A recent study released by The Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity outlines the large number of city residential properties purchased by corporate buyers over recent years. It’s a nationwide trend that can displace residents and impede home ownership, according to the report titled Who Owns Newark? Deborah Smith-Gregory, is the Vice Chair of the Newark Equitable Growth Commission.
“It feels like we’ve been prayed upon. Between the phone calls, between the signs, cash, house for sale, your houses, this has proliferated our neighborhoods. Particularly the south ward and the west ward.”
Mayor Ras Baraka is proposing several measures he says will mitigate the effects corporate buyers are having on residents, one of them a ban on solicitation without permission.
On tonight’s (May 19) Newark Today call-in show streaming on the WBGO website, host Michael Hill will address that report and topic. He’ll be joined by David Trout, author of the report Who Owns Newark? from Rutgers- Newark CLiME (the Center on Law, Inequality, and Metropolitan Equity) and Andrea McChristian, Law & Policy Director with New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, the organization that recently released the report Black Homeownership Matters: Expanding Access to Housing Wealth for Black New Jerseyans.
Newark Today streams live tonight at 8 at wbgo.org.
Michael Hill will take your phone calls at 973-297-0941. You can also submit questions on the Newark Today and WBGO Facebook pages.
