Not until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did Jim Crow laws finally become part of history. Not until 1974 did Chicago take off the books the last Ugly Law that penalized and fined "any person...

If we want to change the sinking direction our country is heading down where more than 46 million of us live in what Martin Luther King termed "the cage of poverty," we need to organize ourselves across issues; we need to connect our individual community-based organizing efforts to...

The United States has a long history of using mean-spirited and often brutal laws to keep "certain" people out of public spaces and out of public consciousness. Jim Crow laws segregated the South after the Civil War and Sundown Towns forced people to leave town before the sun set. The...

Passed in 1987, McKenny-Vento was intended to address the emergency needs of homeless people while the federal government worked to restore the funding which had been cut from HUD's affordable housing programs.

But it didn't work that way. McKinney-Vento has spawned an endless array of continuum-of-care plans, 5-year plans,...

The days of "Please sir, may I have some more?" are over. As of April 1, 2012, the message has changed to "We are ENTITLED to exist in our communities, whether you like it or not."

When we are able to pull together 17 communities and unite behind...

More than 1.46 million households are currently living on less than $2 a day per person in the wealthiest country in the world, more than double what it was in 1996. This shameful fact has had an especially harmful effect on children, whose numbers in these households ballooned...

James Q. Wilson, the person credited with coining the theory of broken-windows policing, died last month and people are starting to ask what "Broken Windows" is all about. Those of us who have been identified as no more than a broken window are sick of it.

The broken-windows...

"They want us out of our community!"
"We're always told to move on, but to where? There are no places for us to be." -- Survey Respondents

Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) and USA-Canada Alliance of Inhabitants (USACAI)...

Can political art change the world? It's a question that political artists often ask, sometimes in frustration and sometimes in despair.

History and current examples show that it can. By itself art cannot change everything, but its effect can be profound. From the Great Depression to present day, art...

On August 10, 2011, the Federal Housing Financing Administration, Treasury, and Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a joint Request For Information (RFI) "seeking input on new options for selling [250,000] single-family real estate owned (REO)...

The criminal justice system has displaced the mental health system as the main institution for dealing with poor people with psychiatric disabilities in the United States.

Federal cuts to mental health and affordable housing programs are responsible for this shameful reality. During his tenure as President, Ronald Reagan instituted sweeping...

This is the final part in "The Quality of Whose Life?" series. It focuses on the proliferation of repressive and discriminatory "quality of life" laws across the country that make it a crime to sit or lie on a sidewalk, sleep outside, panhandle and urinate or defecate in public even...

It is a sad spectacle to see the once-liberal mayor and City Council promoting the right-wing proposals of powerful business interests and ordering a law-and-order crackdown straight out of Nixon.

All across the nation, cities are responding to the rising floodtides of poverty and homelessness, not by creating model programs...

On Valentines Day, Monday February 14th, communities across the country joined together in a collective day of action called by National Alliance of HUD Tenants.

From Washington DC to Florida and from Maine to California, HUD tenants and foreclosure victims, homeless...

HUD has administered the planned obsolescence of public housing for well over 15 years. According to HUD, 150,000 units have been lost to demolition and disposition, although the number of lost units is probably closer to 280,000 if taken from the Millennial Housing Report and Ways and Means...

On Tuesday, December 21st, Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), a founding member of Western Regional Advocacy Project, held a press conference to release a human rights assessment of Skid Row's Safer Cities Initiative, an intensive policing effort launched by Mayor Villaraigosa that has been...

WRAP has been documenting the increases of mentally ill people in local jails as a result of diminished funding for mental health treatment and housing, escalation of "nuisance crime" enforcement by police and private security, and expansion of mental health courts.

The scale of this issue is enormous:...

This is the third article in a series we're writing on Quality of Life ordinances, our contemporary version of the vagrancy laws that have been with us for centuries. In the South, they were used to force freed slaves back to the plantation. In the North, they were...

What images do the words "quality of life" bring to mind? A peaceful beach? A beautiful park? A farmers market full of healthy produce? In the realm of policing, the phrase "quality of life" carries different connotations. It means a veteran getting hauled in for sleeping on the sidewalk, a...

One more stark reminder of the disconnect between our ideals and public policy is to look at the declining stocks of our country's public and project-based housing. See the chart below. In the years between 1994 and 2008, we have been building more and more jail cells but fewer and...