Month: July 2021

I’ve been researching financial crimes involving housing so this picture really spoke to me. As a life long renter who lucked into a rent stabilized apartment almost forty years ago I’ve been oblivious to housing issues and how completely destructive it is to your life to not to have decent affordable housing. There’s a reason housing was number four on the Black Panther’s 10 Point Plan:

4. We want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings.

“The home is the center of life,” wrote Matthew Desmond, the author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. “It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets .. without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.” Put simply, “without a home, nothing else is possible.”

“Keith Thompson, a homeless activist, and his supporters demonstrate for affordable housing on Avenue B, August 1989. Copyright Q. Sakamaki.”

I swore I was not going to watch the fireworks, in solidarity with pets and all living creatures who are not human. But the pull was too great. And now, here I am, posting pictures!

A shot of the orchestra before our performance of Mozart’s Requiem. For a group of singers who never sang together before, and without a rehearsal, we did okay. The conductor took the more challenging bits slowly, and that helped. It certainly helped me. I am hella rusty.