Metropolitics

Life, Loss, and Cooperative Housing in New York

Christian Anderson — 2025-03-11T06:00:00Z

What forms of urban living, sociality, and security are enabled by social housing? At once memoir and counter-history, Just City offers an evocative answer to this question based on experiences growing up in collective housing in 1970s New York.
At a moment when selective nostalgia is being channeled to potent political effect, Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right offers a compelling counterpoint. The book is a memoir detailing the author's upbringing in

- Reviews / housing, right to housing, affordable housing, cooperative housing, public housing, social housing, sociality, urbanity, New York, Upper West Side, Manhattan

Community Movements and Housing Liberalism: Reflections on the Bank of America Low‑Income Housing Competition

Avi Garelick — 2019-10-15T05:00:00Z

Avi Garelick describes how the imperative for realism in affordable housing production conflicts with the goals of a community-based movement for housing justice and control.
The movement for low-income housing in the United States traditionally has been dominated by liberalism. Top-down, centralized institutions led by experts and insulated from grassroots political pressure have managed the project of developing below-market housing stock. In many cities in the 1970s, however, a

- From the Field / affordable housing, housing, community land trusts, community, community organizing, housing justice, New York, Manhattan, United States, Washington Heights

The Evolution of New York City's Black Neighborhoods

John Mollenkopf — 2017-05-09T06:00:00Z

Especially in the central cities of the Northeast, neighborhoods that were once identified with black politics and culture are growing more ethnically diverse, and wealthier. John Mollenkopf examines demographic data from New York City's Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant and reflects on their implications for electoral politics and the fates of economically vulnerable black households.
New trends are influencing American cities. Particularly notable is the falling-off of African-American

- From the Field / immigration, gentrification, New York, Brooklyn, Black politics, Black neighborhoods, Manhattan, Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant