By Jason Sibert
The subject of housing should be at the top of the list of priorities for the incoming Biden/Harris Administration. There is no guaranteeing that it will be a priority, despite the fact that the middle and low ends of the income spectrum are being priced out of both the buying of homes and affordable rental housing. Thousands in our cities, especially the more expensive cities, are homeless, as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York all have large homeless populations.
Radical urban
theorist Peter Marcuse, along with sociologist David Madden, penned a book
called In Defense of Housing (2016) that provides a wonderful guide to
the problems we currently face. The two asked us to rethink our attitude toward
housing. The book makes a very important point that should worry any good
social democrat: “there is no United States state where a full-time minimum
wage worker can afford to rent or buy a one-bedroom dwelling.” This is
particularly disturbing because the non-traded domestic service sector employs
a great number of the members of the working class, and they make at or near
minimum wage. The housing crisis is even worse in the most expensive parts of
the country.
The basic
conflict Marcuse and Madden addressed is the struggle between the house as a
mode of profit production – real estate – and the house as a home. The housing
crisis came about because housing was defined as an investment that outweighs
all other claims about it. In Defense of Housing covered the partial
decommodification of housing in the 1930s when governments on both sides of the
Atlantic invested in public housing, but in the second half of the 20th century,
real estate became a global force – the main factor driving our economy. This
helped build the fortunes of people like President Donald Trump. This
hyper-commodification produced a lot of inequality in a time of stagnating
wages.
In Defense of
Housing analyzed how
the state uses four ways to reinforce hyper-commodification of housing to make
housing an oppressive force. First, the state deregulates mortgage lending,
ends rent control and privatizes public housing in the U.S. and the U.K.
Second, the state allows financialization of housing such as banks pooling
mortgages and selling them as “liquid assets.” Third, the state allows
globalization of housing with foreign investors speculating in U.S. housing or
buying luxury housing as an investment which were never meant to be lived in.
Fourth, the state allows gentrification to increase landlords’ profits with
huge rent increases. Mayors often argue
that more housing will solve the housing crises, but Marcuse and Madden point
out that this will not work if housing is a commodity.
Housing has
sparked activism in our country before. The New York radical immigrant labor
movement starting in 1916 created 40,000 units in non-profit cooperative
housing. The 1917-1920 New York rent
strike terrified the city’s real estate establishment who then allowed the
first eviction regulations. During the 1930s and 1940s, U.S. housing activists
allied with leftist political parties and won national rent control, national
building of public housing, and building maintenance. One can see
something similar brewing today in the growth of tenants’ unions around the
country.
Liberal nationalist thinker Michael Lind also gives us some wonderful ideas on the housing crisis in his story “Why This Man was Prescient (Hint: It has to do with Your Rent).” He points out that spending on rent, as a percentage of income, increases as income goes down. The rule of thumb is that one should not have to spend more than 30 percent of one’s income on rent. However, Lind points out this is not possible for the large number of people who work for low wages. In addition to public housing, as mentioned in Marcuse and Madden’s book, low-income people are helped in another way. There are housing choice vouchers and the fact that the government gives housing developers tax credits to develop affordable housing units – the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. Lind cites the bipartisan policy of pushing home ownership instead of renting, including the policy of selling houses to those with no jobs, assets, or income
In addition, Lind
advocates a housing policy that would help the middle-class and poor because
universal programs that help large segments of the population are more popular –
think Social Security and Medicare! A new housing policy would not discriminate
between owners and renters. Lind proposes a universal federal tax credit that
would help the middle-class and poor. This would keep political conservatives
from pitting the middle-class against the poor in the name of the rich. This
tax would be refundable like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax
Credit, meaning people too poor to pay income taxes would receive checks from
the federal government.
Some form of
federal regulation would be needed to keep landlords and home sellers from
raising their prices to compensate for the size of the tax credit. Commissions
on tax reform have often talked about replacing the current tax credit for
mortgages -which helps many middle-class and upper-middle class people buy
homes but do little to help the increasing number of low-income people – with a
more simple tax credit. In addition, homeless shelters should be constructed
for those who have no money at all. Lind’s ideas provide some
concrete steps on how to stop the commodification of housing, the goal of
Madden and Marcuse.
I myself penned a story with some relevant ideas in 2013 called
“Addressing Housing Affordability Using Cooperatives.” According to the
National Association of Housing Cooperatives (NAHC), cooperative housing is
defined as when “people join together on a democratic basis to own and control
the housing or community facilities where they live.” Each month those who live
in a housing cooperative pay their share of the expenses while sharing the benefits
of the cooperative. According to the NAHC, 1.2 million families live in
cooperative housing in the United States. I
suggested the formation of a Cooperative Housing Authority, with funding from
Fannie Mae, that would purchase old houses and turn them into coop
housing. Coop housing could also be
built from scratch. Such housing is more affordable to working people because
the profit motive is eliminated. Such housing can come in apartment form or in
the form of single-family housing. Some will question the
affordability of such a proposal.
But, then again, housing is not the only area where we see hyper-commodification. The defense industry is
another area where it is rampant. Defense should be about defending our
country, but we cannot have a defense that deforms the society it is trying to
defend. Felix Salmon and Hans Nichols’ story “The Defense Industry
Worries About Biden” tells us much about how the defense industry
operates. The story points out that the biggest defense companies
– Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman,
Raytheon and General Dynamics – usually see revenue increases under
Republican administrations and that those companies are worried that a Biden
Administration will not be as generous to them as the Trump
Administration. The four defense
contractors are now collectively worth $304 billion. That is down $70 billion,
or 19 percent, from the February 2020 high. These companies are quite naturally
pushing an agenda where they draw as much revenue as possible!
There is little discussion in our
country about what type of defense is needed or not needed. The discussion is
controlled by the defense companies that provide money for political campaigns
and that purchase advertising in our media. What we have is a huge
military-industrial complex that produces profits for a few companies and a
defense structure designed to fight the Soviet Union in a world where it does
not exist. We really need to rethink the meaning of security.
Let us allow ourselves to be inspired by the literature of the New Left. The Port Huron Statement, the document created by Students for a Democratic Society, called for participatory democracy where everyone becomes engaged in issues that affect all people – in civil rights, in political accountability, in labor rights, and in nuclear disarmament. Let us be involved in a movement to bring both housing and defense back to the people!
Jason Sibert is the executive director of the Peace
Economy Project in St Louis.