April
2019
18
Gotham Gazette — Manhattan City Council Member Carlina Rivera is part of a growing coalition of Council members pushing for city government’s first major commitment to a seldom-utilized affordable housing model. In the face of rapid gentrification, they say, the city should invest $850,000 in Community Land Trusts, or CLTs, in the city budget currently being negotiated.
April
2019
10
In These Times — Wall Street bankers in expensive suits stopped and snickered on their lunch breaks June 5, 2018, as an eclectic group of New Yorkers with megaphones and banners called them out for investing in socially destructive industries—including private prisons, predatory lending, weapons manufacturing and, of course, fossil fuels.
March
2019
29
New Economy Project recently sat down with Pablo DeFilippi and Rene Vargas Martinez from Inclusiv to learn about their work supporting financial cooperatives (or “cooperativas”) in Puerto Rico. While mainstream banks have been widely criticized for abandoning the Island or profiting off disaster, the cooperativas have been central to Puerto Rico’s resilience and recovery. The […]
March
2019
29
CBS News — David Evans, a 59-year-old New Yorker, was making a modest living working as a messenger and enjoying a state tax refund of $150 or $200. But in the last four years, his refund hasn’t been coming through, Evans told CBS News.
March
2019
28
City Limits, Op-ed by Yuh-Line Niou and Maureen Genna — A Bloomberg report this month showed that the largest banks in the U.S., led by JPMorgan Chase, are closing branches rapidly in poor neighborhoods, even as they open new ones in affluent communities. In other news: water is wet.
March
2019
19
Brooklyn Daily News — As real estate values in Brooklyn have gone through the roof, homeowners in gentrifying black and brown communities in the borough are increasingly being targeted by housing predators, legislators were told on Friday at Brooklyn Borough Hall.
February
2019
28
Gothamist — In its original conception, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) exists to impose oversight on our market such that you, the consumer, don’t get grifted by investors and lenders. Like so many other government institutions, however, the Trump Administration has turned that concept on its head. On Thursday, ahead of a scheduled meeting with the CFBP director, a collection of economic justice groups announced in an open letter that they would not take a seat at the table.
February
2019
27
More than a decade after the financial meltdown, how secure are New Yorkers from the threat of foreclosure? Our recent issue brief seeks to answer this question, based on our analysis of pre-foreclosure notices that mortgage servicers are required to send homeowners at least 90 days before filing a foreclosure action in New York State courts.
February
2019
25
Patch — A few years ago, Brooklyn veteran David Evans got something strange in the mail — a notice that the MTA would be taking hundreds of dollars from his tax returns to pay for tickets from nearly 20 years ago.
February
2019
20
Gothamist — While not particularly good at executing major capital projects or managing a budget or even running trains much of the time, the MTA is apparently very adept at squeezing money out of low-income riders.