What’s Really Causing Our Housing Crisis? Part Four
What is To Be Done?
By Andrew Dobbs
Read Part One: A Radical Look at Supply and Demand, Part Two: Let’s (Blame) the Landlord, and Part 3: The Finance is Too Damn High. Like this sort of thing? Support me on Patreon so I can write more!
I have said it before and I’ll reiterate it here with all of this new evidence: there is no solution for affordability outside of big investments in public housing.
Rents climb because of the monopoly of the landlord class over housing and their ability to stem supply when it threatens their profit taking. Private owners have disproportionate interest in raising rents as much as possible as often as possible. Building substantial amounts of public housing cracks both ends of this problem, breaking their monopoly and their throttle on housing supply. This supply isn’t the cause of the crisis, but it is a symptom, and both the treatment and the cure is to contest the landlord class directly.
This also means that the best strategy for funding this effort is to take resources away from the ruling class and transfer them to the public interest. It is precisely this that our elected officials are most hesitant to do, hence their inane focus on nonsensical alternatives. This is also why the ruling class puts so much energy into promoting neoliberal fantasies through every plausible-seeming channel they can reach. They know that an honest assessment will lead to a raid on their pocketbooks.
The most efficient and direct way to redirect these resources would be to seize and expropriate ruling class property. This is also the politically most difficult — forbidden by a Constitution written by bankers, landlords, and human traffickers — but ultimately necessary if there is going to be any lasting solution to this crisis and the others guaranteed to arise over time. This is not something elected officials are equipped to do or that elections can accomplish; it’s why we need revolutionary organizing as well.
For those still focused on reforms, however, their best option would be to tax property owners on a progressive basis and use the resources for public housing. In cities and states where this is possible, it should be pursued aggressively. This will force many politicians to choose between their donor base and their constituents, making it a terrific progressive organizing opportunity. The ruling class will also seek to sabotage such efforts, as we have seen in Seattle. Again, there is no substitute for militant organizing to overcome such obstruction.
Taxation of this sort is of course illegal In Austin and many other places, though a large housing bond somewhat approximates the process. The biggest difference is that the bond will be repaid through profoundly regressive property taxes — better than nothing, but even our best options are problematic. Furthermore, if the bond just pays for “market affordable” on-site housing or other “incentives” to the landlord class it’s more like a giveaway or bailout than a shifting if power. As for using tax increment financing for affordable housing, also not a bad idea, but very limited when compared to the scale of the problem.
Density Bonus Strategy and a Fresh Start
Probably the most likely tactic for Austin policymaking is the density bonus program, but it will only work if the bonuses are used with certain principles in mind.
First, the bonuses today are most often used by the City as incentives given to developers; industry retains all the initiative. We should instead view them as ways to compel developers to pay for their development — the public interest should reclaim the initiative. This means that rather than allowing lots of profitable development by right and then trading many more entitlements for a little bit of affordability, development should be difficult under normal circumstances yet allowed once substantial investments in affordability are made. This is one of the few ways a land-use code can actually benefit affordability.
Second, the preference should be to collect fees in lieu of on-site affordable housing. As long as the housing is owned by the landlords the primary purposes of the policy — to break their monopoly — is thwarted, and it is just a matter of time before they use political maneuvers or outright lawbreaking to make the housing as expensive as they want it to be.
One likely maneuver: a test case taken all the way to the Texas Supreme Court challenging the deed restrictions and covenants associated with the bonus programs. This Court has repeatedly shown its willingness to abandon the law and precedent to serve the interests that put them on the bench — landlords chief among them. Essentially our present policies of encouraging on-site, privately owned “affordable” housing is dependent upon the progressive goodwill of the Texas GOP primary electorate. This is not a safe long-term strategy.
On a different, practical level, the City can leverage funds much more extensively than the developers can and the cash will translate into far more housing than any ordinance could ever mandate. Making the on-site requirements very demanding and the fees ambitious but reasonable will ensure that the City extracts the resources it needs.
Finally, the City needs to restart this poisoned process on entirely new terms. Instead of trying to solve problems it can’t even touch with this policy, they should use the land use planning process for accomplishing the sorts of things it is good for. One such thing: giving people the kinds of neighborhoods they want to live in. It’s obvious that there’s a chunk of our community that wants to live in dense urbanized environments — the code should designate parts of town that will feature dense, large-scale urban development.
Other folks want to live in single-family homes; Code NEXT can designate where these are. It can likewise deal with drainage, mobility, green space, and a variety of other issues, taking up affordability in the end in the manner we suggested above. This seems like a process likely to allow for substantial consensus or alignment, whereas the present round is doomed to acrimony and, most likely, breakdown.
Conclusion
Code NEXT has become the black hole of local political discourse, sucking in every constituency and consuming every debate in town. It has taken on a magnitude so large it has collapsed in on itself, producing bizarre consequences for everyone drawn into its orbit. Elected officials have promised to use it to roll back world historic economic forces and to solve their local consequences by rewarding the very people that caused them.
Many in town can see that this makes no sense, even if they don’t exactly know why. Others think that it works because what they know is wrong. We stand on the brink of doing lasting damage to our City, and the pressure to do so is enormous because otherwise it will seem that the harm already done will have been for nothing. These are the fault lines in our politics today; the political struggles they entail have become as toxic as they are absurd.
And all the while tens of thousands of people in this city are being run out, intimidated in their own homes by speculators, worked to the bone just to afford to live in a community they see disintegrating before their very eyes.
This is an acute crisis of a way of life designed by the few to exploit the many while pretending to be the opposite. This is the root cause of all the other absurdities that arise in turn, and the only way to solve it all is to rip it out altogether and turn the system on its head. The last shall be first, and the first shall be last — until we have leaders with that as their unwavering goal we will continue on the path we are on, at least until the path runs out and so does our future.
There are small but significant things we can do policy-wise to try and mitigate the damage being done and to build the strength of our people to take on this fight, but in the end the institutions before us today are hardwired to do exactly what they’ve done. They must be dismantled, and something new built instead.
We began here by imagining something ridiculous, but by way of encouraging that work of undoing we should end by imagining something beautiful: a world where everyone is at home. Anything less is unworthy of our consideration.
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