Tagged: gentrification

“She set off on the latest day of job hunting wearing tiny star-shaped earrings that belonged to her 18-month-old daughter and frayed $6 shoes from Walmart that were the more comfortable of her two pairs. In her backpack she had stashed a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch, hand sanitizer for the bus and pocket change for printing résumés at the public library. She carried a spiral notebook with a handwritten list of job openings that she’d titled her “Plan of Action for the Week.” It had been 20 months since Lauren Scott lost her apartment and six months since she lost her car and 10 weeks since she washed up at a homeless shelter in this suburb south of Atlanta with no money and no job. Her daughter, Za’Niyah, had already lived in seven places, and Scott feared that her child would soon grow old enough to permanently remember the chaos. So shortly after sunrise, she packed Za’Niyah into a day-care bus that picked up the shelter’s children, walked to the closest bus station and used her phone to find directions to the first of the companies on her list, an industrial site that would have been 27 minutes away by car. She squinted, with a light sigh, at the public transit curlicue she was about to make through Atlanta: Sixty-nine stops on a bus; a nine-minute train ride; an additional 49 stops on a bus; a quarter-mile walk. ‘Off to the races,’ Scott, 28, said as she boarded the No. 55 bus, and this was a day much like the others, when the cost of destitution was a job hunt in which even the simplest task — placing an application — required four hours, round-trip, on a bus. Scott just needed to get to her job interview, but she was finding around her the obstacles that have shaped this region’s increasingly pervasive and isolating form of extreme poverty. In the metropolitan areas of the Deep South, government policies and rising real estate prices have pushed the poor out of urban centers and farther from jobs. Low-income people have, in turn, grown more reliant on public transit networks that are among the weakest of quality in the country. When they search for work, they step into a region where pay tends to be low and unemployment tends to be high. The share of residents in deep poverty — with incomes below $10,045 for a parent and two children — in these Deep South metro areas has grown by 24 percent over the past decade, according to Census Bureau data.”

The suffering of black people is WORSENING in this country under our nation’s “first black President.” This is SAD and the U.S. government must finally be held accountable and resolve these HISTORICAL injustices!!!

Source: Chico Harlan. “A Lonely Road.” Washington Post. December 28, 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/12/28/deep-south-4/.

the Washington Post says: “Cities are getting whiter” 😏

So where are the black people going? To prison and the morgue? If you cannot see, we are disappearing — which has always been part of their plan. This is very sad…

Source: Emily Badger. “The White Population Is Growing In Many U.S. Cities For The First Time In Years.” The Washington Post. September 24, 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/09/24/the-white-population-is-growing-in-many-u-s-cities-for-the-first-time-in-years/.

“Brooklyn’s ‘gentrification’ is changing juries who decide cases.”

Brooklyn’s courthouses are being rocked by the “Williamsburg Effect.”

The influx of well-off and educated white people to trendy neighborhoods such as Williamsburg is rapidly “gentrifying’’ the borough’s jury pool — and transforming verdicts, lawyers and judges told The Post.

It’s good news for prosecutors in criminal cases — and bad news for plaintiffs in civil lawsuits, they said.

“The jurors are becoming more like Manhattan — which is not good for defendants,’’ noted veteran defense lawyer Julie Clark.

“They are . . . much more trusting of police,” Clark said of the jurors. “I’m not sure people from the University of Vermont would believe that a police officer would [plant] a gun.’’

Former Brooklyn prosecutor and defense lawyer John Paul DeVerna said, “The ‘Williamsburg Effect’ affects every case that goes to trial.

“A contrarian-minded person — and Billyburg has them in spades — can cause discord in the jury room. And if the hipster gets along with everyone, that can even be more dangerous because they are confident and educated, which means they have the potential to hijack the jury.”

The seismic shift also is affecting grand juries, lawyers said.

“The grand jury used to have an anti-police sentiment. When I was a prosecutor 22 years ago, a jury would be 80 percent people of color,” said high-profile lawyer Arthur Aidala. “Now, the grand juries have more law-and-order types in there.

“People who can afford to live in Brooklyn now don’t have the experience of police officers throwing them against cars and searching them. A person who just moves here from Wisconsin or Wyoming, they can’t relate to [that]. It doesn’t sound credible to them.”

Meanwhile, civil juries have become more pro-defendant.

“There’s an influx of money, and when everything gets gentrified, these jurors aren’t pro-plaintiff anymore,” said plaintiff lawyer Charen Kim.

“We’re dealing with more sophisticated people, and they don’t believe [plaintiffs] should be awarded millions of dollars for nothing.”

The percentage of white people in Brooklyn grew from 41 percent to 50 percent between 2000 and 2012, according to US Census data.

Rents in the borough also spiked by 77 percent over the same period, according to a recent report by the city comptroller’s office.

Read more here: http://nypost.com/2014/06/16/brooklyn-gentrification-is-changing-juries-who-decide-cases/.