It’s Time To Expand Our Ideas of Housing
To do so we need to throw away profit-oriented ideas and embrace people oriented solutions
Thanks in large part to the Coronavirus, the foundations of our society have begun to crumble. This has paved the way for solutions which we would have never considered before to now be within the realm of possibility.
Rent strikes and general strikes have been toted around the past few months for workers demanding hazard pay, PPE, and health standards. States around the country have placed moratoriums on evictions to prevent landlords from leaving people on the street in the middle of a health crisis. Calls for the defunding, and even the abolition, of police departments around the country are now circulating across the media to demand an end to the Black death at the hands of police.
These are ideas which generally would not have received serious coverage before without being declared too “radical” or “extreme.” Coronavirus has brought America to a place where we can acknowledge the benefit and need for many of these solutions.These aren’t radical ideas, they are people-oriented proposals that challenge our nation’s attachment to profit-oriented ideas as the only viable solutions.
Ultimately, all of these ideas can help to save lives and increase the quality of life for everyone, especially those who are marginalized by Capitalism and profit-oriented solutions. These ideas work because they are not fueled by the capitalistic need to garner profit which structurally, through its competitive nature, require that one person always gain more than another person. Capitalism and its profit-oriented ideas are not meant to protect the well being of anyone save for a few. Even if you play by the rules of Capitalism you are not guaranteed to be protected.
Even though many of us have adhered to the the rules of Capitalism, we’ve still lost our jobs and now can’t return to work. As a result many of us are relying on unemployment benefits to get us through this pandemic. Those of us who didn’t qualify for unemployment, or didn’t have access to apply for unemployment, are now preparing to receive an eviction notice once the moratorium on evictions is lifted, if it hasn’t already been.
This terrifying reality has brought housing to the front of our minds. There is a recognition that housing is healthcare and we know that we need a safe place to shelter and quarantine for all of us to defeat the Coronavirus. In addition to shelter, we need access to clean water, electricity, and even broadband in our technology-dependent world. We need people-oriented ideas in the housing sector, which currently operates on the idea of profit, to keep ourselves and everyone around us safe and healthy.
Too many of us, even if it were just one of us, don’t have access to the necessity that is shelter. For those of us who do have it nearly a third of us are paying more than we can afford for it. While this has typically been a problem most closely associated with those of us who make the least amount of money, over-spending on housing is creeping up into what we consider the middle class. This is called cost-burdened, federally defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development as paying more than 30% of your gross income on housing, including utilities.
Capitalism Creates Houselessness
Ownership and private property are capitalist ideas designed and based on exclusivity. Capitalism is bad for housing in the same way Capitalism is bad for food, water, and other basic human needs. Commodification and profit- oriented decisions to housing have detrimental consequences for all of us such as houselessness.
Houselessness is a symptom of Capitalism because to be included in a community, to be housed, you must first possess capital. However, a person can often not gain capital without the necessary resources of a home, stable address, and a safe place to sleep. Blocking access to or hindering someone’s ability to access these key resources should be seen as unjust, unethical, and immoral. However, America has allowed for it and, in an effort to appease the demands of Capitalism, we are considering increasing the rate of houselessness while a virus is ravaging our communities.
As eviction moratoriums are prematurely lifted state by state, those of us who were behind on rent before Coronavirus are in trouble. Those of us who have lost our jobs are now facing the uncertainty of an eviction and possibility of being houseless in the midst of a deadly pandemic. Where will we go?
More disturbingly, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed a ruling that will allow shelters which receive federal funding to discriminate against people based on their sex and gender identity. This will disproportionately effect trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) individuals, and more specifically Black TGNC individuals, who are more likely to be affected by the virus.
Our new society needs to ensure we are creating spaces that include and welcome all, without basing our motives on conditionality or respectability as Capitalism has taught us to. How do we get there?
Solutions we have seen before
We can’t keep doing things as we have done them before. Moving forward in any equitable or anti-racist way requires deep structural change to our ideas surrounding housing. Affordable housing development, Section 8 vouchers, and community land trusts will not be enough to move us past the value of a profit-driven housing structure. We need housing to be a human right and we cannot allow anyone to remain houseless. Here is a small fragment of the issues I take with our current solutions to housing reform:
- Affordable Housing
Affordable housing has traditionally been constructed through tax breaks to developers through programs such as Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC). LIHTC is based on the idea that the only way for developers to construct affordable housing is through federal subsidies. Ultimately, the LIHTC program has led to higher costs of constructing affordable units, and fewer affordable units produced than traditional public housing allowed, with years-long waiting lists to get in them. These affordable housing developments often lack proper oversight, and lend themselves to theft from developers who are already profiting off of them at the expense of the houseless individuals they are intended to serve.
- Housing Choice Vouchers
Housing Choice Vouchers, commonly referred to as Section 8, are credited as being the most cost-effective practice to solving the housing crisis. However, this program depends on whether or not a landlord is willing to accept the housing choice voucher. Because of the conditionality and exclusivity prompted by Capitalism many landlords are not willing to accept these vouchers and specifically discriminate against Black and brown people and LGBTQ people, despite it being mandated federally illegal. Additionally, landlords who do accept housing choice vouchers won’t rent to minorities in higher income neighborhoods, essentially practicing segregation.
- Community Land Trusts (CLTs)
CLTs were first designed by a Civil Rights leader, Robert Swann, in the 1960’s. Robert Swann had progressive ideas about land ownership that wanted to remove the ability to gain profit from buying and selling land. He believed we should instead be stewards to the land. CLTs were devised as a way to keep housing on the land permanently affordable. The idea of CLTs is often seen as a radical approach to housing; however, their reliance on grant funding has snipped them from their grass roots. For CLts to be successful they would need to gain more independence from these funders who require boards, lawyers, and other professionalized roles.
Proposed Solutions: Mutual Aid Based Community Housing Initiatives
Community land ownership is the direction we should be advocating for the housing sector to embody. Rather than focusing on homeownership, subsidies to developers, appealing to and relying on landlords, or appeasing grantors — the people need to determine how housing functions rather than a select few. Community land ownership would mean that those living within a particular block, or few blocks, wouldn’t own their homes — instead, the community owns the homes. The community would do the work to make sure their homes are secure and safe for all who live there.
Decisions would be made through direct democracy to ensure all community members have stake and that no one has more power based on access to resources. This is how we ensure everyone in the community has a safe place to live. These communities would rely on each other, not capital, and work with other communities in regional efforts of support.
To function, these communities would need to divest fully from Capitalism. While this may seem like a leftist utopia, a lot of the radical decisions we were told would not work are beginning to gain traction and even manifest in places.
As we continue moving forward in our work towards liberation from all that keeps us suffering, we need to remind ourselves that housing should be structurally situated to include everyone.
