GRITtv: Laura Flanders interviews Laura Gottesdiener, author of ‘A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home’

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On GRITtv’s The Laura Flanders Show, Laura Gottesdiener, activist and author of the newly released book A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home, explains how the “housing recovery” lauded by private industry and politicians does not mean stabilizing for neighborhoods hard-hit by foreclosures, nor does it mean that new families are buying their first homes. Rather: “It’s largely being driven by hedge funds – huge private equity companies – who are going into neighborhoods and buying up hundreds, sometimes thousands of foreclosed properties in any individual city.”

Gottesdiener stresses to GRITtv the devastating impact that historical practices, like redlining, that excluded low-income people and African-Americans (without considering income), have had, and how the same communities became key targets for faulty subprime mortgages. She also discusses Occupy, NESRI ally the Take Back the Land movement, and Moratorium Now in Detroit, who are not only fighting to keep people in their homes, but are changing the way we think of housing in this country.