by 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.”
