< 1 min read Dear friends of Casa Maria, Thanks for all your past and current support. Several hundred people, including many families, still come here every morning for life-sustaining food. The soup we make is especially famous on the street. We continue to struggle to defend our barrio, aka The City of South Tucson aka Barrio Libre. Gentrification has morphed into the local and national Housing Crisis. Investors are snapping up every available property turning them into rentals and raising the rents big-time. This is creating massive uncertainty, desperation and suffering for many families already on the brink of being displaced. A house

3 min read Everyone who is homeless or teetering on the brink of being homeless or even those in this country who have recently tried to buy a house for under $200,000 or even $300,000 knows this is true. Some are making lots of money on the housing crisis. And it amounts to no less than class warfare against the middle class and especially the poor. It’s not magic or bad luck or some invisible hand of the market at work.                 This is about global economic forces whose policies and decisions seep all the way down to my barrio, the City of

4 min read I am Pissed- During this time of uncertainty and suffering due to the pandemic, many continue to pad their already too-fat wallets while a tsunami of evictions/foreclosures is looming ever closer on the horizon. For us here in South Tucson it seems obvious that the solution to the gentrification of the one square mile City of South Tucson is to buy as many homes as possible, getting them off the speculative market and into a Community Land Trust so as to provide housing that low income families can afford. But it is easier said than done. Why? Because “the housing

2 min read Thanks to Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller for revealing how The Realtors and other monied interests are investing hundreds of thousands of dollars to influence the state representative elections on the South and West sides of Tucson. (Outside Groups use Glossy Mailers in Bid to Influence Voters, 7-29-2020) They want to ensure that the Dems elected will serve them in the State government. They are using so-called independent committees to shower money on the campaigns of Daniel and Alma Hernandez. And they sure as hell don’t want candidates with solid track records of consistently acting in the interest of