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Features

ISSUE 33

SPRING 2019

pg. 22

pg. 52

The Joys of Home Buying

We Need a Green New Deal for Housing

EILEEN JONES

DANIEL ALDANA COHEN

pg. 62

pg. 86

The Zone Defense

The Unmaking of the British Working Class

SAMUEL STEIN LAURIE MACFARLANE

pg. 92

The Homeownership Trap DAVID DAYEN

Contributors cover art by Leonie Bos

Loren Balhorn is a contributing

Polina Godz is a graphic designer

editor at Jacobin and co-editor of Jacobin: Die Anthologie.

at Jacobin.

Amee Chew has a doctorate in

organizer at the Center for Popular Democracy.

American studies and ethnicity and is a Mellon-acls Public Fellow. Daniel Aldana Cohen is an assistant

professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative. Ryan Cooper is a national

correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, the New Republic, and the Washington Post. Meagan Day is a staff writer at

Jacobin. David Dayen is a business, finance,

and labor reporter, and the author of Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. Dawn Foster is a Jacobin staff

writer, a columnist for the Guardian, and the author of Lean Out.

Katie Goldstein is a senior national

Peter Gowan is an Irish researcher

and a resident fellow at the Democracy Collaborative’s Next System Project. Owen Hatherley is Tribune’s

culture editor and the author of Militant Modernism and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. Eileen Jones is a film critic at

Jacobin and the author of Filmsuck, USA. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck. Cyrus Lewis is a contributing editor

at Jacobin. Laurie Macfarlane is economics

editor at openDemocracy and a research associate at the ucl Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin

staff writer.

Jerónimo A. Díaz Marielle is a

Mexico City-based geographer and a visiting professor in sociology at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Azcapotzalco. Karen Narefsky is a housing

organizer based in New York and a contributing editor at Jacobin. Petter Nilsson is a member of the

Center for Marxist Social Studies. He works for the Left Party in Stockholm. Diana X. Bell Sancho is an urban

planner living in Quito and a research affiliate with mit’s Displacement Research & Action Network. Luke Savage is a Toronto-based

Jacobin staff writer. Samuel Stein is a geography phd

candidate at the cuny Graduate Center, and author of the book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Jonah Walters is a researcher

at Jacobin and a phd candidate in geography at Rutgers University.

Photo Attributions — Page 5 “Donnybrook Quarter” — Peter Barber Architects. Page 13 “Democratic Presidential Candidate Pete Buttigieg Campaigns In New Hampshire”— Scott Eisen/Getty Images. Page 49 "Amalgamated Housing Inc. Through entrance arch 1." — MCNY/Gottscho-Schleisner/Getty Images. Page 61 “Prigov’s Concrete Poetry” — Lina Ipatova. Page 65 “Ton Steine Scherben concert in the Technical University hours before the occupation.” — Jutta Matthess/ Umbruch Bildarchiv (www.umbruch-bildarchiv.de/bildarchiv/ereignis/rauchhaus_berlin.html). Page 66 “Inside the Occupied Bethanien” — Jutta Matthess/Umbruch Bildarchiv (www.umbruch-bildarchiv.de/bildarchiv/ereignis/rauchhaus_berlin.html). Page 69 "Wohnpark Alterlaa with Liesing" — Thomas Ledl/Wikimedia Commons. Page 69 "Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR" — Robert Byron/Wikimedia Commons. Page 70 “Donnybrook Quarter” — View Pictures/UIG via Getty Images. Page 71 “New Buildings in Sonnwendviertel” — Daniel-tbs/Wikimedia Commons. Page 73 "Sewoon plaza rooftop garden" — Aaron Choi/Getty Images. Page 110 “El Solidario” — Jerónimo Díaz/Flickr. Pages 111 “COVIGU” — Jerónimo Díaz/Flickr. Pages 112 “Zona 6” — Jerónimo Díaz/Flickr. Pages 114 “Standardkök 1945” — Sören Hoffman SH/TT News Agency. Pages 114 “Skärholmen 1968” — Olle Lindeborg/PRB/TT News Agency.

Departments 7

party lines

the soapbox

friends & foes

Brunch Bros Are Just a Symptom

Letters + The Internet Speaks

Mayor Pete’s War on the Homeless

struggle session

vulgar empiricist

uneven & combined

How to Solve the Housing Problem

Universal Rent Control Now

The Housing Question

MEANS OF DEDUCTION

canon fodder

field notes

dossier

What You Should Read

The Great American Mortgage Fraud

The Lingo

red channels

bass & superstructure

ways of seeing

The Irony of Soviet Modernism

Kreuzberg Against the Machine

Rebuilding the Social City

READING MATERIEL

CULTURAL CAPITAL

101

104

106

the worst estate

girondins

versailles

Homeless People Don’t Need an App

The ZombieInvestor Apocalypse

The Private Equity Press

FRONT MATTERS

110

114

117

121

popular front

the dustbin

means & ends

The Cooperative Option

We Once Had the Answers

Going Up the Country

Long Live Jacobin Radio

THE TUMBREL

LEFTOVERS

front matters

THE BEST PAGES ARE AHEAD OF YOU.

FRONT MATTERS

BY CYRUS LEWIS

PARTY LINES

AND KAREN NAREFSKY

Brunch Bros Are Just a Symptom In ancient Rome, Marcus Licinius Crassus augmented his fortune by flipping fire-damaged properties. Crassus formed one of the first private fire brigades, and took advantage of his market domination by rushing to the scene of every blaze. Before fighting the fires, though, he would offer to buy the buildings from panicking owners, who often sold them at a steep loss. Crassus then put out the fires, rebuilt the properties, and leased them back to their former owners at a high markup. He would have been right at home in modern-day Manhattan.

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PARTY LINES

Our president inherited a real estate empire from his father and made his name through constructing and marketing luxury buildings. (Too bad for Donald we invented municipal fire companies in the 1850s.) His son-in-law is a property investor who harasses and steals from his low-income tenants. The head of hud called ending racial discrimination in housing “a failed socialist experiment.” Meanwhile, more than one-third of the country now rents, a figure that continues to grow. Though our national rhetoric still valorizes homeownership, Americans are increasingly unable to achieve or maintain that vaunted status.

Clinton’s hope vi and welfare reform programs, which disallowed construction of new public housing units beyond the total that existed in 1999. Billions of dollars of tax credits have been distributed to banks and investors through the low-income housing tax credit (lihtc) program; billions have been cut from public housing budgets. The results have been disastrous.

Increasingly dependent on property taxes to provide public services, local politicians are unwilling to square off against developers. Increasingly, cities have turned to selling bonds, which means they must maintain a high credit rating to attract bondholders. Credit It’s fitting that we should be in this agencies downgrade ratings on cities position, given the US political with “profligate” social spending, establishment’s approach to housing so cities starved of tax revenue turn over the last fifty years. In the early to entrepreneurship, selling off 1970s, Richard Nixon declared a mora- public goods to the same developers torium on the construction of all who refuse to pay their taxes in federally subsidized housing. When the first place. It’s a vicious cycle that the moratorium was lifted several makes the plundering of feudal years later, it didn’t usher in a new lords seem quaint. era of public housing, but instead began the era of Section 8 vouchers, In spite of the deluge of global capital into real estate assets, a federal subsidy to private landhousing insecurity is getting worse, lords of low-income tenants. In the not better. The burgeoning city years since, the federal government has doubled down on the shift of the superrich is extricating itself from the cities in which we live. to private housing, notably under 8

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Brunch Bros Are Just a Symptom

With each new elegant condo and high-end high-rise development, our economic royals are building their own luxury Ewok Village, parasite-like, on the infrastructure for which we collectively pay.

for addressing the housing crisis. And when they do, it looks exactly like the “solutions” that plague us now: subsidies for landlords and developers, public-private partnerships, and other market mechanisms.

Our cities are becoming concentric rings of unaffordable housing, tourist traps, and low-wage workplaces built on Superfund sites and in flood zones. Capital is not interested in the long-term planning required for building human habitation; it is interested in its returns.

Yet the current political moment also creates an opportunity to recognize housing as a basic right, rather than a marketable commodity or a complex policy problem. Along with public education and universal health care, a massive program of high-quality, well-funded, and widely available social housing needs to be part of the Left’s agenda in the coming years. We need to take universal programs like rent control seriously, and support the creation of nonmarket mechanisms like limited-equity cooperatives and community land trusts.

A seemingly endless wave of disposable income is turning our apartments into condos and our bodegas into brunch spots. But the brunch bros are the symptoms, not the cause. The real gentrifiers are the developers and investors who “create value” out of the homes and labor of working people, along with the elected officials who offer them tax breaks and political cover. At present, there is little resembling a coherent vision to address the housing crisis at the national level. Whether because of the diminished political power of tenants or because the problem looks different in rural and urban districts, national candidates rarely present a platform

Capitalism has proven itself unable to provide us all with homes — the most basic human need after food and water. The system has continued to perpetuate the inequality that has haunted cities since their inception. We are smug about having escaped feudalism, while we all hand over our hard-won dollars every month to someone we literally address as “lord.” We need to find an alternative in our lifetime. ■

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FRONT MATTERS THE SOAPBOX

LETTERS@JACOBINMAG.COM

Letters Okay these letters were a bit better, keep it up.

This Letter Section Causes Us Existential Anguish I’m sorry you requested better letters, here is a bad one. I subscribe to two magazines, Jacobin and Thrasher. Thrasher comes with stickers each month. Jacobin has really great art each month. Could Jacobin include stickers as well? — Andrew Montes, Oakland, CA Eight Hours to Work, Eight Hours to Sleep, Eight Hours For What We Will

The Exercise of Power I agreed wholeheartedly with Bhaskar Sunkara’s editorial last issue (and look forward to reading his book) but I wonder why it was necessary. I’m a democratic socialist and a worker, and that’s why I support the candidate that best represents working-class interests. I want Medicare for All, I want it to be easier to unionize, and I want affordable housing. It’d be great if we had a socialist party. Instead we just have Bernie, so I’ll canvas for him. It’s that simple. Why do we need to find historical and theoretical justifications for an act that is actually very obvious — voting for a flawed candidate in a bad party’s primary, because he’s the best option we have. — Malissa Lewis, Newport, KY 10

For three years in a row I’ve sat through the same annual workplace ethics and compliance training video, produced for the company profiting from my labor. One section features an employee reprimanded for sleeping at work prior to departing for their second job, all while being assured that management understands their situation. During this year’s training, my first group discussion question was, “Why isn’t their position with the company valued enough to be paid a living wage?” Unsurprisingly, management met me with a deep sigh and, “now is not the time.” Now is certainly the time to renew my first year’s subscription to Jacobin. — Akasha Atherton, Port Angeles, WA

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The Green New Deal, Explained

The Internet Speaks

We’re standing in a burning house. AOC is proposing a fire hose. People are calling her unrealistic while fighting over whether we should use a glass of water or whether the whole fire is made up. — Robin Branson, Chicago, IL Where’s the Lie?

Because communication is at the heart of any good relationship.

When I hear anyone call someone a “class reductionist” it usually means their politics are shit. — Jason Berge, The Internet Somehow We Suspect This Isn’t Your Real Name Anything short of Stalinism is neo-liberal centrism. — Nancy Pelosi, San Francisco, CA Thank You for Your Service Only 2 people create the modern world; Plumbers and Sanitation workers.

Your Guide to the Democratic Primaries “Free” & “universal” = not bullshit “affordable” & “accessible” = bullshit. — Jacob McKean, San Diego, CA Wait, She’s at Least a Good Right-SR Ilhan Omar: good job Left Kadet attacking Abrams and aipac. We’re not quite up to Menshevism yet but this wasn’t a bad month.... — Cindy Benn, Queens, NY

— Danny Harrington, Annapolis, MD Clean Your Room Jordan Peterson is Deepak Chopra for guys named Chad. — Gary Linkevich, Washington, DC Mmm, Donuts Centrism is like the center of a donut. It’s either a cloying, sickening mass of sticky-sweet jelly that’ll eventually kill you, or it’s an empty hole. — Eleanor Roosevelt, The Internet HOME IMPROVEMENT

FRONT MATTERS FRIENDS & FOES

BY LUKE SAVAGE

Mayor Pete’s War on the Homeless Pete Buttigieg is a charming man who speaks some Norwegian and wears wool socks. He also oversaw a wave of evictions and waged a campaign against South Bend’s homeless.

Pete Buttigieg is liberalism’s new flavor of the month. From glowing write-ups in major magazines to articles documenting his music preferences and exquisite taste, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana has quickly established a national profile. Considerably less has been written thus far about Buttigieg’s tenure in the mayor’s office — something that just might tell us more about his beliefs and how he would actually govern than his penchant for wool socks and James Joyce. As a Harvard-educated former consultant with McKinsey &

Company, Buttigieg unsurprisingly brought a managerial ethos to his administration. On paper, this implied setting measurable goals, gathering data, speaking to experts, and making improvements to city life. In practice, however, it has often been less innocuous — as evidenced by the mayor’s approach to both housing and homelessness. With 14 percent of the city’s housing vacated or abandoned, Buttigieg had a task force identify every relevant property and recommend an overall course of action. Its conclusion? That the city should slap fines on

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homeowners to incentivize repairs and empower officials to demolish derelict properties at the owner’s expense. But it just so happened that most of the vacant homes were in low-income black and Latino neighborhoods, where some city residents had housing from deceased relatives or were still listed as owners despite having been forced out by pricey mortgages. According to South Bend’s own records, in fact, both the fines and demolitions meted out thanks to the mayor’s policies tended to be heavily concentrated in these neighborhoods (one resident, for example, reported being fined thousands of dollars between 2012 and 2014 for infractions such as failing to mow the grass).

South Bend’s eviction rate doubled between Buttigieg’s 2012 election and 2016.

South Bend’s eviction rate, meanwhile, doubled between 2012 (when Buttigieg was first elected) and 2016, now sitting at three times the national average. Amid rising condos and a booming downtown, things have been a bit cushier for South Bend’s developers, whose efforts have received considerable assistance from the mayor’s office. They got subsidies for luxury apartments, a multimilliondollar tax abatement for a highend downtown office complex, and

even an attempt to sell off a full quarter of the city’s parklands to for-profit owners. In the midst of it all, the city’s homeless population has been subject to arrests and the placement of “Do not give to panhandlers” signs on street corners. The space underneath South Bend’s Main Street viaduct, often used as a shelter by homeless residents, is now subject to frequent spray-cleanings and surveillance courtesy of newly installed cameras.

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Buttigieg, who may yet emerge as the Democratic establishment’s leading Anything But Bernie candidate in 2020, undoubtedly has many points of difference from the Vermont senator — going right back to Sanders’s own tenure as mayor of Burlington, where he butted heads with developers. Faced with a scheme to convert subsidized housing into luxury condos, Sanders is said to have replied to one landlord: “Over my dead body are you going to displace 366 working families.” ■

FRONT MATTERS ANDREA CHIRIBOGA-FLOR

STRUGGLE SESSION

Denver (9to5) DERRICK O’KEEFE

Vancouver (Vancouver Tenants Union) RAY VALENTINE

Washington, DC (Metro DC dsa) CEA WEAVER

New York City (Upstate/Downstate Housing Alliance)

The Housing Question We talked to four tenant organizers about how to build working-class movements for housing justice.

Talk a little bit about the work you do.

Why is tenant organizing a critical component of the housing movement? CEA WEAVER

Housing policy in the United States has ignored renters for far too long. The result is a housing market that is both characterized by and cements deep racial and economic inequality. The result is homelessness! The model of subsidized homeownership for the middle class over nearly everything else has been an abject failure by every metric.

ANDREA CHIRIBOGA-FLOR

As Cea said, we can’t create or pass good policy without building power among those most impacted by the housing crisis.

RAY VALENTINE From my perspective, tenant organizing is the housing movement; it’s the only way to have real solutions on housing. Policy doesn’t make movements, and housing policy especially is pretty simple. It’s 100 percent a question of political will.

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RV The DC Democratic Socialists of America (dsa) project Stomp Out Slumlords started as an antieviction intervention. Our theory was that if we could get more people to show up to court and give them a few basic tips about what you should do in court, more people would be able to defend themselves in a really basic way and we’d be able to tax the capacity of the court. So, we set up this canvassing program. We would pull eviction records and go to places where there were big concentrations of evictions, knock on doors, have a conversation, get people’s contact information so we could follow up with them, and try to push people to go to court. There are two things that have caused us to shift our approach to

this project. One is that at an individual level you see an impact, but with the kind of operation we have we just can’t reach everybody. The other thing we noticed is that our canvassers kept going back to the same places. We were looking for places that have lots of evictions, which means we were drawn to properties where there’s lots of churn and landlords are very aggressive about filing suits. In those places, we tended to find a lot of other grievances. We started to see people multiple times and hear the same complaints. So we shifted towards more traditional community organizing. CW

I’ve been a tenant organizer and campaigner for renters’ rights in New York for the last eight years. Right now, I am coordinating a campaign to strengthen New York State’s rent-stabilization laws. Our campaign is being led by the Upstate/Downstate Housing Alliance, which is a coalition that represents renters and manufactured homeowners (who pay lot rents on land they may not own) across New York. Of New York’s 8 million renters, only 2.5 million (just shy of 1 million households) benefit from rent-stabilized leases. These stabilized tenants still experience sudden and permanent rent hikes; they endure relentless harassment from landlords who are looking to deregulate units. The other 5.5 million renters have no basic protections at all. And 89,000 people in New York State are currently homeless. The housing crisis in New York is a moral and economic

crisis driven by political players who put the needs of their real estate donors over the people. Like all crises of inequality, it hurts low-income people — many of whom are women, many of whom are people of color — the hardest. ACF

I work at 9to5, a Denverbased membership organization that works to lift up women and families inside and outside of the workplace. Most of our work up until 2013 was focused on labor policy, including paid sick days, family leave, and minimum wage. We expanded our work to include public transportation and housing because our members were telling us that these issues were deeply affecting their lives. Our housing campaigns include removing Colorado’s statewide ban on rent control, strengthening the warranty of habitability, limiting housing application costs, creating more protections for mobile-home owners, and creating opportunities for communityowned land. So there are lots of parallels with what’s happening in New York.

DERRICK O’KEEFE I’m a longtime socialist and political activist based in Vancouver. In 2017, I joined with a group of tenant organizers in the city’s Downtown Eastside (known as the “poorest postal code in Canada”) to launch the Vancouver Tenants Union (vtu). The vtu quickly gained a membership base and has had a major political impact in its first twenty months of existence. We got pretty thorough media coverage, and because of that a lot

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of tenants started getting in touch looking for help. The vtu now has a membership of approximately 1,400 dues-paying renters and supporters. In summer 2017, I worked on the independent municipal campaign of Jean Swanson, a longtime anti-poverty activist and fellow founding vtu member. Swanson’s campaign built on and energized the base of renters that the vtu had begun to organize earlier in the year. She galvanized hundreds of volunteers who collected thousands of signatures for a rent freeze in a matter of weeks, and surprised everyone by finishing second despite running as an independent in a crowded field. That 2017 campaign was the impetus for a more broad-based leftwing slate of candidates in the 2018 municipal elections under the banner of the Coalition of Progressive Electors (cope), a fifty-year-old municipal left party. I ran for city council along with Swanson and Anne Roberts. Only Swanson managed to get elected to the ten-person city council, but with no party holding a clear majority, she’ll have a lot of influence. The cope campaign was based around clear, class-based demands, building on the popularity of the call for a rent freeze. Taken together, the founding of the Vancouver Tenants Union and the emergence of working-class, pro-renter electoral campaigns has fundamentally changed the political landscape in Vancouver and the discussion about housing.

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What are some of the biggest successes of your work? ACF

Probably our mobile-home park campaigns. We were able to stop the displacement of one in Aurora, which was set to be rezoned for “transit-oriented development.” In the last several years, a $7.6 million investment has been made across the Denver metro area to build light rail lines, and all the surrounding areas have been going through gentrification. Many mobile-home parks, including this particular one, Denver Meadows, are located in “transit-oriented” areas. Stopping the rezoning was a huge success. Since then, we have been developing a mobile-home park organizing tool kit and policy platform to give residents the tools to advocate for themselves. We also launched a grassroots statewide housing-justice coalition in conjunction with the national Homes for All movement started by Right to the City Alliance. Several campaigns have come out of this, including one to strengthen our current warranty of habitability and a bill to limit housing application costs. These efforts have elevated the problem of maintenance issues, costs, and displacement in the public eye and for our elected officials.

DOK The Swanson and cope campaigns have managed to break up the establishment consensus and reanimate left-wing politics in Vancouver. They have also validated the idea of an “inside-outside” approach to politics, using electoral campaigns to build social movements. Concretely, during the 2018 election period the Tenants Union and the cope campaign helped to defeat a 4.5 percent rent increase announced for 2019. Immediately, our cope election campaign and the vtu responded with petitioning, op-eds, press conferences, and so on. The public was genuinely outraged. Crucially, some in the labor movement, like the B.C. Government Employees Union, joined in to oppose this rent hike. CW After forty years in a defensive posture, fighting to hang onto the system as it stands, the tenant movement has a rare opportunity to win significant gains. A bill to implement “good cause” eviction protections was introduced by socialist State Senator Julia Salazar this January. Salazar was elected refusing to accept real estate donations to fund her campaign — a “no real estate” money pledge that was introduced by State Assemblywoman Diana Richardson and the Crown Heights Tenant Union in 2015, and is increasingly a litmus test for progressive candidates in the state.

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What are some of the biggest challenges? RV The biggest challenge is just getting people brought into organizing. People have extremely low expectations and very little hope about where they’re living for the most part. Sustaining people’s resolve to win is the biggest thing.

We can’t create or pass good policy without building power among those most impacted by the housing crisis.

The Housing Question

We can’t assume that the suffering of poor people who are spending too much money on housing will be acknowledged as a problem that needs to be solved.

DOK One of the biggest challenges with the vtu was the sheer scale of the work. We were in some ways victims of our early success and public impact. There were more requests for help than we could properly respond to. We want to help develop new tenant organizers, so a lot of what we do is the slow, patient work of identifying and developing our members. External challenges have been formidable, too. The institutional left (loosely meaning the union staff and more established social-democratic milieu) for the most part ignored or, in some cases, was scornful of the vtu. More important, of course, was the fierce opposition from the landlord and developer lobbies in the city.

The biggest challenge is the power of the real estate industry to shape the narrative about what is even politically possible in the United States! Too many people believe that renting is a temporary status, that renters are not engaged citizens, and that public housing is inevitably doomed to fail. Beyond that, one challenge is a tension between local work and state or national work. National and state groups that have more resources, members, or political power are often not sensitive to the needs of local communities. But prioritizing the needs of local organizing can also be a mistake — particularly if the local organizing is exclusionary. I think the housing movement has overcorrected, so to speak, to emphasize the local over all else.

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ACF

As in many states, our landlord association has a lot of power and influence in the legislature. Luckily, since the 2018 elections, we are now a “blue state,” but there are still plenty of Democrats who side with landlords and corporate interests. I think this is the case in New York as well. Another big issue is the general lack of tenant protections, particularly when it comes to protections against retaliation and the right to cure an eviction. Currently we have a presumption in favor of the landlord when it comes to retaliation. This means that if a tenant complains to a government entity about a habitability issue, the assumption is that the landlord caused the issue “in good faith.” In about twenty other states, the presumption is the opposite. This is a huge disadvantage for Colorado tenants if they end up in court.

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What are the structures or power relations that we need to change in order to achieve housing for all? ACF

We need to clearly establish that housing should be considered a human right, and that public monies shouldn’t be used to subsidize developers. We need to be more creative with how we address the housing crisis so that there is permanent community control. Instead of tax credits that result in very few permanently affordable units, public monies need to be going towards funding community land trusts and limited-equity cooperatives. We also need to restrict vacancies so that landlords can’t warehouse properties and artificially create a higher demand for housing. Tenant unions need to be normalized through tenant trainings, protections for organizing efforts, and strategies that combine legal action, policy work, and organizing simultaneously, but with a strong focus on organizing.

RV We can’t assume that the suffering of poor people who are spending too much money on housing will be acknowledged as a problem that needs to be solved. The forces that are pro-status quo are much more entrenched even than it might seem. Not only are development and real estate important industries that have vast amounts of money with which to control the political process, but the fact of mass homeownership in America creates a majority of the electorate with a nontrivial material interest in increasing housing costs.

Most politicians, even ones who are progressive on other issues, seem unable or unwilling to challenge the dictates of the real estate market. How do tenant issues play out in the electoral arena where you live and work? How do you think we can make politicians responsive to tenant needs?

CW We need to get landlord money out of politics! Democrats and Republicans are alike in that tenant issues and the issues of the homeless are not political priorities for them, as was mentioned earlier. In New York, the neoliberal establishment worked for years to divide New York City from the rest of the state on issues of housing rights. And it is not uncommon for rent control to be tied up in a grand legislative bargain to a giveback for the real estate industry: they say we can’t win stronger renters’ rights unless we agree to pass an expensive tax break for luxury real estate developers at the same time.

CW Yes, shifting the cultural expectation of homeownership is really important! It’s how people envision themselves building wealth throughout their entire lives. People retire on the basis of their property values; they send their kids to college on the basis of their property values. And in many places the tenant movement is too dominated by 501(c)3 organizing. The tight relationship between the political establishment and the communitydevelopment organizations that fund tenant organizing both propels the movement forward by giving it resources and limits its scope.

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DOK We’ve taken this head on, and to a large extent have made renters’ issues unavoidable for politicians in Vancouver.

The Housing Question

The housing shortage is not a policy problem in need of a trick to solve it, it’s an expression of the inequality that is the inevitable product of a class society.

What role do you think tenant organizing plays in the broader project of building the socialist left? DOK Tenant organizing is essential to overturning inequalities of wealth and power, and the Left has been slow to realize its importance. It not only helps mobilize the numbers and votes needed to advance better policies, but it also helps to shape class consciousness. Just as labor organizing helps to develop class formation, so tenant organizing helps to shape ideas around the politics of urban space and shelter. Especially for millennials, given the decline of labor union densities across North America, many younger people won’t have the opportunity to be in a unionized workplace. Joining a tenant union may be the first class-based, politicizing experience for many people.

RV If we think about the labor movement as the political expression of the working class, we have to recognize that there’s not really an independent tenant movement. If you look historically at when tenant struggles have been successful, it’s been in periods when there’s a general articulation of workingclass militancy in the workplace and other sites of struggle — in the 1930s, and during the urban rebellions of the 1960s and ’70s. This is true internationally as well; rent strikes played a big role in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Tenant struggles don’t move alone. We need to think about situating tenant movements within a broader analysis of where the working class is. Engels had the first Marxist take on housing in “The Housing Question.” People misread the essay to say that housing is a secondary problem of capitalism, but it’s really a sharp critique of “one-weird-trick” ideas about how to achieve housing justice. The housing shortage is not a policy problem in need of a trick to solve it, it’s an expression of the inequality that is the inevitable product of a class society. Engels points out that the same “solution” to the housing problem plays out everywhere: poor people live in hovels, governments tear them down and build nice things, and the poor people end up in hovels somewhere else. It’s the inequality and the pushing people out of desirable places to live that is the essential evil of the capitalist system which needs to be overcome by crushing the root cause of that inequality. You need social planning of housing to deal with this; there’s no way around that. But we shouldn’t think about displacement in a conservative way. There’s an idea about organic communities that need to be preserved and given autonomy and I don’t agree with that. We need to think about overcoming inequality, which is an inevitable consequence of the housing market, and about how to reconstruct the city on an equitable basis. Chasing the art galleries out of the neighborhood is not going to work. ■

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GROWING NUCLEAR RISKS IN A CHANGING WORLD

NEW THINKING & MOVEMENT BUILDING INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Speakers: Daniel Ellsberg Boris Kargarlitskiy Sharon Dolev Lee Tae-ho Reiner Braun Karlene Sekou Andrew Lichterman Achin Vanaik Yayoi Tsuchida Reece Chenault Oleg Bodrov Marcia Campos Joseph Gerson and more

Saturday, May 4 Judson Memorial Church, New York City Register at rosalux-nyc.org/May4 Initiated by: American Friends Service Committee; Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security; International Peace Bureau; Peace Action (National, New York and New Jersey); Peace and Planet; International Trade Union Confederation; Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung—New York Oﬃce

In case you’ve never tried to buy a home, I should warn you: if you’re not affluent, you’re heading into a world of pain.

by eileen jones

The Joys of Home Buying IN THE PAST SEVERAL MONTHS , I’ve been

trying to buy a house. Just a small one, of negligible square footage, with a fenced yard that will provide a recreational area for my dog plus her future dog friends. My whole brilliant plan has been to take my little nugget of money out of the Bay Area, where I pay sickeningly high rent for a one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment — the “half” being a kind of windowless indentation off the main living space — and remove it to someplace where it’s actually worth something. You can guess what that means. Out into the “heartland” of small towns, the vast rural and semirural breadth of America, aka flyover country, the sticks, the middle of nowhere, hicks’ corners, Bumfuck, USA. My own specific choice is a village outside Buffalo in Western New York that I’ll call Oldtown. For many years, living in Oldtown was my humble ambition. My best friends live there, and we share a utopian vision of long evenings wandering from bar to bar on Main Street, annoying the neighbors with our raucous laughter. It’s part of this town’s charter that citizens are allowed to roam around with open liquor containers, which is the only thing Oldtown has in common with New Orleans. I looked forward with bright anticipation to the schedule of my days there: six hours of productive writing followed by a tranquil stroll through town sipping a bourbon on the rocks, waving pleasantly to the neighbors. HOME IMPROVEMENT

eileen jones

House-hunting puts you in even more raw contact with the horrors of capitalism than you’re already accustomed to from years of wage labor.

Oldtown has an illustrious history of eccentricity. It was home to a major late nineteenth-century arts and crafts movement that held strong views on labor and social reform as it related to bookbinding, carpentry, metalwork, and other vital concerns of the day. This movement can be viewed as an outgrowth of that early nineteenth-century flourishing of wild and wonderful ideas that took hold of western New York State, which came to be called “the Burned-over District” for the way the region had been scorched by fiery new religions like Spiritualism, Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, and Jehovah’s Witness-ism. Mixed in there was an equally hot embrace of socialism, women’s suffrage, and abolitionism, as well as experiments in communal living that included adventures in sexual freedom and lurid occult practices. All manner of serious political endeavors got mixed in with crazy utopianism and moonbeam longings. These aspirational nutters were my kinda people. I knew I felt at home there when I stayed in the magnificent hotel in Oldtown, built by the craftsmen back in the day. I looked up at the murals of great civilizations painted on the restaurant walls. On one wall, ancient Rome; on the

second wall, nineteenth-century Paris; and on the third wall, small but mighty Oldtown, representing the dawn of a great new epoch. They thought big in those days. Mine was a modest dream, but in America, even modest dreams have a way of not coming true. I put down four bids on houses in Oldtown, and lost out on every one. See, in just the past two years, tiny Oldtown, population six thousand or so, has become a hot real estate market. This is partly the result of its proximity to Buffalo, making it convenient for commuters, as well as its liberal-left tendencies that make it something of a refuge in Trump country. There’s also the village’s commercial development over the past twenty years. Alongside the venerable bookshop and the shabby, popular diner and the vintage five-and-dime store, a quaint relic that draws tourists from all over the state, yoga studios have cropped up, and upscale craft breweries, and two whole stores devoted to selling high-end olive oil when just one would be excessive. Keep in mind, if you’re a New York City or Bay Area dweller accustomed to ordinary houses going for almost a million bucks, you’ll be dazzled by the affordability

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the joys of home buying

of houses in the heartland. $350,000 would get you an opulent home in Oldtown, and in most places in Western NY. But we’re former teachers and don’t have even that kind of money. We were stuck looking for houses in the $250,000ish range or under — more and more under, actually, the longer we hunted, and the scarier we found the hidden costs of house-buying. The other towns besides Oldtown in the Buffalo area are cheap as hell to live in, and there are houses galore for sale, and no bidding wars over them. But they also tend to be old-timey rural and 100 percent white and fairly nightmarish, featuring extreme political conservatism and gun collections and recently shot deer hanging from trees in the front yard in the fall. Beyond even my own personal quailing over these things, I’ve got a “husband of color” to consider. We’ve got to be careful where we land, because as soon as we leave Oakland, where we’re just a couple, we acquire the status of “mixed-race couple.” It’s worth putting up with olive oil stores if we can live among liberals whose politics might be toothless but whose social behaviors are anxiously proper. They’d rather die than show themselves to be manifestly racist. Latently racist, sure — that’s inevitable. Oldtown is also blindingly white — but only 98 percent instead of 100 percent! House-hunting puts you in even more raw contact with the horrors of capitalism than you’re already accustomed to from years of wage labor. For example, when you consult the Zillow site to look for houses, you’re immediately struck by how many homes are in foreclosure. They’re color-coded to appear on the maps as blue dots. This distinguishes them from regular houses for sale represented by red dots. Blue dots rival red dots for supremacy in many cities and towns in New York State. Check out Buffalo, Jamestown, Poughkeepsie, Schenectady, Syracuse, Troy, Utica. Each blue dot connotes a human tragedy — somebody losing their house because they couldn’t make the mortgage payments. I know about the working-class person’s anxious relationship to their house, because I was raised in a pretty typical hard-pressed family that managed to get ahold of a house and hung onto it grimly through thick and thin, unable to afford decent upkeep on it, but hanging onto it nevertheless. You make that house payment no matter what, if there’s any way at all to make it.

The house is your only asset other than your car, which you also desperately need in a nation that has set its face against decent, widely available public transportation. Lately the headlines are telling us that record numbers of Americans are failing to make their car payments too, which is as good as telling us The End is Nigh. There are many layers to the horror of houses in foreclosure that you probably wouldn’t know about if you weren’t losing your house yourself, or else trying to buy a house. I wasn’t going to buy a house in foreclosure — I’m a socialist, after all — but I read up on it after being urged to consider it by the many helpful advisors who spring up out of the woodwork once you’re a househunter. It’s a murky business, made quite difficult and obscure, involving specialized agents to guide you plus a lot of cloak-and-dagger activities that most people would rather avoid. House inspections generally aren’t allowed in these cases, for example, forcing buyers to take the house “as is.” So you’re told to do your own “curbside inspection,” peering into the vacant house windows and quizzing the neighbors about the living habits of the previous owners. If the house is in pre-foreclosure, and the owners are still living in the property, you’re advised to approach them tactfully to try to persuade them to let you look at the house so you can buy it out from under them, which obviously they’re not going to be inclined to do. These houses are generally bought with cash. That’s a mystifying fact that becomes more disturbing the longer you think about it. Who has that much cash, after all, besides the bank that’s already taking back the house from its suffering owners? Rich people looking for “investment properties,” that’s who. House-flippers and other predators. So poor families are forced to vacate their houses, and the houses are passed up to ruling-class types who can afford to fix them up and rent them out, perhaps, at inflated rates, or remodel and flip them. This is a big recent phenomenon in Oldtown. Some rundown little bungalow built in 1926 will sell for $35,000 and then reappear on the market a year or two later, freshly renovated and listed at $255,000. That describes the first house we bid on, in fact. Here’s how our dismal house-hunt has gone in Oldtown:

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eileen jones

House #1 Our money wasn’t available fast enough for the house-flipper sellers, new to the game and desperate to make immediate money back. A lower rival offer with cash on hand got accepted. Rival was an out-oftowner looking for “investment properties” who promptly put the house up for rent at an exorbitant rate that would look normal in the Bay Area but appalled Oldtown residents: $2,200 a month. Got no renters at that rate, lowered the rate to $1,950 a month, which is still insane but somewhere closer to reality. House #3

House #4

Outbid. Taking no chances, this time we offered 13 percent over the asking price on the small bungalow selling for $189,000, based on our realtor’s research on how high other neighborhood houses had sold in past year. To leave no stone unturned, my friends in Oldtown, who were acquainted with the children of the sellers, put in a personal plea for us. But now that real estate gold-rush fever has seized Oldtown, only money talks. A rival bidder offered 13.5 percent over the asking price and got the house.

Outbid. Another 1920s remodeled bungalow, surely the last one in Oldtown, where homes tend toward massive nineteenth-century ones designed to hold big extended families and maybe even a few servants. This one was ridiculously tiny at 974 square feet — significantly smaller than our current apartment, in fact — but a jewel of craftsman architecture. Even the garage was so beautiful, your car would be proud to park inside it. I managed to get the seller on the phone and was as beguiling as I knew how to be, urged on by family and friends who swore that personal charm would do the trick. Then there was a bidding war that inflated the price of the house to grotesque levels, so far past its listed worth, it was a question whether a bank would loan sufficient money on it. That became somebody else’s problem when we lost the war. After we’d made our “top offer” and got outbid, there was a memorably brief, cold text from the seller at the end, trying to nudge us higher.

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House #2 Our offer wasn’t high enough to satisfy the house-flipper seller, who’d renovated a house built in 1900 in an erratic manner that gave all potential buyers pause. The overpriced place had been on sale for months, highly unusual in Oldtown, where any decent place gets snapped up immediately based on location alone. Our offer and the rival offer, roughly the same, both got turned down. (Note that, no matter how long a house for sale sits with no takers, the minute we put a bid on one, the eerie “rival” appeared. We should hire ourselves out to realtors to drum up business for them.) The house eventually sold, presumably for the absurdly high asking price that even the realtors shook their heads over.

the joys of home buying

The house is your only asset other than your car, which you also desperately need in a nation that has set its face against decent, widely available public transportation.

Apparently, I wasn’t charming enough. In case you’ve never tried to buy a home, I should warn you, if you’re not affluent, you’re heading into a world of pain. At every turn you’re made to feel like some filthy outsider, a scheming social climber trying to muscle into nice neighborhoods where you don’t belong. The first thing you have to do is “pre-qualify” for a loan, and bankers and realtors, in league, express grave doubts that you can afford to buy a house like respectable people do. Your bank balance is pathetic, the amount of debt you’re carrying is deplorable. Don’t you know everyone should have at least $100,000 in savings? We never knew what sketchy characters we were before we tried to buy a house. With House #1, the reason we didn’t have the down payment ready from the first expression of interest in the house was that we were still waiting for my husband’s retirement funds to hit the bank. Don’t even get me started on the massive jerking-around you suffer when you retire and try to get hold of your money, your own money that you patiently accumulated into a little lump sum over many, many years. They hold onto it for an additional month after your verified retirement date just to keep collecting interest on it for a little while longer. And if for any reason you’re trying to roll over a lump sum from a previous job or retirement account, look out — they won’t give it to you. We were made to run the gauntlet of bureaucracy, first applying to roll over funds online as instructed, and when that failed, talking to at least six different

telephone representatives, in as many locations, before we could pry it out of them. Took ages. And by then we’d already lost out on one house, maybe two, while still paying the rent on our old apartment at sickening rates, with our little pot of money steadily shrinking. Then there are all the hidden costs of house-buying. You start out happily looking at Zillow listings, aka “house porn,” celebrating the fact that for the first time in your life you can afford to buy a place, and before you know it you realize maybe you can’t. Can you immediately put up $5,000 in good faith “earnest money” to reassure the buyers? Are you ready for the $50,000 down payment? Don’t forget the closing costs of $5,000–$15,000. Plus you’ll have to pay for the inspection of the house ($500) and lawyers’ fees ($500–$1,000), if by some miracle you ever get a bid accepted. I used to laugh when I called the lawyer to warn him we were putting in another bid on an Oldtown house. No business resulted, but each time he solemnly wished us “good luck.” May the odds be ever in your favor! Beware of the site-specific costs too. In Western New York you have to get radon levels tested, for example. And the taxes are incredible in Oldtown. You’ve got to pay taxes for living in the village of Oldtown and more taxes for living in the larger entity of the town of Oldtown. Then there are the property taxes, the school taxes, and probably the walking-around-with-open-containers-ofliquor taxes. Zillow features a special tax-calculator that

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eileen jones

will give you an estimate. In Oldtown, you can pretty much double the monthly mortgage payment to get a rough idea. Well, what’s the point of dwelling on the details? We never got a house in Oldtown. It meant the death of my little dream, but what of it? Dreams are dying all the time just in my immediate circle of friends and family. America itself is one big dying dream for us all. After a five-month search we finally did get a house in Millville — also not its real name — another old village in Western New York, but one that had long since merged into Buffalo as a suburb. About a half-hour away from Oldtown and our friends, the location is a bit more hectic that we’d hoped. But it’s a nice little house that we managed to get because it was scorned by other house-hunters. See, the house doesn’t have a basement, an alarming anomaly in Western New York. There’s only a crawl space, which freaked everyone out who’d ever seen a horror movie such as Crawlspace (1986). Still, the dreaded “rival bidder” emerged just as we got ready to make our offer, in time to drive the price up. But we finally won a bidding war, paying $195,000 28

for our little 1943 Cape Cod. It has a fenced yard and everything. The dogs will like it. Turns out we were part of a larger movement, as almost all of Buffalo has recently become a pretty hot real estate market too, mainly driven by millennials hunting for cheap housing. I saw the young couples rolling up to open houses at the same time as me, looking wan and tired and probably ready to buy anything just to be done with the misery. I fretted for them. I’d seen some terrible houses that had been superficially remodeled and artfully photographed for Zillow. Would these young’uns know enough to check on the age of the roof and the furnace and the water heater, all time bombs of expense ready to go off after fifteen or twenty years? Would they look for damp cracks in the basement floor, a sign of flooding? Would they think to inquire about the taxes? Would they get taken in and trapped by the lure of low mortgage payments, seemingly so much lower than rents on decent apartments? For that matter, are we overlooking something that’ll ruin us down the line? Maybe we’re all just foreclosures waiting to happen in this brave new world of spreading blue-dot precarity. ■

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means of deduction

AND YET THERE IS A GREAT DEAL OF MONEY MADE HERE.

MEANS OF DEDUCTION

BY RYAN COOPER

THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST

BY AUTHOR AND PETER GOWAN NAME

How to Solve the Housing Problem The size of the housing crisis can be daunting, but with a committed political movement and a little bit of state power, it can be confronted.

The American poor and working class have never been well-housed, but the 2008 financial crisis made a bad problem worse. It dramatically expanded the population of people seriously burdened by the need for shelter. The crash was rooted in the housing market, and the ensuing tidal wave of fore closures resulted in a drop in the homeownership rate of 6 percentage points. Most of those people joined the now 43 million households on the rental market, nearly half of whom spend at least 30 percent

Change in Units by Monthly Rent, 2006–2016

Even when combined with the federal stimulus, by 2015, new unit construction had only reached 400,000 per year — matching construction levels in the late 1980s, when the population was 25% smaller. Meanwhile, much of this building has been heavily concentrated in luxury markets in major cities. Whereas in 2001, construction was fairly equally distributed between cheap, mid-range, and luxury rentals, now the luxury market is by far the largest.

of their income on housing. The post-crash growth in demand has helped drive up rents across the country. Over the last year, the growth in rental households has stopped or even reversed — but rent prices are still increasing. And the number of burdened renters remains substantially above its pre-crisis level. Meanwhile, some people who would have been homeowners in decades past now appear leery or incapable of home buying.

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Despite the fact that rent pressure remains severe and future growth prospects for rental construction remain fairly strong, the construction boom is already slowing. As the Joint Center for Housing Studies concludes, “The rental market thus appears to be settling into a new normal where nearly half of renter households are cost burdened.” Efforts to remedy the housing shortage and ease the rent burden have been pitifully inadequate, both at the city and federal level. But there are tools we aren’t using.

2006 2016

8.8M 8.3M

6.9M 7.4M

7.7M 9.0M

6.3M 8.4M

3.0M 5.0M

1.7M 3.5M

-477,540

+487,529

+1,276,561

+2,098,078

+2,058,920

+178,0399

Under $650

$650-849

$850-1099

$1100-1499

$1500-1999

< $2000

Section 8 Section 8 vouchers are just bandaids on a broken system. Political Viability

Effectiveness

Moderate

The Numbers ELI units, United States (2010–2014) ELI units without assistance 2,523,905

ELI units with HUD assistance 2,573,307

ELI units with USDA assistance

The nation’s major program to ease rents is the Section 8 voucher program administered by hud, which assists about 2.5 million eli (extremely low income) households by subsidizing a portion of their market-rate rents. While that is certainly better than nothing, the program only covers about 22% of the 11.8 million eli households who are eligible. Another 21% have been able to find marketrate housing, 2.5% are covered under the usda Section 515 program, and the remaining 54% are simply left out.

Thus, these programs are restricted to eli households, and only help about a quarter of even that small population. They simply do not touch the vast majority of people trapped by the affordability crisis. What’s more, like any open-ended subsidy to private providers, these sorts of rental subsidies can stoke the rental market further, raising prices overall and exacerbating the affordability crisis.

277,573

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SUB-DEPARTMENT THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST NAME

Percentage of Burdened Renters by Income Group Moderately burdened (1/35)

Los Angeles

Las Vegas

Severely burdened (1/35)

New York

Washington, DC

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Honolulu

New Orleans

How to Solve the Housing Running Problem Hed

LIHTC Income Group

> 70,000

$45,000 – $79,999

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) has become one of the most lucrative corporate welfare schemes in the country — and it didn’t even get us many cheap houses. Political Viability

Effectiveness

Very High

Low

The Numbers Number of units created through LIHTC compared to their cost 1997 70,220

4.1 billion

$30,000 – $44,999

2008 79,157 10.2 billion

2014 58,735 6.8 billion

$15,000 – $29,999

< $15,000

All Households

Omaha

New Units Created by LIHTC Tax Credit Allocation (2014 dollars)

Policymakers’ chosen strategy to create more affordable units is often to coax the private market using tax incentives and zoning rules. The largest such program is the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (lihtc), under which some 90% of new affordable housing is built. This gives a tax credit to developers for building low-income housing. Once again, one of the biggest problems with this program is its pitiful size: it only provided about $300 per rent-burdened household in 2017, at a total investment of just $8 billion. This would not be remotely adequate to make

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a serious difference in the size of the housing stock even if the program were exceptionally efficient. But it isn’t efficient either: on the contrary, research suggests that at least some of the new housing created under the tax credit would have been created anyway. Crime also undermines the program’s efficiency: a Frontline investigation discovered substantial corruption in the lihtc process, helping to account for the fact that while the cost of the credit has increased by 66% from 1997–2014 the number of units created under the credit has actually fallen from over 70,000 per year to less than 60,000. Moreover, because subsidized units are often placed in poor neighborhoods to avoid political resistance, they tend to increase segregation and concentrate poverty. The program also amplifies segregation in the other direction, according to a study from the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, which found that subsidized units occupied by white people (often designated especially for artists) tended to be placed in white neighborhoods. Finally, the affordability requirements under lihtc generally lapse after either fifteen or thirty years. And the 2017 Republican tax bill also dented the usefulness of the credit, by reducing the subsidy by shrinking the distance between the overall tax level and the tax credit level.

SUB-DEPARTMENT NAME

New Privately Owned Housing Units Completed, United States (1980–2018)

1.98m

1.75m 1.18m

1m 1.09m

.59m

1980

1985

1990

Inclusionary Zoning Mandatory inclusionary zoning was supposed to end New York City’s housing crisis. But so far, the results are underwhelming. Political Viability

Effectiveness

High

Low

The Numbers Effects of inclusionary zoning funding in New York City (2014–2019) Low-Income or Extremely LowIncome Households 979,142

Affordable Units 424,949

Units funded by mayor’s office 38,700

Units “preserved” by mayor’s office 83,000

1995

2000

2005

Growing in popularity is “inclusionary zoning,” which mandates that new residential projects include some fraction of affordable units. There are a huge variety of approaches under this umbrella, but once again they are plagued by problems of scale and efficiency. New York City pursued the policy through a tax credit costing the city $1.4 billion in 2016. The program has created some new housing, but some developers have also gamed the system by forcing tenants out of existing affordable units, destroying those buildings, and then collecting city tax money to build a new partly high-end development. This is a waste of money and a waste of space: the luxury units private developers naturally include in their inclusionary projects tend to be much

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2010

2015

larger than affordable or midrange units, meaning less housing per unit of land overall. Efficiency problems aside, none of these programs are remotely big enough to match the scale of demand. For example, a Brooklyn development that was 80% affordable — a far greater fraction than the usual scheme — had over 87,000 applications for its 200 affordable units. Between 2013 and October 2017, the NYC government financed a mere 78,000 units. And the vast majority of those units weren’t new construction; they were existing units maintained at an affordable rate rather than lapsing into the upscale market.

How to Solve the Housing Running Problem Hed

Rent Control Rent control is probably the best weapon we have for checking the power of the landlord class. No wonder it’s under attack. Political Viability

Effectiveness

Low

High

Furthermore, high-demand cities appear to have settled into a quasi-equilibrium in which developers compete largely over the luxury market, instead of smoothly bidding prices down to near marginal cost.

The Numbers Rent Controlled Units in New York City (1981–2011) 285,555

38,374

’81

’91

’02

are reduced. And in any case construction takes a long time and buildings last even longer — even if market processes do work, it could take decades for such units to “filter” down to lower market segments.

’11

Another strategy is rent control, a reasonable policy for allowing people to remain in their homes and preserve existing affordable units, especially in the face of a spike in demand. However, it does little to enable the construction of new units; and stronger forms may actually impede new private construction when they cut into potential profits. However, if a desirable neighborhood is removed from rent controls and other such regulations, builders will naturally build new luxury units. Luxury units tend to attract luxury amenities and increase local prices, even if overall city prices

Even as profits in the luxury market decline, many developers in high-demand cities have continued to build luxury apartments and post extremely high rents. Instead of cutting prices, they attract tenants with one or more months of free rent and other similar sweeteners, or simply eat the cost of empty apartments for a while — the vacancy rate among the most expensive 10% of apartments has increased from 6% in 2012 to 13% in 2018. A major enabling factor here is undoubtedly America’s extreme income inequality, which makes it generally less lucrative to cater to a mass middle-class market than it would be in a more equal country, and unquestionably explains much of the overwhelming shift to luxury construction On the wealth side of the equation (which is even less equally distributed than income), there are many investors with nearly bottomless resources who want high-return investment and can afford to wait years for it to pan out.

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Under such conditions, it makes even more sense for developers to pursue luxury units — both for the increased income and so as to be able to capitalize high rents into a high asset value and high potential sale price. All this could help explain why apartment construction has slowed nationally. “ Developers want to maintain their listing prices, and then futz with the numbers behind the scenes,” a real estate broker told the New York Times. But once the building is filled up, its value will reflect that greater income stream, and can fetch a higher price. Though residency vacancy rates are still low overall, they are quite considerable in high-end office markets, with vacancies reaching 14.2% in the Washington, DC metro area, and 20% for storefront retail in Manhattan. Many cities have indeed seen neighborhoods removed from rent control and other regulations experience extremely rapid rent increases — that is, gentrification. Several neighborhoods in New York City selected by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg for deregulation, notably former industrial neighborhoods in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, have experienced precisely this process. At bottom there is no escaping that in very high-demand cities today the marginal private market apartment is going to be far out of reach of the average city resident.

SUB-DEPARTMENT THE VULGAR EMPIRICIST NAME

Public Housing How can we solve the housing crisis? Simple: have the government build more housing. Political Viability

Effectiveness

Very Low

Very High

The Numbers Age of New York City Housing Authority Developments 30–39 years old 51 developments

40–49 years old 96

50–59 years old 78

60–69 years old 64

70+ years old 15

Public housing is no longer a major priority for any city, but there are many legacy buildings still housing over 2 million people. Despite over forty years of disinvestment — the nationwide backlog of maintenance in such projects amounts to over $26 billion as of 2010 — public housing is virtually the only available housing for poor people in many cities. However, the American approach to public housing is also inadequate and has severe negative side effects. Two million units is simply not very many in a nation of over 320 million people. Where they do exist, means-testing units to only poor people means that rents will be very low, thus placing a large budgetary burden on cities and the federal government. As a result, even with strict qualifications and vast spending, there are not, in many cities, nearly enough units to house even the officially poor population. In Washington, DC, for example, the waiting list for the meager 8,000 public units was closed to new applicants in 2013 when the total number waiting reached 70,000. Worse still, poor-only public housing concentrates poverty in particular locations — directly creating one of the worst social ills in American cities. Concentrated poverty is associated with higher crime, racial segregation, poor educational outcomes, drug abuse, gang violence, and a host of other problems.

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Finally, the expense and poor reputation of public housing have fueled efforts to get rid of public housing altogether. The hope vi program helps demolish severely dilapidated units and replaces them with mixed-income lower-density ones, while the Rental Assistance Demonstration (rad) program sells them to private developers outright. As a result, the number of public units has eroded steadily over time, falling by 60,000 between 2006 and 2016. Despite the terrific demand for public housing, and the fact that those units continue to provide functional shelter for many people, it is no coincidence that “the projects” are a notorious place in most cities where they exist. Applicants are driven by economic desperation, not a desire to live in run-down apartments in dangerous neighborhoods. ■

DEPARTMENT MEANS OF DEDUCTION NAME

BY AMEE CHEW

SUB-DEPARTMENT UNEVEN AND COMBINED NAME

BY AUTHOR AND KATIE GOLDSTEIN NAME

Universal Lorem Ipsum Rent Dolor SitNow Control Amet Rent control is making a comeback. Across the country, tenants and housing justice organizers are taking on the mighty real estate lobby and its political allies through a powerful escalation of legislative and electoral activity. Oregon enacted a statewide rent cap in February. In Florida, Colorado, Illinois, and Nevada, state legislators introduced bills to lift bans against rent control. And in California, despite the defeat of Prop 10 — which would have allowed the expansion of rent control — another package of legislation has been introduced that would remove state-level restrictions on rent control, make eviction protections widespread, and prevent rent gouging. Chicago-area voters have voted overwhelmingly three times now for rent control, while in November, the New York state senate flipped from red to blue largely on a “universal rent control” platform. Federally, Senator Elizabeth Warren has included incentives

IgnoreNam DEK: the neoliberal aliquet, ipsum naysayers; et semper rent control convallis, can bequam an important lacus luctus nisi, in tool ac our cursus battle enim fordiam housing ut leo. justice.

for localities to pass rent control in her new housing bill. We face the worst renter crisis in a generation. The market has never met the needs of low-income renters, and production is increasingly geared at the luxury end. The largest corporate landlords have gained an unprecedented share of rental properties, while the deregulation of Wall Street has fueled heightened speculation. In this context, big real estate has poured tremendous funding into public relations campaigns that allege rent control hurts renters. But powerful tenant, community,

HOME IMPROVEMENT

and political organizing is pushing back and demanding housing policies that are accountable to tenants’ needs. The Center for Popular Democracy, the Right to the City Alliance, and PolicyLink recently released a report, “Our Homes, Our Future,” to highlight the critical importance of rent control. Our networks actively support tenant organizing across the country. In this report and through our affiliates’ organizing, we demand that policymakers put human needs first. Rent control matches the size and urgency of the renter crisis. Few

SUB-DEPARTMENT UNEVEN AND COMBINED NAME

Rent Control Prohibited/ Preempted by the State

Rent Control Permitted, Not Established in Any Municipality

Rent Control Permitted, Established in Some Municipalities

Statewide Rent Control

Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning Prohibited/Preempted by State

other policies can offer meaningful relief that is as quick and farreaching. If rent control campaigns underway in six states and two cities succeed, 12.7 million renter households would be stabilized — at little to no cost to government. If adopted nationally, 42 million households could be stabilized. Rent control operates by setting a predictable schedule for allowed 38

rent increases, usually a maximum percentage. In cities where rent control already exists, it is often the largest source of affordable housing. Strengthening and expanding rent control would help move us towards a more equitable, inclusive economy and society. Jacqueline Luther, a renter in Los Angeles, puts it this way: “We

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need stronger rent control, to live our best lives.”

A Policy That Works Rent control works — it effectively increases housing stability and affordability. It reaches those in need, disproportionately benefiting low-income tenants, people of color, immigrants, seniors,

Universal Rent Running Control Now Hed

promote affordability, it will be too late. In “hot” housing markets like San Francisco and New York City, few low-income households would remain in gentrifying areas were it not for rent control and public housing. As Phara Souffrant, a Caribbean-American resident of Brooklyn and leader in the Crown Heights Tenant Union says, “It’s not just about the money. It’s about having a ground to stand on.” Immediately after Los Angeles adopted rent control, the share of renters who moved in the prior twelve months decreased by 37%, with the rates dropping most for black and Latino renters. In Manhattan, tenants in rent-regulated units were ten times as likely as those in market-rate units to have lived in their homes for twenty years or more (35% compared with 3%). Similar results were seen after the Santa Monica passage of rent control.

Rent Control Laws By State

women-headed households, and those with disabilities. The stronger and more universal controls are, the better it is at helping the most marginalized. Rent control is first and foremost a tool that slows displacement. It helps alleviate the churn of forced moves and evictions that plague low-income tenants. It buys time

for low-income communities of color under pressure from gentrification, by countering the displacement caused by rapidly rising rents — and importantly, here it is able to intervene rapidly, before it’s too late. If we instead rely on new construction, which is overwhelmingly geared at the luxury end, to “trickle down” to

HOME IMPROVEMENT

Yet in mainstream policy circles, stability as a vital benefit of rent control is neglected. Homeowners’ role in “anchoring” neighborhoods is typically celebrated. But for renters, economists have traditionally framed rent control’s success in improving housing stability as bad — a sign of “lack of mobility” and of “inefficiency” in the allocation of housing units. Yet for many low-income tenants, “mobility” isn’t a choice, but a violent process of displacement. In the words of Vaughn Armour, a black senior in Brooklyn and leader in New York Communities for

SUB-DEPARTMENT UNEVEN AND COMBINED NAME

$36,000

Rent Control Saves Tenants Thousands Per Year Annual Rent in Rent Stabilized and Non-Stabilized Units

$21,960

$18,000 $15,600

$16,500

$12,360

Los Angeles

New York City

Manhattan

Rent Stabilized Units

Non-Rent Stabilized Units

Change’s campaign for universal rent control, “If I didn’t have rent-stabilized housing, I’d be in a shelter or in the street.”

If rent control were expanded, the majority of beneficiaries would be low-income. In Los Angeles, low-income households, and black renters, gained the greatest № 33 / SPRING 2019

savings after rent stabilization’s passage. Rent control reaches low-income immigrants who are not eligible for government housing assistance. It helps slow the displacement of families with children. When renters thrive, they lift up their communities. Cost-savings on rent would give low-income renters more resources to spend, boosting local economies. Stable, affordable housing would promote better health, educational outcomes, and job retention. It would foster recovery from illness and be protective against domestic and sexual abuse. Whereas gentrification is linked to decreased voter turnout among historically disenfranchised groups, stability would help enable strengthened social networks, community institutions, and democratic participation. “It’s not just a renters’ issue,” says Adrian Leong, an organizer with the Chinese Progressive Association in San Francisco, who recognizes how vital low-income housing is to preserving Chinatown. “We all rely on rent control, to have a vibrant community.” Rent control supports undervalued reproductive, domestic, and care labor that is vital to the fabric of society. “The type of work I did, you can’t make much money — you have to do it from your heart,” shared Gwendolyn Viola Fox Bibins, a social worker, active member of the Crown Heights Tenant Union, and Caribbean-American immigrant who has lived in the same Brooklyn home for thirty-five years. “ A rent-stabilized apartment allowed me breathing space,” she says,

Running Hed

Vacancy Decontrol

and now despite her meager savings, it ensures a place to retire. Luther, a former foster-care youth, attained her Master’s in therapy while living in rentstabilized housing. But her sister, not as lucky to find stabilized housing, was pushed into homelessness.

On “Unintended Consequences” The common argument against rent control goes like this: according to supply-side economics, any kind of rent regulation will dampen construction and supply. Thus, rent control’s opponents say, it will ultimately lead to a worse housing shortage, and hence, even higher rents, especially for uncontrolled units. Crucially, rent control does not, on balance, cause rents in nonregulated units to increase. Rent control is not the driver of speculation, gentrification, or a housing shortage. In Massachusetts, California, and New Jersey, rent control slightly improved affordability in noncontrolled units or had no harmful effect on these rents. The evidence shows it’s lifting or loosening rent control that fuels skyrocketing rents across the board. Empirical evidence shows that rent control does not hurt housing construction. In fact, the two can go hand-in-hand. Firstly, in the US rent controls don’t cover new construction anyway. But also, the housing market is more complicated than Econ 101 theory — overall market conditions and zoning

In California and elsewhere, rent stabilization laws permit rents to be raised without restriction, back up to market-rate, each time a tenant moves out — a provision called “vacancy decontrol.” This poison pill, imposed throughout California in 1995 and increasingly inserted in rent regulations since the 1970s, has drastically reduced affordability. In Santa Monica, before vacancy decontrol, rents for 83 percent of controlled units were affordable to low-income households; after vacancy decontrol, less than 4 percent of stabilized rental units remained affordable to such households. “High rent vacancy decontrol,” which permanently decontrols stock once rents reach a certain threshold, has caused the hemorrhage of over 155,000 rent-regulated units in New York City since 1994. What’s more, vacancy decontrol encourages landlords to find ways to force tenants out so they can raise rent without limitation.

Substractions from NYC's Rent-Stabalized Housing Stock, 1994-2017 Vacancy Decontrol

Co-op/Condo Conversion

High-Income Decontrol

Substantial Rehab

421a and J-51 Expiration, Commercial Conversion, Other

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

HOME IMPROVEMENT

12,778 total units 10,724 10,388 9,752 12,965 13,836 12,802 10,755 11,421 12,692 13,017 14,045 13,974 14,204 16,833 18,588 16,907 14,175 9,499 7,597 9,013 10,812 7,524 6,657

UNEVEN AND COMBINED

have far greater influence on construction. And whereas housing debates focus largely on private construction, there’s also the option of pairing rent control with massive public construction to turn housing shortages into surpluses by building public and social housing, at far greater speed than the private market. Rent control does not necessarily lead to declines in maintenance, either. While the research can appear ambiguous, it is important to distinguish improvements in buildings’ cosmetic appearance from functional maintenance that is critical to health and safety. When rent control is abolished or weakened, we’ve seen increased gentrification and the cosmetic building improvements associated with it. However, studies show that rent control had no negative impact on plumbing, an indicator of functional maintenance, or on abandonment. In Washington, DC, the share of physically deficient units declined after rent stabilization was implemented; and rent-controlled units were even less likely to be deficient than noncontrolled units, despite the latter being more expensive. Many tenants report that rent control, combined with strong code enforcement, gives them the legal mechanisms and leverage to attain improved conditions — for example, by putting rent in escrow until landlords respond to repair demands. Without protection, tenants often fear asking for repairs, because eviction through rent increases can always be the retaliation. 42

Opponents say that compared to means-tested subsidies, rent control is “inefficient” at helping the needy, because any tenant gains are canceled by landlord losses. But whereas the largest corporate landlords would hardly miss $1,000, this amount is significant for low-income households. Economists’ cost-benefit analyses, which only compare dollar amounts and not their human impact, ignore such distinctions. Nor do they typically include the costs to the government or public of homelessness and displacement. Rent control helps stretch limited, means-tested subsidies, which reach only a small fraction of those in need, and with its more universal scope, can promote social equity on a larger scale.

housing and subsidies, as well as policies that limit speculative practices. Over the decades, rent-controlled stock shrinks, whether because buildings naturally age and grow decrepit, or because of removals by loophole. For rent control to retain its coverage over a broad portion of stock, controlled stock must be replenished through the continual inclusion of newer buildings.

Universal Rent Control Is Most Effective

Rent control is a basis for building renter power. Movements will only grow as conditions worsen for renters, and tenants organize to protect their homes and communities. The stakes are high, and the real estate opposition is enormous — but there is great urgency for policymakers to rise to this political moment for rent control, for renters, and for a more just housing market. ■

Rent control is most effective at keeping housing affordable for low-income tenants when it’s strong and covers as many units as possible. In the United States, rent control’s shortcomings are oftentimes due to its lack of teeth, as over the decades, landlords and their allies in office have rolled back or watered-down existing regulations (e.g., by imposing vacancy decontrol). Strong rent control can help to dampen speculation. However, truly curbing the dominance of speculative influences on rents, and ensuring broad, long-term affordability, requires that controls be paired with other interventions: massive investment in public

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Rent control preserves and deepens affordability, but by itself does not produce new units — so public construction must step in. Other policies like regulating Wall Street, public banking, vacancy taxes, and community land trusts must be employed to limit and dismantle the mechanisms of real estate speculation.

MASTER DISCOVERY DISCOVER MASTERY M.A. IN LIBERAL STUDIES mals.gc.cuny.edu

Africana Studies American Studies Approaches to Modernity Archaeology of the Classical, Late Antique, and Islamic Worlds Childhood and Youth Studies Fashion Studies Film Studies Individualized Studies International Studies Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies Law and Society New York Studies Science and Technology Studies Social and Environmental Justice Studies Sustainability Science and Education Urban Education Western Intellectual Traditions Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

reading materiel

SOCIALIST CLIFFSNOTES

READING MATERIEL

BY CYRUS LEWIS

CANON FODDER

AND KAREN NAREFSKY

What You Should Read You’ll need to lug all these books with you every time you move in search of a cheaper apartment.

1. In Defense of Housing (Verso, 2016)

2. All That Is Solid (Penguin, 2015)

David Madden & Peter Marcuse

Danny Dorling

A comprehensive and accessible overview of the US housing crisis, the commodification of housing, and potential alternatives.

A look at how the Tories and New Labour contributed to the United Kingdom’s disastrous housing situation. Dorling takes aim at specific policies, such as a tax on extra bedrooms for lowincome tenants, and proposes ways to redistribute and rebuild Britain’s housing stock.

HOME IMPROVEMENT

CANON FODDER

3. Rebel Cities (Verso, 2012) David Harvey A foundational text for housing and anti-displacement organizers. This is where Harvey elaborates his well-known “Right to the City” concept, the idea that urban residents create surplus value that is seized and exploited by developers.

4. Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (Verso, 2019)

5. The Great Rent Wars (Yale University Press, 2013)

Samuel Stein

Robert Fogelson

This book interrogates the role of planning in the capitalist state, and the role that the rise of real estate capital plays in setting that state’s agenda. It also explores the history of our developer president.

A somewhat dry but illuminating account of the country’s first rent control laws, passed in New York City as a response to the post– World War I housing shortage. Also provides an interesting perspective on tactics, messaging, and political organizing in the 1920s.

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What You Should Read

6. Purging the Poorest (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

7. Modern Housing for America (University of Chicago Press, 1996)

Lawrence Vale

Gail Radford

This book ties together two themes: the disinvestment and destruction of public housing in major American cities, and the displacement agenda of economic development projects like the Olympics.

Early American social-housing advocate Catherine Bauer was inspired by European models and sought to implement similar strategies. In addition to exploring her advocacy, this book also looks at the New Deal’s approach to housing and the role of labor unions in early public housing.

9. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (Routledge, 1996)

10. Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance (Verso, 2019)

11. Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing (Zed Books, 2017)

Raquel Rolnik

Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, & Laurie Macfarlane

Neil Smith Published in the ’90s, Smith’s theory of a “rent gap” characterizes gentrification as an expression of economic forces. Gentrification is not, in fact, simply the result of cultural trends (popular enthusiasm for avocado toast and Nordic coffee).

12. The Rent Trap (Pluto Press, 2016) Rosie Walker & Samir Jeraj Combining tales of housing precarity and revenge evictions with hard data to paint a scathing picture of the viciousness of the landlord class.

A thorough survey of the affordability crisis being inflicted on populations the world over. As the housing policies of the US and UK are exported around the globe, so too is the policy of transferring national wealth from working- and middle-class commons to the global rich.

13. How to Kill a City (Bold Type Books, 2017) Peter Moskowitz In this searing indictment of “urban renewal,” Moskowitz shows how municipal governments are complicit in making private capital’s extortionate rent extractions the new normal.

HOME IMPROVEMENT

8. Evicted (Crown Publishers, 2016) Matthew Desmond Desmond’s policy solutions are not compelling, but his interviews with evicted residents and his framing of the problem certainly are.

A good primer on the economics of housing and financialization, with clear-cut alternative policy proposals to boot.

14. New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy (Cornell University Press, 2013) Edward Goetz Goetz’s book puts the lie to claims that tenant-based vouchers and subsidies for private development of low-income housing have been anything less than a disaster. A powerful call for the necessity of renewed investment in public housing. 47

READING MATERIEL FIELD NOTES

The Great American Mortgage Fraud How banks engaged in systematic forgery to prove ownership of foreclosed homes.

Over the previous two decades, the mortgage business had been transformed. Traditionally, a bank would issue a mortgage loan to a homeowner and the loan would remain on the bank’s books until it was paid off. But with the arrival of mortgage securitization in the 1980s, home finance got a lot more complicated.

With mortgages being flipped multiple times to multiple buyers, the rigorous paperwork and notarized signatures required in many states to prove ownership of a mortgage were simply ignored. Many investment trusts that supposedly “owned” the mortgages had never actually received the mortgages, notes, or any paper mortgage assignments. So when banks and servicers decided to foreclose on delinquent homeowners, after-thefact forgery was the only way to prove title.

The most common version of the securitization model resembled a convoluted Rube Goldberg machine. A homeowner would get a loan from a mortgage originator, like the now-defunct Countrywide. The originator would sell the mortgage to an investment bank, like JP Morgan Chase, acting as “depositor.” The depositor would bundle the mortgage along with thousands of others, and transfer formal ownership to a “trust,” which would issue bonds to investors, backed by the mortgages. After pocketing the proceeds of the bond

Lorraine Brown, the CEO of DocX, was the only person to go to prison in a nationwide scandal that resulted in millions of Americans being illegally ejected from their homes. Of the dozens of banks that used her services, not a single one has had an executive face criminal charges.

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DocX was the document processing company that did much of the dirty work. Millions of mortgage assignments like this one featured fake signatures and falsified notarizations.

sale, the depositor would contract with another bank to act as “trustee,” that is, to administer the trust. The trustee would be responsible for making sure that the mortgage payments were collected from the homeowners (along with any late fees and penalties) and that the proceeds were passed on to the bondholders. To handle the mortgage collections, the trustee would typically hire yet another company to act as the “servicer.”

In 2010, 1.2 million households lost their homes to foreclosure. In the blizzard of court documents and county records that accompanied each of these human tragedies, a document like this one usually figured: a mortgage assignment.

A mortgage assignment is a legal instrument in which the owner of a mortgage — the creditor to whom the homeowner owes money — transfers ownership of the debt to another party. But in many thousands of cases, including this one, there was something highly fishy about the mortgage assignment.

“Linda Green,” for example, appeared in thousands of documents as the “vice president” of dozens of different banks. The real Linda Green was a former auto parts employee in suburban Atlanta who was paid an hourly wage by DocX. As the crisis unfolded, DocX paid a series of different low-wage employees to forge her signature. Internally, DocX apparently used a template, in which “BOGUS ASSIGNEE” was the placeholder for the fake holder of the mortgage whose ownership would be attested in court. “BAD BENE,” meanwhile, stood for “bad beneficiary.” Amid the chaos of mass foreclosure, the document company accidentally submitted scores of documents with these tongue-in-cheek designations. (Here, Deutsche Bank was meant to appear where “Bad Bene” is listed.)

READING MATERIEL DOSSIER

The Lingo This list won’t make your city any kinder, but it might help you crack its code.

Area Median Income (AMI) The median income in a metropolitan area. Used by hud to calculate eligibility for affordable housing subsidies. These incomes are way higher than those in poor neighborhoods, making the subsidies out of reach for most people living in them. Bird Dog

Fair Housing Act

The eyes and ears of real estate investors. Bird dogs search for “undervalued” properties that they can bring to investor’s notice for a fee. They ensure that real estate investors know way more about the property value than most buyers.

Luxury Apartment! (based on 80% area median income) $5K / mo

Federal legislation, passed in 1968, that prevents landlords from refusing to rent or sell housing to members of a protected class. Enforced (supposedly) by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (hud).

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Tiny Homes

Homelessness Solved! Tiny Home cottage 4 sale!!! 0bd < 400ft²

Fair Market Value (FMV) The fair market value is the price at which property would change hands between a willing buyer and a willing seller. Workers typically are underinformed and under pressure and end up overpaying. Gentrification Increasing property values in an urban community, typically as the result of investment by local government, community activists, or business groups. Leads to the displacement of many existing residents. Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) A zoning law that requires or incentivizes private developers to set aside some of the units in a development at a lower rent. Yet the “below-market” rents are typically set according to ami (see above).

Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC — pronounced “LIE-tech”) A tax credit program created by the federal government in 1986. Credits are distributed to developers through state and local housing agencies, then sold to banks and investors in exchange for cash to finance affordable housing development. Ninety percent of all affordable rental housing built in the US uses lihtc financing. They’re much more expensive than the direct federal construction of public housing — and less effective. Section 8 A voucher program, funded by the hud, to subsidize low-income renters (and, by extension, private landlords). The voucher holder is responsible for finding housing where they can use the voucher, and for paying 30 percent of their income in rent (the voucher covers the rest).

HOME IMPROVEMENT

Small freestanding homes, typically under 400 square feet, promoted by some West Coast cities as a solution to the homelessness crisis. They are often placed on wheels so they can be moved to different locations. Not too different from trailers. Vacancy Rate The percentage of total housing units in a given area that are vacant or unused. Low vacancy rates generally indicate a high demand for housing in the area, and vice versa. YIMBY Acronym for “Yes In My Back Yard.” The term arose as a rebuttal to “Not In My Back Yard,” or nimby, a common protestation against affordable housing developments, homeless shelters, and other “undesirable” development proposals. Since 2014, yimby has become the catchphrase of a pro-density movement. Proponents of expanding housing stock, many assume that the benefits of even luxury development will filter down to poor renters.

we need a green new deal for housing BY DANIEL ALDANA COHEN

What would a bold left-wing housing plan look like? Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s build ten million new, public, no-carbon homes in ten years and guarantee housing for all.

ran in her primary against incumbent Democrat Joe Crowley, she had the Green New Deal on her website. But her big talking points were her district’s cost of living crisis, anchored in rising housing costs, gentrification, and Crowley’s links to luxury real estate developers. “It’s time we stand up to the luxury developer lobby,” she wrote on Twitter. “Every official is too scared to do it — except me.” With her bold Green New Deal resolution, she has now linked the climate and housing crises. The resolution states clearly that all Americans must be entitled to “affordable, safe, and adequate housing.” But neither she nor her allies have elaborated on the housing piece since then, focusing instead on creating millions of new jobs. Talking about jobs is understandable. But as her campaign emphasized, the crushing cost of housing is just as central to workers’ economic pain as stagnating wages, if not more so. Luxury developments, she said, make the four main crises in her district — affordability, inequality, immigrant security, and homelessness — even worse. Across the country, median incomes have stagnated since 2000. In that same period, a foreclosure boom has shredded millions of families’ savings, and average urban rental costs have increased by 50 percent. Overall, just one in five Americans eligible for housing subsidies actually receives them. A Green New Deal can’t deliver economic justice or solidify mass support without tackling housing head-on. HEN ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

ILLUSTRATION BY JOANNA NEBORSKY

DANIEL ALDANA COHEN

A Green New Deal for housing means building ten million new, public, no-carbon homes in ten years. And again. And again. And again. Ten million isn’t a crazy number. The United States is already building well over one million housing units a year. Still, the system is broken. Climate change only makes the situation more urgent. Millions of people will need new homes as extreme weather makes swathes of the country unlivable. Yet housing fits awkwardly into left climate debates. It doesn’t turn up in your average Green New Deal proposal; it was absent from Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything and from the demands in the People’s Climate March. Where climate does meet housing, it’s usually in the form of proposals from the likes of Elon Musk, to put a solar panel on every suburban home and a Tesla in every driveway. Green jobs proposals overlap with desperately needed building energy upgrade programs — like a huge scale-up of federally subsidized weatherization for poor and working-class households, municipal building upgrade mandates, and deep energy retrofits of public housing. But they pay no attention to the need for new construction. We can change that. A huge build-out of high quality, beautifully designed, meticulously financed public housing, with diversity of design and governance structure, would meet millions of people’s housing needs and create tens of thousands of skilled jobs in the no-carbon

construction sector for decades. Done right, the new housing would yield lovely, walkable, mixed-used, diverse, and democratic communities across the country. Density alone isn’t enough. It does lower carbon emissions, but study after study also finds that when residents of dense neighborhoods are wealthy, the footprint of their luxury consumption — from iPads to plane trips — overwhelms the carbon savings that come from walking to brunch. Per capita carbon footprints in the West Village are two to three times higher than those of comparably dense neighborhoods in the Bronx. Dense, working-class neighborhoods near public transit, anchored by public housing, are good to live in and have small carbon footprints. Right now, in hot land markets, well-planned public transit hubs raise housing costs and displace low-income residents away. Public transit-plus-housing would be far fairer — and would suck carbon out of the streets. Meanwhile, the working-class women of color who populate the housing movements that fight against gentrification and demand more affordable housing might not always talk about climate change — although increasingly they do. But their demands are objectively low-carbon. Their movements and demands are essential to any coalition that would decarbonize urban life.

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We Need a Green New Deal for Housing

canceling market mechanisms THE NEED FOR A HOUSING GUARANTEE through a

program of mass public home-building is overwhelming. In city after city, gentrification is unleashing cultural and economic traumas. A national eviction epidemic is deepening poverty, throwing families onto the street for making a little too much noise, or simply for committing the crime of being poor. Eviction threatens the 17 percent of US renter households that pay over half their income in rent, while another 21 percent are paying over a third. In sum, as David Madden and Peter Marcuse write, “According to the standard measures of affordability, there is no US state where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford to rent or own a one-bedroom dwelling.” Meanwhile, unequal homeownership makes housing the single most important factor in the appalling wealth disparity between white and black Americans, a structural divide widened by racist New Deal–era mortgage policies and deepened further since. The housing crisis also manifests in buildings’ damaged guts, where failing boilers and busted window frames leak carbon and break budgets. In the mid-Atlantic, over half of all black households have recently suffered utility shutoffs, cut back on food or medicine to pay utility bills, or kept homes dangerously hot or cold to stave off bankruptcy. A fifth of white households are just as fuel-poor. In New York City after Hurricane Sandy, 45 percent of public housing apartments in affected areas had visible mold after the storm. But even before the storm, that number was 34 percent. The climate and housing crises are already converging, and the connections will deepen over time. Advocates have won mighty legal victories to finally enforce the 1968 Fair Housing Act, passed in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, that should in theory ensure adequate, affordable housing for people

of color. But the current market and affordable housing tool kits can’t build the needed new homes, especially as the climate and housing crises merge. Sea-level rise alone will displace some thirteen million Americans this century — in a good-case scenario. That’s more than the twentieth century’s great migration, which New Deal redlining channeled into lasting segregation. Heat, fire, drought, and other impacts will likely displace millions more. Those same pressures worldwide will increase rates of immigration and refugee arrival. A market approach to these housing pressures would be disastrous. Real estate and construction companies would be the real beneficiaries of a push to build more homes with private construction, a subprime building boom turbocharged with tax credits, and financing through “predatory home loans.” We saw how that story ends in 2008. Another private housing boom would repeat the pathologies of earlier ones, locking in decades of segregation, fueling poverty, eviction, and foreclosure. The tangle of public-private partnerships and market tweaks that currently pass for affordable housing policy is almost as bad. At present, the main mechanism for federally financed affordable housing construction is the Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (lihtc) program, which subsidizes private developers. As money for real public housing dried up decades ago, lihtc funds increased. A classic liberal compromise, this public-private partnership has become a bloated corporate giveaway that housing advocates miserably defend as the best there is. The Right savages its corruption and inefficiencies, while research shows a long-term decline in the program’s bang — actual low-income housing — for its buck. Other remedies are just as weak, from federal to local levels. Section 8 housing vouchers improve individuals’ lives; they also concentrate poverty and leave the broken housing market intact. In cities, raging debates over zoning and other market mechanisms to increase housing supply mask an underlying consensus. All but a hard-core fringe of market fetishists recognize the need for nonmarket housing alongside new private construction. The real debate is over how much nonmarket housing, and how to build it. In California, Gavin Newsom is proposing a “Marshall Plan” to create an astonishing 3.5 million new housing units in four years, increasing the state total

HOME IMPROVEMENT

DANIEL ALDANA COHEN

by a quarter. With proper public leadership, California could give the country a masterclass in lovingly contextual urban design. And yet, to make most new homes affordable, Newsom has suggested pouring hundreds of millions into tax credits for private builders, exemplifying a reluctance among leading liberals to leave the safety zone of public-private partnerships. But change is coming. Even the Clintonite Center for American Progress is coming around. Their recent report, “Homes for All,” called for direct federal grants to pay for the construction of one million units of high-quality, mixed-income public housing in five years. But a million units is too few. And the report’s idea of only building on already existing public land betrays a lingering unwillingness

to confront the very land market that’s the central problem. It’s time to let go of tax credits and market nudges, and get real. Just as Medicare for All and a federal jobs guarantee would attack health and job needs at their roots, we need to bypass the money-suck of corrupt public-private partnerships and enact a housing guarantee backed by mass public housing build-out at the scale of our needs. Despite the propaganda of the real estate industry and a cowering class of centrist wonks, European and American precedents show us exactly how the public can house millions of people affordably, safely, without carbon — and with style.

The crushing cost of housing is just as central to workers’ economic pain as stagnating wages.

towards the temples of public luxury THIS PAST SUMMER , standing in a grassy garden in

Vienna, I had what felt like a religious awakening. I’d come to the city’s ostensible public housing temple, Karl Marx Hof, a giant leafy complex of 1,200 apartments, with gently rounded arches and fine stonework surrounding broad lawns, fountains, and gardens. But Vienna itself is the temple. The city’s Social Democrats — whose radicals, in an exception for Europe, never defected to form a separate Communist Party — were first elected after World War I. They haven’t lost a free election since. (They were, it’s true, beaten by fascists in a civil war.) 56

In 1919, they inaugurated what became known as Red Vienna, most famous for its massive public homebuilding program. They levied harsh real estate taxes that devastated the land market, making it cheap to buy land to build on. They raised a third of the needed housing funds from luxury taxes. A political poster from the period shows a muscular red fist swiping a bottle of champagne from an ice bucket, while horrified bourgeois in tuxedos and gowns back off. Taxing rich people’s spending on champagne, race horses, and servants redirected money into bricks, tile, and gardens for the working class. And the Social Democrats built housing in every neighborhood: no one should be able to tell a person’s status from their postal code. These weren’t just rooms in square boxes. The complexes integrated sophisticated services. Karl Marx Hof had cultural facilities and a dental clinic. The social fabric woven into the housing developments connected socialist and labor movement commitments to affordable housing with the best ideas of a feminist movement that was born on the barricades of 1848, and a public health movement that quickly followed. Vienna held design contests for public housing and the best architects competed. As I toured projects across

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We Need a Green New Deal for Housing

the city, I saw a wide range of gardens, courtyards, stairwells, cornices, archways, laundry facilities, and other common spaces. Almost uniformly five or six stories high, walkable, dense, green, shaded, and interwoven into a pleasantly dense but not overwhelming urban fabric, Viennese housing is one giant joke at the housing market’s expense. Today, roughly a third of the city’s housing is still public, city-owned. Another third is limited-equity cooperatives, the more recent trend, showing even more innovative designs. A final third is private, with good quality and low costs. Even in Europe’s racist, neoliberal rubble, Vienna can hold its head up. Its most immigrant-dense, working-class, and public housing-rich neighborhoods vote in huge numbers against the archconservatives who draw support from beyond the city’s limits. Vienna has recently implemented free day care for children aged zero to seven. Public transit costs a euro a day for a yearly pass. “People do get very angry if a bus takes longer than seven minutes,” one of my guides, the historian and neighborhood councilor Armin Puller sighed, with a grimace to show his dissatisfaction at the service’s disintegrating quality.

And carbon? Vienna’s summers are almost as hot as New York’s. But in most public and cooperative housing, air conditioning is banned. Some buildings from the postwar period are brutally hot — they could use the occasional a/c. But most housing benefits from the city’s quality of design and are comfortable year-round. Puller showed me one cooperative complex that surrounded flexible play spaces, their grounds creatively landscaped like a Star Trek caricature of utopia; the buildings’ balconies had sliding plastic doors that could instantly turn broad patios into cozy sunrooms. I cried a little on the inside. When he next showed me an experimental public school where each classroom had a dedicated outdoor space, with wheeled chairs and tables so that groups could shuttle between microclimates at will, a few tears leaked. All of us could have this. Of course, Vienna is far from perfect. You can’t have eco-socialism in one capitalist, European city. But guess what: when the working classes build lasting, creative institutions that raise and spend money well, life is a lot better. And with Vienna’s extraordinary transit and dense housing, per capita carbon emissions are miniscule.

HOME IMPROVEMENT

DANIEL ALDANA COHEN

ten million no-carbon homes TODAY, AMERICAN HOUSING PROJECTS are unjustly

stigmatized, but it’s also true that a lot of it was built on the cheap and badly maintained, turning the ideal of social housing into a symbol of urban decay. Could the United States reverse that damage and achieve anything resembling Red Vienna’s achievements? “Social Housing in the United States,” a report by the People’s Policy Project, a left-wing policy think tank, shows how Vienna, Sweden, and Finland managed to produce such high-quality housing — and how the United States could do the same. Two takeaways stand out. First: quality and financing. With upfront investment and intelligent policy design, you get glorious housing by pricing generous maintenance costs into tenants’ monthly payments. Then, for the poorest tenants, you subsidize out of a separate anti-poverty fund. One column for quality public housing. A second column for abolishing poverty. The other takeaway: speed. In the 1960s, Sweden had about three million housing units. Many were crumbling; plus, they needed more. With some admittedly rough edges, Sweden built one million public homes in ten years. They increased their housing stock by roughly a third in a decade. The ppp proposal is more modest: ten million public housing units in ten years, federally financed and locally implemented with financial structures similar to those used in Vienna and Sweden. The cost? Roughly equivalent to the Trump tax cut. Yes, there would be obstacles. The biggest is local resistance in many of the best places to build. Because much of this housing will help people of color live in mostly white suburbs, locals will rebel. School districts will be battlegrounds. Indeed, white suburbs and leafy 58

urban neighborhoods have long refused public housing developments, violating the Fair Housing Act. But a Green New Deal government would enforce that law, wielding every legal and financial carrot and stick it can muster — and mass mobilization could be the most powerful. Another obstacle is land prices in desirable areas. Here, Vienna’s precedent of punishing real estate taxes is key: flatten speculation, build homes. What’s more, the inevitable local battles that a huge infusion of federal money will bring are actually good — the result is more likely to reflect local groups’ particular needs. No one wants to live in a PowerPoint crudely blocked together in Washington, DC. At first, local battles over implementation will be frustrating. But for the most part, we’re talking about a political context in which millions have clogged the streets to overthrow the political establishment. And it will be easier to mobilize a public housing coalition of angry rent-burdened tenants, racial and housing justice groups, unionized construction workers (and prospective workers), and local politicians who want to get reelected, around massive public investment rather than a measly lihtc tax credit scheme. There’s no substitute for mass mobilization, but there are many rewards. Funding should allow motivated groups to experiment with limited-equity cooperatives and community land trusts, even if much of the new housing would probably be built and governed by local authorities, at least early on. Public homes should also be built in different shapes and sizes, with the program reaching beyond cities and suburban transit nodes into rural areas blighted by poor home quality — from Appalachian towns to indigenous reservations — where local control over design and other details will be essential. We will also need aggressive oversight by auditors, to stamp out opportunism and corruption. From Red Vienna to the New Deal infrastructure programs, keeping public projects clean was key to holding mass support. As noted, democratic neighborhoods anchored by dense, well-connected, public housing are the gold standard of democratic, no-carbon urbanism. Public

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We Need a Green New Deal for Housing

construction standards and smart localization will also make these bulwarks of ruggedness to withstand brutal weather. And their construction would strengthen other Green New Deal staples. A low-carbon housing guarantee is a great fit for a job guarantee. Decarbonizing the economy requires electrifying everything — replacing stoves and water heaters and mastering technologies like home heating pumps that both warm and cool. The best accelerator of buildings’ technological improvement? Smart public procurement. Weatherizing existing homes and

swapping their appliances will be a necessary but tedious slog. A huge home-building program with a net-zero carbon mandate could train and equip tens of thousands of workers in the skills needed to strip carbon from each of the country’s houses, apartments, and offices. You could have a threadbare, patchwork quilt of training programs, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, with baby firms struggling to sell big ideas to luxury homebuilders. Or you could join up federal law, federal money, local social movements, and the world’s best science, engineering, and craft standards. Tough call.

HOME IMPROVEMENT

DANIEL ALDANA COHEN

building the dream YOU MAKE BUILDINGS NO-CARBON by slashing their

energy use and powering what’s left with renewables. But there’s more than just wire linking the public housing ideal and the project of vast public, renewable power. The two are linked by an irresistible dream: ordinary people seizing control of their place in the world. That’s no empty abstraction. Take New York State’s grassroots campaign for a just transition, New York Renews. The coalition was started by environmental justice, labor, and housing organizers after the 2014 People’s Climate March in New York. After focusing for years on environmental justice, these largely housing-oriented organizers knew they had to branch out, connecting to the state’s rural anti-fracking groups, labor unions, and community hubs. Four key leaders took road trips upstate to build the coalition that’s leading the charge for its Green New Deal–style Climate and Community Protection Act. And there’s an obscure but surprisingly strong historical precedent linking social housing and public power. One of New York’s storied socialist cooperative housing complexes was actually designed in homage to Vienna’s Karl Marx Hof, echoing its elaborate masonry and round arches. The Amalgamated Dwellings in New York’s Lower East Side was built for a leftist Jewish textile workers’ union in 1931, to house 236 families. The co-op still stands. The building’s designer, Roland Wank, was inspired by Red Vienna. Remarkably for downtown Manhattan — now and then — the building proper only covers about half of its expensive lot space, devoting the rest to a large, garden-studded courtyard. As I learned during a recent visit with William Rockwell, an architect, resident, and the building’s unofficial 60

historian, even the rooftops were specially designed for dancing and parties. As we discussed the intricate Art Deco stonework, Rockwell insisted, “This is not cost effective. This is about love, making a statement.” From the start, the Dwellings included a library and an open cultural space with a cozy stage for performances, for making the good life together. The multifunctional, airy design links a radical New York tradition to Austria’s labor, socialist, feminist, and public health movements, themselves rooted in the Europe-wide revolt of 1848. Wank was a Hungarian leftist who studied architecture in Budapest and briefly in Vienna, then immigrated to the United States in 1924 to chase new dreams. Shortly after designing the Amalgamated Dwellings, Wank took a job with the New Deal’s Tennessee Valley Authority, which was set up by Franklin D. Roosevelt to break monopolistic and useless private electricity utilities. Wank became the authority’s chief architect. He built celebrated workers’ housing around the country, led the design of several hydroelectric dams, and helped steward the Rural Electrification Administration that brought electric power to tens of millions of Americans through democratic cooperatives (they still operate). Wank’s dams are known for their elegant, monumental, and public-oriented design. Critics were stunned by their beauty. Wank also innovated by establishing visitors’ plazas and sculpting roads for ordinary people to absorb the infrastructure’s glory as they came in to visit. As one obituary put it, Wank “saw to it that [the dams] were approached as one would the Acropolis.” The towns Wank built for workers and people displaced by dams were innovative. One of them, Norris, featured the country’s first green belt. The town also excluded black residents and workers. Wank’s work crystallized all that was good in the New Deal — and all that was rotten. The New Deal didn’t just reproduce Jim Crow, it hardened it. Yet we can reconstruct some of the New Deal’s, and Wank’s, best insights — namely, that experimentation and equality had to run through infrastructure big and small. Abolition democracy, as first articulated

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We Need a Green New Deal for Housing

From the Lower East Side to rural Tennessee, Wank built structures that made socialism’s grand promises monumental, intimate, and useful. by W.E.B. Du Bois in those years, will require even more public power: plentiful no-carbon energy, a truly democratic government, and democratic housing for working people. From the Lower East Side to rural Tennessee, Wank built structures that made socialism’s grand promises monumental, intimate, and useful. Thinking about Wank’s work helps us focus on the ten million public, no-carbon homes’ core premise: climate justice will be visceral. It’s about more than solar photovoltaic cells, healthy rainforests, and plant protein. It’s about how we work and live: the stone, glass, and steel that we shape with our hands to protect us from the elements — and to bind us to their beauty. The politics of climate change and the transformation of the built environment are the same damn thing. And they have a history. There was a bright red line between the street architects who built barricades across Europe in 1848, founding a continent’s socialist and feminist politics, and the arrival of no-carbon hydroelectricity, built by public institutions and delivered by cooperatives, in rural America’s poor heartland. That line curved through the greatest public home-building project of Europe, and the great socialist cooperative tradition of New York City, tracing brick-and-mortar homes and bright green gardens that made the abstract ideals of social equality literally tangible — justice you can run your fingers over. It was, to be sure, a crooked line, a line that divided. It needs to be redrawn with an ambition scarcely imaginable on the Left even a year ago. Ocasio-Cortez’s pivot from housing to climate is coherent: the two challenges are one — and urgent. We

can think huge and act fast, one Herculean decade at a time. In 1941, as Nazis threatened to swallow Europe for good, and the New Deal became a war economy, Roland Wank, the builder of immigrant homes and public power, published a moving essay on architecture as politics. Anticipating today’s mood, he urged his fellow builders to embrace the era’s radical uncertainty, to attack inequalities mercilessly, and to take pleasure “in struggle when the fight is hot and passion runs high.” Seizing the political moment, Wank continued, “is one of the vital experiences that make life worth living.” His essay’s title is a rebuke to his failures, and to the failures of the New Deal, which a Green New Deal must correct. The simple title is also a slogan, a fierce clapback to the critics who want to slow our pace and shrink our desires, who want to nudge the markets we plan to transcend, hoard the power we plan to share, and who scorn the public dream-homes that we’ll build for our resplendent survival: “Nowhere to go but forward.” ■

HOME IMPROVEMENT

Samuel Stein

THE ZONE DEFENSE What we need isn’t exclusionary zoning, inclusionary zoning, upzoning, downzoning, a zoning freeze, or no zoning at all. We need an anticapitalist planning movement.

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The Zone Defense

Some of the most militant housing actions I have ever witnessed arose in opposition to buildings that don’t yet exist. I have seen occupations, disruptions, and even physical fights break out in order to halt state approvals for development projects. While it might seem a bit abstract to raise a ruckus in the present over construction in the future, everyone involved — from protesters to politicians to developers — understands the stakes. The fight over housing is about both what is there and what isn’t: the cost of living in existing buildings, and the price of future developments. The pace and price of residential construction affects everything else in an area, from sewers and transit to taxes and schools. The rules guiding future development are therefore crucial to fights over both present and future housing conditions. The way we make such decisions is known as planning. It is both the vision we have for our cities and towns, and the way we seek to implement it. There are many long-standing traditions of urban planning around the world, as practiced by both utopian socialists and cut-throat capitalists. Planning can be robust and seek comprehensive approaches to addressing the entire urban ecosystem, from physical development to environmental protection, or it can be narrow and carve out a limited role for government and a greater role for capital. Housing has long been a central concern for urban planners, from industrial revolution-era building safety codes to mid-century public housing projects. In recent years, one particular planning tool has grown to outsized influence, and become almost a substitute for the entire practice of residential planning. Zoning — a set of rules that regulate future

development — is the most important way many municipalities shape their cities. This is especially true in places like Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, and others that have experienced a wave of new investment. Entrepreneurial mayors have seized on zoning as a way to make a permanent mark on their cities’ skylines. Community organizers have used zoning and

HOME IMPROVEMENT

SAMUEL STEIN

the public process around it as tools to fight gentrification, by either trying to stop zoning changes that would encourage luxury development, or by using rezoning to incentivize low-income housing construction or protect working-class communities. The rezonings many mayors are pushing, though vast in scale, cannot be mistaken for comprehensive plans; they are, in fact, more often abdications of planning to the market. Rezonings set limits for development in some places and channel it toward others, but rarely create new physical spaces or social policies. Sometimes zoning has been bent toward those goals as a shortcut, with detailed plans for particular projects or anti-harassment tenant protections written into the zoning code. In most cases, however, zoning is less a plan than a parameter — a framework within which private development does or does not take place in the future.

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The Zone Defense

THEIR CODE AND OURS Zoning determines what kind of buildings can go where, and at what size. In the traditional model, different types of activities are divided up into various “use types”: residential, commercial, industrial, recreational, and so on. Areas, and even individual lots, can be used for more than one thing at a time, but the zoning code allows the state to detach these uses as desired. The classic justification for separating uses is industry and housing: no one should have to live next to a smoke-belching factory. But the separation of uses has roots in less altruistic impulses. In 1885, the country’s first zoning code was introduced in Modesto, California, and it used bans on laundries to exclude Chinese workers and families from the most desirable areas of the city. About forty years later, New York City instituted zoning after high-end Fifth Avenue merchants lobbied the city to zone out manufacturing. Their goal was less to protect health and welfare than to prevent Jewish garment workers from walking down their streets and scaring away their patrician customers. Ten years after New York, Birmingham, Alabama used zoning to lock in residential segregation, producing a zoning code geographer Bobby Wilson calls “one of the most overt expressions of white supremacy ever put into law in the twentieth century.” In addition to separating uses, zoning also limits the height and bulk of future buildings. This can be set in any number of ways and, like the separation of uses, can be done for a number of purposes: a plain and simple height cap can be put over a district, limiting how tall new buildings can be; a more flexible

system can allow virtually unlimited height, as long as buildings are set back to allow for light and air to pass through their lots; limits can be placed on new buildings based on the size and shape of neighboring properties, in order to encourage continuity; built forms can be mandated to increase or limit the space between buildings, and between structures and the street; a “bonus” can be offered to developers, allowing them to build more if they provide a desired feature, such as cheaper housing or open space; an allowance can be included for property owners to sell “air rights” — or the theoretically developable space above and around a structure — from one building to another, which can then build taller than is otherwise allowed; “special districts” can be created that have their own rules, often straying far from the limits of traditional zoning into areas like landscape design or tenant protections. Many cities have experimented with each of these approaches, sometimes all at once. Over the years, zoning has become quite complex, keeping an army of development lobbyists, technical experts, corporate consultants, and land-use lawyers employed. When

HOME IMPROVEMENT

SAMUEL STEIN

New York City’s zoning code was created in 1916, it was 85 pages long. When it was revamped in 1961, the new resolution was 539 pages. Since then, another 3,436 pages of amendments have been added. In New York today, there are about 150 different zoning types in use around the city. Under these circumstances, developers looking to build have two choices. First, they can design a structure that fits the existing zoning rules. This is called “as of right” development. There is essentially no public process required for this type of construction, and as a result tenants have very little input on or leverage over what gets built. If a developer wants to build a fifty-story luxury condominium in an area that allows that sort of thing, little short of direct action or lawsuits will stop it. The other type of development, however, involves building outside the zoning code’s constraints. That would mean either designing something bigger than permitted or proposing something other than the allowed use — like a condo complex in an area zoned for manufacturing.

Fights against exclusionary zoning, like the long legal battle in New York’s suburban Westchester County that has lasted since the 1980s, aim to integrate neighborhoods and mandate that new housing be affordable to more potential residents.

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The Zone Defense

In order to do this, the developer has to seek a variance from the city. Lawyers and planning consultants are brought in to make the case that the city’s zoning code should be changed on one particular lot in order to accommodate whatever it is the developer wants to build. This gives people an opportunity to protest, however, and say that they do not want the project to go through. Plenty of times this works, and the developer has to revise or discard their plans. It can be an expensive and time-consuming process, and is therefore something for-profit developers generally seek to avoid. If they can get an entire neighborhood rezoned to their liking, however, they will be able to build whatever they want without having to bother with any sort of pesky public process. Drawing out rezoning is an extremely complicated legal and political terrain. People spend years studying land-use planning and law to truly master its intricacies and quirks. It is also a terrible bore — not many people would voluntarily subject themselves to countless hours of debate over the merits of c6-2a zoning versus r8a. Yet the zoning code is one of the most important legal

documents in a city for both activists and real estate investors because it sets the rules for new development. It is, however, a highly imperfect vehicle for housing politics. What activists tend to care most about is the price of housing; what the zoning process is designed to adjudicate, however, is the size and use of buildings. The system thus encourages housing activists of all stripes to expend a great deal of energy arguing over housing densities as a proxy for housing costs. In suburban contexts — including the outer stretches of most cities — the zoning code is often written to allow only large lots for single-family homes. This helps lock in high land values as the only things that can be built are big expensive houses. Smaller and more affordable homes are outlawed, as are apartment buildings or any other kind of low-cost multifamily dwelling. This practice is known as “exclusionary zoning” because it keeps out a wide swath of people who will never be able to afford homes of these sizes. Combined with a regressive tax code that rewards large landholders and owners of multiple homes, exclusionary zoning perpetuates intergenerational

HOME IMPROVEMENT

SAMUEL STEIN

When New York City’s zoning code was created in 1916, it was 85 pages long. Now it’s over 3,500 pages.

wealth, racial inequality, and spatial segregation. It helps wealthy neighborhoods stay wealthy and offers them an ample tax base for extensive and exclusive public services — particularly schools. In the United States, many of these zoning codes correspond with New Deal-era and postwar racist housing policies. The era of mass suburbanization was sparked by a series of initiatives meant to standardize the home loan industry, increase homeownership, depress worker militancy, and spur employment in construction and related industries. Some of the most important programs were led by Roosevelt’s Federal Housing Administration (fha), which, among other things, insured mortgages for those who otherwise would not receive them. As part of this program, the fha wrote guidelines for banks that dictated what type of residential communities they wanted financed. Following real estate industry “best practices,” the fha 68

preferred: new construction; space between properties; and, more than anything else, racial segregation. Neighborhoods with African Americans and recent immigrants were coded unsafe for investment and redlined (shaded red on maps to signal their planned decline). Meanwhile, white families were offered subsidized mortgages for housing in new suburban districts. Undoing these laws was a crucial part of the mid-century Civil Rights Movement, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made many of these practices illegal. But while explicit rules to segregate housing by race were outlawed, exclusionary zoning has kept many of these places almost entirely white. Fights against exclusionary zoning, like the long legal battle in New York’s suburban Westchester County that has lasted since the 1980s, aim to integrate neighborhoods and mandate that new housing be affordable to more potential residents.

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The Zone Defense

WHAT INCLUSIONARY ZONING CAN’T DO

As campaigns against exclusionary zoning continue, many cities are turning toward what sounds like its opposite: “inclusionary zoning.” This program encourages private developers to build some amount of income-targeted apartments along with their luxury developments. The program varies from place to place: in some instances, developers must put their affordable apartments inside expensive new buildings; in others, the affordable units can be built elsewhere; in still other examples, developers must pay into a city-run affordable housing fund. Often cities use a combination of these strategies. New York City, for example, has allowed all three. Proponents of inclusionary zoning argue that these schemes will undo years of racial and economic segregation and create new housing for those least served by the private market. Unless it is attached to other subsidies, it costs the city nothing and passes the burden of affordable housing production onto those who benefit most from gentrification — real estate developers. Critics, meanwhile, tend to focus on the low number of cheap apartments these programs actually create. Most of the time, their affordable units are just a small fraction of new development. In New York City from 2005 to 2013, affordable apartments built through inclusionary zoning accounted for just 1.7 percent of new housing growth. Detractors also question the term “affordable” and ask: “affordable to whom?” Buckingham Palace, after all, is affordable to the royals. Often the income targets for these inclusionary zones are higher than the neighborhood average, and far from the greatest need. Sometimes the affordable apartments actually turn out to be as expensive or more than market-rate apartments in a given neighborhood. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s new and improved inclusionary zoning scheme, for example, allows the “affordable” housing in some neighborhoods to go to people

making 115 percent of the area median income — an “area” that includes not just the neighborhood, or the city, but the entire metropolitan area (including wealthy suburbs with exclusionary zoning). These are legitimate criticisms, but there is a more fundamental issue. In most iterations, inclusionary zoning is triggered by an upzoning — or an increase in development capacity — in areas already at risk of gentrification. This creates a windfall profit for affected landowners, who are then allowed to build something big and glitzy with far more rent-producing units than whatever stands on their lots today. Even without doing a thing, they can sell the land for a great deal more than it was worth prior to the rezoning, thus speculating off the value the city has gifted them. Supportive planners will argue that inclusionary zoning allows them to “recapture” some of this value, but that framework ignores the impact of such changes on the wider neighborhood. When luxury development is encouraged in low-income neighborhoods, the value of surrounding properties rises too, and along with it the rents. Long-term tenants as well as low-income migrants then suffer from either higher rent burdens — the percentage of incomes paid to rent — or displacement to another neighborhood, another city, or another region entirely. Ultimately, inclusionary zoning is a real estate strategy, not a social program. It is part of a larger turn away from public housing or even public subsidy and toward market-based planning strategies. It neither decomodifies housing nor limits landlord power. In response to these pressures, many tenants promote downzoning, or reducing development capacity in their area, as a strategy to ward off speculative developers. In the right settings, and when paired with other pro-tenant policies, this can work: it limits the amount new developers can build, and incentivizes landlords to preserve their existing structures because any new building they put up would have to be smaller than what is there today. But downzoning can also drive up property values, since buildings built to the old, higher zoning suddenly become highly prized possessions. Such buildings can then sell for more and command higher rents. Downzoning alone, then, cannot ensure long-term housing stability or affordability for working-class tenants.

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SAMUEL STEIN

TAMING THE MARKET

If, under these conditions , both upzoning and downzoning can spur rent hikes, what is to be done? Libertarians will contend that it would be in tenants’ best interest to eliminate zoning altogether. They claim that all zoning does is limit development, thereby constraining the supply of housing and raising its price. In a highly speculative market, however, simply increasing the housing supply doesn’t automatically reduce costs. From 2014 to 2017, new residential construction in New York City — to take one example — kept pace with population growth but was matched by an almost equal number of newly vacant investment properties: vertical safe-deposit boxes and money-laundering devices. Meanwhile, working-class tenants’ rent burdens continued to rise precipitously. “Unleashing the power of the market” is as vacuous an idea in housing as it is in any other realm. If eliminating zoning is not the answer, neither is preserving existing conditions in perpetuity. The kinds of rezonings on offer are almost always those that raise property values and drive up rents, and therefore must be militantly contested. But that doesn’t mean our existing zoning codes, crafted largely to safeguard

real estate capital and preserve generational wealth, are worthy of defense. We can’t fall into the trap of defending an untenable status quo solely because our opponents want to change it. The answer to this crisis is not exclusionary zoning, inclusionary zoning, upzoning, downzoning, a zoning freeze, or no zoning at all. The problem is an overreliance on zoning — a tool ill-equipped to confront the private land and property markets — and the solution is a popular movement for anticapitalist urban planning and the decommodification of land and housing. A socialist system might use zoning as one tool among many to shape future construction, but it would not need to rely on zoning as a bank-shot mechanism to regulate the cost of housing. Zoning itself is a rather weak means for low-cost housing production and retention, especially when compared to classic methods: public housing, particularly, but also rent control and community land trusts. We need plans in place to preserve housing for the poor and working class, and ensure that new construction meets our needs as we define them. The Left can’t avoid zoning fights: zoning is too central to cities’ gentrification strategies and suburbs’ exclusion strategies to ignore. But we must remember that zoning is just the beginning — not the end — of our struggle. We need real planning, and we need to build popular power to control planning’s parameters. ■

If eliminating zoning is not the answer, neither is preserving existing conditions in perpetuity.

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cultural capital

ANTONIO GRAMSCI DIED FOR OUR SINS — AND SO YOU COULD MISQUOTE HIM.

CULTURAL CAPITAL RED CHANNELS

BY POLINA GODZ

The Irony of Soviet Modernism

How a 1975 blockbuster satirized the spread of a typical high-rise.

her arrogant and jealous boyfriend, the two fall in love.

If you ask anyone who grew up in a Russian-speaking household they would tell you that the most famous Soviet movie isn’t anything by Sergei Eisenstein or Andrei Tarkovsky, but instead a two-part romcom. Eldar Ryazanov’s 1975 blockbuster, The Irony of Fate (or Enjoy Your Bath!), has a plot that hinges on the uniformity of modernist Soviet housing. Zhenya Lukashin, the main character, is about to get married, so he and his friends get blackout drunk in a bathhouse. But they forget which one of them is supposed to take a plane to

Leningrad that night. They decide it’s likely Zhenya, who wakes up a few hours later in a taxi taking him to his Moscow address (in Leningrad). So uniform is the city planning in the movie that in an absurdist twist his key ends up unlocking the flat. Soon after, Nadya who actually lives in the apartment arrives, only to find hapless (and pantless) Zhenya in her bed muttering comments about the rearranged furniture. After bickering about who the apartment in fact belongs to (the correct answer is “the state”), a few rude remarks about Nadya’s cooking and an encounter with № 33 / SPRING 2019

It’s a lovely ending, but the opening of The Irony of Fate is even more striking. It’s a three-minute animation, drawn by Vitaliy Peskov, with a plot of its own. It begins with a suit-clad architect finishing a sketch of a few neoclassical buildings, adorned with moldings, arches, and multiple columns. One by one these decorative elements fall off as the number of approving signatures goes up. The final design is that of a solitary modernist high-rise that then comes alive and starts its march around the planet, multiplying in cinematic fades. But though the cartoon reflects the reality of its decade, that of urban planning previously tested in capital cities rapidly spreading across diverse landscapes, it does an injustice to the ambitious scale of Soviet modernism and its idealistic, creative vision. In his first year as premier, Nikita Khrushchev addressed the construction professionals “on the need to implement industrial methods, increase the quality and

A typical five-story building of the 1-468 series.

diminish the cost of construction.” To him, housing was an undeniable priority, and he had to grapple with two factors unique to the Soviet Union. First, war damage was still significant throughout Soviet cities, some of them completely demolished, offering an urban blank canvas that needed to be filled fast and cheap. The Stalinist architecture with its taste for pomp and grandeur wouldn’t work, but the International Congress of Modern Architecture (ciam) experiments in France and Holland espoused the simplicity and honesty of construction that Khrushchev could relate to. Second, Khrushchev’s mass amnesty of prisoners released thousands from the labor camps who were now rushing to cities in search of work. As the first step towards his ambitious housing goal, Khrushchev oversaw the creation of the new infrastructure for building mass-produced modular housing. One of the most famous high-rise designs, k-7, commonly referred to as “khrushchyovka,” could be put together from a few dozen parts. While Khrushchev was no art connoisseur (just as much as he loved modernist architecture, he hated abstract art), in no time he became the most influential Soviet architect. The rationality and lack of excess that characterized this new approach excited designers who worked on the

project, many of whom had a background in constructivism. Based on the numbers alone Khrushchev’s housing provision could be considered one of the most influential modernist undertakings: it almost doubled the living space per person in the country. In terms of aesthetics, there were still lots of bureaucratic hoops to jump through. On top of the impracticality of custom designs, the project operated under a strict set of standards. What made the effort’s scope possible also stifled some of the artistic expression within it. However, while it might have limited the creativity of architects on the level of individual buildings, it shifted the vision towards whole neighborhoods, or microdistricts,

as they came to be known, as operating units, where unique arrangements of public spaces and parks sparked a creative outpouring. The new urban design was that of spaces in between. This is also where the Moscow conceptual art movement largely took place. Artists Andrei Monastyrski, Irina Nakhova, and Dmitri Prigov, who moved to the new housing early on, poked fun at their uniform urban environment, but were also heavily inspired by it. A lot of the artwork produced at the time relied on repetition and played with the uniformity and reproducibility as its key elements. The installations and performances featured instructions and guidelines. A lot of poets and visual artists spoke fondly of the

Dmitri Prigov’s poetry on the side of his house in the Belyayevo district of Moscow.

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the lack of diversity in housing with the lack of diversity in lifestyles, a metaphor not uncommon for the period’s art, but it doesn’t blame the misfortune of its characters — who end up apart, eventually returning to their regular lives — on their housing. Quite the opposite; if not for the housing mishap the two would have never realized how mundane their lives and relationships were. The movie also gives one a glimpse at what a typical Soviet apartment looked like — a small but tasteful one bedroom that each of the characters (a doctor and a school teacher) could occupy on their own. When I showed The Irony of Fate to my American friends, many expressed jealousy at those living arrangements. In fact, the availability of housing allows for the dramatic turn of events in which Nadya leaves her possessive boyfriend and spends the night with Zhenya, singing about love, the meaning of life, and private property (one of the songs famously goes “Think for yourself, decide for yourself — to have it or not to have”).

Stills from Afonya (1975), top, and Autumn Marathon (1979), bottom, by Georgiy Daneliya.

geometric compositions and the vastness of the space between the buildings even if sometimes in a cheeky way. The Irony of Fate is similar to the absurdist art of its time in that it both satirizes the typical housing block and relies on it for plot development. In a way it conflates

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Other Soviet classics are also set in a typical Soviet housing block, reflecting the reality of many people’s lives. For instance, Autumn Marathon and Afonya by Georgiy Daneliya (also famous for his anticapitalist alien dystopia that looks like Burning Man and includes an invented language, Kin-Dza-Dza), extensively feature the housing complexes that they are set in. They dwell on the vastness

Still from The Fool (2014) by Yuri Bykov.

of spaces between the buildings to the point of romanticizing them. If there was one thing I heard from people who actually lived in similar districts, it’s that the wastelands that developed between the blocks were perhaps not as pleasant to less artistically inclined souls. While it became common for the courtyards and throughways to house informally built garages in the last decades of the Soviet Union, with the arrival of capitalism these spaces were quickly turned into vending opportunities. From shopping malls and small kiosks dotting the landscape to large advertisements stretched across the sides of towering high-rises, the stark Soviet neighborhoods became a set for capitalist growth.

Image courtesy of Kuba Snopek, first published in the book Belyayevo Forever: Preserving the Generic.

While the original designs of these neighborhoods were meticulously planned to have a school and a clinic within walking distance of each inhabitant, as well as public transport and cultural institutions easily accessible to all, some of these districts saw new exclusive schools and private clinics sprout recently for those who can afford them, dividing formerly united neighborhoods. With the housing privatized and the salaries and pensions of those who still live in aging apartments low, maintenance has also been easily overlooked. With the rise of crime in the ’90s, the overgrown wastelands of the residential districts, especially those on the outskirts of the cities, became dangerous. These conditions feature prominently in some more recent films that are set in a typical Soviet housing block — Everybody Dies But Me, Loveless, a recent Best Foreign Picture nominee, and The Fool. The latter centers the grave state of disrepair of a high-rise in an unnamed town and the moral dilemma of a municipal plumber, Dima, who notices a fissure in the wall and choses to help the inhabitants despite being told over and over again that each is on their own. The movie clashes personal responsibility with the corrupt government authorities and HOME IMPROVEMENT

ill-spirited individualism in a highstakes drama. Whereas in The Irony of Fate housing provides a crucial setting, in The Fool it becomes a central actor endangering the lives of and appealing to the worst instincts in its inhabitants. It is truly an irony for the ages that Khrushchev’s housing provision, one of the most egalitarian and successful projects of its time, is increasingly associated with the life-threatening conditions, largely a result of neoliberal deregulation and increasing inequality. The Fool is a heartbreaking movie that raises the question of how to preserve people’s homes, most of which are now over fifty years old, when most of them are privatized. A recent book published by the Strelka Institute for Media, Urban Studies and Architecture makes a case for designating some of the Soviet microdistricts as unesco heritage sites. Its author, Kuba Snopek, posits that while physical buildings as such might not meet the conditions for preservation, it is the cultural expression that was inspired and set in the Soviet microdistricts that ought to be preserved. “What,” he wonders, “if every house had a plaque that said ‘This is where Nadya (or Zhenya) lived?’” ■

CULTURAL CAPITAL BASS & SUPERSTRUCTURE

BY LOREN BALHORN

Kreuzberg Against the Machine How the West Berlin squatter scene produced Germany’s greatest rock band.

If you’ve ever studied at a German university you’ve probably witnessed some kind of “occupation.” In most of these rather curious spectacles several hundred indignant students refuse to leave a lecture hall until their demands are met, while wizened administrators humor them for a few hours before they trickle home and things return to normal.

someone inevitably puts on the music of Ton Steine Scherben, the West Berlin rock band whose 1972 double lp Keine Macht für Niemand (“No Power for Nobody”) is a both a pop music treasure and an angry broadside against the status quo, delivered with an earnestness and enthusiasm that would make most listeners cringe if recorded today.

Both sides know the drill. One working group drafts a mission statement, another cooks food (probably vegan), and the police wait outside annoyed. Over the course of any occupation

The album was a milestone for rock music performed in the German language and remains popular to this day. But what makes it particularly unique (and explains its exuberant

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sloganeering) is the environment from which it emerged: West Germany’s militant squatter movement in the early 1970s. Occupying or squatting public space (the German word Besetzung makes no distinction) lives on in the country’s activist repertoire as a throwback to when the tactic was widespread and much better organized. The eccentric but highly resourceful movement began as an aftershock of 1968, as thousands of youth occupied public buildings and empty apartments to build their own communes, day cares, and cultural institutions. The creation of a sprawling counterculture in many West German cities was necessitated by the simple fact that while young people in the late 1960s were caught up in a cultural revolution, West German workers had it fairly good and weren’t particularly inclined to socialize the means of

Ton Steine Scherben concert in the Technical University hours before the occupation. Jutta Matthess / Umbruch Bildarchiv.

production. Disappointed by the tedium of proletarian militancy, many self-styled revolutionaries opted for the more attractive route of moving to the inner city, living communally, and organizing young workers influenced by ideas emanating from the campuses. Though largely cut off from mainstream society, these new communities were so extensive that for participants it understandably felt like they were building a new world street by street.

“Our Aesthetic Is Political Effectiveness” One of the most dynamic squatter scenes was in the West Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg. West Berlin in the 1970s was a special place. Life was cheap. Big capital had more or less abandoned nato’s island behind the Iron Curtain, and government subsidies along with a draft exemption (West Berlin was not technically part of the Federal Republic) made it a haven for rebels and dropouts. Kreuzberg, a run-down working-class neighborhood bordering the Berlin Wall, soon became a magnet for Turkish immigrants, low-wage workers, and growing numbers of students fleeing their suburban lives for the grit and excitement of the divided city. The Kreuzberg youth movement was chaotic. One protagonist,

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Lothar Binger, acknowledged in his memoirs that most activists were driven by “a sheer act of will to get involved in some kind of political praxis” and had practically no theoretical training. Serious organizing overlapped with more questionable initiatives like the “Central Council of Vagabond Hash Rebels,” a band of dope-smoking political outlaws who robbed banks at gunpoint and handed the cash to left-wing groups, while propagating the “consciousnessexpanding” qualities of illicit drugs within the movement. A leading Hash Rebel was the professor’s son Georg von Rauch, after whom Berlin’s most legendary squat and one of Ton Steine Scherben’s most popular songs, the “Rauch-Haus-Song,” would be named in 1971. The young rebels’ opposition to the status quo was total, their fight as much against the boss and US imperialism as it was against

BASS & SUPERSTRUCTURE

Inside the Occupied Bethanien Jutta Matthess / Umbruch Bildarchiv.

the stultifying norms of their parents’ generation. Political protest overlapped with new clothing styles, drug use, and exciting new music from abroad prompting an explosion of creative expression. That explosion formed the raw material from which Ton Steine Scherben crafted their unique sound. The band saw their music, which they called “agitrock,” as a tool in the political struggle. In a manifesto published shortly after their founding, they argued that rock music should be straightforward and enjoyable, with lyrics that young workers could relate and sing along to. “We don’t need an aesthetic,” they wrote, “our aesthetic is political effectiveness.”

Burning Down the Haus Then, as now, one of the most pressing issues affecting the people of Berlin was space. Most young workers lived with their parents in cramped, run-down apartments well into their twenties. Coal heating and shared bathrooms were the norm. Rents in Kreuzberg nearly quadrupled between 1962 and 1972, and following a series of large developments on the city’s fringes, urban planners looked to build in the center to save on infrastructural costs. Demolition of old housing stock and its replacement with modern high-rises was widely seen as the solution. Landlords responded by neglecting their properties, speculating that the city would soon

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buy them out to build something new anyway. Though the new developments promised modern, improved living conditions, they were often twice as expensive and unattainable. For a lot of people in Kreuzberg, modernization amounted to little more than gentrification imposed by the welfare state. It was in this tense atmosphere that the Bethanien hospital, an impressive nineteenth-century Rundbogenstil building, closed and was sold to the city in 1970. Kreuzberg’s youth movement wanted the building for its own purposes, while the municipality hoped to house community institutions or build social housing on the land. The government was willing to listen to squatters’ demands, but over time many

Kreuzberg Against the Machine

grew frustrated with the pace of negotiations and agitated for more radical steps. This illustrates a characteristic typical of squatting in West Germany: often, conflicts were just as much with private developers as with Social Democratic administrations. At the same time, the state’s relatively tolerant stance toward squatters certainly helped the movement flourish as long as it did, and permitted institutions like Bethanien to survive until today. After a first successful occupation in July 1971, Kreuzberg’s squatters set their sights on the hospital. The atmosphere in the city had grown particularly hot after Georg von Rauch was killed in a shoot-out with police on December 4. Seeing a chance to weaponize their music for political aims, Ton Steine Scherben called for an occupation of Bethanien during their concert at the Technical University on December 8. Lead singer Rio Reiser later recounted that the groundskeeper, an old Communist, secretly switched on the power in the dormitory adjacent to the main building earlier that evening. When the concert ended hundreds of fans charged across the city, occupied the hospital dormitory, and dubbed it the “Georgvon-Rauch-Haus” in honor of their fallen Hash Rebel. A tense standoff with police ensued, but the squatters ultimately stayed put and have occupied the

building ever since. Rio Reiser wrote the lyrics to the “Rauch-HausSong” that very night, and ten months later the band released Keine Macht für Niemand. The title track, a staple at any lefty gathering, was originally commissioned as an anthem for the underground terrorists of the Red Army Faction.

In 1973 there were 69 autonomous youth centers in Germany; three years later, there were 272.

Energized by their Kreuzberg success, the Scherben decided to turn every concert into a “spontaneous” occupation and spent the next few years touring the country and inspiring new squats. In 1973 there were 69 autonomous youth centers in Germany; three years later, there were 272. By the mid-1970s the band was exhausted and broke (most

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squatters expected them to play for free) and moved to a commune in the country. Their music grew more esoteric and turned away from the militant politics of their Kreuzberg days. Some members later campaigned for the Social Democrats and the Greens, but Rio Reiser’s early death from alcoholism in 1996 prevented him from witnessing his comrades take their place at the helm of the German state. Nearly fifty years later, Keine Macht für Niemand stands out as a remarkable work of popular culture. After all, making political (let alone revolutionary) music that doesn’t sound embarrassing is impressive in any language — doing it in German, not exactly known for its righteous jams, seems almost impossible. This fact was not lost on their fans, either. An icon of West Berlin counterculture in his own right, Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld once called Ton Steine Scherben “the only German embodiment of the rock music idea.” That may be true, and the band was certainly one of a kind, but creativity never emerges in a vacuum. Arguably it was not the Scherben who embodied the idea of rock music so much as the frenzied, chaotic explosion of the squatter movement itself. Their utopia didn’t last long, but for a brief, brilliant moment they showed that given the right political conditions (and maybe the right drugs), even Germans could make cool music. ■

CULTURAL CAPITAL WAYS OF SEEING

BY OWEN HATHERLEY

Rebuilding the Social City To solve the housing crisis, we may have to go back to the future.

One of the most frequently heard solutions to the housing crisis was summed up by the British urbanism portal CityMetric in the slogan “Build More Bloody Houses.” For sure, there will have to be new bloody houses in any socialist approach to a problem that neoliberalism has quite deliberately fostered. But even leaving aside the question of why builders don’t build more bloody houses (it’s often much more profitable not to), we need to ask other questions. What kind of houses do we want? Where do we want them? And what should they be like to live in? 80

The products offered by the building industry are geared towards the maximization of profit for landowners and developers, and most of the typologies we see around us — from the “stunning developments” on British riversides and the “executive estates” in the suburbs, the pencil towers of Manhattan to the McMansions in the exurbs — are the products of greed, closing off the enormous architectural and design possibilities. So, if these tedious, flashy, and mean options aren’t enough, what can we do instead?

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One of the most obvious places to look for this answer is in the legacy of housing provision embarked on by reforming governments in Europe in the twentieth century, whether built by the socialdemocratic municipalities of its west or state-socialist regimes to the east. In both cases, there was a serious attempt at freeing architecture and planning from the grip of landlordism, and housing was built that was in nearly all cases superior to what the private market had provided for workers. There was also an enormous faith that technology by itself could sort out economic and social problems and, often, a disinterest in much other than getting stuff built fast. But while the Soviet Union, East Germany, Scotland, or France almost solved their housing problems at the cost of creating enormous and homogeneous factory-built dormitories, other aspects of social-democratic

Residential Park Alt-Erlaa in Vienna Harry Glück, Requat & Reinthaller & Partner, Kurt Hlaweniczka ( 1985).

or state-socialist housing have endured more successfully. In that category, we could put the stunning housing legacies of Vienna, where housing was revolutionized three times over — first in the 1920s, with the construction projects of the Red Vienna period, second in the luxurious communal provision of 1970s housing estates like Alt-Erlaa, with its hanging gardens and rooftop swimming pools, and third in the 1990s, in the explicitly feminist social planning of the Frauen-Werk-Stadt. We could add to that the “Million Program” of 1960s Sweden, which was a rare example of mass production being put to humane uses, with woodlands and parklands running through idyllically landscaped houses and flats; the combination of the sublime and the intimate in Yugoslavia’s Brutalist housing complexes, like New Belgrade and Split 3; and the communes and

Narkomfin Communal Appartments in Moscow Moisei Ginzburg & Ignatii Milinis ( 1928–1929).

workers’ clubs of the Soviet Union’s first decade, like the Narkomfin communal house. Contemporary models present a much more difficult question. Is there anything being designed now — or in the last decade — that gives some hint of what a revived form of socialist living could be like? There are a few to which we can still point. In Britain, the most celebrated designer of housing in the last few years has been the architect Peter Barber, who since the early 2000s has been mostly designing HOME IMPROVEMENT

for Housing Associations, the charitable bodies that have provided most of the nonmarket housing built in Britain since the 1980s. These owe their ancestry to the charities, like the Peabody Trust, that were set up as a form of noblesse oblige for the “deserving poor” in the Victorian era. In this particular case it was literally an effort by George Peabody to keep himself out of hell after his death (the demise of this fear may explain the lack of enthusiasm today’s plutocrats have for providing social housing).

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Donnybrook Quarter in London Peter Barber Architects (2006).

Housing Associations were a major New Labour enthusiasm, and tend to partner with big developers, offering a fig leaf of “affordable” housing, often to replace demolished public housing. However, within these strictures, there’s no doubt that Barber’s work has been humane and innovative, in a “sector” where the Housing Association flats have often been afterthoughts shoved in at the back end of prestige schemes. Looking at them casually, Barber’s estates can appear quite retro — tributes to the golden era of social design. Donnybrook Quarter, a low-rise street-block covered in icing-sugar-like white render, recalls the De Stijl housing of 1920s Rotterdam. Worland Gardens in East London and Pegasus Court in the north of the capital both partake of the monumental scale of “Red Vienna,” with grand colonnades and archways. But looked at more closely, there are

two major differences. One is the diversity of the plans of the flat types, no longer based on a single nuclear family module, but reflecting the many different sizes and needs of families; this diversity is reflected in the complex sections of his blocks and terraces. The other is the primacy of the street, rather than the semipublic courtyards and greens that usually dominate social housing. Influenced by the Marxist critic Marshall Berman, Barber explicitly tries to combine the abstraction of modernist design and the popular theater of the street. Also driven by Housing Associations is much of the recent social housing in Vienna, which is also one of the only European capitals that hasn’t started dismantling its legacy of noncapitalist housing. One example is the Sonnwendviertel, a housing scheme completed in 2014 near the recently reconstructed

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Hauptbahnhof, their individual blocks sharing space around a public garden linked by walkways and skyways. One block, designed by Studio Vlay, has within it a farmer’s market and a cinema for residents. The little things that are so often done badly in “Anglo-Saxon” economies, with their “value engineering” and their Private Finance Initiatives, are exquisite, like the smooth, poured concrete stairwells leading to the flats and the cinema, with seats molded into the structure. These sorts of meticulous details, like the social facilities in the estate, are usually the preserve of luxury flats, high-end speculative housing. “One-third of the apartments were given out directly through the city of Vienna,” Studio Vlay architect Lina Streeruwitz told me. “There you can apply for each project and on a certain day you will be offered up to three apartments via an internet platform.

Rebuilding the Social City

Since there are a lot of people on the list, it is a kind of lottery. The rest of the apartments are allocated through the housing association, in personal meetings and according to waiting lists based on a first-come, first-served principle — although this process is not very transparent.” But unlike most opaque public bureaucracies, which have been successfully retooled to serve the interests of capital, running the punitive and skeletal remains of a welfare state, Vienna Council still manages to expand rather than restrict its social provision. Similarly, the new city extension at Aspern, now underway, shows a still thriving social housing system at work. Unlike in Britain or the United States, impressive

public spaces — squares, greens, and streets — were not gated, chopped up, or surveilled by cctv cameras, but threaded together, both intimate and collective. Walkways and multiple levels constantly create views of the estate and vistas of the distant inner-city skyline; most blocks have swimming pools on their roofs. A u-Bahn connection was built before the housing was even occupied. Some of the public spaces were for residents only, and as with Peter Barber’s work, the blocks follow an easily definable “street” pattern, with shops on the ground floor, but these were alongside abundant and clever public spaces to explore. Whereas these schemes can be seen as continuations of

Courtyard inside Sonnwendviertel in Vienna Studio Vlay (2012–2014)..

traditional social-democratic housing, in a context where it is more dismantled than extended, others try and redress two things which are often considered to have been lacking in how social democrats built. Rather than housing being constructed by large public or semipublic institutions and allocated via waiting list, they offer a more prefigurative, directdemocratic approach to ownership and management; and while a lot of twentieth-century housing was the result of mass production and far from eco-construction techniques (lots of steel and concrete), much of the more interesting housing being built today goes in the opposite direction, using renewable materials. Both of these can limit the accessibility

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of this as mass housing — that is, eco-housing and cooperative housing tends to go to those already in the know. But there is still a lot that the Left can learn from it; and in Berlin, for instance, the selforganized Baugruppen have by now built quite substantial enclaves of nonprofit housing. Britain has a surprisingly important role in these movements, historically; one of its great inspirations is the experiments launched by the London Borough of Lewisham in the 1980s, where a modular wood construction system devised by the émigré modernist Walter Segal was put in the hands of working-class residents, on local authority-owned land. There has been little on the same scale since, but there are exceptions. The lilac (ahem — “Low Impact Living Affordable Community”) housing estate in Leeds, for instance, completed a few years ago, designed by architects White Design, is a genuinely convincing model, not just because of its cooperative ownership and sustainable construction techniques (packed straw bales in a timber frame, with solar panels heating the water) but because it’s big. Several two-story blocks and a communal tea room have deep balconies overlooking an attractively overgrown green square (open to the public) with a pond in the middle and allotments round the back. The design, meanwhile, avoids the embarrassing techno-hippy aesthetics so common in the genre for a simple modernist grid. As a result, it doesn’t feel like an enclave, somewhere where the cognoscenti

gets to live decently, but a logical and serious proposal for housing which could, and should, be rolled out everywhere. These schemes give hints of what newly built housing could be more like; but for various reasons — not least the wastefulness of demolition and the ecological and financial cost of much new construction — we’ll need to refurbish a lot of what exists. Of course, a lot of that will just be putting layers of insulation on buildings, but there are two recent projects which are much more radical, one in Paris, and one in Seoul, both based on doing strange and interesting things with 1960s projects. The Seoul example is Sewoon Sangga, a shopping, industrial, and residential complex built in the late 1960s. It was designed by the architect Kim Swoo-geun during the long era of developmentalist dictatorship in South Korea, when planning and building an industrial economy, fast, took precedence

over everything else. Accordingly, it is dramatic — four interlinked sections (one since demolished) which are together the size of a small town, cutting a rectangular path through the alleys and winding streets of the historic city and a post-Korean War refugee settlement. It’s what used to get called a “megastructure” in the 1960s, with an intense condensation of retail (in the service levels at the bottom and the elevated walkways above), housing (in four stories stacked on top) and most interestingly, repair and industry (in the top-lit arcade and dense internal alleys in-between). Like other declining 1960s megastructures, it had been slated for demolition by the previous mayor. The recently elected Park Won-soon administration decided to renovate it instead, through a process of consultation with a local residents committee, as “a hub of urban culture, tourism and industries.” Speaking as a tourist, I could interpret it as some fulfil-

Influenced by the Marxist critic Marshall Berman, Barber explicitly tries to combine the abstraction of modernist design and the popular theater of the street.

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Rebuilding the Social City

Sewoon Plaza Rooftop Garden in Seoul Seoul City Architects department under Kim Young-joon (2017–2020).

ment of a now half-remembered idea of what the future was meant to be like in the 1980s: ultramodern, unsentimental, high-tech, but also provisional, noisy, slightly chaotic. The new spaces attached to this include walkways filled with young architectural firms and a “Production City” of robots in an internal hall. A square in front offers incongruous views of an ancient shrine, and an elevator goes up to the roof, where they are growing cabbages. This is exactly the sort of place that contemporary urbanists and architects talk about designing — combining recycling, reindustrialization, automation, density, urban agriculture, live-work spaces, democratic accountability, permeability, complexity … but end up creating a quite familiar hipster urbanism of street food markets and condos instead. As design, it’s brusque — the new walkways are straightforward steel frames, clipped onto the

in the process. On top of that, two new wings of council housing were built onto the existing structure.

concrete — but effective. Importantly, the project shows what can happen when you have an intelligent and imaginative City Architects department (as Seoul does, with a sixty-strong team under Kim Young-joon), able to oversee and enforce an urban plan. Similarly unusual is the renovation of the Tour Bois-le-Prêtre in Paris by the architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal. This took a 1960s tower, slated to be demolished, and renovated it. That’s normal enough, and in many places — in the UK and US in particular — this sort of cosmetic renovation of public housing tends to go along with at least a change in ownership from public to semipublic or charitable, and at worst, with the existing residents being cleared from the building altogether. Here, the renovation was done for the existing residents, who stayed in their flats throughout, and gained larger rooms and new winter gardens

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The tower is now much more elegant and modern, and better insulated, with larger flats, and provides more social housing — and all this with no evictions and no changes in ownership. Of all the recent projects that show some hints of what a rejuvenated socialist housing could look like, this is the one that goes furthest, showing how the new city could emerge out of an imaginative, modernist, and socialist reconstruction of the buildings we already have. It is genuinely universal — mass social housing, without the need to prove yourself a good co-op member or a straw-bale aficionado to get it. Ironically, the reasons why this became possible are strictly financial. I once got the chance to ask Jean-Philippe Vassal how they managed to get away with what they had done with the Tour Bois-le-Prêtre, given that any local government in, say, London or Chicago would have laughed them out of town for suggesting it. “Money,” was his answer. He and Lacaton had provided a report showing how much cheaper their proposal would have been than demolition. Imagine what would have been possible with enthusiasm rather than pragmatism. ■

The Unmaking of the British Working Class Margaret Thatcher described Right to Buy as “one of the most important revolutions of the century.” She was right. And we’re still living with the consequences. LAURIE MACFARLANE

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IKE MANY ADVANCED ECONOMIES ,

Britain is in the grip of a housing affordability crisis. Average home prices are now nearly eight times that of incomes, more than double what they were twenty years ago. For property owners, this has provided enormous benefits. Since 1995 alone, the value of Britain’s housing stock has increased by over £5 trillion — accounting for three-quarters of new household wealth. In the early 2000s, home price inflation was so great that 17 percent of working-age adults earned more from their house than from their job. But as home prices have continued to increase and the gap between home prices and earnings has grown larger, the cost of housing for those locked out of property ownership has become prohibitive. In the absence of adequate social housing, many have increasingly found themselves

with little choice but to rent privately. For those stuck in the private rental market, the proportion of income spent on housing has risen from around 10 percent in 1980 to 36 percent today — among the highest in Europe. The consequences have been severe. The number of homeless people in England has hit a record high, having more than doubled since 2010. Across the country communities are being segregated along socioeconomic lines. The result is a growing divide between those who own property (or have a claim to it), and those who do not. The housing crisis in Britain is not natural or inevitable. Instead, it is the product of a carefully planned political project first developed by the Conservative Party in the 1950s, accelerated under Margaret Thatcher, continued by New Labour in the 1990s and 2000s, and then reinforced by Conservative-led governments since 2010.

ILLUSTRATION BY ARIEL DAVIS

LAURIE MACFARLANE

The housing crisis in Britain is the product of a carefully planned political project first developed by the Conservative Party.

The “Property Owning Democracy” A

FTER THE END of the Second World War,

housing was widely viewed as a national priority. Half a million homes had been destroyed during the conflict, and a further 250,000 were badly damaged. The properties that remained were often crowded and unsanitary. The response of Clement Attlee’s 1945 Labour government was to undertake a vast program of public home-building. Together with a set of other complimenting reforms, the aim was to provide universal access to high-quality homes that met the needs of working people. The Labour government’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act kept land in private hands, but nationalized the right to develop it — meaning that landowners and developers had to apply to their local authority for planning permission to build new property. Strong compulsory purchase powers ensured that land could be acquired at low cost for housing development, while rent controls limited the excesses of private landlordism. For Conservatives in Britain, the Labour’s Party’s radical agenda was deeply concerning. In 1946 the member of parliament and future prime minister Anthony Eden warned the Conservative Party conference that Labour was creating a society where “everyone must rely on the State for his job, his roof, his livelihood.” In order to turn the tide against Labour’s socialist advances, Eden declared that Conservatives must embrace the vision of “a nation-wide propertyowning democracy.”

Eden borrowed the term “property-owning democracy” from his Conservative colleague Noel Skelton, a Scottish lawyer who coined the term in 1923 in a series of articles for the Spectator. Writing in the wake of the Russian Revolution, Skelton believed that an expansion in the number of property-owners was the best way to neutralize the appeal of socialism among workers. Eden did not have to wait long for his vision to have an impact. In 1951 the Conservative Party was elected into government after a snap general election on a promise to build 300,000 houses a year. Responsibility for delivering this pledge fell to the new housing minister, Harold Macmillan. Despite publicly championing the superiority of the private sector, Macmillan quickly realized that the only way to meet his party’s ambitious target was to dramatically increase public home-building. But despite increasing the supply of social housing, inspired by Anthony Eden’s call to arms, Macmillan also introduced a series of policies aimed at encouraging homeownership. These included measures to increase the availability of cheap mortgages and make it easier to construct private homes, which together kick-started the dramatic rise in homeownership that would continue for half a century. During this time, the idea of allowing public housing tenants to buy their homes also began to gain traction in Conservative circles. Though Macmillan himself was skeptical of the idea, he oversaw the removal of restrictions preventing the sale of public housing. Over the course of the next two decades, a growing number of Conservative-controlled local authorities began to sell their housing stock to tenants, and the popularity of such transactions sparked interest at the national level. By the mid-1970s the selling-off of public housing enjoyed widespread support among Conservative Party leaders. All they needed was a prime minister willing to implement it on a mass scale.

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“The Object Is to Change the Soul” M

ARGARET THATCHER swept to power in

1979 on a manifesto that promised to deliver Eden’s vision of transforming Britain into a “property owning democracy.” The first step towards this came in October 1980 when the government passed its first Housing Act, launching the flagship “Right to Buy” policy. Right to Buy gave public housing tenants the legal right to purchase their homes from local authorities at a discount of up to 50 percent. The Housing Act 1980 also included a number of incentives to encourage the Right to Buy option. Despite some initial resistance in Labour-controlled councils, the policy proved immediately popular across the country. Because local authorities were prevented from using the proceeds of sales to build more public housing, the effect of the policy was to dramatically reduce the stock of, and the number of people living in, public housing. During Thatcher’s time in office, 1.5 million publicly owned properties were transferred into private hands, and many more followed in decades after. Today, just 2 million public houses remain in Britain — down from 6.5 million when Right to Buy was introduced. As wealthier tenants were better placed to take up the Right to Buy, its effect has been to concentrate the poorest and most disadvantaged households in public housing. While in 1979 20 percent of households in the top decile of the income distribution lived in public housing, by the mid-2000s this had fallen to close to zero. Not surprisingly, the policy has also led to a marked decline in the quality of properties that are available in the public sector. When Right to Buy was introduced, it was justified on the basis that it would reduce public spending. However, the policy has been remarkably poor value for the money: taxpayers funded the initial building of the council houses, subsidized the substantial discounts

HOME IMPROVEMENT

LAURIE MACFARLANE

offered to tenants and then — once the homes were sold — missed out on the rental income that would otherwise have been received. In addition, the lack of public housing has meant that the government has had to spend ever-greater amounts subsidizing individuals so that they can afford to pay private rents. Today nearly one in five households in Britain is reliant on housing benefit, which costs the British government £25 billion a year — more than it spends on the police, roads, and buying military equipment combined. Much of this ends up in the pockets of private landlords. A recent study found that four in ten homes sold under the Right to Buy scheme are now owned by private landlords, who charge tenants more than double what they would pay in public housing. On its own, Right to Buy was a powerful policy. But its true potency came from its interaction with a series of other reforms introduced by Thatcher. The most significant of these was financial-sector deregulation. Up until the 1970s, mortgage lending was mostly carried out by mutually owned building societies which were limited in their ability to extend credit. But under Thatcher, restrictions on lending were removed and commercial banks were incentivized to become active players in the mortgage lending market. This deregulation triggered a shift in the role that retail banks played in the British economy, from mainly lending to businesses for productive investment, to primarily lending for family home purchases, taking property as collateral. This unleashed a flood of new credit into the housing market, fuelling a house price boom. In turn, households were incentivized to take out ever-larger mortgage loans to get on the “housing ladder” and reap sizable capital gains. Thus, a feedback loop emerged between mortgage lending, home prices, and increasing levels of household debt. The normalization of double-digit home price growth, combined with the expectation that prices will continually increase, stimulated demand for houses as financial assets. Today mortgage loans collateralized against property are the main source of the money supply in Britain, and bank balance sheets are largely secured against property values. Debt-fuelled home price inflation has become a key source of demand in an otherwise stagnant and unproductive economy. Volatility in home prices is quickly transmitted into volatility in the wider economy, meaning that Britain’s economic performance is intimately tied to the housing market.

Simply put, Thatcher’s push to privatize housing and deregulate finance remade British capitalism. But perhaps more significantly, it took aim at traditions of collective solidarity in working-class communities. There, by giving more people a direct stake in the system of private property and unearned wealth, Thatcher’s reforms did much to erode socialist sentiment. This was no accident: as we have seen, the Conservative Party has long understood that domestic property relations have a significant bearing on people’s ideological outlook and voting preferences. This is a lesson that Conservative politicians still hold dear today, as was evidenced in 2016 when former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg revealed that the Conservative chancellor George Osborne once remarked to him: “I don’t understand why you keep going on about the need for more social housing — it just creates Labour voters.” In this sense Right to Buy has been a remarkable success. As homeownership in Britain has increased over time, the number of voters with a vested interest in the buoyancy of a financialized housing market has increased, while the constituency of voters with an interest in high-quality public housing has declined markedly. For the majority of households, the family home is now the primary source of wealth. This has placed the Left in somewhat of a bind. Any policies aimed at addressing the affordability crisis for the minority of non-homeowners risks generating an electoral backlash from the majority, while also risking financial instability and a possible recession. As a result, the Labour Party largely abandoned its focus on public housing and instead began to place greater emphasis on meeting homeowners’ aspirations. Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, this has started to change. In 2018 the party published “Housing for the Many” — an ambitious plan to undertake the largest public home-building program in over thirty years. Despite this, the party is still officially committed to policies aimed at helping more people onto the property ladder and widening access to the benefits of homeownership. Whether this dual strategy is really sustainable remains to be seen. In 1981 Thatcher remarked that “Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul.” Right to Buy is perhaps the best example of what this looks like in terms of practical policy. We’re still living with its bitter success.

№ 33 / SPRING 2019

The Unmaking of the British Working Class

Democratizing Ownership F

OR SOCIALISTS , the aim must be to move

towards a society where houses function as somewhere to live, not as vehicles for accumulating wealth. Achieving this requires building mass support for the decommodification of housing. Such a task will be challenging as long as most of the electorate have a material stake in a highly financialized housing market. But the experience of Right to Buy offers several lessons. The first is that stories and narratives matter. Thatcher’s housing revolution did not take place in a vacuum: it was part of a wider project that was rooted in a specific view of how wealth is created and distributed in society. This was a world where, so long as there is sufficient competition and free markets, every individual will receive their just rewards in relation to their true contribution to society. There is, in Milton Friedman’s famous terms, “no such thing as a free lunch.” In Britain, this narrative helped to normalize the idea that wealth accumulated from rising home prices is normal and just. But of all the different areas of the economy, housing is perhaps the area where this is most glaringly wrong. The driving force behind rising house prices is typically rising land prices, and we have known since the days of Adam Smith that land is not a source of wealth but of economic rent — a means of extracting wealth from others. The truth is that most wealth made through the housing market is gained at the expense of others who will see more of their incomes eaten up by higher rents and larger mortgage payments. The case for decommodification must therefore accompanied by a compelling narrative about how wealth is really created and distributed in society — one which must be rooted in an analysis of power and exploitation. The second lesson is that experimenting with alternative approaches at the local level can produce powerful case studies that can become the basis for new national policies. Right to Buy was only adopted as party policy after a number of Conservative-controlled councils demonstrated that the sale of public housing was feasible and popular at a local level. Already there are many alternative housing solutions being incubated across Europe and North America, from community

land trusts to cooperative housing projects. These should be supported and, where possible, scaled up. The third lesson is that the language of control can be incredibly powerful. One reason why Right to Buy proved so popular was that it was sold to families as a means of achieving greater control over their lives. Often this control was of a narrow and individualistic nature, such as the ability to redecorate or refurnish a home. But in a world where many people feel a growing sense of alienation in relation to the places where they live, there is a significant opportunity for the Left to tap into a latent desire for greater democratic control over the decisions that affect people’s communities. Material pulls also matter. It is unlikely that Right to Buy would have been as successful had tenants not been offered steep discounts on the value of their property. In order to win popular support, any strategy for the decommodification of housing must also include sufficient material incentives to make it attractive, particularly for working-class households. The final lesson is that the transformation of housing cannot be pursued in isolation, but must be accompanied by a suite of complimentary reforms — particularly policies that target the financial sector. Ever since land became private property it has been intimately bound up with the evolution of finance, acting as collateral on which it is possible to secure credit and enjoy capital gains. Today real estate functions as the prime asset class in the global financial system, meaning that it will not be possible to decommodify housing without simultaneously introducing measures to bring finance under greater democratic control. Taken together, these lessons provide a sketch of what a successful strategy for decommodifying housing may look like. This could involve empowering communities with the rights, resources, incentives, and funding needed to bring land and property into collective ownership and take control of local assets wherever feasible — managing assets democratically in the interests of those who live there, both now and in the future. This would represent a radical departure from the failed notion of a “property owning democracy,” and towards a reshaping of society around the idea of “democratically owned property.” Thatcher herself described Right to Buy as “one of the most important revolutions of the century.” She was right. Property rights are not neutral or fixed; they invariably reflect power and class relations in society. Margaret Thatcher understood this — it is essential that the Left does too. ■

HOME IMPROVEMENT

BY DAVID DAYEN

Millions have already faced the dark side of the American Dream. Is there a way to stabilize and democratize homeownership?

№ 33 / SPRING 2019

HEN A CRISIS OCCURS in America, we usually have the decency to perform an accounting. We know how many died when the Titanic sank or when the Twin Towers fell. We know how much property was destroyed in the recent California wildfires. But incredibly, we don’t have a precise totaling of the number of Americans who lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis, following the implosion of the financial system and subsequent Great Recession. The government simply didn’t tally up the damage, which tells you everything about how much the victims mattered to those in charge. The best estimates, all from private sources, vary. Industry analyst CoreLogic, in a March 2017 report, claimed 7.78 million foreclosures between 2007 and 2016, a figure that doesn’t include short sales or deedin-lieu foreclosures, transactions that resulted in family dispossessions. The National Association of Realtors

does include short sales, and begins from the actual peak of the housing bubble in 2006, finding 9.3 million lost homes from then to 2014. Add in the continued defaults — as recently as the first quarter of 2018, 45 percent of all loans in foreclosure were originated in the peak housing bubble years — and it’s reasonable to get to 10 million. That’s somewhere between 20 and 25 million people evicted from a home they purchased, the biggest and most important financial transaction of their lives turned to rubble. They were sold on a dream, a fantasy passed down through the generations about picket fences and a Chevrolet in the driveway. They didn’t know who was lurking on the other side of the mortgage contract: an orgy of predatory lenders desperate to fill big-bank demands for more loans to convert into securities. As borrowers faltered under high-cost mortgages they

ILLUSTRATION BY NELSON GONÇALVES

DAVID DAYEN

couldn’t afford, and were pushed into foreclosures instead of loan modifications, they faced the dark side of the American Dream. We continue to live with the lacerating social consequences, which raise serious questions about whether the dream should be permanently extinguished. Should we reconsider homeownership as an end goal? Should federal policy put home purchases within reach of young people suffering from sky-high housing costs and student debt? Do the risks of homeownership outweigh the benefits? And is there a way to democratize those benefits so everyone can attain them?

That Trap of Extra Payments REDATORY LENDING DID NOT spontaneously appear at the turn of this century. Prior to the Great Depression, the government played almost no role in housing, and mortgages bore little resemblance to those sold today. The most common product had two to five year terms, where borrowers would pay only interest every month, and then a “bullet” payment of principal at the end. If the borrower couldn’t afford the principal, the lender could roll the balance over into a new loan. Installment loans like today’s mortgages, with a down payment up front and smaller monthly payments thereafter, were seen as sleazy products peddled by unscrupulous door-to-door salesmen, which delivered a false sense of security for workers who would inevitably fall into excessive debt. Jurgis Rudkus, Upton Sinclair’s lead character in The Jungle, purchases an installment mortgage without reading the fine print about the additional charges of interest, insurance, and property taxes. The promised nice home outside Chicago is actually an unfinished rat trap with walls too thin to protect his family from the cold. The Rudkuses lose the home after missing installments, in the process forfeiting the $300 down payment, a giant sum in those days. Just days later the mortgage company moves in another family, restarting the cycle. “Jurgis could see all the truth now,” Sinclair writes, “that trap of extra payments, and all the other charges that they had not the means to pay, and would never have attempted to pay!” The bullet-payment mortgage didn’t hold up during the Depression, either. When the stock market crashed and unemployment surged, mortgage-holders refused to renegotiate contracts. Without the cash to pay off loans 94

or the ability to sell the home as prices plummeted, borrowers defaulted in record numbers. By 1933, a thousand families lost homes every day. Interventions carried out by Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, like the mortgage-purchasing Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (holc), and the insurance-providing Federal Housing Administration (fha), did stabilize the market, but came with their own cruelties. The holc and then the fha produced maps identifying where they would assist borrowers and supply mortgage insurance, highlighting the restricted areas with red lines. This practice of redlining in black neighborhoods combined with restrictive covenants and whites-only selling in the areas the fha was willing to insure. The fha’s underwriting manual indicated: “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities.” Left without the opportunity for homeownership, blacks were forced into contract buying, where the seller kept the deed until all payments were made, and could take back the home after a single late payment. Contract buying, like the installment loans made to immigrants before, preyed on vulnerable populations with little recourse if they wanted to shelter their families and use homeownership to build wealth. The result was a yawning racial wealth gap. By the time the Fair Housing Act passed in 1968, African Americans simply didn’t have the resources to integrate neighborhoods and capitalize on home price appreciation. And then came the final blow, during the housing bubble. In a form of reverse redlining, modern-day predatory lenders also targeted black neighborhoods, steering them toward subprime loans. As far back as 1993, African Americans were five to eight times more likely to hold subprime loans as whites. During the bubble, brokers went door-to-door in black communities offering cash-out refinances, which issued loans for more than homes were worth, with the remainder paid out. It was a deliberate strategy to sell families struggling with the cost of living on using their home equity as an atm, effectively extracting the meager wealth gained over the decades. Instead of seedy contract sellers generating the schemes, the country’s biggest financial institutions carried this out. They used many of the same tactics — appraisal fraud setting mortgages at inflated prices, force-placing junk insurance on borrowers without their

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The Homeownership Trap

The belief in homeownership as the only path to prosperity must be called into question.

knowledge, underwriting loans that a low-income individual couldn’t possibly pay. The problem in the 1960s was that black people couldn’t get loans from banks; the problem during the bubble is that they could. Subprime borrowers were promised their homes would always increase in value, and they could always refinance to escape trouble. That worked until the music stopped, the bubble collapsed, and borrowers defaulted en masse. The result was an extinction event for the black and Latino middle class, as former congressman Brad Miller put it. Minorities had more money tied up in their homes and therefore more to lose. But the millions of families damaged by the crisis suffered profound economic and social dislocations. As job loss drove foreclosures, foreclosures drove job loss, particularly in the real estate sector. The debt overhang stunted the recovery, as losses were concentrated on relatively poorer borrowers who subsequently stopped spending. Higher unemployment rates in areas with the most foreclosures led to long-term effects on lifetime earning potential. Neighborhoods with high vacancies saw lower property values and higher crime rates. Spikes in foreclosures correlate with suicides, and physical and mental health complications, as borrowers skip prescriptions and hospital visits. Over a century of predation in pockets of the homebuying market burst into view in the bubble, and could lead one to consider whether homeownership is in fact the problem. As Ryan Cooper has written, America since the Depression has massively subsidized homeownership, through deductions of mortgage interest, fha insurance, and government-guaranteed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which backstop the market through securitization. Before the Trump tax cuts, property taxes could also be fully deducted, though now state and local taxes of this type are capped. Nevertheless, these housing-related subsidies predominantly flow to richer families and exacerbate the wealth gap, implicitly giving renters less than the full benefits of citizenship. US policy positions homeownership as a forced savings vehicle. If home equity rises above inflation over time, borrowers come out ahead. But to quote Cooper, “If we grant that saving money is good, then why should owning a home, of all things in the world, be the preferred savings vehicle for the middle class?” Houses decay through the years. The value is mostly subjective,

HOME IMPROVEMENT

DAVID DAYEN

accompanying the perception of the neighborhood or nearby school districts. The combination of mythologizing over homeownership and belief that the wealth ladder cannot be climbed without it pushes people of limited means to stretch their way into purchasing homes, with potentially disastrous consequences. Furthermore, conflating homes with assets tends to restrict housing supply, because more supply dilutes existing property values. This raises prices on everyone unfortunate enough to not have secured a home, and deepens the housing affordability crisis. Plus, as we have seen, a single dramatic event can devastate homeowners — it’s reasonable to speculate that the reliance on housing for wealth-building fuels a bubble mentality. On the other hand, homeownership eliminates the need to pay rent, which is a tremendous financial return for any family. Outside of interest (which can be deducted from taxes), a mortgage payment goes right back into a homeowner’s pocket in home equity. You are effectively paying rent to yourself, without being taxed on that income stream. And that, more than anything, creates the wealth-building potential of homeownership. There are other presumed side effects of homeownership, like community stability, higher voter participation, and better educational outcomes. But the foreclosure crisis has probably put that illusion of security into the past.

Toward a Cooperative Future MERICA HAS YET TO COME UP with a better system to enable people without stores of capital to invest to gain wealth. Even a social wealth fund won’t yield the kinds of increases equivalent to potential homeownership gains. And yet government encouragement of this system of wealth-building leaves out an entire class of renters from sharing in the bounty. How can we broaden this out, so homeowners aren’t unfairly enriched while also made vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the real estate market? One possibility is to designate homeowner subsidies as a universal benefit, with a voucher to every family, whether they own or rent. Similarly, housing personal savings accounts could be created to set aside money for the cost of any housing, including rentals. You could view rent control as a way to redistribute housing support to a broader population. And building dramatically more social housing with federal and state dollars would 96

increase supply without newer units being given over to luxury development. That’s the best way to ensure the benefits of a supply-side solution actually transfer to those in need. But if there is something we want to salvage from homeownership, we could open it up to a broader section of the population in ways that aren’t obviously predatory. For example, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan for down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers in formerly redlined neighborhoods would begin to level the playing field for historically disadvantaged citizens to attain homeownership. But we can also go outside traditional homeownership structures. Nonprofit community development financial institutions with a stake in the neighborhoods they serve, often with board representation from community members, could get first crack at distressed mortgages or land available for sale, removing a profit motive from the lender. These entities can also finance affordable housing development. Community land trusts, similarly, have the development of neighborhoods foremost in mind. These trusts acquire and maintain ownership of plots of land, leasing properties to homeowners. Since the land is really what appreciates in value, this keeps prices down. Whenever the homeowner sells, the trust takes part of the upside, also putting downward pressure on prices. There are problems with scaling this up today because of the high costs of land in developed urban locations. But over 225 community land trusts exist now, and more can be installed in areas where land costs are currently affordable. Cooperative ownership, where residents buy shares in a corporation that owns the underlying property, giving them the right to occupy one of the units, can in some cases be cheaper than traditional mortgages. Limited-equity co-ops give individuals a long-term lease on the unit along with a voting share in the corporation. This allows for some of the benefits of homeownership, with the equity share increase over time, without the speculative harms or barriers to entry from high mortgage costs. Elements of a more democratized housing market are already in place today. After the bubble collapse, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were brought into government conservatorship. Without the pressures of competing for market share with subprime lenders, the plain-vanilla loans Fannie and Freddie buy to convert

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The Homeownership Trap

into securities have performed exceedingly well. As the only main players on the secondary market, Fannie and Freddie can generate standards for loan appraisal, origination, and servicing that keep the market in line. This is what a nationalized mortgage finance sector looks like, and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s done a decent job of at least preventing the predatory excesses of the previous decades. If we can eliminate the most catastrophic downsides to homeownership, maybe what it offers to first-time homebuyers outweighs the risks. One thing is clear: everyone should be wary of privatizing these entities, as the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans favor,

which would put Wall Street banks back in charge of the mortgage machinery. The foreclosure crisis was a scarring event in our history, and we should not only never forget its damage, but also use it to inform how to house America safely and equitably. The belief in homeownership as the only path to prosperity must be called into question. But while it is unlikely to be abolished tomorrow, there are ways to sustain it, or at least a facsimile of it, without putting homeowners on the precipice of financial disaster, and without consigning renters to second-class citizenship.â&#x20AC;&#x192; â&#x2013;

“A compelling economic case for socialism, and a deeply moral one . . . illuminating its genuine virtues.” — GL E N N GR E E N WA L D, cofounder of The Intercept

“A lively account of socialism’s history and current meanings [that] makes the case for a genuine alternative to our deeply unequal social and political order.” —E R IC F O NE R, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, emeritus, Columbia University

“Accessible, irreverent, and entertaining. . . . A razor-sharp guide to socialism’s history, transformative promise, and path to power.” —N A OMI K L E IN, New York Times– bestselling author of This Changes Everything

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the tumbrel

THE LANDLORD IS A RATIONAL MISER.

THE TUMBREL THE WORST ESTATE

BY DAWN FOSTER ILLUSTRATION BY ROSE WONG

The Private Equity Press For years a joke was told among the British media, that journalists covering housing only ever wrote two stories, headlined “House prices fall” or “House prices rise.” This is more revealing than pithy: housing is more than just a commodity, but for decades the press failed to acknowledge this. From the height of the Thatcher years until the housing crisis reached even the professional class, property as a speculative money-making tool was the sole focus of housing in the media. The concept of home, philosoph ically, housing as a human right, homelessness and gentrification barely got a look in. Right to Buy, the Thatcherite scheme in which municipal housing tenants could purchase the home they rented at a hefty discount, paved the way for the decimation of social housing across the United Kingdom. While newspapers told readers how to invest in “up and coming” areas,

We should demand a media that covers the lives and struggles of working people — homeless, on the verge of eviction, trying to hang on. And not the glamorous lives of property speculators.

and daytime television was thronged with programs themed around home renovation (and increasing value in turn), the housing crisis in Britain slowly gained pace. As Right to Buy ate up more and more homes, transferring social housing into the private market, few outlets reported on the fact that increasingly, families who had bought these homes were selling them off swiftly — either to make a quick profit, or because they’d overcommitted on their mortgage. Local authorities tended to be

HOME IMPROVEMENT

more forgiving and lenient landlords than banks, allowing people to catch up on arrears rather than instantly seizing the property. Those homes then became privately rented apartments in many cases. I’m sat in one right now, and most of my friends — young professionals in London — also live in ex-council properties, paying exorbitant sums to private landlords. Another largely unreported aspect of the looming crisis was the failure of New Labour to address the problem. One of the reasons politicians have done little to solve

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housing in the UK is because home ownership is classed as “aspirational” and the idea that purchasing property should be profitable is now ingrained in the British psyche. When our wages rose as rapidly as house prices, that made sense. But they’ve stagnated entirely since the financial crash, while home prices continue to grow in the areas where work is concentrated. One scheme designed to appeal to the “aspirational” was Labour’s heinous Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders program, a scheme that writer Owen Hatherley described as “slum clearances without the socialism.” After the areas around London saw economic boom with rising property values, Labour attempted to stimulate a revival of the housing

102

market in other areas. In doing so, the government demolished social housing estates, promising to rebuild them: in many cases they did not, or evicted people then left their homes to rot. When they did rebuild homes, they did so for young professionals, not the largely working-class communities they had uprooted. This served purely to make deprived areas even more deprived, and showed traditional Labour voters there was no respect for them in Tony Blair’s “modernized” party. Nothing revealed the chasm between how people genuinely live and how the media believe they do more than the Grenfell Tower fire. Since it devastated a social housing block, most of the media very quickly had to learn about how decades of right-wing

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policy had ravaged public housing. They found out that the building was no longer owned by the local authority, but a quasi-autonomous outsourced body (a Housing Management Organisation) and that the tenants had little say in how the building was refurbished. Having written for years about housing, but not property prices, I was suddenly bombarded with questions by journalists trying to catch up on thirty years of housing policy. Most lived in homes they owned, could afford mortgages, had actual steady contracts, hadn’t rented in decades, and knew nobody in social housing. That showed vociferously in the stilted and grasping coverage that repeatedly corrected itself as the facts of the story became clear.

Running Hed

To take just a few examples: “Man whose flat started Grenfell blaze packed luggage before raising alarm” read a Sun headline. “Grenfell fire activist gets tax-payer-funded hotel room despite still using flat,” lamented the Sunday Times, and the Telegraph bravely reported on a “Grenfell fire survivor caught running cannabis factory in tower block.” Along with a major shift in housing policy, we clearly need a change in media attitudes to housing. That will happen slowly along with changes in media itself. More and more young journalists are renting and are as angry as the general public about the injustices of market-based housing. They won’t be part of a privileged media class, but firsthand witnesses to working-class struggles. In my previous apartment, yet another former local authority flat owned by a private landlord, I lived next door to the local authority housing offices. Each day after 6 am, people lined up for housing advice, desperate for assistance and facing or already experiencing homelessness. One morning I found a woman heavily pregnant and hysterical with tears, and took her indoors for a cup of tea. She explained she had left her partner because he had beaten her almost daily since she became pregnant. She had begged the local authority for emergency accommodation every day and been rebuffed each time as “not vulnerable enough.” Her friend had told her the week before she could no longer

Nothing revealed the chasm between how people genuinely live and how the media believe they do more than the Grenfell Tower fire.

Capital

Gentrific By Samu

“Casts a c dynamics estate an coauthor

sleep on his sofa. She had been sleeping in a local park instead: Capital City the council worker told her if she Gentrification and the Real Estate State By Samuel Stein came back once she’d given birth, “Casts a cold and brilliant light on the underlying political she might be given a short-term dynamics of global cities and rightly concludes that real estate and finance are in charge.” —Frances Fox Piven, place in a hostel.

Red Sta

The Teac By Eric B

coauthor of Poor People’s Movements

Similarly, one Sunday night, my phone buzzed endlessly when people heard of a women’s safe house in west London where the ceiling had fallen in with water damage and the women and children living there were either Red State Revolt ignored or offered unsecured The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics Eric Blanc accommodation very nearBythe “The best on-the-ground description and explanation abusive men they’d fled. In both of the red state teachers’ revolt. —Diane Ravitch, author of instances, the women involved The Death and Life of the Great American School System were eventually given short-term suitable accommodation after a huge amount of pressure. But the costs involved were gigantic. A proper system of housing involves local authorities building and The People’s Republic of Walmart having access to enough properHow the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying ties to keep people safe and the avoid Foundation for Socialism shelling out massive sumsBytoLeigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski “A tour outsourced companies that thende force through the history of economic planning, from the dark heart of capitalism to the self-management house people inadequately. of workers, from the earliest agricultural civilizations to the cybersocialists of the twentieth century.” —Nick Srnicek,

author of Inventing the Future These are the stories of everyday life in capitalist Britain. They are the stories that a future Corbyn-led Labour government Available at versobooks.com will need to tell. They are the and wherever books are sold. stories that we desperately need @versobooks a media to start covering as Available at versobooks.com and wherever books are sold. eagerly as they chart property booms. ■ @versobooks

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“The bes of the red The Deat

The Peo

How the the Foun By Leigh

“A tour d from the of worke cybersoc author of

THE TUMBREL GIRONDINS

BY MEAGAN DAY ILLUSTRATION BY ROSE WONG

Homeless People Don’t Need an App, They Need a Fucking House The headline pretty much sums it up.

Last summer, Seattle counted twelve thousand homeless residents, the highest number ever recorded in its annual count. Seattle also added about twelve thousand apartment units last year. It’s like a line from an old seafaring poem: Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink. But rest easy, Seattle’s tech wizards are here to disrupt homelessness. A new app called Samaritan allows Seattle’s housed population to donate to their homeless neighbors. It works like this: Samaritan gives homeless 104

people who sign up for its service “beacons,” bluetooth-enabled devices worn like necklaces. Samaritan app users are alerted on their smartphones when they pass someone wearing a beacon. Users can then read the profile of the beacon-wearer, and donate money if they’re so moved. Donations can be redeemed at select stores and restaurants. They cannot be used to buy alcohol. The beacon-wearer must check in monthly at a participating nonprofit, or else their beacon is disabled. Samaritan isn’t the only homeless-donation app to come out of № 33 / SPRING 2019

Seattle. There’s also WeCount, which allows users to donate specific items — sleeping bags, coats, backpacks, toiletries — to homeless people. The founder of WeCount, a tech entrepreneur who has sold multiple companies to Google, raves to the press about the “huge emotional roi” (return on investment) donors get from participating. Seattle may be pioneering in this field, but it’s not alone. In Philadelphia, an app called StreetChange combines the bluetooth-beacon idea with the tangible-donations idea. In order to be eligible for a StreetChange beacon, a homeless

person needs to complete a survey listing their goals and the steps they plan to take to reach them. The person can then build a registry of items they need, and passersby can donate to their registry. When they have enough funding to procure a particular item, they can go to a participating brick-and-mortar store and pick it up. There are some surface-level problems with these apps. For one, all of them take pains to safeguard the donor against the possibility that the recipient will use the donation inappropriately. The unspoken notion is

that homeless people need help, but they also need to get their acts together. These attempts to sidestep uncertainty about the afterlife of donations entrench the idea that it’s people’s worst habits that make and keep them homeless. But what’s more concerning is that homelessness itself has become so normalized that our society’s supposed luminaries of innovation are focused on easing the daily strain of living without shelter, with a buck here and a blanket there. What about ending homelessness altogether? That would be real innovation. HOME IMPROVEMENT

The truth is that eliminating homelessness is no more technically difficult than building a complex web of bluetooth beacons, item registries, participating stores and nonprofits, and smartphone donor-users. It is only more politically difficult. And that’s because it requires taxing the rich and redistributing our society’s wealth. In the end, there are no shortcuts. If we want people to live in homes, we must make homes for them to live in — not have them rely on the mercy of the tech gods. ■

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THE TUMBREL VERSAILLES

BY BRANKO MARCETIC ILLUSTRATION BY ROSE WONG

Palo Alto, the beeping, whirring heart of Silicon Valley, has a homelessness problem. Even as the upscale city has become home to billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page, nearby families sleep in vehicles and garages, and one-third of area schoolkids are homeless.

The ZombieInvestor Apocalypse There’s no use in asking why vacant housing and homelessness exist despite the presence of the superwealthy. These issues exist directly because of them.

But Palo Alto has another problem. Its more fortunate residents live next to empty and unused homes. These locals pick up the mail and move recycling bins for their nonexistent neighbors, they say, and regret the “social hole” left by their nearly year-round absence. Rows of abandoned homes are meant to be a trait of poverty-stricken cities like Detroit or Flint. Why are they plaguing wealthy neighborhoods in the heart of Silicon Valley? To put it simply, the rich. Palo Alto is just one of many cities in the United States and around the world dealing with the phenomenon of “ghost houses” and “zombie neighborhoods”: property bought up by wealthy, often foreign, investors meant to serve as a second, third, even fourth or fifth home, and left empty for months and months even as locals scrounge desperately for affordable shelter. The same trend can be seen in places like Aspen, where superrich owners who have bought up vacation homes have left the town “hollowed out,” in New York, where the lights stay off all night in the windows of large portions of luxury apartment

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The fact is, national borders simply don’t exist for the superrich like they do for the rest of us.

buildings, or, most dramatically, London, where “buy-to-leave” investors became a flash point of public dissatisfaction. This trend shows no sign of stopping. Knight Frank, a global real estate consulting firm, recently published the results of a survey of 600 private bankers and wealth advisers around the world about their ultrarich clients. According to their findings, these individuals (worth at least $30 million) own an average of 3.63 residences, 42 percent of them have homes outside their main country of residence, and 22 percent are planning on joining this club over the course of this year. The influx of wealthy and largely absent homebuyers has a deleterious impact beyond just wasting perfectly good housing. When local property markets are globalized, it upends the most basic assumptions about how such a market is supposed to work, most critically the idea that house

prices and rents reflect how much local people earn. According to one 2017 study, when out-of-town investors buy up 10 percent of a city’s housing, rents rise sharply while the general welfare of its residents drops. Older owners reap benefits as their home prices rise, but renters are hit hard, and younger homeowners face higher housing costs in the future.

More radical measures briefly made a blip in the wake of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London, when the city bought up sixtyeight flats in a luxury apartment complex to house some of the survivors. But so far there seems to be little push to do something similar when it comes to the crises of homelessness growing around the world.

Things are only going to get worse. Imagine increasing numbers of locals priced out of the towns and cities in which they’ve lived and worked for most of their lives, as whole blocks of housing stand eerily deserted. It won’t just be the social lives of these places that are sucked dry — tax bases and area economies will collapse.

It’s not that governments lack the powers to do it; they lack the political will. In the United States, government entities aren’t shy about using eminent domain to simply seize private property when they want to build a football stadium or an oil pipeline, as long as those affected are working-class taxpayers. The equation seems to change when the cause is housing the homeless, and when the people to be affected are the international elite.

In other words, there’s no use in asking why vacant housing and homelessness exist despite the presence of the super-wealthy. These issues exist directly because of them. Already governments have stepped in to try to deal with growing problem, some more forcefully than others. Vancouver, one of the places most visibly affected by the investor-led “zombie” housing, put in place a 15 percent tax on houses bought by foreigners in 2016, but experts have warned this will miss purchases by various middlemen, and leaves out those who got in before it was set up. The New Zealand government passed a total ban on foreign home buyers last year, while Australia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom have tightened the rules around real estate purchases by nonresidents. HOME IMPROVEMENT

The fact is, national borders simply don’t exist for the superrich like they do for the rest of us. They own homes in multiple countries, spanning continents. Investor visas give them a fasttrack to residency, to the point where agencies exist that promise them “global citizenship” for a price. And if you’re wealthy enough, you can simply buy a passport, Peter Thiel-style. At a time when border-security regimes make life miserable for migrant workers or those seeking refugee status, it’s telling who capital is welcoming in with open arms. ■

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leftovers

THE MAGAZINE IS NOT “ABOLISHED,” IT WITHERS AWAY.

LEFTOVERS

BY JERÓNIMO A. DÍAZ MARIELLE

POPULAR FRONT

AND DIANA X. BELL SANCHO

The Cooperative Option Mutual aid cooperatives in Latin America give us a glimpse of what democratic social housing could look like.

The mid-twentieth century saw unprecedented urbanization in Latin America. Millions of migrants were left to fend on their own in cheap rental housing in city centers, or forced to find alternatives in peripheral areas. Irregular land markets and occupations surged, giving birth to “favelas” in Rio de Janeiro, “pueblos jóvenes” in Lima, the “villas” of Buenos Aires, “ranchos” in Caracas, and “cantegriles” in Montevideo. Life within this self-built, low-cost housing came with deep insecurity for residents — lack of access to basic public services such as 110

potable water and sanitation, extensive distances from public transit and work sites, and insecure rights of tenure, often resulting in displacement by state authorities. In this context, groups throughout the region began to explore models of collective ownership. Proposals sprang up in Mexico, and important advances in the construction of housing cooperatives took hold in Salvador Allende’s Chile until they were brutally destroyed by the Pinochet dictatorship. It was in Uruguay, however, where cooperatives prospered.

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The Uruguayan Cooperative Center (ccu), founded in 1961, advanced three pilot cooperatives for unionized workers. Inspired by their success, ccu leaders along with worker cooperatives and trade unions pushed for the recognition of this model of popular housing in the 1968 Law of Housing. Crucially, this facilitated state financing and along with it, access to land. An expansion followed and cooperative members, hailing from the labor movement, formed the Uruguayan Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives (fucvam) as a “cooperative of cooperatives” in 1970.

Since then, the organization has grown to comprise nearly 500 housing cooperatives. In total they’re home to more than 20,000 families, nearly 3 percent of the Uruguayan population. The decisive impact fucvam has had in advancing the right to housing for workers in the country is linked to the model of cooperativism it has consolidated. Grounded in the principles of collective property, mutual aid, self-management, and direct democracy, the fucvam model resolutely departs from market-oriented treatments of housing and land. The projects are financed through credits via the Uruguayan National Bank of Loans, often as subsidies towards loan repayments for families with incomes less than $2,000 monthly. But mutual aid plays a decisive role. Each family is responsible for contributing twenty-one hours weekly of work, which goes towards the collective construction of the housing project, regardless of who will be assigned a particular unit. Tasks are assigned according to abilities and on completion, units are assigned through a lottery system, according to household size. This approach to production both reinforces solidarity between cooperative members and permits savings of between 15–20 percent of total project costs. The nonprofit Institutes of Technical Assistance, whose operations are mandated and regulated by the 1968 National Housing Law, play an important

fucvam has grown to comprise nearly 500 housing cooperatives, home to 3 percent of Uruguay’s population.

role in assisting this work. These teams of architects, lawyers, and other professionals support the design and construction of projects under broader community direction. By law their involvement is mandated, but they can charge no more than 5 percent of the total project cost. The practice of self-management extends from this culture of mutual aid and takes hold throughout the work of the cooperatives. Members take on important responsibilities before, during, and after the construction process. This is facilitated through an organizational structure that centers direct democracy through general assemblies and elected representation in key bodies, both at the local level and within the national federation. The role collective property plays in establishing stability for families and in challenging capitalist notions of property cannot be understated and, perhaps, is what most distinguishes it from other popular housing experiences in the region. The cooperative obtains land in a collective manner and ownership HOME IMPROVEMENT

remains that way — households have an indefinite contract for the use and enjoyment of their units, and a right to pass this down to heirs, but the housing and all communal areas remain property of the cooperative. If a family decides to leave the unit, they receive a payment for the hours of work they contributed plus the amount of the depreciated loan they paid into.

The State’s Role The 1968 National Law of Housing was foundational to the broader political project fucvam took on. From 1973 to 1985 this was threatened, when a dictatorship took power in Uruguay and the Federation, along with other working-class organizations, faced persecution. In addition to denying lands to the Federation and delaying in the delivery of loans, in 1983 the regime passed an ordinance that sought to reclassify the tenancy status of the cooperatives away from collective property. fucvam led a campaign of resistance, including a payment strike against the National Loan Bank, helping awaken a broader

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SUB-DEPARTMENT NAME

popular movement that resulted in the dictatorship’s fall.

cooperatives themselves but the surrounding neighborhood.

Afterward, the Federation — self-financed through the monthly quotas of cooperative members — continued mobilizing to reestablish the recognition of collective property tenancy and to reinstitute the state land bank, along with new municipal land banks. The latter has proved to be a vital planning instrument for local governments.

At the national level the Federation has worked to deepen processes of political formation and capacity-building among cooperative members through the establishment of a National School of Formation, Enforma. Since 2013, the school has annually brought together upwards of two hundred cooperative leaders.

In Montevideo, for example, large complexes have been developed that, by involving dozens of cooperatives, end up producing entire neighborhoods such as the José Pedro Varela complex, Juana de América complex, or, more recently, the Pablo Estramín neighborhood. In such cases, a portion of the cooperative’s plots were yielded for public education facilities, establishing infrastructure that benefits not only the 112

Exporting the Model For Latin American organizations committed to advancing community-centered struggles for affordable housing that are rooted in deeper transformations, the fucvam experience has been a unique source of inspiration. The first connections were with the National Union of Popular Housing of Brazil (unmp) and the Occupiers and Tenants Movement (moi) of Argentina. Despite not № 33 / SPRING 2019

having the necessary political, financial, and legal instruments to support the cooperative ownership of social housing, these movements have developed similar proposals in their countries. At the end of 1990s, fucvam established a strategic alliance with the Swedish Cooperative Center (today “We Effect”) to undertake a systematic transfer of the model to neighboring Paraguay and eventually elsewhere. In Asuncion, a collaboration of the Committee of Churches for Emergency Aid (cipade), funding support from We Effect, and guidance from fucvam seeded the first mutual aid housing cooperatives in the country. The early success of these first experiences permitted the Paraguayan co-ops to secure state financing for the further

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construction of homes. Understanding the broader political project, the co-ops emulated the federative model of fucvam and founded the Central of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives of Paraguay (ccvamp). This influenced the approval of Law 2329 of 2003, which established the Administrative Framework of Housing Cooperatives as well as the Fund for Cooperative Housing. In the early 2000s, pre-cooperative groups were also formed in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with workers from the informal sector. Early challenges included overcoming an institutional and economic context where “homeownership” dominated and adapting a model that emerged from Uruguayan trade unionism to a country of deep indigenous and peasant roots. As in other contexts, the articulation of a national association was necessary

The role collective property plays in establishing stability for families and in challenging capitalist notions of property cannot be understated.

to maintain unity and exchange among the cooperatives and solidify a longer-term political project. The expansion of the model in Central America followed soon after. At the heart of the exchanges is the knowledge that the mutual aid cooperative model must be part of deeper social transformation and in the fundamental role political struggle plays in the acquisition of state financing, access to land, and

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the legal protection of collective tenure. In this way, such a South-South exchange has consolidated a regional project that decisively breaks from market-oriented treatments of housing and land. The fucvam experience, and the ways in which it has reverberated across the region, gives us not only inspiration, but a concrete path away from neoliberal urbanization and to a right to the city. ■

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LEFTOVERS THE DUSTBIN

BY PETTER NILSSON

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In less than a decade, a country with a population of only 8 million constructed a million new homes. It was a remarkable achievement — one in four Swedes still live in houses built in this period. And yet, the “million program” has become a symbol of socialist failure, proof that large-scale political solutions to social problems should never again be attempted. What happened, and should we bother to correct the record? In 1964, the ruling Social Democratic Party (sap) set out to create a “comprehensive program for society’s housing and land policy.” The premise for the program was Sweden’s late and rapid

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industrialization in the late 1800s, which fueled urbanization. With construction unable to keep up, this led to an acute housing shortage in the 1950s, overcrowding in cities, and a generally low housing standard. The crisis was real, and due to a combination of political will and economic good fortune, it was possible to address it. Sweden came out of World War ii with its industries intact and benefited from a postwar reconstruction boom. The sap had been in power since 1932, and used the next three decades to cement its social-democratic program and create the welfare state programs and sectoral bargaining we

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Sweden’s social democrats managed to solve a housing crisis and build a million homes in less than a decade. Why, then, is the Miljonprogrammet maligned today? associate with the Nordic model. Crucially, a radical pension reform in 1959 helped tap into the capital that could be put to use in large-scale housing production, and was bolstered by subsidized lending and other funding mechanisms for municipalities to begin construction projects. Reforms in public land acquisition also made it possible to acquire large areas for city planning. In accord with the dominant trends of modernism, the functions and measurements of houses were highly standardized. Some were built around a modular system where different versions of movable walls were organized

LEFT: The standard kitchen — architect Sigrun Bülow-Hübe and Ingrid Samuelsson, October 22, 1945.

around a bearing concrete center, intended to make it flexible for future family sizes or needs. The kitchens were organized based on surveys done by the state and a Swedish Kitchen Standard was adopted by the Swedish Standards Institute which meant, for example, that all countertops had the same height and all kitchen drawers were same size. This, by the way, made it possible for Ikea to standardize fittings that worked in every Swedish kitchen and laid the basis for its multinational furniture conquests. The standardization and the scale of the undertaking made it possible to fund a new building

BELOW: Residential area in Skärholmen, August 1968.

infrastructure. Factories could, for instance, specialize in prefabricated elements and keep costs down — and the labor market policies were in place to encourage workers into the construction industry. These planned new neighborhoods were supposed to become model societies, but the size and tempo of the program came with its own problems. People started moving in before construction had finished, no green spaces had started to sprout, and building materials were still lying about. At the same time there were beginnings of a “green wave / back to nature” movement and images of

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children playing amid broken rocks soon become a symbol of things having gone too far. The simultaneous uprooting and resettling of large working-class populations meant that the newly formed communities lacked familiar social bonds, and with everyone at work, kids were left to their own devices. But the image of the homogenous state subject in a grey concrete neighborhood isn’t a proper representation of the program. In fact, only a third of the houses constructed were tower blocks. Neighborhoods with three stories or less and single-family homes made up the rest.

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Nevertheless, the Miljonprogrammet in Sweden today conjures up the image of concrete tower blocks in city suburbs that are to a large extent currently populated by first- and second-generation migrants with little education and few job prospects. From right-wing leaders to the mainstream pundits, it is often used to discredit any large-scale political undertaking, and to point to the inherent pitfalls in attempts to solve social issues — such as Sweden’s current housing crisis — through politics. However, the million program cannot be understood outside of an array of welfare reforms that attempted to produce a just society. Surveys show that people who live in rental units tend to be more egalitarian and less marketoriented than homeowners. However, in and of itself, no housing policy can remedy social inequities. During the construction phase state regulation kept private debt and housing prices in check, but when the neoliberal wave crashed into Sweden in the ’80s, wage differences increased rapidly. Together with the deregulation of financial markets, this encouraged

housing speculation. In 1974, the state all but withdrew from the housing market — the pent-up need for renovation for homes built in this period is estimated at around $70 billion. The social problems associated with some of the million program neighborhoods are the effect of growing inequalities and segregation, and state retreat. With slowing wage growth and increased income differences, the consequences of a more unequal society will show up somewhere. But even though some neighborhoods bear the mark of this development, it did not originate there, and even less was it caused by the houses themselves. The consequences of the neoliberal deregulation has ironically come to be seen as synonymous with one of the last great interventions of social democracy. At a time when collective solutions to social problems are considered to be a thing of the past, the Left can do well to point to the million program’s successes. Decent housing for everyone at decent prices meant that — together with

The welfare state in Sweden, much like the houses it built, is a sturdy shell that has stood for decades but is in desperate need of a new push.

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other welfare provisions — women could divorce without the risk of homelessness, parents could be sure that their kids could find homes no matter their chosen careers, and workers could go on strike without risking their basic necessities. Sweden once more needs rapid and massive construction: estimates put the need at around 700,000 new homes. The private market has been unwilling to construct affordable housing at that rate, and the resulting shortage has meant increased pressure on Sweden’s rent control system, which is soon to fall if nothing is done. International surveys also warn that the housing market is likely to crash, compounding problems. The welfare state in Sweden, much like the houses it built, is a sturdy shell that has stood for decades but is in desperate need of a new push. In lieu of a reformist program at the level of the record years, and a Social Democratic Party radical enough to push for it, Sweden seems unable to solve problems whose solutions were evident a half-century ago. ■

LEFTOVERS THE DUSTBIN

BY JONAH WALTERS

Going Up the Country

The New Left and the “back-to-the-land” movement.

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When Ray Mungo deserted Cambridge for a commune, he absconded with the Liberation News Service’s (lns) entire printshop. A radical wire service, conceived as the New Left’s answer to the Associated Press, the lns had been mired in sectarian bickering since Mungo co-founded the organization in 1967 as a Boston University undergrad. By the next year, the

young writer had reached his limit. He was going up the country. After a stop at the lns office in Washington, DC — where Mungo and his comrades executed a slapdash heist, flinging ink, reams of paper, even whole printing machines into a waiting van — the group eventually wound up with some modest acreage in Vermont, which they christened “Total Loss Farm.” (They weren’t HOME IMPROVEMENT

great farmers, but as good left-wing journalists, they were at least unflinchingly honest in their choice of names.) At first, their plan was to hole up and relaunch lns from the underground. But the woodsy bunker proved far too bucolic for politics. “The farm in Vermont had fooled us, just as we hoped it would,” Mungo wrote at the time. “It had tricked even battle-scarred 117

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youth militants into seeing the world as bright clusters of Day-Glo orange and red forest, rolling open meadows, sparkling brooks and streams.” “Sometimes groups of people come from the cities and want to build a shack, settle down, they won’t bother us in the least, can’t they stay and double the population?” Mungo wrote during the homesteaders’ first autumn on the land. “No you can’t stay, go do it yourself, don’t suck energy off our trip … soon it’d be fifty and we’d have all the congestion griefs we’re seeking to escape.” During the 1970s, the back-to-theland movement saw hundreds, even thousands, of young people ditch their city digs in favor of intentional rural communities. Many of these ex-urban émigrés described their exodus in cultural, even spiritual, terms — a generational awakening after the headstrong chaos of the antiwar movement. Maybe that’s why Mungo said he always felt “deep-down rotten” sending the interlopers packing — but still, he couldn’t let them stay. The back-to-the-land movement coincided with a protracted housing crisis in American cities. In fact, a good portion of those New Leftists who didn’t go underground or up the country in ’69 found new political homes in militant tenants’ movements — including Tom Hayden, whose years spent organizing renters in Santa Monica led a local paper to eulogize him, decades later, as “the father of rent control” in the community.

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This crisis of overcrowding and disinvestment led to dramatic 1960s urban uprisings, particularly in majority-black cities like Newark. The unrest forced President Johnson’s hand — his Model Cities program already underway, he authorized the Federal Housing Administration to back mortgage loans for low-income residents, sparking a bonanza for private lenders and speculators. What started as an effort to provide black tenants with the credit necessary to become black homeowners instead ended in a wave of foreclosures, allowing landlords to extract still more exorbitant rents in increasingly blighted neighborhoods. Across the country, in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and elsewhere, tenants’ battles became front lines in the class struggle many student radicals had left behind. In tracing their line of flight away from the cities and towards a countryside they imagined as limitless and fertile, the back-to-the-landers like Mungo and his friends became archetypes as old as New England. These were pioneers, rugged free-soiling settlers, dressed in tie-dye and hemp. To a certain extent, at least, they were conscious of this connection and eager to play around with their new roles, even indulging some of the most reactionary tropes in the American popular imagination. In Mungo’s dreamier passages, for example, we hear that “Indians bring us red and yellow lush peaches” and that, by lying in the tall grass beside a

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campfire, the white residents of Total Loss become less like “the crazy boogers of New York” and more like the indigenous who, like all settlers, they can’t help but both fear and admire. Of course, the back-to-the-land movement never approached the scale of earlier settler movements, and its main stages were New England pastures, not the westward edge of a perennial frontier. Nonetheless, in Mungo’s parody-tinted descriptions of the good life in Vermont, and in the countless stories that inspired the back-to-the-land-movement, you can sense the echoes of this uniquely American delusion — that land is plentiful, its promise limitless, and so every conflict, even class conflict, can be avoided if the belligerents just leave the city and mature. ■

POSTSCRIPT: On Ray Mungo, see his Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with the Liberation News Service (Beacon Press, 1970) and Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life (E.P Dutton, 1970). Photos by Peter Simon. PREVIOUS: The founders of Total Loss Farm: Sitting, from left: Michelle Clarke, Ray Mungo, and Peter Simon. Standing, from left: Richard Wizansky, Marty Jezer, Verandah Porche, and Laurie Miller. RIGHT: A May Day celebration at Total Loss Farm.

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LEFTOVERS MEANS & ENDS

BY MICAH UETRICHT

Long Live Jacobin Radio The Museum of the Revolution in Perquín, El Salvador, tells the stories of the Marxist guerrillas that fought a bloodthirsty, US-backed regime during the country’s civil war in the 1980s and early ’90s. If you visit, the ex-guerrilla staffers will, between harrowing tales of armed combat, proudly recount how they ran their radio station, Radio Venceremos, by recording in caves and running radio transmitters up trees in the jungle. The Salvadoran military was obsessed with destroying the station, which broadcast stories of repression and resistance that you couldn’t hear anywhere else. One US-trained Salvadoran commander once commented, “so long as we don’t finish off this Radio Venceremos, we’ll always have a scorpion up our ass.”

(Legend has it that the guerrillas finished off that same officer by luring him into a trap: he thought he had finally captured the radio transmitter from a group of fleeing guerrillas and could thus destroy the station; the transmitter was actually a bomb, exploding inside his helicopter.) The stakes for most leftist broadcasters today aren’t anywhere near as high. But the spoken word has always been a key medium for transmitting socialist ideas. There are millions of people who might find 3,000-word longform essays a daunting starting point, but could be reached through compelling oratory and debate. That’s why we have Jacobin Radio. We recently launched The Vast Majority, hosted by myself. It joins three already existing

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Jacobin Radio podcasts: The Dig with Daniel Denvir, Behind the News with Doug Henwood, and Jacobin Radio With Suzi Weissman. We’ve published over three hundred episodes so far, featuring interviews with a wide range of left writers, organizers, and politicians, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, David Harvey, Bernie Sanders, Jane McAlevey, and many others. It’s a mix you won’t hear anywhere else, drawing tens of thousands of listeners every week in multiple new episodes. We hope you check out Jacobin Radio, and if you feel so compelled rate and review us on iTunes and contribute at jacobinmag.com/donate/ to keep the project going. ■

“Not a black sheep, but who’s the creep Trying to put me on the street while I’m trying to sleep?” Boots Riley, — “Kill My Landlord”

雅各賓 春天 19

雅各賓春天 19