Harlem Rents Are 90 Damn Percent Higher Than In 2002

Posted on June 10, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By John Del Signore

Median rent costs in Central Harlem increased by a vertiginous 90% between 2002 and 2014, according to a report analyzing newly-released census data. Meanwhile, in Bed-Stuy, the median cost of rent rose 63% over the same time period, prompting the neighborhood to change its infamous slogan to Bed-Stuy: Do Or Die Trying To Come Up With $2,000 Every Month Are You Kidding Me?

The new data was released last week by the U.S. Census Bureau, and is drawn from a survey of 18,000 New Yorkers, conducted by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Urban Development. And while the conclusion drawn by the report’s author, the Community Service Society, isn’t new (NYC rents are obscene—News at 11), it is shocking to consider just how astonishingly unaffordable parts of NYC have become—especially areas that were once considered to be a relatively affordable alternative to more high-priced neighborhoods.

The report focuses only on tenants who have recently moved, which CSS says “eliminates the tendency of lower rents paid by long-time tenants to smooth out market changes and mask the changes that affect tenants who are looking for a place to live.” Check out the map accompanying the report; along with the unsurprising increases of over 50% for Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and south Brooklyn, we’re also seeing sizable rent increases in parts of the Bronx, Inwood, and what appears to be Jamaica, Queens.

Read More Harlem Rents Are 90 Damn Percent Higher Than In 2002: Gothamist.

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Rural Americans Struggle With Access to Fresh Food

Posted on June 10, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Ryan Schuessler

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Roger Chilen remembers what Brewster was like before the town largely became a collection of vacant storefronts and crumbling houses.

There were businesses and families and crowded town barbecues in front of the bar. For residents, it was a good life. But when he returned to Brewster in 2000 after living in Denver, something was different in this hamlet in the Nebraska Sandhills, now home to just 12 people.

Spencer’s Market, Brewster’s only grocery store, had closed. Nobody left in town can quite remember when — sometime in the 1970s or ’80s. The building was turned into a saloon, which soon shut its doors as well.

“That was a real loss when they went out,” Chilen said. “You adapt. You have to.”

These days, he and his wife have a garden where they grow food in the summer. They can and pickle produce for the winter, and she bakes bread. All the grocery stores in Blaine County had closed by the mid-1990s, locals say. Now the closest grocery store to Brewster is more than 40 miles away.

As the populations of places like Brewster and nearby Dunning dwindle and rural grocery stores close, vast stretches of rural America are becoming food deserts, defined in a rural context as living more than 10 miles from a grocery store. By one estimate from the Missouri-bas

via Rural Americans Struggle With Access to Fresh Food | Al Jazeera America.

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Charity Is Not a Substitute for Justice 

Posted on June 10, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Marian Wright Edelman

Marian-Wright-Edelman“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means—except by getting off his back.”

–Leo Tolstoy, from What Then Must We Do?

“Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice.”

–Nelson Mandela

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke these words on April 4, 1967, at New York City’s Riverside Church—a year to the day before his assassination in Memphis—he was describing something my friend Dr. David Hilfiker shared in a thoughtful Sunday sermon at The Church of the Saviour called “Justice and the Limits of Charity.”

In his speech the night before his murder, Dr. King repeated the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan who stopped and helped the desperate traveler who had been beaten, robbed, and left half-dead as he journeyed along the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. The Good Samaritan is traditionally considered a model of charity for his willingness to treat a stranger as a neighbor and friend. Dr. King agreed that we are all called to follow his example and serve those around us who need help. But he reminded us that true compassion—true justice—requires also attacking the forces that leave others in need in the first place.

Read More Charity Is Not a Substitute for Justice | Marian Wright Edelman.

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6 Ways White Supremacy Takes a Toll on the Mental Health of Black People

Posted on June 10, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Terrell Jermaine Starr

Officially, Kalief Browder died as a result of suicide at his family’s home in the Bronx this weekend. Yet it’s not a stretch to say the racist criminal justice system that locked him up for more than three years without a trial was likely the main culprit for the young man’s death. In 2010, the cops arrested 16-year-old Browder after another teen accused the boy of robbing him of his backpack. Browder has always denied the accusations. His family couldn’t afford the $10,000 bail, so Browder was forced to stay in Rikers for three years. While there, he was held in solitary confinement for 400 days, beaten by jail guards, abused by other inmates and attempted suicide several times.

Black people make up just 14 percent of the U.S. population, yet 38 percent of those locked up, according to a recent report; 60 percent of those in solitary confinement are black. A fact sheet from Solitary Watch reports that solitary confinement can create or exacerbate mental health issues. Browder never had a chance.

Read More  6 Ways White Supremacy Takes a Toll on the Mental Health of Black People | Alternet.

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He Cries Alone: Black Men and PTSD

Posted on June 10, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Ericka Blount Danois

They’re crying out for help. But will anyone listen?

They are African-American men, struggling with mental illness and post-traumatic stress disorder—many are veterans, but many more are civilians struggling in secret, ashamed.

These are men like 26-year-old James Brown. Brown served two tours in Iraq. When he returned home he was diagnosed with PTSD. He ended up going to jail for a court-appointed sentence in 2012 in El Paso, Texas. That’s where several guards reportedly detained him in riot gear and forced him to the ground. He began bleeding through the ears, nose and mouth and his kidneys shut down. According to media reports, the guards did not order medical attention for him. He went into the jail on a Friday. By Sunday, he was dead.

Brown’s case, which is still pending investigation, points to many issues surrounding PTSD, the criminalization of mental health as it relates to black communities and disparities in treatment. PTSD severely affects people’s chances of gaining and maintaining steady employment. According to the National Coalition of Homeless Veterans, on any given night, nearly 50,000 veterans are homeless and roughly 40 percent of those homeless veterans are African American or Hispanic.

“It wasn’t until 1979, that PTSD became a legitimate mental health diagnosis,” Ron Armstead tells The Root. Armstead works with the Black Caucus Veterans Brain Trust to level disparities for black veterans. “Prior to 1979, there were problems targeting PTSD as a legitimate diagnosis. There still isn’t a silver bullet treatment for it. But there are a variety of treatment modalities that people are using.”

The issues surrounding PTSD and diagnosis are compounded by health disparities in African-American communities. Many African-American men are reluctant to go to the doctor because of misdiagnosis or mistreatment. There is also the perceived weakness surrounding asking for help for men. Armstead says many men may not see PTSD as something for which one even go to the doctor.

Read More He Cries Alone: Black Men and PTSD – The Root.

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Can America Heal After Ferguson? We Asked Desmond Tutu and His Daughter

Posted on June 10, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Fania Davis & Sarah van Gelder

Can we recover from the legacy of slavery, lynching, land theft, disenfranchisement, redlining, job discrimination, and mass imprisonment? We turned to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter the Rev. Mpho Tutu for wisdom on this question. Desmond Tutu led the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, formed in 1995. Many people anticipated violence and a breakdown of society as decades of apartheid ended. Instead, the country transitioned relatively peacefully to a multiracial democracy, in part because of the truth and reconciliation process.

Enabling the spirit of forgiveness was Ubuntu, an ancient southern African belief. Ubuntu holds that individuals exist only in relationship with other living beings: I am because we are. It is our responsibility as relatives to take care of one another.

Might truth and reconciliation, informed by the ideals of Ubuntu, play a role in the United States? Is it time—as Fania Davis proposed in an article for yesmagazine.org—for truth and reconciliation processes to examine and attempt to heal the police violence aimed at black people?

Archbishop Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, claims to be retired at age 83, although he continues to be sought out for his wisdom and counsel. The Rev. Tutu, is an Episcopal priest, the executive director of the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, and coauthor with her father of The Book of Forgiveness.

Read More  Can America Heal After Ferguson? We Asked Desmond Tutu and His Daughter by Fania Davis and Sarah van Gelder — YES! Magazine.

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What We Don’t Mention About Unemployment

Posted on June 10, 2015 by The Soul Brother

Associated Press

In this year’s State of the Union address, President Obama mentioned jobs 19 times, repeating it more than any other word with any policy implications. “Our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999,” he said in his opening remarks. Shortly thereafter, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) delivered the GOP rebuttal, using the word at nearly twice the rate, in admittedly less rosy terms.

Focusing on jobs in political speeches isn’t news. After all, the unemployment rate tends to dictate the terms of a campaign and the outcome of an election. But while the State of the Union from both party leaders tackled employment with nods to education, technology and globalization, they ignored a lesser-known issue haunting the job prospects of at least 70 million Americans: criminal records.

According to the National Employment Law Project, one out of every four adult Americans has a criminal record, a broad term covering everything from violent crime to arrest without a conviction. But for most employers, the devil isn’t in the details—simply having a criminal record can often be enough to have your resume dismissed by employers, leaving you without options to earn a stable income.

The result is that a significant chunk of working-age adults, particularly communities of color, are barred—by law or stigma—from contributing to the economy.

Read More Don’t Mention About Unemployment.

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America’s war on Black girls: Why McKinney police violence isn’t about “one bad apple”

Posted on June 10, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Brittney Cooper

In just over two months, we will commemorate the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a natural disaster that ravaged communities along the Gulf Coast. This tragedy was made infinitely worse not only by decades of governmental neglect and far-ranging poverty, but also by the fact that so many Black people could not swim.

That nearly 60 percent of Black people cannot swim is directly attributable to decades of segregated pool facilities in this country. While that problem ostensibly went away with the desegregation efforts of the mid-20th century, de facto segregation of pool facilities persists to this day, because community pools are now largely private amenities in suburban neighborhoods that many Black youth don’t have access to.

This is the backdrop of the troubling and traumatizing incident that occurred in McKinney, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, over the weekend, when 19-year-old Tatiana Rose threw a pool party and invited several friends to use the community pool in her neighborhood. Many of those friends were Black, and many of those Black friends also live in the neighborhood. At some point, as Tatiana says in a video interview, two white adult women began yelling at her and her friends to “go back where they came from,” “back to section 8 housing,” and calling them “black fuckers.” When a 14-year-old girl responded, the women further ridiculed her, prompting Tatiana to tell the adults that the girl was 14 and their comments were inappropriate. According to Tatiana’s account, the white women then approached her; one “hit her in the face” and the other began participating in the attack.

According to reports, multiple calls came into police. At least one call came from either Tatiana, her mother (who was present) or her friends, reporting that these white women had attacked the partygoers. Other calls came in from residents who reported that many Black children who were unauthorized to be there were there and fighting. Apparently, the party got larger and some children jumped over the fence to get to the party.

Read More  America’s war on Black girls: Why McKinney police violence isn’t about “one bad apple” – Salon.com.

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The Obama Administration Is Expanding a Program to Fix Up Public Housing—Too Bad the Program Might Also Privatize It

Posted on June 10, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Jake Blumgart

When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his administration’s plan on May 19 to help dig his city’s public housing authority out of its $16 billion capital-needs hole, attention quickly focused on the plan’s reliance on a controversial initiative with a wonky name: “infill” housing. Infill housing calls for some of the “underused” spaces in public housing projects to be leased out to private developers, who will then be charged with building a mix of low- and market-rate housing on the sites. Among some advocates, the plan has fueled fears that the city is opening the door to privatization.

Yet, even as debate has simmered over infill housing, there has been little discussion about the city’s decision to include another controversial program in its housing plan: the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program (RAD). RAD will be applied to only some 1,400 of almost 180,000 units, making it an admittedly fractional part of de Blasio’s preservation campaign. But it is being broadly pushed throughout the rest of the country, where housing authorities are equally desperate to find a fix to their budget woes. Similar to the infill solution, it seeks to attract private capital to bail out the nation’s underfunded public housing.

The RAD program is one of the Obama administration’s answers to the dire problem of the United States’s decaying public-housing stock. Most developments were built in the middle of the last century and require repairs commensurate with their age. HUD recently found that the nation’s 1.2 million units need at least $25.6 billion in capital repairs. But Congress has proved unwilling to provide the funds needed to restore a New Deal legacy program that is anathema to the ideology of Republicans and centrist Democrats. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has noted that the program’s capital and operating fund “lost 25 percent of its inflation-adjusted value since 2001” (emphasis theirs).

Read More  The Obama Administration Is Expanding a Program to Fix Up Public Housing—Too Bad the Program Might Also Privatize It | The Nation.

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Rand Paul In Baltimore Speaks of Unequal Justice

Posted on June 10, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Naureen Khan

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a 2016 Republican presidential candidate, referred to the suicide of 22-year-old Kalief Browder as a tragic example as he spoke of justice applied unequally to black and white Americans Tuesday night.

Browder was arrested in 2010, when he was 16, for stealing a backpack—a crime he insisted he did not commit. He was in jail on Rikers Island in New York City for three years, without a conviction. His plight, including brutal beatings by jail guards and other prisoners as well as years in solitary confinement, was chronicled in a 2014 New Yorker story and became a symbol for a broken criminal justice system — one that Paul has invoked frequently on the campaign trail.

“I’ve been telling this story for about a year and a half, two years, and it makes me sad now. I thought about not talking about it or doing the story but I thought that this young man’s memory should help us to try and change things. He died this weekend, he committed suicide,” Paul said. “Even if you’re convicted of a crime, in America for goodness sake, are we going to let people be raped and murdered and pillaged in a prison because they’re convicted? And he wasn’t even convicted.”

The remarks, among the most somber and reflective the Kentucky senator has made on criminal justice, came at a fundraiser dinner for Baltimore County Republicans, only miles away from where protests broke out in the aftermath of the death of another African-American man in police custody.

Read More  Rand Paul In Baltimore Speaks of Unequal Justice | Al Jazeera America.

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