“Shelter, stability, and storage are what the homeless are looking for… And they will continue to develop in nooks everywhere. The city is wasting money and effort fighting a losing battle. The truth is the homeless in this country are people who can’t go away. They have no place to go. But it is not over. It will never be over until there are equal rights, justice, and compassion for those in need. By cooperating and taking care of each other, the homeless show the housed what humanity is all about.” – Mike Zint, founder of First They Came for the Homeless, Berkeley.
Some 30 to 40 million American renters — at least those who have managed not to get evicted already — are at risk of eviction and homelessness when the last state and federal eviction moratoriums are projected to expire between July and September. Many of them, primarily the so-called essential workers, have been living in a permanent state of unbearable anxiety since the pandemic began, facing repeated moratorium expiration dates with only last-minute extensions, and in many cases, no extensions at all. To date, only a fraction of the federal rent relief funds designed to avert eviction has been paid out.
Criminalization
Renters are terrified of eviction. Unhoused people already have a life expectancy some twenty years shorter than average. Renters are also witnessing the stepped-up encampment sweeps by cities claiming they can ignore CDC guidelines now that the pandemic is partially managed. On June 29, the Los Angeles City Council voted 12-3 to draft rules that would outlaw camping near schools, parks, libraries, daycare centers, preschools, homeless shelters. They cover areas that threaten public safety and other “sensitive” locations and bans tents and encampments from blocking sidewalks.
On the very same day, police in Sausalito, California, dismantled an encampment of 35 men, women, and children with a bulldozer. On June 30, Sacramento Democratic Mayor Darrell Steinberg announced a plan to force homeless people to accept shelter whether it meets their needs or not. Republican candidate for Governor Kevin Faulconer began campaigning on a platform to break up encampments and force unhoused people to “change behavior.”
The reality is that the system refuses to provide the housing that human beings need. Rent relief programs, moratoriums, other pandemic relief measures, and programs of “permanent supportive housing” are necessary but are based on the flawed idea that the housing system is sound and will self-correct after the pandemic is over and all the people who are currently homeless are housed. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even before the pandemic, the City of San Jose, California, found that two or three new people became homeless every time it housed one unhoused person.
The ultimate cause of the housing crisis is that a capitalist economy cannot function in an era of digital production. Workers replaced by automation no longer have money to pay rent, and the government is no longer willing to subsidize housing for people not needed by industry. This fundamental failure has been exposed and severely aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic when tens of millions of people lost work and could no longer pay rent. A wave of pandemic-inspired concern forced California Governor Gavin Newsom to pledge to pay 100 percent of back rent owed by renters and spend $12 billion to house the homeless. This is still barely scratching the surface of the problem.
Because it refuses to meet people’s needs, the system is step by step suppressing the people’s right to vote and right to protest, as part of the state’s transitioning into a fascist dictatorship. The criminalization of unhoused people serves this transition by dividing and terrorizing some of those sectors most likely to resist.
Incremental Reforms
Change is necessary, but what kind of change? “We Want a Society Without Landlords,” a recent article by Andrej Helm, is based on the Berlin housing movement, which is currently involved in a campaign to oust large corporate landlords and turn their buildings over to public ownership. Helm offers a brief history of the 19th to 21st-century housing movement and identifies three trends: technocratic, reformist, and socialist.
The “technocratic” position has been and continues to be the dominant trend in the recent American housing movement. It consists primarily in advocating tax incentives and providing “demand-side subsidies” (like the federal Section 8 choice voucher program) to make the production of “affordable” housing profitable for investors. The chief American example is the so-called Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) enacted in 1986. But LIHTC only produces 100,000 units a year, while there is a documented shortage of 7.4 million extremely low-income units alone.
The “reformist” trend in the housing movement attempts to address the obvious failure of technocratic solutions by seeking to limit profit, regulate housing markets, control rents, and expand public and cooperative housing, without otherwise challenging the market’s basic operating principles. The best examples of this model are the nationwide rent control movement, the limited number of public housing projects still operating, and the various privately owned but HUD-subsidized apartments around the country. The problem with many of these projects is that they are insufficient, and when their terms of affordability expire, they throw whole communities into crisis.
A Society Without Landlords
The “socialist” trend, as identified by Andrej Helm, works within these same movements to limit rents and expand cooperatives and social ownership. Still, it does so with the ultimate aim of abolishing private ownership of rental housing altogether. Brick and mortar housing is relatively inexpensive and getting more reasonable all the time, with technological improvements like 3D printing. The actual cause of housing unaffordability is the cost of land, artificially inflated by speculation.
Land ownership in the United States today is thoroughly corrupted and clouded by its historical legacy of outright theft, slavery, genocide, railroad baron land grants, racist homesteading laws, and 20th-century red-lining. Because it rests on this edifice of exploitation and racial oppression, the entire U.S. real estate industry has no moral legitimacy. People who believe in housing as a human right have a responsibility to start dismantling this system, beginning as the people of Germany with the largest corporate landlords.
Revolutionaries work within the existing, practical movement that is fighting for housing today. They emerge from and work with people living in encampments and people in the various cooperative and public housing movements. There can be no successful housing movement that does not include unhoused people, and in their way, encampments are one of the initial steps toward reclaiming land for meeting human needs. Wherever they are, revolutionaries fight for a revolutionary approach, not to fix a broken housing system but to decommodify it and abolish evictions altogether. Evictions are breaking down whatever distinctions may exist between housed and unhoused people.
Ultimately the only way to decommodify housing is through the politicization of the social revolution that is already breaking out across the country. Carrying this revolution through to completion requires building an organization of revolutionaries dedicated to imbuing the people with a vision of the cooperative society that is possible today, which distributes not just housing, but all the necessities of life based on human need instead of private profit.
Published: August 13, 2021
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