The UB Gender Institute will host a panel discussion on “Social Reproduction and the Crisis of Housing in Buffalo” at 4 p.m. March 15 in the Screening Room in the Center for the Arts, and via Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public.

The panel will address how social reproduction — the passing on of social inequality across generations — is affecting Buffalo’s housing situation.

Panelists are:

• India Walton, a candidate for the Masten District seat in the 2023 Buffalo Common Council election and director of Roots Action Buffalo/Roots Action Civic Engagement. She is a former executive director of Fruit Belt Community Land Trust and a 2021 Democratic candidate for mayor of Buffalo, who ran on a housing advocacy platform.
• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University and a former UB undergraduate. She is a 2021 MacArthur fellow, author of “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership” (2019), and a semifinalist for a National Book Award and a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
  
• Rahwa Ghirmatzion, former executive director of PUSH Buffalo (People United for Sustainable Housing), a West Side activist and housing advocacy organization.
  

Carrie Tirado Bramen, director of the Gender Institute, says assembling a panel of this stature is necessary to shed light on these important and complex issues.

“Buffalo, like much of the U.S., is in a severe housing crisis, where rents have escalated, pricing most city residents out of affordable housing,” Bramen says. “This panel will address the roots of this crisis and how it is interconnected with other forms of injustice.

“We will also discuss what safe, sustainable forms of housing look like and how feminist leaders are at the forefront of this movement.”

To attend the event, register on the Gender Institute’s website. For more information, contact the UB Gender Institute at ub-irewg@buffalo.edu or by calling 716-645-5200.