summary:"The passage discusses the transformation of Westside Mobile Home Park in Durango, Colorado, from a threatened community facing displacement to a cooperative and community land trust model of housing ownership. The residents of the mobile home park organized to counter the sale of the park to a corporation known for raising rents and imposing strict rules. They successfully formed a housing co-operative and purchased the park with the support of Elevation Community Land Trust. Now, the park operates as a community land trust, ensuring that land is removed from the real estate market and owned jointly by residents and the land trust.
This model aims to preserve affordable housing and empower residents to have a say in decisions that impact their lives. It also highlights the rarity of collaborations between housing co-ops and community land trusts, especially in mobile-home communities. The passage emphasizes the historical significance of such models, rooted in the civil rights era, and their role in addressing issues of inequality and racial disparities in homeownership.
Ultimately, the residents of Westside Mobile Home Park now have a sense of ownership and control over their housing, with plans to redevelop the park collectively, increasing their sense of power and possibility for the future."
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/colorado-mobile-home-park-collective-ownership-affordable-housing/
This model aims to preserve affordable housing and empower residents to have a say in decisions that impact their lives. It also highlights the rarity of collaborations between housing co-ops and community land trusts, especially in mobile-home communities. The passage emphasizes the historical significance of such models, rooted in the civil rights era, and their role in addressing issues of inequality and racial disparities in homeownership.
Ultimately, the residents of Westside Mobile Home Park now have a sense of ownership and control over their housing, with plans to redevelop the park collectively, increasing their sense of power and possibility for the future."
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/colorado-mobile-home-park-collective-ownership-affordable-housing/
Reasons to be Cheerful
‘Their Voices Will Be Heard Now’: How a Colorado Community Preserved Affordable Housing
In an unusual approach, a land trust and a co-op collaborated to save a mobile-home park from corporate buyout.
What would such an economy look like? Several key objectives stand out.
1. we must expand and decommodify universal public services.
2. we must establish ambitious public works programs, to build renewable energy capacity, insulate homes, produce and install efficient appliances, restore ecosystems, and innovate socially necessary and ecologically efficient technologies
3. we must introduce a public job guarantee, empowering people to participate in these vital collective projects, doing meaningful, socially necessary work with workplace democracy and living wages.
4. we also need to scale down socially less-necessary forms of production. Fossil fuels are obvious here: we need binding targets to wind this industry down, in a fair and just way.6 But—as degrowth scholarship points out—we also need to reduce aggregate production in other destructive industries (automobiles, airlines, mansions, industrial meat, fast fashion, advertising, weapons, and so on), while extending product lifespans and banning planned obsolescence. This process should be democratically determined, but also grounded in the material reality of ecology and the imperatives of decolonial justice.
5. we urgently need to cut the excess purchasing power of the rich using wealth taxes and maximum income ratios.
https://monthlyreview.org/2023/09/01/the-double-objective-of-democratic-ecosocialism/
1. we must expand and decommodify universal public services.
2. we must establish ambitious public works programs, to build renewable energy capacity, insulate homes, produce and install efficient appliances, restore ecosystems, and innovate socially necessary and ecologically efficient technologies
3. we must introduce a public job guarantee, empowering people to participate in these vital collective projects, doing meaningful, socially necessary work with workplace democracy and living wages.
4. we also need to scale down socially less-necessary forms of production. Fossil fuels are obvious here: we need binding targets to wind this industry down, in a fair and just way.6 But—as degrowth scholarship points out—we also need to reduce aggregate production in other destructive industries (automobiles, airlines, mansions, industrial meat, fast fashion, advertising, weapons, and so on), while extending product lifespans and banning planned obsolescence. This process should be democratically determined, but also grounded in the material reality of ecology and the imperatives of decolonial justice.
5. we urgently need to cut the excess purchasing power of the rich using wealth taxes and maximum income ratios.
https://monthlyreview.org/2023/09/01/the-double-objective-of-democratic-ecosocialism/
Monthly Review
Monthly Review | The Double Objective of Democratic Ecosocialism
Humanity in this moment faces two major crises: one ecological, growing more acute with every planetary boundary passed; the other social, leading to deprivation and despair across the globe.
An innovation that propelled Britain to become the world’s leading iron exporter during the Industrial Revolution was appropriated from an 18th-century Jamaican foundry, historical records suggest.
The Cort process, which allowed wrought iron to be mass-produced from scrap iron for the first time, has long been attributed to the British financier turned ironmaster Henry Cort. It helped launch Britain as an economic superpower and transformed the face of the country with “iron palaces”, including Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens’ Temperate House and the arches at St Pancras train station.
Now, an analysis of correspondence, shipping records and contemporary newspaper reports reveals the innovation was first developed by 76 black Jamaican metallurgists at an ironworks near Morant Bay, Jamaica. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from west and central Africa, which had thriving iron-working industries at the time.
Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a lecturer in history of science and technology at University College London (UCL) and author of the paper, said: “This innovation kicks off Britain as a major iron producer and … was one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/05/industrial-revolution-iron-method-taken-from-jamaica-briton
The Cort process, which allowed wrought iron to be mass-produced from scrap iron for the first time, has long been attributed to the British financier turned ironmaster Henry Cort. It helped launch Britain as an economic superpower and transformed the face of the country with “iron palaces”, including Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens’ Temperate House and the arches at St Pancras train station.
Now, an analysis of correspondence, shipping records and contemporary newspaper reports reveals the innovation was first developed by 76 black Jamaican metallurgists at an ironworks near Morant Bay, Jamaica. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from west and central Africa, which had thriving iron-working industries at the time.
Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a lecturer in history of science and technology at University College London (UCL) and author of the paper, said: “This innovation kicks off Britain as a major iron producer and … was one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/05/industrial-revolution-iron-method-taken-from-jamaica-briton
the Guardian
Industrial Revolution iron method ‘was taken from Jamaica by Briton’
Wrought iron process that drove UK success was appropriated from black metallurgists, records suggest