in the network.

Nations are coextensive with land, not that the land has ties to blood or biology (the misstep of historical fascism and contemporary nationalism, to glorify the soil) but the physical geography of land determined the networks superimposed over it.

Europe, for example, has for so long been balkanized into nationalities and peoples separated by mountain ranges, seas, and long distances, and brought together by modifications to this physical geography (see: Spain’s hegemony over Europe and its fantastic road system prior to 1648).

Now, pan-Europeanism burgeons on the fact that highway systems, shipping, and a porousness of state borders has reduced or annihilated these impediments to a common access to the European network. It fails because it does not see that the same forces that drive Pan-Europeanism point towards a global society.

The separation of the information network from place thus reduces the determination of place upon network, of place upon user, of place upon that user’s conception of themselves interacting with others, to the point that in a globalized world the user will interact with their physical neighbor in the same network as they will interact with someone in a different (city/state/nation/region), such that planetary consciousness necessarily forms.

Why is #AltWoke amoral?

Short answer: Politics is amoral. Long answer: As it stands, the political infrastructures of Western governments are collapsing. The Right solidified its stranglehold on structural power. Right Accelerationism is several steps ahead of its Leftist counterpart.

In America, the GOP is imploding and the Alt-Right is slowly replacing this obsolete party. The Right is vulgar, so we’ll stop taking the moral high road and be even fouler. The Left has no structural power, and the stakes are far too high. We truly stand to lose everything.

Traditional means of Left praxis are ineffectual against this ascendant superstructure. Asking that every individual respect the humanity of ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities is naive. It will take more deceptive and subversive methods for the political Left to affect any change. #Alt-Woke praxis is, if anything, a reappropriation of Vladislav Surkov’s idea of ‘nonlinear warfare.’ We don’t fight fair. We won’t be civil. We don’t resist power, we seize it.

3. Praxis

The question of AltWoke Praxis is also the question of Left-Accelerationist Praxis: How does one organize politically? AltWoke Praxis has two modal structures: Right Hand Praxis & Left Hand Praxis. Or, The Hand That Strikes & The Hand That Repurposes. RHP takes advantage of the cracks within the Alt-Right, disrupting any roadblocks to clear a path so LHP can shift the Overton Window. LHP repurposes existing technologies, networks, and power structures to initiate a counter-hegemony. LHP advances AltWoke’s core tenets without ever explicitly espousing as such. Privacy is crucial to Left Hand Praxis, so it won’t be listed, but appropriating multinational corporate identity is a crucial first step.

Right Hand Praxis

Alt-Right countersurveillance. Invade their spaces, disrupt their safe space. Break out of your filter bubble, learn their language. Learn who they are, and what they believe. Befriend them only to spy on them. Dox the doxers.

Exploit the right’s paranoia and affinity towards pseudoscience. If they believe that supplements will boost their testosterone or tin foil nets disrupt phone signals, exploit that market.

Direct action hacktivism. Penetrate the SEO. Make #altwoke viral. Twitter bot agit prop.

Appropriate post-fact culture. Conspiracy theories are memetically powerful. The Left does itself a disservice by not making its own. Speak their language to make it compelling: “Peter Thiel is a member of the Bilderberg Group!”

Exploit their contradictions: Human biodiversity is incompatible with Traditionalist Catholics. White nationalists think Identitarians are ineffectual Third Positionists. Drive them further into their own filter bubbles and out of voting booths.

Agitate Leftist demonstrations. The more the Woke, horizontal Left marches, the better. It takes any potential attention away from Left Hand Praxis.

[biofunmy]

As Newark Rises, Could Black Residents Be Pushed Out?

In the summer of 1999, a new minor league baseball stadium opened in Newark, attracting more than 6,000 spectators, including the mayor, to the first game.

The publicly financed ballpark, which offered sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline, cost $34 million and was one of the most expensive minor league ballparks ever built.

Elected leaders said the stadium would help reverse the declining fortunes of a city struggling with poverty and crime. One official declared that it would “send a loud signal that Newark is back in business.”

Twenty years later, the stadium has been reduced to a pile of rubble, the team that played there having folded. Taking its place is yet another project supporters say will bring an economic windfall: a sprawling development featuring hundreds of apartments, stores, office space and a hotel.

But this plan comes at a pivotal moment for Newark, a city that has long exemplified the struggles of America’s fading manufacturing hubs.

The proposal for the stadium site is just one of several residential and commercial projects with the potential to accelerate the slow but steady transformation Newark has experienced in recent years.

With the city’s star on the rise, local officials find themselves at a crossroads: They must manage the development Newark has long needed while avoiding the kind of gentrification that could push out its poorer and largely African-American residents.

Skyrocketing rents in major metropolises across the country have forced people to abandon places like San Francisco and New York City in favor of smaller nearby cities like Oakland and Hoboken, N.J.

But now even those places are becoming unaffordable. As a result, developers are taking a greater interest in Newark, a 20-minute train ride from Manhattan. Elected officials and activists have vowed to prevent Newark from becoming, as the mayor often puts it, “the next Brooklyn” by making sure the city remains affordable.

“We’re trying to get that development to happen and get people investing in the city, while at the same time creating opportunities for the residents who live here in the city,” the mayor, Ras Baraka, said in an interview. “It’s not easy. There’s no city in America who’s actually figured it out. Everybody has been attempting to do this, including New York, and it’s been very and extremely difficult.”

Under former Mayor Cory A. Booker, a Democrat who is running for president, companies like Audible and Panasonic established their headquarters in Newark, bringing new life to the downtown area and helping raise local property values.

In the past three years, at least four multimillion-dollar developments have brought luxury apartments, charter schools, office spaces and the city’s first Whole Foods market to Newark.

A new infusion of homes, stores and restaurants follows decades when the city struggled to attract outside investment.

Newark was left hobbled both by the loss of many middle-class white residents to surrounding suburbs and the infamous 1967 riots, which many African-Americans viewed as an uprising against an abusive police force and a local government that neglected their needs.

The unrest seared the city, leaving a legacy of gutted buildings, vacant lots and a lingering perception that Newark was a broken, dangerous place.

Though the city is safer than it has been in years, with violent crime steadily decreasing, fighting the stigma has proved almost as difficult as fighting crime, said Larry Hamm director of the People’s Organization for Progress, a local grass roots group.

“At one time you couldn’t get people to come to Newark,’’ Hamm said. “They were afraid. And so investment was only coming in dribs and drabs,” he said, adding, “The development never outpaced the rate of decay.”

In the 1990s, local leaders hoped the stadium could help repair the city’s image. The team playing there was called the Newark Bears, named after a club that had left the city in the late 1940s during a more prosperous era.

“What I was hoping for was to bring the old Newarkers back, the people I grew up with, hard-working people,” said Rick Cerone, the first owner of the Bears, who was born and raised in Newark and played for the Yankees in the 1980s and 1990s. “I wanted to see the team bring this city into its former glory.”

The idea of using a stadium as a tool for revitalization was part of a national trend. In New Jersey, seven minor league baseball stadiums were built between 1994 and 2001. But as many sports economists have shown, building flashy new stadiums rarely translates into economic gains for taxpayers.

Attendance at Bears games started out strong but competition from the region’s many professional sports teams made it difficult to fill the stands. After switching owners at least three times and narrowly escaping bankruptcy in 2008, the team finally folded in 2013.

The city and county continued to pay off millions of dollars in debt on the stadium until 2016, when Lotus Equity Group, a New York-based developer, bought the property for $23.5 million. Lotus, which also purchased an adjacent property where a seedy motel once stood, plans to turn the 12 acres of vacant space into a development called Riverfront Square.

The project, which is estimated to cost around $1.7 billion, will include 2,000 residential units and developers said they believed the building would appeal to professionals from New York.

Perry Halkitis moved from Manhattan to New Brunswick after he became dean of the Rutgers School of Public Health, which has campuses in both New Brunswick and Newark.

But after just a few months, he said, he realized, “the place I really wanted to live was Newark.”

Now he is getting ready to move into a building that was once a chocolate factory. Though he said he got a great deal — $265,000 for a 700-square-foot loft — the price was not what drew him to the city.

“It reminded me of what New York was like as it was developing in the 70s and 80s and 90s,’’ Mr. Halkitis said. “It was interesting and it had edge and it had culture. I hope and pray that Newark will hold on to some of that edge because that’s what makes it great.”

Ben Korman, the chief executive of Lotus, said the company was doing everything it could to “make sure that this project will ultimately give opportunities to Newarkers.”

The project will include hundreds of rental housing units at below the market rate, a public park that will host programs for the surrounding community and retail spaces that will be operated by small-business owners.

Still, some people expressed concern that the project would cater to wealthy newcomers while excluding longtime residents.

“It’s not for us black people,” said Gail Goodson, 68, who lives in a public housing complex a few blocks away from the proposed development. “We’re not going to benefit from it.”

Some activists worry that a building boom downtown could radiate out into more residential neighborhoods and push up housing costs.

“When you limit it and contain it then I think that that’s appropriate, but how the city reacts to setting boundaries, I think that’s going to determine if there will be gentrification or not” said Maria Lopez Nunez, a director at the Ironbound Community Corporation, a neighborhood group focused on social justice.

The pressures of rising housing costs are already being felt by many people in Newark. Between 2000 and 2015, median rents in the city rose 20 percent even as median household income fell by 10 percent, according to a 2016 study by Rutgers Law School.

“The risk of displacement — even in the absence of traditional gentrification — is real for most Newarkers,” the report said.

Since Mr. Baraka took office in 2014 he has won the support of affordable housing activists by adopting policies like inclusionary zoning, which requires developers to offer 20 percent of residential units below market rate in new buildings with more than 30 units,

Developers can also receive tax abatements for hiring minority and female contractors as co-developers on projects to build affordable housing.

And Newark recently became the third city in the country behind New York and Los Angeles to start providing free legal representation in court to low-income residents facing eviction.

“Anybody that comes to the city now is going to come with a mind-set of collaboration,’’ Mr. Baraka said. “I don’t care who they are. They’re going to come and sit with everybody at the table.”

Despite these measures, activists wonder how well the city will be able to resist market forces.

“They’re walking this tight rope of trying to entice developers to come and build in the city,’’ Mr. Hamm said, “while at the same time trying not to hurt the very people who voted them into office. That’s a tough tightrope to walk.”

Sahred From Source link Real Estate

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[thekotaroo]

Profiles of Pride: June 5th! 🏳️‍🌈Alicia Garza🏳️‍🌈

Alicia Garza (born January 4, 1981) is an American civil rights activist and editorial writer from Oakland, California. She has organized around the issues of health, student services and rights, rights for domestic workers, ending police brutality, anti-racism, and violence against trans and gender non-conforming people of color. Her editorial writing has been published by The Guardian, The Nation, The Feminist Wire, Rolling Stone, HuffPost and Truthout. She currently directs Special Projects at the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Garza also co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement.

With Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, Garza birthed the Black Lives Matter movement. Garza is credited with inspiring the slogan when, after the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, she posted on Facebook: "Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter, Black Lives Matter" which Cullors then shared with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Garza's organization Black Lives Matter was spurred on by the deaths of black people by police in recent media and racial disparities within the U.S. criminal justice system. She was also struck by the similarities of Trayvon Martin to her younger brother, feeling that it could have been him killed instead. Garza led the 2015 Freedom Ride to Ferguson, organized by Cullors and Darnell Moore that launched the building of BlackLivesMatter chapters across the United States. Garza self-identifies as a queer woman, and her spouse is biracial and transgender; Garza draws on all of these experiences in her organizing and activism.

Previously, Garza had served as the director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights in the San Francisco Bay Area. During her time in the position, she won the right for youth to use public transportation for free in San Francisco and also fought gentrification and exposing police brutality in the area. Garza is an active participant in several Bay Area social movement groups. She is on the board of directors of Forward Together's Oakland California branch and is also involved with Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity. She is also on the board of directors for Oakland's School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL).

[viralnewstime]

Fantastic Negrito’s Xavier Dphrepaulezz has been making music for nearly 30 years, but his breakthrough didn’t come until 2015. The Oakland, California musician persevered through a spell of street hustling to land a major label deal in the mid-90s. It would prove an inauspicious partnership – his solo debut flopped and then a devastating car accident put him in a coma towards the end of the decade.

Although he recovered physical strength, he decided to give up on music in 2007 and become a marijuana farmer. But his creative ambitions couldn’t be extinguished and after an emotional reawakening listening to Skip James, he released the debut Fantastic Negrito EP in 2014.

Fantastic Negrito took out NPR’s inaugural Tiny Desk contest in 2015 with a passionate re-interpretation of Delta and Chicago blues that bewitched the judges and resonated around the world. Two albums later, Dphrepaulezz is a two-time Grammy winner – 2016’s The Last Days of Oakland and 2018’s Please Don’t Be Dead both nabbed the Best Contemporary Blues Album gong.

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A strong blues influence runs through his work, following the example of legends James, Robert Johnson, R.L. Burnside, Lead Belly and Howlin Wolf. But Dphrepaulezz’s work also betrays an experimental inclination and incorporates mean electric guitar sounds, drum programming akin to modern hip hop and R&B and Eastern influences.

1. Night Has Turned To Day, Fantastic Negrito (2014)

‘Night Has Turned To Day’ is an apt introduction to Fantastic Negrito’s distinct stylistic slant. It’s a four to the floor blues hoedown with slide guitar, honky tonk piano and a lyrical tale of redemption.

Dphrepaulezz explained the song’s origins during his Tiny Desk showcase: “I spent three weeks in a coma and damaged every part of my body. I wrote this song 10 years afterwards and it’s basically about the things that are messed up in your life, the things that are broken, the things that are fucked up, you take ‘em and you just make them better.”

2. An Honest Man, Fantastic Negrito (2014)

Self-produced and self-released via his Blackball Universe label, the Fantastic Negrito EP illustrated Dphrepaulezz’s determined independence. Details of what built that self-sufficiency can be found in ‘An Honest Man’. A mid tempo ballad with a desperate edge, Dphrepaulezz chronicles the highs and lows of life on the street where violence, drugs and prostitution stimulate excitement and confusion in equal measure.

3. Working Poor, The Last Days Of Oakland (2016)

This lithe blues/funk number kicks off Negrito’s debut LP, lambasting the swelling wage disparity in US cities. Dphrepaulezz’s home city of Oakland has seen sprawling gentrification and urban displacement in recent years, hence the album title. Working Poor’s central refrain, “I keep on knocking but I can’t get in,” pithily sums up the seeming insurmountable chasm between rich and poor.

4. In The Pines (Oakland), The Last Days Of Oakland (2016)

‘In the Pines’ was written in the 1870s and famously revitalised by blues legend Lead Belly in the 1940s. Also known as ‘Black Girl’ and ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’, it’s since been covered by Nirvana, Billy Bragg and Keith Richards.

Fantastic Negrito gives the song an Oakland-centric update, including this stark comment on police brutality: “Black girl, black girl, your man has gone / Now you travel the world alone / You raised your child all by yourself / Then the policeman shot him down.”

5. Lost In A Crowd, The Last Days Of Oakland (2016)

Premiered during FN’s Tiny Desk appearance, ‘Lost In a Crowd’ heralded the sort of heavy blues spirituals that would dominate The Last Days of Oakland. The lyrics are quintessential Negrito, warning against fear’s paralysing potential and underlining existential finitude: “This is your life / Now you’re gone / There’s no tomorrow / It’s here, it’s on.”

6. Plastic Hamburgers, Please Don’t Be Dead (2018)

Album two begins with another potent political message, this time targeting American consumerism, drug addiction, gun availability and governmental manipulation. ‘Plastic Hamburgers’ is also a stomping blues rock number that isn’t too far removed from Lenny Kravitz.

“The ‘Plastic Hamburgers’ riff, that’s blues in E,” Dphrepaulezz told Music Feeds. “Blues in E can stop a war from happening, because we can all get under that human umbrella and all gather round this fire of music.”

7. Bad Guy Necessity, Please Don’t Be Dead (2018)

One of the highlights of the FN repertoire, ‘Bad Guy Necessity’ boasts an exceedingly sleazy groove: “That bass line was written based on the way drug dealers walk in my neighbourhood,” said Dphrepaulezz.

The lyrics are partly inspired by Donald Trump’s incessant deflection of blame and the way his alt-right followers appoint minority communities as their enemies. “Everybody needs a bad guy so they can have a saviour,” said Dphrepaulezz. “It’s the oldest trick in the book.”

Despite referencing such unfortunate features of our present reality, ‘Bad Guy Necessity’ is marked by soulful integrity.

8. A Boy Named Andrew, Please Don’t Be Dead (2018)

An avowed fan of Pakistani vocalist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Egyptian oud player Hamza El Din, Dphrepaulezz brings his Eastern influences to bear on ‘A Boy Named Andrew’. Rather than a straight-up tribute, however, the song’s driven by a greater ambition.

“It sounds like this Eastern chant, but I imagine humanity a thousand years ago,” Dphrepaulezz said. “We’re all in front of a fire, all these different people and cultures all together chanting.”

Humans are capable of some truly devastating things, but the chorus stays hopeful: “The wheels of time, they keep on turning / We’re still learning to fly.”

9. Transgender Biscuits, Please Don’t Be Dead (2018)

Six months before Please Don’t be Dead came out, FN jumped on twitter to pose this question: “What do you do after you write a song entitled transgender biscuits?” The titular biscuits don’t actually feature in the body text, but Dphrepaulezz rattles off a list of identifying characteristics to draw attention to the ridiculousness of discrimination. It all occurs over a tilting groove that would ably lend itself to a boom bap re-work.

10. Bullshit Anthem, Please Don’t Be Dead (2018)

We’re back to where we started. The psychological determination underlying ‘Night Turns To Day’ is given a more irreverent voicing on disco-blues number, ‘Bullshit Anthem’. “Take that bullshit and turn it into good shit,” sings Dphrepaulezz. And with Fantastic Negrito as your guide, it shouldn’t be too hard.

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Fantastic Negrito return to Australia this month for Byron Bay’s Bluesfest. They have also announced a pair of sideshows in Sydney and Melbourne. Dates below.

Fantastic Negrito Bluesfest 2019 Sideshows

Presented by Music Feeds

Tickets on sale now

Sunday, 14th April Oxford Art Factory, Sydney Tickets: Moshtix

Monday, 15th April The Corner, Melbourne Tickets: Eventbrite

The post Fantastic Negrito: 10 Essential Tracks appeared first on Music Feeds.

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[giarts]

How did we get here?

Submitted by Steve on October 27, 2018.

Nia King reports from the After Ghost Ship preconference at the 2018 GIA Conference in Oakland:

The After Ghost Ship panel was organized by Claudia Leung, outgoing senior program associate at the San Francisco Arts Commission. She began the panel by giving a shout out to Nadia Elokdah (Deputy Director at Grantmakers in the Arts) for all her hard work moving the conference at the last minute. The conference was originally set to take place at the Oakland Marriott, but since Marriott workers are on strike nation-wide, the conference had to be moved at the eleventh hour. Claudia then introduced the panelists: Katherin Canton of Oakland Creative Neighborhoods Coalition and Emerging Arts Professionals SF/Bay Area, David Keenan of DIY Safer Spaces, Devi Peacock of Peacock Rebellion and the Liberate 23rd Ave Collective, Eric Arnold of the Oakland Creative Neighborhoods Coalition and Black Arts Movement District Community Development Corporation and moderator, journalist Chris Zaldua.

Eric Arnold spoke first and gave a presentation called “How did we get here?” which attempted to sum up to last 20 years of gentrification in Oakland. He provided a lot of important background information for the discussion, so I’m going to take some time recapping his presentation.

In 1999, then Oakland mayor Jerry Brown (now California’s governor) instituted an initiative called 10K with the goal of bringing 10,000 new residents to downtown Oakland. Between 2000 and 2015, Oakland’s population rose by about 44,000 but only 1,000 units of “affordable housing” were built. (According to Eric, affordable housing is defined on a federal level as where a resident/tenant does not have to spend more than 30% of their income on rent. For some reason, in Oakland, even housing where you are spending up to 60% of your income on rent is considered “affordable.”) The housing built as part of the 10k initiative was all market rate.

Read the full post at the conference blog.

Posted by Steve on October 27, 2018 at 02:09PM. Read the full post.

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Wk 13 Readings Notes

Oakland’s Black Artists make Space for themselves

“Everybody wants to consume Blackness but nobody wants to make sure we don’t die”- Zoe Samudzi

-Addresses how the declining black population as a result of the housing crisis and the gentrification has made financial difficult to not only find a space but also exist as a black artist in 2018 Oakland. Black culture attracted White to move in but Black culture itself was pushed out.

Black Aesthetic purports to be a self-determining & infiltrating& world-building project seeking to undermine& unsettle itself -> series of Qs

The Claim of Innocence

- Identity, not defining heritage

-Understand whiteness

White construct has shaped the black cultural imagination for generations. Imaginary Black Killer ( The white man killed his family but blamed it all on the fake imaginary black man)

2015 46%  black artists gained budget, not even from Oakland.

While it is clear that Black culture is oppressed and does not get the respect and encouragement they deserve, there are still some support going. Shows how the culture is changing.