The first time I ever heard the term “social housing” was at a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) meeting in Buffalo, NY, in the fall of 2024. A former colleague of mine invited me to the meeting, which was hosted at Crane Branch Public Library in the Elmwood Village neighborhood where I live. Convening that day was the infrastructure subcommittee in the DSA’s Buffalo Chapter. They were discussing housing issues, which have been a professional interest of mine since my first job in public policy in 2016.

Let’s examine what we know about social housing. Here I have curated a variety of articles by independent news outlets which have reported on social housing developments “glocally” (that is, locally and around the globe). We selected independent news outlets because they dare to examine the issue via ideas that challenge the status quo. Mainstream (or legacy) media have reported on social housing, too, but their bias is toward capitalist market solutions for the housing crisis. In this context, social housing is casually dismissed as a viable housing strategy. If you read independent media, however, social housing receives treatment as one of many viable housing strategies that can help New Yorkers and other Americans.

Steve Peraza speaks with James J. Coughlin, a public historian and author of the 2023 zine, City of Distant Neighbors: The Proliferation and Entrenchment of Residential Segregation in Buffalo, New York (1934 to 1961).

On August 19, 2024, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul delivered a spirited speech in support of the presidential hopeful Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. Quite surprisingly, Governor Hochul raised the specter of runaway child care costs as a common issue facing middle class Americans, which, in turn, raised questions about what the governor of New York will do to lower these costs here in the Empire State.

On Sunday, August 5, 2024, Fitz Books and Waffles in Buffalo hosted the Vintage and Vinyl Pop Up, where community members enjoyed free music from local DJs and connected with a wide range of vendors selling vintage clothing and vinyl records.

It’s August now, and all the flower fans who visited Buffalo’s 30th annual Garden Walk Buffalo festivities are somewhere enjoying the hundreds of pictures they undoubtedly took walking in neighborhoods like mine. I live in the Bryant neighborhood, where the founders of Garden Walk live on the appropriately named “Garden Walk Way.”

On Sunday, July 28, 2024, Burning Books bookstore hosted their third annual community block party at 420 Connecticut Street on the West Side of Buffalo, NY, raising awareness for local social justice campaigns and providing family recreation for West Side residents. Over 100 Buffalo residents braved the scorching 90-degree late July heat to enjoy the various attractions, including a giant bouncy house obstacle course, dunk tank, and community tables and booths hosted by progressive community organizations like PUSH-Buffalo, Democratic Socialists of America, and Urban Roots.

One of the great joys of being an academic is watching people go from beginner to trailblazer in a field of study. As a writer for Weave News, not only do I get to watch emerging rock stars like Ms. Song Lee ‘do their thing’, but I get to share their voices with the world. In this Interweaving conversation, I am pleased to introduce you to Ms. Song Lee, High Road Fellow and Child Care Community Advocate.

At 6pm on July 18, 2024, Western New York Child Care Action Team (WNYCCAT) hosted a community celebration for the child care industry’s rank and file. WYNCCAT is an activist organization whose mission is “to educate, investigate, plan, strategize, advocate and provide swift actions that lead to productive, long term, results and solutions that positively impact the child care community across all modalities.”

It’s been more than a month since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. In that month, I carried on with my day-to-day activities albeit with a heavy heart for the victims of the war. The officials and military combatants are not at the center of my thoughts and worries – the civilians are. Before the attacks, they bore the brunt of the war and terror in the region, and for decades after they will, too.

On Thursday, July 20, 2023, Abra Lee, ornamental horticulturalist and Black historian, presented research from her forthcoming monograph, “Conquer the Soil.” This public lecture inaugurated the 2023 Garden Walk series of events, coordinated by Gardens Buffalo Niagara, which includes the East Side Garden Walk, on July 22-23, 2023, and the Buffalo Garden Walk, on July 29-30, 2023. In other words, Buffalo has a two-week flower festival – and Abra Lee got us started.

Ms. Gail Wells is Founder of Buffalo Freedom Gardens and a Project Consultant for Grassroots Gardens of Buffalo. Founded in 2020, Buffalo Freedom Gardens has two aims, first, to help residents create sustainable food sources on the East Side of Buffalo through urban farming and, second, to bring the vibrancy of horticulture to urban spaces. Between 2020 and 2021, Ms. Wells and Buffalo Freedom Gardens helped more than 80 residents start gardening – front-yard, backyard, raised bed, and container gardens – to feed their households and beautify their homes.

Sara E. Jablonski is a 4-H Team Educator in the Cornell Cooperative Extension Erie County. She develops 4-H Youth Development clubs in the Buffalo, NY, and Amherst, NY, areas. She helps young people find their spark! She is one of my colleagues at Cornell in Buffalo, and she was kind enough to share with Weave News the work she does in the community and the flowers that she admires in Buffalo.

I’ve lived in a city most of my life. Save 5 years in Canton, NY, as a St. Lawrence student, I have lived in either New York City (21 years) or City of Buffalo (16 years). I’m a city creature, ranging through one or another major city. Flowers and gardens have not always been of interest to me. In New York City, I lived close enough to Central Park to enjoy some of nature’s bloom. Three blocks from my railroad apartment in El Barrio was the 97th street entrance to the park. As a teen, it wasn’t the park’s green spaces that attracted me, but the hilly walkways that outlined the grassy field. I blazed those roads with my bike, catching enough speed to soar off short ramps made of broken sidewalk…

I’m a recovering college professor. Teaching is my drug – it gets me high. But these “highs'' never last long, and my addiction was costing years off my life. The problem isn’t teaching; it’s learning – learning is the purpose of teaching, and I cannot tell when, how, or why people learn in college classrooms. So to summarize, since 2007, I have been getting high off teaching, leading history classes at two different universities, and sharing my expertise with more than 1500 students until I resigned in 2023. In that period, I’ve struggled with anxiety and depression, I’ve fought off rashes and infections, and I’ve been hospitalized for stress-related conditions afflicting my heart, arms, and brain. Getting high on the job was killing me.

On Friday, June 23, I joined the Fellows on two tours, one of the People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH-Buffalo) Green Economic Development Zone and another of an urban farm administered by Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP). On both tours, I was chasing flowers with my phone – I’m obsessed. But I found much more than flower pictures. I found myself on the grassroots, too, a drop of dew shimmering in sight of Eden.

One April morning in 2021, I snapped a cell phone picture of a peony that was growing outside my mom’s house in Amherst, New York, a suburb of Buffalo. It was toward the end of the COVID pandemic. The term “new normal” was all the rage. I didn’t know it, then, but I was searching for love, and I had found it. This morning, the sun was beaming; the flowers were stretching for sunlight; and I was falling head over heels for the flowers of Buffalo.

By Kali Villarosa

In the third installment of her Covering the Margins project, supported by a fellowship from the NY6 Upstate-Global Collective, Kali Villarosa takes a close look at news coverage of problems affecting African American communities on Buffalo's East Side. She finds a significant difference between the coverage provided by the city's two most influential news outlets (WBFO and The Buffalo News, respectively), on the one hand, and the city's African American newspaper (The Challenger Community News), on the other. The latter outlet, she argues, "stands as the guide for what should be incorporated into the more mainstream outlets and also points us toward the realization that individuals themselves must question their news sources, their content, and the impact of these coverage patterns on their city."

By Kali Villarosa

In a period of increasing political contention and global displacement, the conversation around refugees, immigration status and documentation/legality has become more prominent within the news media. In the second installment of her Covering the Margins series exploring news coverage of marginalized populations in Buffalo, NY and Ahmedabad, India, Kali Villarosa examines how three news outlets in Buffalo have framed the story of refugee/immigrant populations in order to tell an especially celebratory story about the city itself.