The housing movement in the United States is held back by real internal divisions that are manipulated by the real estate industry to thwart, misdirect, and disorient it. Homeowners struggle valiantly to pay their mortgages and avoid foreclosure by predatory banks. Tenants fight an increasingly desperate battle to pay rent and avoid eviction and displacement. Unhoused people are in a daily war for their very existence, as they struggle for protection from the cold and police persecution.
All of them objectively confront a housing system dominated by big banks, private equity corporations, developers, and corporate landlords. The system is based on maximizing profit and only incidentally provides actual housing for residents, if it provides any housing at all. Securitization of the mortgage industry subjects the entire housing infrastructure to the demands of global speculative capital. Powerful operatives in government, academia, and media promote false narratives to shift the blame for the housing crisis to anywhere except the real culprit – the system itself.
Housing has historically been instrumental in elevating white supremacy, not only through housing discrimination itself, but also through the impact of housing segregation on education, employment, services, pollution, and policing. The divisions between homeowners, renters, and unhoused people are sharpened and embittered by these racial inequities. African American and Latinx communities have far lower homeownership rates than whites, and correspondingly higher rates of housing insecurity and homelessness.
Overcome Divisions
Millions of young people of all colors have given up all hope of realizing the “American Dream” of one day owning a house. Only 23 percent of California households can afford to buy a median-priced home. Those that do manage to buy homes are often trapped into working multiple jobs to pay exorbitant mortgages.
Landlords try to pit homeowners against tenants by claiming tenants are lazy and/or criminal, deserve no rights, and should just move if they cannot afford the rent. According to corporate landlords, there is no such thing as displacement since tenants are only making “free-market choices” when they are torn away from their families and communities and forced to leave their jobs or else commute for hundreds of miles.
Homeowners are often influenced by the NIMBY (not in my backyard) movement that opposes new affordable rental housing (or in some cases any new housing at all). Real estate lobbyists try to persuade homeowners that increasing housing supply to benefit renters will lower their property values.
NIMBY propaganda can and often does convince some renters as well as homeowners, even relatively low-income homeowners, that unhoused people are a threat to their neighborhood and unworthy of their sympathy or support. Enhanced by hate speech from media and politicians, this has created an extremely dangerous situation for the unhoused community. In October, Luis Temaj was set on fire and burned to death while asleep in his sleeping bag on a sidewalk in San Francisco. City officials deliberately aggravate divisions by placing shelters (and low-income housing) in poorer neighborhoods and not in upscale neighborhoods.
Cause of Housing Crisis
The housing movement has been complicated by the recent emergence of the so-called YIMBY (yes in my backyard) movement. YIMBYs are well-funded by tech companies and real estate developers and are primarily relatively younger “urbanist” professionals, who claim the solution is to increase supply by relaxing zoning regulations and allowing more housing construction. YIMBYs have been bitterly and rightfully opposed by renters, whose interests they disregard in their rush to support displacement through so-called transit-oriented development.
YIMBYs have started a big debate over whether the housing crisis is caused by undersupply or just by poor distribution of the housing that exists. The answer is both. There is a real shortage of housing units in certain regions. At the same time, there are thousands of vacant units in recently constructed luxury buildings. But this debate obscures the real issue.
The real cause of the crisis is that major developers and investors deliberately withhold financing and refuse to build, unless and until the housing shortage gets worse, to project home prices and rents high enough to maximize their returns. Zoning regulations are not the determining factor. The real cause is the for-profit housing model itself, and the corporations that dominate it.
Solutions
The real estate lobby and its supporters have spread the big lie that America cannot afford to house its people. Housing costs are primarily based on land values, and land values are inflated by monopoly ownership and extraction of super-profits from distressed renters. As economist Thorstein Veblen pointed out, modern land ownership is not even legitimate, as it “rests not on a natural right of workmanship but on the ancient feudalistic ground of privilege and prescriptive tenure, vested interest, which runs back to the right of seizure by force and collusion.” In America, force and collusion included enslavement of African Americans and murder and robbery of Native Americans.
The solution is to demolish the system of private ownership of land and rental housing. Ultimately, we need to nationalize land and make residential areas freely and equitably available for all to use on the basis of need. Homeowners should be given their homes free and clear, tenants should be given ownership of the units they live in, and unhoused people should be granted vacant government or corporate-owned homes to house themselves and their families.
The next step is to establish and expand a social housing sector that will build or acquire decent homes that people can rent or own for 30 percent of their income. Social housing is purposely built to meet human needs and fulfill human rights, not corporate profit. Although social housing has been built in various cities like Vienna and Singapore, based on very particular historical conditions, social housing at the current moment in the United States will not be built without a significant expansion of the revolutionary movement, and ultimately an actual political revolution that transfers power from the corporate ruling class to a government run by the working class. The role of revolutionaries is to work within all the various sectors of the housing movement and fight for its unity and its consciousness of who the real enemies are and how to defeat them.
The growing movement to create housing that is cooperative, free, community-based, and supportive is increasingly confronting state power in the form of sanitation sweeps, police power, and city politicians trying to use homelessness as a political path to power. This growing movement is uncompromising and is step by step uniting tenant rights groups, street vendors, and homeowners. This movement’s demands for housing, harm reduction, and trauma-informed care as a method and a principle for everything that is done is increasingly being embraced by social forces throughout the country. RC
March/April 2022 Vol2. Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades
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