displacement

37 families at the Riverdale Mobile Home Park in Jersey Shore, PA may lose their homes to make way for a water extraction plant that will supply natural gas drilling operations. The families have until June 1st to leave, and the compensation they are being offered does not cover the costs of relocating their trailers. The water extraction facility will be operated by Aqua PVR, a partnership of Aqua America and Penn Virginia Resources. They gathered on March 28th to speak out about how they will be affected.

On Monday November 11th 2009, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced that it will abandon its $300 million dollar world research-and-development headquarters in New London CT.  This comes only  four years after a Pfizer-inspired development plan resulted in the landmark Kelo v. New London Supreme Court ruling, which sanctioned the use of eminent domain for private development.

Dear Mandela is a film produced by Christopher Nizza and Dara Kell -- film makers of Sleeping Giant -- about the struggles against displacement by South Africans living in shack settlements. Those of us whoparticipatedin last fall's round of video making classes with Our City Our Voices learned a lot from these film makers and the beauty of this particular film. Together, we also were able to reflect on the conditions in which the shackdwellers both live and struggle and how it relates to our lives in the US.