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Adaptive reuse isn’t a silver bullet to solve the housing crisis
The website “HousingHumanRight.org,” funded by AIDS Healthcare Foundation, recently took out ads on Google to top the search result for “YIMBY” – Yes in My Backyard. YIMBY is a response to the “Not in my backyard!” tagline used by homeowners to oppose shelter, multi-family housing, public transportation, or any other “undesirable” land use in their…
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Ending the drug war is essential to reproductive justice
When an anti-choice TikTok user argued against safe and legal abortion by comparing it to prescribing Oxycodone to heroin users, viral TikTok physician Dr. Eric B missed the mark in his pro-choice yet pro-drug war response. The anti-choice original poster told viewers: Can I go to your office and be like, “Hey I need some…
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Electric SUVs are a bad use of lithium
Just as automakers have coalesced on moving towards electric vehicles, it’s become clear the affordable EV is dead. Back in 2017, media anticipated that affordable mass-market EVs were just around the corner. The compact sedan Tesla Model 3 was announced at $35,000 as a Ford Focus competitor, while the Chevy Bolt was already available at…
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Limited Equity Cooperatives: combating displacement with collective ownership
Abstract In Seattle, the past decade of job and population growth dwindled housing affordability and caused a record crisis of displacement and homelessness. The city’s home prices accelerated beyond the means of working-class families, and new construction was dominated by rental housing that offers residents no long-term cost stability or tenancy guarantee. The City of…
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Power and Violence in the Gig Economy
The largely immigrant of color workforce is denied lifesaving employment rights, while experiencing media stigma and political persecution. Attempts to improve these conditions through regulation may eliminate income opportunities for undocumented workers. The “gig economy” of ride-hailing and food delivery apps has rapidly grown in the past five years. This development is the latest in…
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What Should Aurora Be?
Aurora has the asset and opportunity to develop a lively street while improving equity. Neighbors, communities, and the City should act to preserve the resources that protect Aurora’s most vulnerable residents, including sex workers and unhoused people that call the highway home.
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Seattle’s new cottage policy is a win-win for affordability and neighborhood livability
If you’ve spent time in any of Seattle’s residential neighborhoods in the past 3 years, you’ve probably seen slight variations of this modern mansion popping up everywhere
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Class and Labor Movement in the Tech Industry
Known best for its negative impact on communities, venture capital affluence, ‘fun’, and overwhelming gender discrepancy, the tech industry is rarely thought of as a working class environment. The rank-and-file are often conflated with the capitalist class as toxically entrepreneurial, with a fetishization of overtime as passion, and belief in Libertarian Capitalist politics. A shortage…
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The Housing Activism Divide
As more folks are displaced to southern suburbs and the streets themselves, the loss of community has run toe-to-toe with places of memory being written over with new construction. The number of houseless people in the county has doubled to over 11,000 in just a few years, each 5% bump in rent putting over 200…