Fluent Essays

Did Moms 4 Housing have the right to occupy 2928 Magnolia Street? Why or why not?To arrive at your position, you should continue to explore the following ideas from our discussion forums: your philosophy on the balance between human rights and property rights your interpretation of the history of racist housing policy in the United States your beliefs about community activism Ultimately, your essay will synthesize the facts, examples, and perspectives from the texts in this unit to support your thesis. You will strengthen your credibility (appeal to ethos!) by including at least one counterargument.  An introduction that describes the general situation and narrows down to the specific issue. A thesis statement that conveys your main argument in response to the prompt. PIE-style paragraphs that support your thesis. At least one counterargument paragraph. Clear writing that displays the sentence focus and sentence boundary conventions of standard English grammar. MLA format (including Times New Roman 12 pt font), MLA in-text citations, and an MLA-style Works Cited page. At least 5 FULL pages of writing. will use Moskowitz, How to Kill a City, as a source. Then, you will choose from the texts (listed below) that we read/ watched for this unit. See rubric for number of texts that you should incorporate into your essay to synthesize with Moskowitz:  KCET, City Rising: Gentrification and Displacement (Links to an external site.) Rothstein, Segregated By Design (Links to an external site.) Coates, The Case for Reparations (Links to an external site.) Moms 4 Housing (Links to an external site.) Website Kendall, Oakland: Moms 4 Housing Home Sells for $587,500, Will Become Homeless Housing (Links to an external site.) or read PDF here download. KQED Podcast: A Right to Housing (Links to an external site.) Hahn, These Moms Fought for a Home and Started a Movement (Links to an external site.) Ferrari, The House on Magnolia Street (Links to an external site.) Grabar, A Property Manages Take on the Coming Eviction Crisis (Links to an external site.) ABC 7 News Wedgewood Properties, company in battle with homeless moms evicted from Oakland home, answers questions about business (Links to an external site.) KQED Forum, Moms 4 Housing Activists Seek Right of Possession in Housing Case (Links to an external site.)1. Write a new 500 word paper on a business start-up idea. See below for more details.* Note: You will use this business concept throughout the quarter, so consider making it something of interest to you. 15 2. Add a cover page. Use one of the Cover Page templates. 3 3. Give your document a title (ex: Business Proposal for _______) and format as Heading 1. 2 4. Add page numbers. 3 5. Change the font of what you have written today from the default one. 3 6. Change the format of a few words in the first paragraph of your paper to italic and bold. 3 6. Change the text alignment of one of your paragraphs. 3 7. Change one of your page orientations to Landscape. 3 8. Change one of your pages Margins to Narrow or a custom size. 3 9. Indent the first line of every paragraph using the ruler. 3 10. Insert a hyperlink to a reference on the web. 5 11. Spell check your document. 3 12. Add at least 2 references as footnotes. 5 13. Create a bullet list of at least 3 reasons why this is a good idea for a business. 3 14. Turn on Track Changes and make a noticeable edit in the last paragraph of your paper. 5 15. Turn on Comments and enter a comment; also in the last paragraph. 5 Total: 67 *DETAILS Consider: . 1. What business format would you use? 2. What in your background qualifies you to start this business? 3. Why would it be successful? 4. What is the competition like? 5. What is the history of similar businesses? 6. Envision giving this or using this to get funding to start this business. Important Factors: 7. Must be a business, not a job 8. Has to be a business that would have expenses 9. Can be a fantasy- i.e., doesn’t currently exist 10. Must be school appropriate 11. Can have employees and/or contract workers v. 09-25-20152 How Gentrification Works The word gentrification was coined by British sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964. In her book London: Aspects of Change, Glass described the upheaval of certain neighborhoods in London by the middle-class “gentry” from the countryside. “ One by one, many of the working class quarters have been invaded by the middle class—upper and lower,” Glass wrote. “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.” Even then, gentrification meant remaking a neighborhood for new incomers and to the detriment of current residents. The first mention of gentrification stateside seems to have occurred four years later, in 1969, when a white Brooklyn man named Everett Ortner founded the Brownstone Revival Committee, a nonprofit committed to the “brownstone lifestyle.” Ortner began publishing The Brownstoner, a magazine dedicated to convincing other middle- and upper-class white people to move to Brooklyn. One article in the magazine proclaimed, “ Gentrification is not ‘genocide’ but ‘genesis.’ ” Gentrification supporters such as Ortner were intent on persuading the gentry that gentrification was an organic movement made up of people who wanted to improve neighborhoods—in other words, he and others wanted to shift the focus from larger forces to individual decisions. Ortner wrote in The Brownstoner, “ I think one should approach the acquisition of a brownstone, the way one goes into a love affair: To the non-lover it is merely a row house. To the brownstone connoisseur, it is part of an architecturally homogeneous cityscape, scaled perfectly for its function, housing many but offering each person space and privacy and a civilized style of living.” But even then, in the early days of gentrification, the process had just as much to do with a specific set of policies and corporations that benefited from them as it did with love. The first Back to the City Conference, established by Ortner in 1974, was sponsored by a real estate industry group called the Development Council of New York City as well as by the Brooklyn Union Gas company, and its purpose seemed to be less to help revitalize neighborhoods and more to revitalize the profits of Brooklyn real estate firms and the local gas company. The largely vacant neighborhoods were not good for gas sales, and gentrifiers would uplift the neighborhood’s economies and the bottom line of Brooklyn Union Gas. The gas company went as far as to renovate its own four-story brownstone in Park Slope and advertised in a local paper, “ The gas-lit outside appeal of the new homes is complemented by the comfort features inside: year round gas air conditioning and plenty of living space that spills over into free form backyard patios dotted with evergreen shrubbery and gas-fired barbeques.” Ortner and his fellow members of the Brownstone Revival Committ3 Destroy to Rebuild When African Americans in the city say it’s hard to live in New Orleans, many of them are not just talking about a lack of jobs, inadequate housing, or racism. They mean it is literally hard to stay here without being displaced, that it was hard to have returned here after Katrina, and that they feel they are constantly at risk of being pushed out. Between the rhetoric of politicians who said they saw Katrina as an opportunity to revamp the city, the unavailability of money for repairs and housing for people left homeless by the storm, and the one-way tickets to places far away from New Orleans that were handed out to the storm’s victims by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the message seemed clear: The city is better off without you. There did seem to be a concerted, if unstated, effort to prevent many from returning after Katrina. Ruth Idakula, a former city worker and current activist with the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal, is from Nigeria and has lived in the United States for twenty-four years. She settled in New Orleans because it felt like, in her words, “Africa in the Western Hemisphere.” She now lives in an apartment in the Bywater, the neighborhood perhaps most synonymous with gentrification here. But it wasn’t easy getting back. After being forced out of her Garden District home by Katrina, Idakula had to essentially lie her way back into New Orleans. After the storm she lived in Shreveport, a city in northwestern Louisiana, for four months, and then Atlanta for four months. Itching to come back, she called FEMA week after week, seeing if she could get money to help her resettle in New Orleans. On her fourth or fifth call, Idakula said, a FEMA official told her, “The reason you’re not getting any money is because you keep saying you’re going back to New Orleans.” There was no official policy to displace people, but FEMA seems to have preferred to send people anywhere but back. New Orleans residents who couldn’t afford to settle somewhere else or return on their own were placed in all fifty states—anywhere but the city they’d left behind. It’s unclear exactly how many people stayed out of New Orleans after the storm, but of the 1.36 million applications for assistance filed with FEMA after the storm, 84,749 came from Houston, 4,186 came from New York, 29,252 came from Atlanta, and 966 came from Minneapolis and St. Paul. A year later, there were at least 111,000 Katrina evacuees living in Houston, anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 living in Baton Rouge, and 70,000 living in Atlanta. “ FEMA was scrambling to get people anywhere they could ,” one professor who studied the diaspora told me. “If they had a church in Alaska saying they’d take a few people, FEMA would put them on a plane.” There’s no federal mandate that suggests the government should attempt to return people home after a disaster. So Katrina’s victims were given housing anywhere it was available. Nearl4 The New Detroit On an early summer day in 2015, Detroit Bikes, one of at least four high-end bicycle manufacturers in Detroit, opened its first retail shop downtown. The shop had recently signed a lease on the ground floor of the Albert, one of Detroit’s premier new loft conversions, which sits across from Capitol Park, a newly renovated park in an up-and-coming section of the city’s until recently barren business district. Outside, the storefront employees passed out stickers with the company’s logo and chatted up the few pedestrians passing by—some walking their dogs, others biking or walking to work. In most other cities this would be unremarkable. And today, in Detroit, it’s becoming commonplace. But even five years ago, this scene—people walking downtown, shopping, buying hundred-dollar bike saddles—would strike many Detroiters as ridiculous. Inside the shop, Detroit Bikes founder Zak Pashak served up locally made tamales as potential customers milled about the store and surveyed the company’s offerings: two models of bikes, each priced at $700; $100 leather Brooks bike seats; $65 Bern helmets; some high-end messenger bags; other standard bike gear. “I love downtowns, and this is the middle of a historic city,” Pashak told me after we took a seat on a bench in Capitol Park. “You just have to be aware of what you’re moving into and be as good a guest as possible.” Not long ago, Capitol Park was crumbling. But in 2009, the city undertook a renovation of the park and sold several city-owned buildings surrounding it to private developers. Since then, at least fifteen development projects , mostly conversions of historic office buildings and run-down apartments into high-end condos, have been completed. Capitol Park is now one of the most expensive addresses in Detroit. You can still see parts of the old neighborhood poking through—homeless people still hang out in the park, a couple of cheap cafés and delis take up a few corners—but for the most part, the neighborhood now caters to the newly arrived aspirational-class youngsters: there are expensive and hip restaurants, ironically dive-y bars with pricey cocktails, even a John Varvatos store where shoes start at about $400. Gentrification in much of Detroit seems to have skipped the beginning phase with the artsy folks, the laid-back coffee shops, and the activists and instead jumped straight from broke dystopian metropolis to yuppified playground. Max Gordon, twenty-four, whom I found wandering Detroit Bikes, moved from one of the city’s wealthier suburbs a few months ago. He’s now the property manager of the apartment building that Detroit Bikes rents ground-floor space in, and he is wholeheartedly in favor of the transition the new buildings have helped bring about. “Down here is the place to be,” he told me outside the store. “We’re on the cutting edge of everything going on.” The Albert is jointly managed by two of Detroit’s biggest development companies, Bedrock and Broder & S5 The 7.2 Detroit’s gentrification isn’t so much about the displacement of one group by another, as it is in New York or San Francisco. In the 1950s, the city was home to nearly 2 million people. Today, fewer than 700,000 people live here. There’s plenty of room for the city to grow, plenty of abandoned structures and vacant land that can be reinhabited. Instead, gentrification here operates in two separate, concurrent processes: the rich, mostly white newcomers to the city and their allies in business get accolades from the press, the government’s attention, and the financial backing of Detroit’s nonprofit sector, while the rest of the city—the remaining 134.8 square miles outside the 7.2—slowly falls off the map, bled out by foreclosures, blight, and a lack of city services. For those who stay but cannot afford to be within the 7.2, the city is literally going to seed around them. Cheryl West is one of the ones outside the 7.2. When I met West, she was standing in her front yard, surrounded by sixty cardboard boxes containing her life. A few volunteers from Detroit Eviction Defense—the city’s preeminent anti-eviction group—guarded her boxes and helped tape them up. Two gave an interview to a documentary filmmaker from Ecuador. Other men who were being paid a low hourly rate by Wayne County—the county that encompasses Detroit—lugged everything else from West’s former house and tossed it into a dumpster parked curbside. A sheriff’s deputy let West take one last look inside her house and give me a quick tour. She showed me the pink-carpeted living room; the kitchen, which had already been partially gutted by the house’s new owners; the spot where her father’s piano used to sit. West, sixty-eight, had lived here for sixty years. She’d seen her neighborhood go from majority white to black, through riot and police violence, through relative wealth and struggle. She’d seen it become what it is now—beautiful but severely decayed, its large four- and five-bedroom homes either boarded up or already gutted by people seeking scrap metal to sell, the storefronts on its main avenues shuttered, their windows broken, their roofs collapsed. We exited the house, and the deputy told the dozen or so neighbors, activists, and passersby assembled on West’s lawn that from that moment on, only those employed by Wayne County could enter. Cheryl West’s family was in many ways an exception to the rules that governed Detroit and much of the United States at the time. When West’s family moved in, every house in the neighborhood, along with many other neighborhoods in the city, had deed restrictions barring African Americans from buying them. However, despite those restrictions, West’s parents were able to buy the house from a Jewish couple looking to leave the city. They were the first black homeowners on the block. Her father was also the first African American music teacher in the Detroit Public Schools, and her sister was one of the only African American journ6 How the Slate Got Blank At the back of Alfonso Wells Memorial Playground, a small neighborhood park in northwest Detroit, sits a concrete wall covered in colorful murals. Today the wall seems somewhat randomly placed—it’s not separating much of anything except some grass from a street. But it’s there for a reason: in the late 1930s a developer tried to secure a mortgage, backed with mortgage insurance from the federal government, to build a housing development in the then largely white neighborhood. The Federal Housing Administration determined that the proposed houses would sit too close to those of an “inharmonious” racial group to qualify for mortgage insurance. In order to meet federal requirements, the developer built the wall—six feet tall, a foot thick, and a half mile long—to separate a black neighborhood from a white one. The federal government approved the project a few weeks later. How do you solve a problem as old as the United States? Gentrification may be a relatively recent phenomenon, but as geographer Neil Smith notes, it’s really just the continuation of the “locational seesaw”—capital moves to one place seeking high profits, then, when that place becomes less profitable, it moves to another place. The real estate industry is always looking for new markets in which it can revitalize its profit rate. Fifty years ago that place was suburbs. Today it’s cities. But that’s only half the explanation for gentrification. In order to understand why cities are so attractive to invest in, it’s important to understand what made them bargains for real estate speculators in the first place. It may sound obvious, but gentrification could not happen without something to gentrify. Truly equitable geographies would be largely un-gentrifiable ones. So first, geographies have to be made unequal. One 2014 study from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business found that poorer neighborhoods near already gentrified areas gentrified much faster than adjacent middle-class areas. As Smith’s rent gap theory suggests, this makes economic sense: gentrification is more profitable if the area being gentrified is initially cheaper. So the question is, how did those areas become cheaper? The United States has a long history of dispossessing the poor of adequate housing through explicitly racist planning and housing policy. If gentrification requires cheap real estate, before areas can be gentrified they must be divested from, and the history of American housing is largely the history of a purposive concentration of African Americans and a subsequent disinvestment in their lives. Few would argue that American housing is equitably distributed. It’s obvious to anyone who drives around an American city that there are areas of wealth and areas of poverty, that train tracks and highways often separate Hispanic neighborhoods from white ones, black ones from Asian ones. Most know without much thinking that “the projects” are in the “bad neighborho