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The Class War on the Tenant Class [1]

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Date: 2023-06-20

Housing affordability is at its lowest level since 1986 . In the richest nation in the world, there are 582,000 homeless people , with homelessness particularly acute among Pacific Islanders, Blacks, and Native Americans. Americans have been led to believe that the question is merely one of affordability and a lack of compassion for others, but this characterization ignores a darker reality: that throughout America, there is a harsh and protracted class war pitting exploitative landlords against a struggling tenant class, and which is driving homelessness.

The System Is Rigged in Favour of Landlords

Rent inflation has grown faster than overall inflation, ever since we started collecting such records. Indeed, the gap between rental inflation and overall inflation is at its highest level ever. Rent has become a bigger and bigger expense for the average American, despite broad support for affordable housing .

The reason this is so is that, quite simply, the system is rigged in such a way that it allows landlords to jack up rents with very few checks, all the while touting themselves as struggling. The data above implies that landlords are enjoying their most profitable era ever. Landlords have been able to capture the regulatory system, and our culture has stripped away any shame from preying on the vulnerable. At the wrong end of landlord power and cultural support, are racial minorities and low-income families, who are being pushed deeper into intergenerational poverty.

We are told that the housing crisis is fundamentally a supply question, that if we could simply build more houses, everything would be okay. This is a very sanitized view of what’s going on. This is the philosophy behind Andreessen’s call to “build” again. What this ignores is that developers have no incentive to drive prices down. Over the last few decades, house prices have only briefly ever gone down, and that was a result of the Great Recession. All things being equal, prices always go up, not down.

The narrative also ignores the fact that new homes are more likely to be owned by the rich or well-to-do, who can turn around and rent them out to those in need, at exploitative prices. Simply building more is nothing more than a wealth pump for the already rich. So while we may invest in such plans in the belief that they will resolve the problem, there is no evidence that this actually happens. The system rewards profiteering and the solutions on the table, founded on the idea that the problem is supply-side, ignore the class war that’s going on.

NIMBY?

In 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic ravaging economies and upending lives, billionaire venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, wrote a sweeping indictment of America’s inability to build big things, “It’s Time to Build” , where he pointed to “crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and take the jobs of the future”. Yet, two years later, it emerged that Andreessen had opposed a plan to add 137 multifamily housing units by rezoning nine lots in Atherton, California, where Andreessen resides.

While this story is salacious on its own, its deeper lesson is that NIMBYs have made affordable housing initiatives difficult to progress at the local level, where they can exercise their wealth to keep the poor as far away from them as possible. Andreessen is not alone, there are NIMBYs across America, and despite their stated support for affordable housing, in practice, it’s the last thing they want. If true reform is to happen, it has to be done at the state level, where NIMBYs, despite their wealth, will have to contend with a public that is broadly more supportive of affordable housing reform. Without a shift in where the battle for reform is taking place, we are bound to have the rhetoric of reform met by stealthy opposition.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/20/2176644/-The-Class-War-on-the-Tenant-Class

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