“De Blasio’s Doomed Housing Plan” by Samuel Stein, as published in the Jacobin, was a thoroughly enjoyable read. The structure of the piece is very reader-friendly as Stein guides the reader through a series of proposed solutions to De Blasio’s plan. This structure imitates the complexity of NYC’s housing problem, as answering yes/or no to question A (as proposed by Stein) may lead you forward to step B or send you back to A.

The first chapter of “The Neoliberal City” by Jason Hackworth introduced the reader to the philosophies of classic liberalism, egalitarian liberalism, and Keynesianism. At the end of this chapter, I felt as if I had learned a lot but I failed to see how this information applied to contemporary social issues. Chapter three seeks to address this problem, by putting the previously mentioned philosophies into perspective. Towards the conclusion of the piece, I was especially interested in the grants awarded to individuals PHAs for demolition of the most “severely distressed” housing units. During Nixon’s War on Drugs, a similar practice was used to reward police precincts that carried out the most profitable police raids. If one parallel were not enough, the “One Strike and You’re Out” program is similar to the “three strikes” law, which feeds mass incarceration in the USA.

Question: What is the chain of ownership in a community land trust? What is a relevant example of a community land trust? How many community land trusts are there in NYC?