THE HOUSING CRISIS: ONE YEAR AFTER LOCKDOWN
By David Rovics, Counterpunch.
March 20, 2021 | EDUCATE!
Above photo: Nathaniel St. Clair.
All the folks moving to Portland from California or New York and talking
about how great the real estate prices are here may not know it (note: I was
once one of them), but this city is the most rent-burdened city in the
United States, and it exists within a country that, like this city, is
undergoing multiple long-term crises, one of which is a housing crisis. The
housing crisis, like so many other crises, got much worse one year ago this
week, when the country, and much of the rest of the world, shut down.
Although this is a city that lost half of its Black population to the rise
in the cost of housing between the years of 2000 and 2010 alone, according
to census data, one year ago this week, if we talked about the housing
crisis as one neck-deep in institutional racism, we would often be met by
blank stares. One year on, the fact that there is racial discrimination in
the real estate and rental markets, and the fact that housing justice is
also a question of racial justice is largely accepted as self-evident in
mainstream circles.
Less examined are the outrageous levels of profiteering on the backs of
pretty much the whole of the society, led by a class of super-rich
oligarchs, in their quest for ever more profits, as they systematically
engineer a constant rise in the cost of buying or renting housing, across
the country, as real wages continue to stagnate, nowhere near rising along
with the cost of housing, except among corporate executives, investors, and
a select strata of six-figure workers. But this entire phenomenon of sucking
the wealth of society constantly upwards, towards the corporate landed
gentry, is finally receiving at least a bit more widespread scrutiny than it
has received in a very long time - if not nearly enough of it.
To be clear, it's easy to see that we are in the midst of an epic struggle.
Several major genies have come out of their bottles, and they're not going
to just go away now. How all of this unfolds is unknown, because "unknown"
is the nature of the future. But it's been a year since the lockdown, and a
long three months since I've written anything on the class war that we call
the housing crisis (not that I wasn't thinking about it much of that time,
and reposting articles about related news on anti-social media).
Of course, a major development since I wrote about what was at the time the
most recent iteration of eviction moratorium and renter assistance
legislation in the state of Oregon, in late December, is the Biden
administration managed to take office, and even managed to squeak in with a
Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. As I write, the latest round
of stimulus checks are arriving in bank accounts across the country,
unemployment assistance for gig workers like me has been extended until
early September, and a new child tax credit is apparently going to lift tens
of millions of families in this country out of poverty over the next year,
including mine, with an unprecedented, almost two trillion dollar government
spending package. (Unprecedented, but only equal to what we normally spend
on the military during a two-year period.)
What we have seen up til now, prior to the lockdown, and more so since the
lockdown, is a dramatic rise in the number of people living in tents on the
sidewalk or in broken-down cars on the street, a dramatic rise in young
adults moving back in with their parents, and a rise in evictions. The rise
in evictions has been hugely mitigated by local, state, and federal eviction
bans that have come and gone over the past year, depending on the locality.
Although caused in particular by a combination of an already burdensome cost
of housing combined with low wages, when those wages were in so many cases
lost entirely, eviction bans and government aid have so far prevented the
"eviction tsunami" that the business press has been concerned about.
Concerned, of course, for reasons of capitalism's self-preservation in the
face of this unacceptably high degree of societal chaos, if not out of
empathy for the millions of people who face the horrors of eviction in a
typical, non-pandemic year in this country, who are normally ignored by the
corporate media.
Now, we don't have a $15-an-hour minimum wage, but significant amounts of
aid is coming in, which will significantly affect the lives of many people.
First of all, this needs to be acknowledged. Government response to the
pandemic was largely a disaster, economic aid for suffering people has been
too limited and badly apportioned, but now there's a lot more of it, and
it's going to make a difference.
If we take a moment to reflect on the situation and consider the future for
the still-very-much-ongoing housing crisis in the US, among other crises, we
can wonder whether this new stimulus package would have passed if Biden and
Harris had not won the election, and we can wonder whether it would have
been as significant as it is if not for a year dominated by constant
domestic unrest. And we can ask what forms of unrest might have been more
influential than others, in inspiring such generosity from that gang of
several hundred millionaires (with a nice little squad of righteous
progressives) that we call the US Congress.
Regardless of how we got here or why this happened - by which I mean how
this society got into such a stratified mess, and how the government got
inspired to spend so much money to try to get us part of the way out of it -
what we can be sure of, according to copious precedent, is that any solution
to the housing crisis that just involves paying the back rent is no solution
at all. Even canceling all rent and postponing all mortgages for everyone
during the whole of 2020, none of which is remotely on the Congressional
agenda, wouldn't solve any long-term problems.
This is because the housing crisis predates the Covid crisis, so getting us
back to where we were in 2019 would mean returning us to the housing crisis
we were in already. But were the rental and other housing assistance to be
sufficient to meet the need that's out there - and as far as I understand,
even with this new spending package, it isn't - then what the corporate
landlords and their management companies would do is raise all the rents.
Those who have studied history are aware that one of the biggest friends of
the labor unions during the early years of the industrial revolution in New
York City were the landlords who owned the buildings the workers lived in.
Why? If they were paid better, the landlords could charge more rent.
Meaning, of course, that most of the extra tax money raised, most of the new
government debt incurred, even if it is ostensibly being spent in the name
of keeping the housing-insecure housed, among other things, is ultimately
just going to make the rich richer. And if there's more aid, that's just
more money to be funneled upwards.
So what's the solution, if not aid? Control over costs. Only this can
prevent the landlords from just charging more, as we earn more, or get more
government aid, or institute a universal basic income, or whatever other
such programs come along. A lack of good regulation of the housing market
will inevitably sabotage all such efforts.
Of course, regulating the landlords means regulating the very corporate
entities that spend the money that gets most of the politicians from both
parties elected in the first place, in this auction that we call democracy,
so changing policies around regulating what landlords can charge - or even
questioning whether and to what degree anyone should be allowed to practice
this particular form of business enterprise, of running little monopolies
that "provide housing" for people who would otherwise have none - is
inevitably going to be extremely controversial among the kleptocracy. So
getting this kind of regulation passed requires lots of resistance. Even
more resistance than was required to get the $1.9 trillion bailout passed.
And what kind of resistance is that of which I speak? People will, have, and
do argue about points like this endlessly. Did all the burning buildings in
cities across the country inspire politicians to spend more to alleviate
poverty and address institutional racism and other endemic problems, or
would the politicians be even more inspired towards egalitarianism if all
the protests had been permitted marches and candle-lit vigils? Unknown.
But if we are assessing the housing struggle and wondering where to go from
here, I think there are some important observations to be made about the
recent past, that speak to where we might focus efforts in the future.
There are many tenants unions and other networks cropping up all over the
country that are focusing on a wide variety of issues of concern to renters,
but if we were to boil their efforts down to two major demands, they would
be the demand for actually affordable housing in the form of real, effective
rent control legislation, and the demand for an end to the practice of
forced eviction, and any threats to that effect. In other rich countries
housing is a guaranteed right, rent control is widespread and practiced
effectively, much housing is cooperative or government-owned, and
well-maintained, and forced evictions are extremely rare.
Here in Portland, the scene around the Red House on Mississippi Avenue has,
overall, been a great example of the potential for eviction defense tactics
to change the whole equation when it comes to whether or how often the
authorities, real estate investors, landlords, etc., will consider carrying
out forced evictions or foreclosures. There is clear reason to believe the
local authorities are far less enthusiastic about carrying out forced
evictions since their failed effort to evict the residents there in north
Portland, in the latter days of 2020.
While there are many cliquish aspects to the elements of the autonomous
scene that tend to be attracted to the history and practice of eviction
defense - and that's true in the US and in other countries as well - I think
we can say unequivocally that when several dozen people (with the potential
of quickly becoming a couple hundred people) are committed enough to risk
arrest and police violence, among other things, by re-occupying a house
after an eviction was carried out, and then by occupying streets in the
neighborhood around the house, setting up fencing and tire spikes to prevent
vehicular assaults as people did around the Red House, then we will affect
policy moving forward.
Aside from the importance of inclusiveness, and the effectiveness of the
various forms of civil disobedience practiced in the course of the Red House
eviction resistance, there are other things to note about how events
unfolded here in Portland over the course of the past year that might help
us think about the next moves.
There are clearly many reasons for Portland being one of the flashpoints of
resistance over the past year in the US, and also one of those places where
resistance around race and housing most naturally intertwined. I wouldn't
want to under-emphasize the importance of factors like the cost of rent
relative to the average wage here (what they call "rent burden"), which, as
I mentioned earlier, is the nation's highest, or the long history of housing
discrimination against people of color here. But I think an important
psychological element on this front is that so many of the people here,
activists or not, moved here after being priced out of New York City,
Seattle, or California, and this experience colors their perspective on
everything. Many of them - us - feel like we have nowhere else to go, in
many ways. Cornered.
Another factor that seems worth noting is the way the local movement
organized itself into different blocs responsible for different activities
related to maintaining a social movement, from feeding people to caring for
their wounds to fixing their cars to providing legal support to providing
sound at protests. This phenomenon was not limited to Portland, of course,
but was more of an organized thing in some places than in others.
Especially since the January 6th Capitol siege, people, organizations and
networks across the political spectrum have been losing their social media
accounts. I personally know many people around the world who are solid
members of the left, not the sort to be making death threats or spreading
outrageous conspiracies, who have lost their Facebook or Twitter accounts in
the past few months. Long before all this deplatforming was a big news item
in early 2021, the movement in Portland was actively pivoting to stop
relying so much on the corporate platforms. Although Twitter is still a very
useful place to stay abreast of happenings on the street here if you follow
the right accounts of grassroots activists and journalists, activists in
Portland increasingly do their communicating in private Signal groups and
other more protected spaces, less vulnerable to disappearing at the whim of
a Silicon Valley billionaire.
One of these blocs, essentially, has been an initiative I've been very
involved with called PEER - Portland Emergency Eviction Response. There are
several other groups, or committees within larger organizations, involved
with doing very much the same sort of thing, such as the eviction defense
committee within Portland Tenants United, which itself is part of a broader
network of tenants unions that has recently formed, the Autonomous Tenants
Union.
On PEER's website folks can sign up to receive text alerts about evictions
that may be happening. PTU's eviction defense group has a similar setup.
PEER's web and text operation is very intentionally set up independently of
any major corporate platforms. Anyone who can receive a text message can
sign up, anonymously. As things continue to develop with Big Tech and Big
Data, along with the suspensions of so many social media accounts, it
becomes more and more clear how important it is for essential communication,
and lots else, to be, as much as possible, independent of corporate
platforms, and at least slightly less subject to mass surveillance.
As these networks here have been growing, we have made a very conscious
effort to plaster the town with stickers. Posters, too, but especially
stickers. They last much longer - sometimes months, in prominent places
around town. We have focused our stickering campaigns on neighborhoods and
parks where protests happen often, as well as near Class C apartment
complexes, which can be found all over Portland, in some parts more than
others.
The focus on physical media is because we don't want to just communicate
online, and we feel that the physical presence of such messages around town
has a different sort of impact than a post on the web. It's also not subject
to Facebook's insidious algorithms or censorship efforts. The slightly
illegal nature of spreading the word by putting stickers on public property,
such as on the otherwise blank, shiny steel backs of the many signs poking
out of the sidewalks, seems to have a somewhat comforting effect on many
people who may be wondering who these eviction defense people are. Whoever
they are, they like to deface public property, so maybe they're OK. The
medium communicates as much as the message does.
As the person responsible for answering PEER's email, I have developed the
distinct impression that there are a few folks around town who identify with
this nascent eviction defense squad much the same way people who feed the
hungry in public parks without a permit identify as Food Not Bombs. In
either case, what some people are identifying with is simply a tactic, more
than anything else. In the case of Food Not Bombs, you needn't have met
anyone else engaged in the practice, necessarily - if you're feeding people
for free in a public place and risking arrest by doing so, that's more or
less the whole shtick.
And if you believe in eviction abolition, and risking arrest by trespassing
or perhaps engaging in other forms of civil disobedience in order to keep
people housed, rather than pitched onto the sidewalk, then you're a PEER of
mine and others. It's just the basic concept of solidarity, coordinated by
text mob, rather than the old tin horns of the Rent Strike Wars in the
1840's, or the telephone trees in the age of the land line.
Or to put this whole update into one sentence:
However big or well-targeted the bailout may be, in all likelihood, lasting
change won't happen until we take on the corporate investor landlord class,
demonstrate how much support this cause has, stop business as usual, and
force the politicians to pass the kind of legislation that will control the
rent, now - not in some capitalist's imagined future.
David Rovics is a songwriter, podcaster, and part of Portland Emergency
Eviction Response. Go to artistsforrentcontrol.org to sign up to receive
text notifications, so you can be part of this effort. Another Portland is
possible.