By the League National Housing and Homelessness Committee
Photo: Shutterstock, Billy F. Blume Jr.
Some of the cruelest and most painful attacks on the working class are happening on the housing front. As Will Suphon of Tucson, Arizona explained, “The housing market, the job market, the price of food … it’s all become rather insane and so many people are being thrown to the wayside. You can do everything right and still end up living in your car.”
The ruling class revealed its real, long-term solution to the housing crisis in Project 2025, the 920-page plan for establishing a fascist corporate dictatorship if they can get a “conservative president” elected. It calls for mass evictions of non-citizens, huge cuts in Section 8 housing assistance, abolishing Home First affordable housing and doubling down on housing segregation. Donald Trump, the Project 2025 candidate, has called for confining unhoused people in relocation camps in remote city outskirts. The aim of all this brutality is to protect the profits of the FIRE sector of capital (finance, insurance, and real estate).
Project 2025 is a response to the tenant organizing and housing rights upsurge that has been steadily growing since the 2008 crisis and crested in 2020 during the intersection of the pandemic era “Cancel the Rent” movement and the massive George Floyd rebellion. Tenants presented the Homes Guarantee program to the incoming Congress and Biden administration in January 2021. This is a solid working-class program endorsed by over a hundred organizations from around the country:
- At least 12 million social housing units (permanently off the private market and not available for speculation) and an end to homelessness;
- $150 billion+ investment in existing public housing, repeal of the Faircloth Amendment, and a Green New Deal for Public Housing;
- A national tenants bill of rights (including just cause, universal rent control, universal accessibility) and a $200 billion Community Control and Anti Displacement Fund;
- Reparations for centuries of racist housing policies; and,
- An end to land/real estate speculation.
Although scaled down dramatically, parts of the Homes Guarantee program made it into the 2021 Build Back Better bill that came only two Senate votes short of adoption. Since then, however, communities have been battered by spiking rents and expired eviction moratoriums, while the FIRE sector used its rising profits to consolidate political support in both parties. They funded studies and media projects attacking affordable housing programs and blaming homelessness on criminality and mental illness. They defeated the re-election campaign of Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri, who in 2021 led the Capitol steps sit-in to extend the eviction moratorium.
The movement today has no choice but to work to defeat Project 2025 and the candidates who support it. Project 2025’s answer to the housing crisis is essentially the “bloody story” that Donald Trump has promised to implement if elected. To prevent bloodshed, most of the movement is supporting the Kamala Harris campaign, not as the answer to the housing crisis, but as a tactic to be able to live to fight another day.
The Harris housing plan has essentially four components:
- Build three million homes in four years, primarily through an expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program,
- $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers,
- Crack down on corporate landlords who use algorithmic price-setting,
- End federal tax breaks for corporate investors who buy up 50 or more single family rentals.
Homes Guarantee supporters like Alliance for Housing Justice noted that the very presence of a positive housing program in a major party presidential campaign is a step forward and is a tribute to the years of tenant organizing that got us to this point. But many revolutionaries are speaking out against the weaknesses in her program, even as they fight to get her elected.
The Harris housing plan is a retreat even from the Build Back Better bill. The three million homes is a good (if insufficient) aspirational goal, but it is unlikely to be achieved since the tax credit program it relies on has produced only 3.6 million units in 40 years. The $25,000 down payment assistance program may well end up offset by rising home prices based on the increased demand it creates. In any case, it is unfair to lower-income tenants who will receive nothing.
Going after corporate landlords is good, but targeting corporate investors buying single family rental homes is unlikely to have a significant impact, since they only own 3% of those homes.
Revolutionaries have to deal with the reality that the FIRE sector is an important Harris campaign funder and holds tremendous media power that can either lift up her campaign or crush it. Furthermore, as Vox has pointed out, Harris’s housing program is essentially torn by the challenging political math of the fact that 65% of American households are homeowners, as are an even higher percentage of registered voters. Revolutionaries always stand with the lowest-income workers who are the backbone of the movement, but we have to do it intelligently and strategically.
We have to redouble our efforts to organize and educate the renters at the heart of our movement. Resist every effort to separate out and attack tenants who get evicted and become unhoused. Resist every effort to round up tenants based on their skin color and/or immigration status. Build unity across all low-income communities, and build long-term alliances with the homeowners among us, most of whom are mortgage-burdened so-called “bank tenants.”
The housing crisis is one aspect in the overall crisis in the private property system. In the epoch of AI, human laborers increasingly find themselves without work, income, or means of subsistence, and certainly not the means to be able to pay $3,000 a month rent. The private housing market is helpless to address this crisis because any time rents look like they might start to become affordable, for-profit developers simply stop building housing until they rise again. The path forward toward housing as a human right is to fight for the government to intervene to create enough social housing to make the Homes Guarantee a reality.
Published on September 29, 2024
This article originated in Rally!
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