Category: Urban Development
No, Our Homes Aren’t a Plaything for Speculators
No, Our Homes Aren’t a Plaything for Speculators Disproportionately impacting the low-income and poorly housed, COVID-19 was, in the words of one London politician, “a housing disease.” Historically, working-class people fought for and won public housing as a way of getting homes that wouldn’t cost their lives. Today, we need…
Dissertation Overview
My dissertation research defines and employs comrade scholarship in an inquiry of the past, present and future of public housing. The goal of the research is to lift up residents’ experiences and perspectives, alongside critical scholarship, to question state-led plans and envision alternative housing futures. The research manifests as an…
Handout and Social Media Slides on Development on Hallets Cove, Astoria, for the Justice For All Coalition
This handout was created for outreach and a community meeting at Astoria Houses in May 2021. It aims to clarify the state of development on the peninsula where Astoria Houses is located, and forthcoming plans. View &/or Download: Hallets Point View social media slides using the gallery below: [ngg src="galleries"…
Handout and Social Media Slides – Where is the Money for Public Housing? for Justice For All Coalition
This handout undermines the repeated assertion by public officials that there is no money for public housing by pointing to the public money and support involved in other private development deals in the region of western Queens. View &/or Download: Wheres The Money? View social media slides in gallery below:…
OpEd titled “Sunnyside Yards Master Plan Sits on a Deck of Myths” in City Limits
Last Tuesday, the NYCEDC released their long-awaited—and dreaded—master plan for development over Sunnyside Yards. In it they praise themselves for their “robust engagement efforts” and “inclusive, community-driven process”, and for making this $14.4 billiion project about human and community needs rather than the profit desires of developers. They position the…
OpEd titled “Stop Sunnyside Yards! Reparative City Building Now!” in City Limits
Image Credit: Adi Talwar Caption: A 2017 Sunnyside Yards feasibility study proposed scenarios that included up to 24,000 units of housing—including up to 7,200 affordable units—in residential buildings as high as 69 stories, surrounded by as much as 52 acres of open space. Over the last year, the quasi-private, city-affiliated…
StoryMap of State-led Changes in Long Island City
“Change” has come to define Long Island City, and increasingly Western Queens, as new buildings – and land values – go up, and working-class tenants, small manufacturing and businesses, and independents artists are pushed out. The City and its agencies often describe these changes in relation to trends, as though…
Mapping Project titled “Recalibrating Queens”
This ended up being more experiment than concrete project as the longer-term vision of the project remains aspirational. But the project is evidence of some of what comrade scholarship can look like, and the project at this stage does reveal interesting and useful findings. Overview Recalibrating Queens is a digital…
OpEd titled “A Community-Centered Perspective on Displacement” in Shelterforce
Image Credit: Tree City Architecture. Illustration by Fritz Ahlefeldt via flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 In the last year, displacement has become a hot topic for policy analysis and intervention in New York City and across the country. For example, in 2017 the Regional Plan Association released its fourth plan for…
‘Walking in my Shoes’ – An Open Digital Pedagogy & Urban Justice Project
The Walking in My Shoes (WIMS) Project is an open digital pedagogy project that began as a way to: 1) more deeply involve the students in my class with the issues we were discussing, 2) publicize the the conversations that took/take place in my public university setting, 3) to stretch and…