One of the many outrageous and surreal moral paradoxes of life in the imperial core was made disturbingly obvious early on during the COVID crisis in a shuttered Las Vegas—then void of tourists—when its city officials moved unhoused residents into an empty outdoor parking lot. In a woesome illustration of capitalism’s hallmark scarcity in the midst of plenty, looming directly above the forgotten were the city's glitzy-ritzy hotels with thousands of empty, unused rooms stacked skyward—taunting the unsheltered who were made to sleep below, partitioned by lines of chalked concrete. Let’s call it what it was: an open-air prison. Fast forward a year later, with vaccines aplenty, millions of additional Americans are now at risk of joining the ranks of the unsheltered thanks to the soft-fascism of the Biden administration and its refusal to take direct action to prevent a looming eviction crisis. These days, few can afford to join the American-dream-home-ownership-cult, as prices have soared past their breaking points all across the nation, with California exemplifying the surge, where homes are now selling for $50-70,000 above their listing prices. And even for the renters who aren’t behind on their monthly debt payments to land-barons, they are confronting increased housing precarity as well, with rents skyrocketing to ever outrageous levels. In a world where housing—a basic necessity that everyone needs—has become a speculative hyper-commodity driving unfathomable levels of wealth inequality in the midst of apocalyptic climate chaos, to say that there is a “housing crisis” is a tragic understatement. Our contemporary and abject social contract can be summed up as: “PAY RENT OR DIE.” So without pause or confusion, we must unapologetically recognize that housing is both a human right and a public good that must be provided unconditionally to every person on the planet. Accordingly, there should be no such thing as a “housing market”—a gross absurdity that does little more than guarantee that housing’s exchange value will always trump its use value. Let us be clear: Housing is a human right. Therefore, rent is a human rights abuse and landlords are human rights violators, full stop. Not surprisingly, as the core feature of the second most important node along The Golden Square, free housing for all needs to be acknowledged as a non-negotiable, bare minimum provision to be expected from any decent society. In this episode, Jesse & Matt grapple with the unconscionable injustices of for-profit housing, seeking out those much too neglected vectors of emancipatory struggle where housing decommodification can begin, brick-by-brick, archway-to-doorway.
Mentioned In This Episode:
Occupy Wall Street Era Meme: 6 Homes for Every Homeless Person
Patrick Range McDonald in Housing Is A Human Right: “President Joe Biden Says Housing Is a Right. It’s a Game Changer.”
In his 1944 State of the Union address, Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a “Second Bill of Rights” that included the right for every American, regardless of “station, race, or creed” to have “a decent home.”
Harvey J. Kaye in BillMoyers.com: “Remembering Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Second Bill of Rights”
The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 25 Includes the Right to Adequate Housing:
“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
Important Caveat: Although signed by all 192 nations of the UN, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a non-binding treaty.
The 1949 U.S. Housing Act identified—as a national objective—the provision of “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.”
“Language acknowledging the responsibility of states to supply adequate housing for their citizenry appears in the national constitutions of sixty-nine countries.” (In Defense of Housing by David Madden and Peter Marcuse)
In Defense of Housing by David Madden and Peter Marcuse. Published in 2016 by Verso Books.
Henri Lefebvre’s The Right to the City (Le Droit à la ville) (1968). Translated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas and reprinted in Writings on Cities. Published in 1996 by Wiley-Blackwell.
Mary Ellen Flannery in NEA: “The Homeless Professor Who Lives in Her Car”
Alastair Gee in The Guardian: “Facing Poverty, Academics Turn to Sex Work and Sleeping in Cars”
Eve Ottenberg in Truthout: “Underpaid Adjunct Professors Sleep in Cars and Rely on Public Aid”
The bad faith whining by Libertarians with their favorite straw man appeal: “Nothing that requires the labor of others can be a human right.”
The belligerent bellowing of the fully indoctrinated neoliberal subject & Right-Libertarianism run amok: “I got mine. Fuck You!”
The ever-present refrain of the “How Will We Pay For It?” question is nothing more than a Bad Faith Horseshit Hoodwink; as witnessed in AOC’s rebuttal to Chris Cuomo’s question on CNN about how she plans to pay for The Green New Deal: The Radional National’s YouTube Channel: “Ocasio-Cortez Makes Cuomo Look Dumb For 'How Do You Pay' Question”
Robert Hockett in Forbes: “The Green New Deal: How We Will Pay For It Isn't 'A Thing' - And Inflation Isn't Either”
David Graeber’s Classic (and Short but Sweet) Essay: “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer Might Surprise You!”
The Marxist Geographer, David Harvey, in his RSA Animate lecture, points out how the American dream of home-ownership was built up in the 1930s to produce permanent wage discipline because “debt incumbent homeowners don’t go on strike”: “Crises of Capitalism.”
Another popular meme during the Occupy Wall Street days of 2011: “Humans are the only animals on earth that have to pay rent to live.”
To paraphrase Joseph Biden’s whispers to the Ruling Class, “Nothing Has Fundamentally Changed.” The meme continues in 2021.
According to estimates by the US Census Bureau there are nearly 15.6 Million Vacant Housing Units in the U.S. (2021). According to estimates by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development there are more than 560,000 homeless people in the U.S. (as of 2019). This means that there are approximately 30 vacant homes for every unhoused person in the U.S.
Jeff Collins in The OC Register: “Inland Empire Starts 2021 with Nation’s Highest Rent Increases”
From Binyamin Appelbaum’s Op-Ed in The New York Times: “America’s Cities Could House Everyone If They Chose To”:
"The nation’s homeless population could be housed for $10 billion a year — less than the price of one aircraft carrier."
We spend $1.25T on the Military-Industrial-Complex each year as detailed by Mandy Smithberger & William Hartung in POGO: “Making Sense of the $1.25 Trillion National Security State Budget”
Doug Henwood’s Radio Show Behind the News, Where He Interviews Gianpaolo Biaochhi About How We Can Solve the Housing Crisis.
NYU Urban Democracy Lab: “The Case For A Social Housing Development Authority” by Gianpaolo Baiocchi and H. Jacob Carlson with Marnie Brady, Ned Crowley, and Sara Duvisac (November 2020)
The national average rent increased by 36% in the past decade – as noted by Irina Lupa in RENTCafé: “The Decade in Housing Trends: High-Earning Renters, High-End Apartments and Thriving Construction”
Median rent prices for 1 bedroom apartments and much more can be found in the Zumper National Rent Report.
Grocery price increases during the Covid crisis are detailed in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Labor Review by Dave Mead, Karen Ransom, Stephen B. Reed and Scott Sager: “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Food Price Indexes and Data Collection”
Alicia Adamczyk in CNBC: “Minimum Wage Workers Cannot Afford Rent in any U.S. State”
Median Sales Price for a Home in the US is currently around $350,000.
Median Sales Price for a Home in California is currently around $800,000.
The Two Greatest Causes for the Perpetual Poverty in America: The Cost of Healthcare & The Cost of Housing
David Graeber in Jacobin: “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep”
More than 10 million people in the US (or 14% of renters) are behind on rent an average of $5K-$6K; as reported by Annie Nova in CNBC: “More Than 14% of Renters Are Still Behind as National Eviction Ban Comes to an End”
Noah Sheidlower in Untapped New York: “The Controversial History of Levittown, America’s First Suburb”
Owned: A Tale Of Two Americas (2018). Directed by Giorgio Angelini.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press.
Sean Illing in Vox: “The sordid history of housing discrimination in America: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on how the real estate industry undermined black homeownership.”
Samuel Stein’s Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Published in 2019 by Verso Books.
Samuel Stein in Jacobin: “Gentrification Is a Feature, Not a Bug, of Capitalist Urban Planning”
Doug Henwood’s Behind The News Interviews Samuel Stein, Author of Capital City, on Bourgeois Urban Planning with an Emphasis on New York City.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011). Directed by Chad Freidrichs.
The Big Short (2015). Directed by Adam McKay. Featuring Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell.
The Panama Papers (2016). Directed by Alex Winter.
The Laundromat (2019). (Inspired by the story of the Panama Papers.) Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Featuring Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas and AJ Meijer.
“50% of all of capital’s valued assets are in land.”– referenced in Samuel Stein’s Capital City
Renegade Inc Interviews David Graeber: “Batshit Construction”
“The World’s Largest—and America's Priciest—Home Is Ready for Its Close-up” “Behold “The One”—a Record-Breaking Los Angeles Estate with 105,000 Square Feet of Living Space and, It Seems, a Nearly $350 Million Price Tag.”
Vivian Moreno in The New York Times: “$100.4 Million Sale at One57”
Lucinda Shen in Fortune: “Here’s How Many Homes the Average Billionaire Now Owns” (2016): “There’s a new bar for wealth in America: Nine homes and 19 cars owned by the average “ultra-high net worth” individual.”
During the height of Red Vienna’s political power, people spent 4% of income on housing; as shared by Zohran Mamdani in The Gravel Institute video: “How Socialists Solved the Housing Crisis”
North American Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN)
Debt Collective Debtor’s Union
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)
DSA Housing Justice Commission (@dsa_housing)
The US Labor Bureau of Statistics: “The union membership rate of public-sector workers (34.8 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (6.3 percent).”
Aram Ayra: A Democratic Socialist running for city council in Riverside, CA who pledged not to take money from the police..
We need to be spending $10T over 10 years for The Green New Deal; as reported by Niv Elis in The Hill: “Ocasio-Cortez: $10 Trillion Needed for Effective Climate Plan”
Ian Angus in Climate and Capitalism: “The Origin of Rosa Luxemburg’s Slogan ‘Socialism or Barbarism’”
Kate Evan’s Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg. Published in 2015 by Verso Books.