The Planning Board rules on “2 Washington Street“ The 2 Washington Street site, looking toward the Hudson. Photo, © NIA It’s late Tuesday afternoon. I am at my home office, struggling with my latest essay with the working title “Architecture, Authoritarianism and Democracy”. It is the densest thing I have written since I started writing […]
Topic: Housing
The Leyland Proposal
It was the winter of 2007. I got a letter in the mail. It was from an oil and gas company. But not one that I had ever heard of. It said that there was a large reservoir of natural gas under the 1875 farmhouse plus 7 acres of land that my wife and I […]
The Grounding
Author’s note: I am not a lawyer. The following does not constitute legal advice. It is a brief in support of a proposition. The Return describes an operable remedy to urban renewal. The Grounding describes an executable, doctrinal path that enables it. The chartered covenant proposed in The Return rests on constitutional building blocks that […]
The Return
“Some men see things as they are and ask why; I dream things that never were and ask why not?” — Robert Kennedy, March 18, 1968 The trilogy named the problem. We Know Who You Are Working For, Reparations: The Preferential Rental Option for the Displaced, and The Holding described, in three different registers, the […]
The Holding
Image distributed by the developer. Third in a series, after “We Know Who You Are Working For” and “Reparations: ‘The Preferential Rental Option for the Displaced’” A developer has filed an application with the City of Newburgh to build a 172-unit market-rate residential and office complex on ten acres of waterfront ground south of Washington […]
Reparations: “The Preferential Rental Option for the Displaced”*
What Kearney’s Plan Actually Offers, and What Was Actually Taken At the Newburgh city council work meeting of April 23, a representative of Kearney Realty & Development Group announced what the developer called the “first in the nation” right-to-return policy for descendants of people displaced by Newburgh’s urban renewal program.1 Twenty percent of units at […]
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We Know Who You Are Working For
Councilman Omari Shakur, who represents the City of Newburgh at-large, addressed the Newburgh Community Land Bank from the council floor on the evening of April 22’s council work meeting. He had been listening to the Land Bank’s executive director walk the council through a slide presentation describing fourteen years of operation, and he had been […]
The House I Live In
The House I Live In performed by Josh White There is a song most people know from Frank Sinatra. But Sinatra was not the first to record it. Called “The House I Live In”, it is a song about a promise — that the people who built this country, who cleaned its floors and worked […]
New York’s Housing Rebels Who Just Wouldn’t Leave
A Brief History of the Loft Tenant Struggle in New York City, the parallel Squatters Movement, and the lessons they hold for City of Newburgh tenants. 1960 – 2000 The loft tenants movement is one of the most consequential and most untold organizing stories in New York City history — a decades-long campaign by artists […]
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