Beyond California

On Thursday, just days after city officials adopted Denver’s first dedicated affordable housing fund, community organizers marched to demand rent control from state lawmakers.

Construction workers, cashiers and janitors are moving out of Washington, D.C., while doctors, economists and software developers are moving in. As the cost of housing increases in the city, it’s part of a larger trend, says the District of Columbia’s Office of Revenue Analysis (ORA), which has low-wage workers fleeing for the suburbs, and higher-wage workers flocking to urban cores.

The first meeting between Minneapolis apartment owners and two council members who’ve floated the idea of changing housing discrimination laws in Minneapolis started with a struggle to define terms.

Area landlords wanted to know if the proposed ordinance, which is being considered by Council Vice President Elizabeth Glidden and Council Member Abdi Warsame, is going to mandate that building owners within the city accept housing vouchers under Section 8, the federal program that helps low-income residents find market-rate apartments via a government subsidy?

Forty years ago, there were five million council houses in England, lived in by three out of ten families. Since then the number has declined by two-thirds. The Housing and Planning Bill, which returns to the Commons this week, will make it even more difficult for anyone either to get a council home or to keep it once they do.

Seattle officials have charged 23 landlords with discriminating against prospective renters after testing for illegal treatment at properties across Seattle.

The Seattle Office for Civil Rights has filed discrimination charges against 23 landlords after a series of sting operations aimed at rooting out bias against renters.

The office paid “testers” posing as prospective renters to check for illegal discrimination based on family status, disability and use of Section 8 rent vouchers.

Kim Powell has lived in West Harlem all her life, most of it in her rent-regulated apartment. The 53-year-old remembers cruising the neighborhood in her father’s car as a kid, looking at the gutted and burned-out buildings of the 1970s. But over the last two decades many of the homes and shops in Powell’s neighborhood have been restored. As early as the 2000s, gentrified Harlem was on the entire country’s radar as Bill Clinton set up offices for his foundation in the neighborhood.