Housing is Determined By Class Power and Profit, Not "Supply and Demand"

By Shi Sanyazi

There is a widely accepted belief among the journalists, think tanks, and politicians who animate the housing discourse that a lack of housing supply is the source of tenants’ present conditions (ever-rising rents, primarily). It follows that these thinkers advocate for a variety of policies which will, in their eyes, allow the market to “self-correct.” Once the supply of housing has met the demand, they argue that rents should go down (just like in the graphs we drew in high-school economics class!).

We shouldn’t deny that the idea has a comforting appeal. It offers a neat, ostensibly “common-sense” solution that all sides — developers, landlords, tenants — can theoretically get behind. It’s very easy to say: “match supply and demand and rents will go down — that’s just how markets work.” It’s more difficult to admit the inconvenient truth. 

The truth is that — especially in the era of algorithmic price-setting and increasingly financialized, corporate ownership of rental housing — our conditions as tenants are determined by the balance of class power, not the balance of supply and demand. 

Landlords, developers and their financiers are classes with class interests — namely, making the fattest profits possible. They are highly organized and have historically been willing to wage war on anyone who challenges their bottom line. Real estate capital’s return-on-investment depends on their capacity to out-organize and overpower tenants. 

Tenants' class interests — community control over our housing and the basic need for shelter — are, by definition, the opposite of real estate capital’s class interests.

The “supply crisis” narrative is deficient because it makes no attempt to reckon with the class relationships which define the housing market. The assumptions this narrative makes about the behavior of the housing market hinge on ignoring the structural imbalance of power between tenants and landlords, developers and their financiers. 

Landlord’s profit margins are determined by their level of organization (aided nowadays by political corruption, algorithmic financialization and consolidation of the rental housing stock) and the state’s ability to enable their exploitation with neglect, violence, and the threat of violence. Developers similarly ensure their profits by working in tandem with local governments and the police to forcibly remake neighborhoods to their liking, displacing working-class Black and brown communities. Lurking in the shadows, backing the landlords and developers, is the ruthlessly efficient and sophisticated arm of finance capital.

If we understand real estate capital as an organized class pursuing its class interests, and if we take the “pro-housing” argument at face value (i.e; increased supply will decrease rents), then we would expect real-estate interests (whose profits would be cut into if rents decreased) to oppose their policy prescriptions.

It’s quite curious then that the real-estate lobby and their political bedfellows openly support “pro-housing” non-profits and propagate their political lines. Powerful lobbying groups like the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and the National Multifamily Housing Council revel in parroting “pro-housing” talking points. From REBNY’s 2022 testimony on Mayor Adams’ housing plan: 

New York is facing a housing crisis. A key driver of this crisis is the lack of housing production and inadequate supply to meet the needs of our growing and diverse city.

They go on to — shocker! — recommend the city and state remove regulatory barriers to development and continue to subsidize their lucrative construction projects. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that NYC Mayor, Eric Adams, agrees: he’s pledged to administrate a “city of yes,” arguing bluntly in The Economist that “although many factors contribute to the problem, at its core we have a housing crisis because we are not building enough housing.” NY Governor Kathy Hochul’s housing proposals echo the same logic. For what it's worth, Adams and Hochul have both been consistently showered with real-estate donations.

So, despite the promise that building more housing will bring down rents, the real-estate lobby embraces the prospect of building more housing! Why? Because the “supply crisis” narrative is an idea working in defense of their class interests.

Do we really believe that landlords and developers will actively support a reduction in their profits? Do we think they’re going to resign themselves with a deep sigh and a “well, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles?” How naïve can we possibly be? As James Baldwin once wrote of capitalism, to imagine these leeches ceding power and profits willingly demands “yet more faith and infinitely more in schizophrenia than the concept of the Virgin Birth.” 

Landlords and developers have no interest in solving the housing crisis because the permanence of that crisis is the condition of their wealth and power. This understanding has serious practical implications. 

In other words, if we understand our conditions to be a result of class struggle (rather than a market imbalance), it becomes quite clear that our conditions will be determined by our level of organization as tenants and our ability to wage struggle against the force that commodifies our need for shelter: real-estate capital.

The magic lies in our hands and our hands alone

This conclusion is the same as that at the core of all consciousness-raising movements, indeed at the core of all anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal movements (see, for example, the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa; the Combahee River Collective; or the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil). It's the same conclusion which the legendary anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon came to:

[Political education] means driving home to the masses that everything depends on them, that if we stagnate the fault is theirs, and that if we progress, they too are responsible, that there is no demiurge, no illustrious man taking responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people and the magic lies in their hands and their hands alone.

The magic lies in our hands and our hands alone.

When we get organized, we have the capacity to transform our conditions. Will we win collective control over our cities? Will the threadbare protections we have left be rolled back? Will we stagnate? It’s up to us! 

Through militant organization, tenants wield — and historically have wielded! — a tremendous amount of power. Every concession from the landowning class; thus, every victory for tenants, has been won through this organization. 

The first rent control laws in New York City were passed due to pressure created by waves and waves of militant rent strikes (not to mention the fears of a Bolshevik-style revolution that these strikes helped inspire). Great Depression-era tenant activism — which included the successful efforts by the Communist Party to reverse evictions of working class tenants — was the impetus for New York City’s first public housing projects (FDR himself said that the concessions of the New Deal were driven by a desire to “save our system, the capitalist system…”). Mass agitation by Black organizers led to the passage of Fair Housing laws (while the real estate lobby was organizing against them). The COVID-19 eviction moratorium in New York was fought for and repeatedly extended due to pressure from organized tenant unions.

These are all tenuous and often contradictory reforms (public housing in the US, for instance, often deepened racial segregation), class truces which politicians negotiated in exchange for relative peace and quiet. The goal is not to aspire to reform, but to highlight that these reforms were not enacted because of our participation at the ballot box, nor passed by a benevolent state, nor advocated for by benevolent landlords and developers — they were fought for, collectively, in the streets and hallways and lobbies of our neighborhoods. 

Tenants are and always have been the protagonists of the struggle for control over our buildings, neighborhoods, and cities. 

OK. With that in mind, we can move on to addressing the core claim — that the “housing crisis” is caused by a supply deficit — in detail. Through this, we can highlight that the “housing crisis” is not “fixable” with “policy.” Our conditions as tenants are determined by our level of organization and effectiveness at waging class struggle.

The “supply crisis”

An imbalance between supply and demand is not the source of tenants’ present conditions. The real source — as has been the case since capitalism violently imposed its will on the world four centuries ago — are the private property relations which enable the exploitation of working people by the landowning class. Present-day gentrification is just one chapter in the centuries-long story of displacement, enclosure and imperialism which has marked the penetration of capital into indigenous and working class communities. So long as these relations remain intact, our struggle will persist. 

This is not to say that we should never build housing. There’s no doubt that under the collective governance of the working class (god-willing), the supply of housing would be responsive to migration and other fluctuations in demand. The disagreement stems from a core question: who is building housing and for whom are they building housing?

The alternative to the current arrangement, wherein tenants have next to zero democratic control over their communities, is to organize towards a world where tenants themselves collectively control and direct the development of safe, beautiful, ecological housing. 

That’s the polemic response — let’s dive a little deeper. As we work through the details, let’s keep the argument in mind:

Tenants’ conditions are determined by the balance of class power, not “supply and demand.”

This section is divided into a few parts to make it a bit more digestible. 

Mind the rent gap!

We can start by exploring the process of gentrification, where we can very clearly observe how real estate capital wields its class power to mold cities to its liking. Notably, its class organization has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, as the rental housing stock has been consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. It can be quite challenging nowadays to figure out who your landlord actually is, as they usually hide behind a maze of shell companies, LLCs and Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). An army of supers and management companies further distance landlords from tenants, acting as convenient buffers for the corporate owners and private equity firms pulling the strings.

As a result of this consolidation, private equity firms, mega-developers and corporate landlords execute rent hikes, serve evictions, illegally (and legally) deregulate apartments and in sum, cause displacement, in an increasingly coordinated manner. 

In our organizing, more often than not, we work with tenants in buildings owned by a landlord with hundreds to thousands of units in their portfolio. (The average apartment in New York City is part of an 893 unit portfolio.) When we visit other buildings in that portfolio, we’ll usually find the same issues, whether disrepair, harassment, skyrocketing rents, and (illegal and legal) deregulation. 

(If you are interested in researching the owner of your building in NYC and kick-starting a tenants association in your building, JustFix is an incredible asset.)

To streamline gentrification, mega-developers, corporate landlords, and private equity firms utilize sophisticated algorithms to identify “rent gaps.” A rent gap is the difference between the rent currently being paid by tenants and the rent that could be potentially charged in the same location if the current tenants were evicted through legal or illegal means. PropTech companies like Skyline AI and RealPage are accomplices in this plunder. Their business is that of identifying apartments which are “‘inefficient’ in the rental market in relation to their total cost, before teaming up with the largest property investment companies to make an offer.” 

These advanced techniques (enabled by troves of data collected by big tech firms) allow investors to target optimal neighborhoods for gentrification with pinpoint accuracy. It shouldn’t surprise us that at a neighborhood level, there is a direct correlation between concentrated corporate ownership and gentrification. 

Naturally, real estate capital’s drive to extract as much profit out of our cities as possible does not care much for pesky renter protections like rent-stabilization and public housing. In fact, the relatively low rents in rent-stabilized apartments and public housing (as compared to market-rate) make them even more appealing, in the sense that they present even larger rent gaps to “close.” 

From a private equity firm’s perspective: Imagine a rent-stabilized building which rents for an average of $800/mo per unit, in a neighborhood where rents are averaging $1500/mo per unit (and climbing!), or are where rents are primed to increase to that price (in accordance to the precise calculations of algorithms from RealPage and Skyline AI). To a private equity firm, the building represents an opportunity for superprofits. To the building’s working class, usually Black and brown tenants, the building is not an investment opportunity — it’s home, a small pocket of resistance to the waves of real estate capital engulfing their communities. But if the private equity firm can evict the current residents, destabilize the building, and slap on a gentrification mask — then they can charge many times as much in rent and make a fat profit. All in a day's work for the vampires sucking our cities dry. 

Real estate capital also pushes this class agenda through legal action. For instance, New York City landlords are currently suing to wipe out rent regulations which protect around 1 million tenants from naked exposure to the “free market.” This case will go to the revanchist Supreme Court, who will likely rule in favor of the landlords. Once again, we can plainly observe that our class enemies are organized and aggressive!

It’s not an accident that in our organizing we encounter and experience consistent patterns of harassment, disrepair, and neglect in rent-regulated buildings. In New York City, deregulation is most commonly allowed upon vacancy, so it follows that landlords and speculators doggedly pursue vacancy via eviction. Some of their choice strategies include: buyouts, fake eviction notices, illegal refusal to renew leases, intimidation, neglect, intentional disrepair, cutting off heat, electricity and water, calling the police on tenants, and direct harassment. There are technically legal protections against strong-arming tenants out of regulated apartments, but they’re rarely enforced. Like other tenant’s rights (or, for that matter, any right “granted” by the state), protection from harassment is generally only realized when enforced by organized tenants. 

It’s also not an accident that the real-estate lobby and their politician friends have intentionally neglected to fund the upkeep of New York City’s remaining public housing stock. After all, NYCHA’s repair backlog (many tens of billions dollars) makes for a very convenient political device. When it came time to justify the “Preservation Trust” — nothing more than a scheme to privatize and commodify that remaining bastion of working class affordability — NYCHA’s repair backlog was cynically presented as evidence that public funding is no longer feasible. When challenged by outraged NYCHA tenants, conservative and “socialist” politicians alike argued that we have no option but to turn to the private sector to save NYCHA. As Holden Taylor writes: 

The line of reasoning put forth by the policy wonks and “socialists” advocating for the trust is, as usual, one of pragmatism and practicality. The Trust is the only way to get money for repairs, they say. This boils down, to butcher Rosa Luxemburg’s aphorism, a framework of “Privatization or Barbarism,” as these experts claim that the only alternative to the Trust is the status quo and the ever more crumbling infrastructure and dire quality of life that define it. Again, this is a failure of imagination. It is the socialist’s responsibility to push past the status quo, to fight for socialism, not merely a different form of marketization.

These observations about de-regulation and the privatization of public housing also help us to understand why the minority of left YIMBYs — who argue we should pair market solutions with an increase in social housing and tenant protections — are so woefully misguided. There is no way to guarantee that any housing we build will stay affordable when landlords, developers and finance capital have demonstrated they will wield their class power to commodify every inch of the city they can get their grubby hands on. Even our supposedly “socialist” elected officials are liable to bend to the will of real-estate capital without an organized mass movement to back them. The sober reality is: the remaining sources of off-market housing are being eroded because we are not sufficiently organized to protect them. The only way to protect those apartments and reverse the trend is through organized struggle. 

For instance, in 2020, organized community groups resisted the illegal eviction of tenants at 1214 Dean St. in Crown Heights. By occupying the stoop and physically resisting the eviction, the tenants eventually forced the city to buy the apartments and convert them into publicly-funded, affordable housing.

Build, baby, build! What could go wrong?

It doesn’t matter how “market optimistic” you are (as one reporter recently described the “pro-housing” non-profit Open New York) — when we let developers build freely, they will always be incentivized to build market-rate housing because those are the developments with the juiciest profit margins (and often the juiciest subsidies). This is not a neutral outcome. Building housing which people in surrounding neighborhoods cannot afford is the one of the first steps in the process of gentrification. 

In response to residents’ concerns about displacement, politicians will often promise that developments will meet the needs of communities because they contain 10% or 20% affordable units. This logic is premised on the idea that flooding a working class neighborhood which desperately needs cheap housing with, for instance, 900 market-rate units and 100 “affordable” units (which, due to the way affordability is measured, are often not actually affordable to those who most desperately need them), will produce anything but an influx of wealthier people who will displace the current residents. Just the announcement of permits for new market-rate developments can set off a frenzy of speculation, as investors look to sink their grimy fingernails into the imminently gentrifying neighborhood. 

The rise in the median income of an area (which inevitably accompanies market-rate development in working class neighborhoods) is often the impetus for steep hikes in the median rent. Which is to say: when people have more money, landlords generally raise rents (and rents usually rise faster than income — a few studies to reference: here, here and here.) Income inequality ensures that rising median rents disproportionately displaces working class tenants, as Francesca Manning explains:

While some people’s income is increasing at a rate to keep pace with rising rents, a large group of people’s wages are stagnating, falling, or rising far too slow to keep them housed … households that live in high-income [areas], whether or not they are themselves high income, end up paying a higher and higher percentage of their wages in rents.

In locales where market-rate development is not profitable, developers will not develop unless subsidized. This is a prominent form of “organized abandonment,” the movement of capital and social services away from populations and geographies deemed surplus and/or no longer profitable. Working class Black and brown communities are the first victims of this abandonment. These communities are faced with either: investment and gentrification; or disinvestment and abandonment. It’s russian roulette, except all of the chambers are loaded. Flint’s working-class Black population is one such example of a community which has been systematically abandoned by capital and the state.

Even with an understanding that developers will always build for profit, some will maintain that new housing supply at the top-end creates downward pressure on the market and “filters” units down to working class tenants. This is not an effective strategy, especially with the urgency that present conditions demand. Even when a filtering effect can be observed over decades, it is usually outweighed by the more immediate effects — sharply increased rent burdens and displacement  — that market-rate development set in motion. It’s important to understand that the “housing market” is not a single, unified market, but rather a series of income-level based sub-markets. Increased supply at the top end of the market can simultaneously stabilize rents for high-income tenants and increase rents for low-income tenants.

The “filtering” theory makes more than a few dubious presumptions. Three more are:

1. that new apartments will be occupied by warm-blooded humans;

2. that tenants are able to move constantly to and from apartments in the name of market equilibrium; 

3. that landlords who were recently collecting rent from a wealthier tenant will suddenly have a change of heart and lower their rent to accommodate the new, lower-income tenant who is moving into the “filtered” apartments.

1) ignores the reality, which is that many of these apartments are destined to be bought for investment purposes. At least a hundred thousand units in New York City are investment properties and second homes for the ultra-rich. As Raquel Rolnik writes, luxury real estate in places like New York City has increasingly become a “safe-deposit box for the transnational wealthy elite,” rendering many new apartments un-filterable.

2) and 3) are even further divorced from reality. I’m not quite sure where the filtering theory nerds are finding landlords willing to grant day-to-day leases to allow for this kind of flexibility — nor where they find landlords willing to sacrifice their bottom line for the sake of market equilibrium. 

To this point (that supply and rents are not necessarily, or even likely to be correlated), we can briefly look at two of the metropolitan areas which produced the most housing in the last decade (2010-2019): Raleigh, NC and Austin, TX. Both of these cities maintained a ratio of 1-2 jobs per new housing unit, which mainstream economists consider to be “healthy.”

In Raleigh, housing construction kept pace with population growth from 2010-2019. Did rents stabilize or go down in accordance with the magic supply and demand graph? No! They rose 53%, miraculously spurning the ironclad economic law of supply and demand.

In Austin, between 2010 and 2020, new housing production actually outpaced population growth (25.5% to 21.7%). According to the “supply crisis” narrative, rents should have gone down or at least stabilized, right? You’ll be shocked to learn that between 2010 and 2020, rents in Austin increased by 93%. Historically Black enclaves like East Austin have rapidly gentrified in spite of the growth in housing construction. The supposedly common sense relationship between housing supply and median rents is, uh, not so apparent to the average tenant in Austin.

The shock troops of real-estate capital

Class power requires enforcers, and real-estate capital’s war on working-class tenants is no different. The police are intimately involved in the process of displacement. 

The police are, after all, the most visible manifestation of the violence which undergirds private property relations. When you don’t (or can’t) pay your rent, you come face to face with the enforcers of the private-property relation: the court sending a Marshall to serve you with an eviction notice, and the police forcefully and violently executing that eviction if you resist. Landlords rely on the police to backstop evictions, which is the most fundamental mechanism for the reproduction of privately-owned housing. Without the threat of eviction, the landlord's power would evaporate, as we experienced during the COVID-19 eviction moratoriums. The state’s power is also felt implicitly: even if a tenant association is interested in taking a radical action like resisting a fellow tenant’s eviction, they understand that the state will almost certainly intervene on the side of the landlord, and can therefore be discouraged from acting. 

The process of eviction is nothing less than the state using their monopoly on legal violence to privilege the landlord’s right to exploit us over our human need to have a roof over your head. 

Gentrification relies on the same violence to function. In its infancy, gentrification is marked by the violent projections of private property relations onto working class communities, which solidify in physical form as the police. Cops consistently step up broken windows policing in neighborhoods which are gentrifying, further exposing working class Black and brown communities to the carceral state. Broken windows policing is the proverbial stick to the carrot of tax abatements, rezoning and developer incentives which open the floodgates for real estate capital. 

In the process of gentrification, homeless tenants (homeless people are tenants in that they do not control their housing; the struggles of housed tenants and homeless tenants exist along the same spectrum of precarity) are brutalized and disappeared. Eric Adams’ assault on homeless tenants which we have resisted over the past year is inseparably part of this same project. He is not uniquely evil either; his predecessors De Blasio and Bloomberg similarly utilized the NYPD to terrorize homeless tenants and remake the city to the real estate lobby’s liking. Connecting the struggles of homeless tenants to housed tenants — not just in solidarity, but as a movement united in opposition to the same forces of real estate capital — is a crucial task.

As many have compellingly argued, including her own family, Breonna Taylor was, at least in part, a victim of state-sanctioned gentrification. Breonna was murdered in the Russell neighborhood, which was being explicitly targeted for gentrification by the city of Louisville. Before and after her murder at the hands of the state, there was an observable “sharp increase in public nuisance cases, with 84% of those cases occurring in Louisville’s predominantly Black western half, which includes the Russell neighborhood.” As the Root Causes Research Center explains:

… the forces of property and police converged in Russell to acquire the remaining property for the redevelopment of Elliott Ave through the collaboration of the Louisville Metro Develop Louisville Office and the Louisville Metro Police Department’s Placed Based Investigations Squad (PBI). Increased pressure from the Louisville Mayor's Office to acquire these properties led directly to the rapid employment of PBI. The PBI Squad, then, employed a concept they were barely familiar with, to create the false evidence needed for the "No-Knock Warrant" that led to the murder of Breonna Taylor.

Gentrification is a process which travels along the existing contours of racial capitalism. Working-class Black communities (including homeless tenants) are the first to encounter — and the first to resist — the rusty knife edge of displacement. 

In sum: Gentrification is initiated by speculative, algorithmically-backed, financialized development and landlord harassment; enabled by racist police violence, tax abatements, developer incentives and capitalist urban planning; and resulting in displacement and harm (sometimes death) for the working class Black and brown communities who stand in its way. Gentrification is, in other words, not a natural phenomenon, not an unavoidable but necessary process, but rather one front in real estate capital’s organized class war on working class tenants.

Does this evidence point to a solution which gives more freedom to developers and landlords? No. Gentrification can only be stopped by collective control of our buildings, neighborhoods and cities. After all, it's highly unlikely that communities would displace themselves if and when they win control over their space.

One glimmer of hope we can look to for inspiration: In Los Angeles, after being confronted with rent increases of up to 200%, the tenants of Hillside Villa organized, militantly — in Spanish, Cantonese and English, no less. In 2022, their organizing paid off: they successfully pressured the city to buy their building on their behalf, thwarting their landlord's attempt to fatten his profit margins and placing their housing under some level of community control.

Ransom, manipulation, collusion

Organized real-estate capital demonstrates every day that it will protect its profits by any means necessary — regardless of “market equilibrium.” Outside of the strategies we’ve already covered, some of their choice tactics include market manipulation, legal action and collusion.

For instance: CHIP — a New York landlord advocacy group — is currently keeping 20,000 rent-stabilized units vacant (an act that is particularly malicious considering that over a hundred thousand New Yorkers are homeless, including thirty thousand children). In total, over 60,000 rent stabilized units are currently vacant across the city. Why? As a threat! A show of force! An act of organized class war! CHIP has openly stated that they won’t put these apartments back on the market until the state legislature repeals the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protections Act, which limits their ability to jack up rents after making necessary renovations. It’s a “ransom!”

As Karl Marx himself pointed out (and others have more recently argued), the tendency of the landowning class to withhold their land from the market, and to threaten to withhold land from the market, is intrinsic to capitalism. Holding land off the market is not an irrational action for landlords — it is a rational, profit-maximizing strategy that is employed everyday by landowners across the world. This tendency is why, seemingly paradoxically, increases in vacancy rates do not always correspond with reduced rents.

This tendency explains why property owners will always fight vigorously against any regulation which would restrict their ability to keep units vacant. For example, in response to a newly passed vacancy tax which would fine landlords for failing to rent empty apartments, organized San Francisco landlords (through lobbying groups representing thousands of property owners) are suing the city, arguing they have “constitutional and statutory rights to keep their units vacant if they so choose.” Constitutionally speaking, they’re correct — the Supreme Court will always protect property owners “right to exclude” — but that’s only because the Supreme Court is designed to codify and protect private property relations.

According to the most recent statistics (from 2021), there are around 250,000 (officially) vacant units in New York City. Importantly, the vacancy rate does not include the hotel rooms which sit empty while homeless tenants beg for change just outside their doors, nor unreported warehoused market-rate apartments, nor the hundred thousand or so units which are kept as investment properties and second homes for the ultra-rich.

While in any context, there will be some vacancies, to really understand this number we have to understand which apartments are vacant. Low-cost apartments are at near-zero vacancy levels while the vacancy rates  in high-cost apartments remain extraordinarily high. Tracy Rosenthal of the LA Tenants Union sums up this disparity bluntly: “There is no shortage of housing except for poor and working people, which the market has never and will never provide.” 

In their 2022 report, the Community Service Society of New York echoes Rosenthal, writing that many of New York’s vacancies can be attributed to “long-term overproduction of luxury condos/co-ops as investment vehicles.” They sum up their findings neatly:

There is very little available housing at low rents, but a lot available at rents most New Yorkers couldn’t possibly pay. At the same time, more and more apartments are going unused, not because nobody wants them – clearly there’s plenty of demand for housing – but because their owners are keeping them as pieds-a-terre, Airbnbs, investment properties, or warehoused rentals.

One example of this phenomenon, from Madden and Marcuse:

On January 16, 2015, a limited liability corporation named P89-90 bought a single penthouse apartment in Midtown Manhattan for $100,471,452.77 … the luxury tower that it tops, branded as One57, is not likely to be a particularly sociable environment. Chances are that none of the building’s ninety-two condominium units will be their owner’s sole residence. In fact, many of the apartments in One57 will remain empty. They will be held as investments or as vanity homes for people who do not lack for places to live. One57 is not high-rise housing so much as global wealth congealed into tower form.”

In recent years, the rental housing stock has become increasingly concentrated in larger and larger portfolios controlled by private equity firms and corporate landlords. In New York City, around 9 in 10 apartments are owned by corporate landlords. 

One important implication of this trend: the more organized and concentrated ownership is, the easier it is for landlords to collude and fix prices — a task made significantly easier due to the rise of algorithmically-informed price-setting. Services like the now infamous RealPage — which uses advanced data to help landlords charge the highest possible rents for their units — openly boast about their role in driving the staggering rent hikes of recent years. A ProPublica investigation revealed RealPage has “recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money.” RealPage and other similar services are a potent tool for cartel style market collusion, a fact which has not escaped the ire of the Department of Justice's antitrust lawyers. 

A common “pro-housing” argument is that increased supply gives renters more options, thus allowing us to play landlords off of eachother and secure lower rents. Again, this line of thinking ignores the sordid reality, which is that landlords will flex their class muscle to keep rents high — and that without organization, tenants have no power to contest their ever-worsening conditions. What good is a market equilibrium if the landlords are almost certain to collude, warehouse apartments and keep rents high regardless?

Landlord’s profit-maximizing behavior plainly highlights the irrationality endemic to capitalism. Well, let's amend that: it's quite rational for those who own the property. For the rest of us (the vast majority) — not so much. A system which distributes (and chooses not to distribute!) housing based on the profits that will accrue to its owners is a system which is incapable of ending the precarity which defines our lives as tenants. 

The “housing crisis” is not so much a crisis as a permanent feature of urban capitalism, an unavoidable consequence of developing and distributing housing as a commodity to line the pockets of the few, rather than organizing housing around the social need for shelter. Framing our experience as a “crisis” insinuates that it is an aberration from the norm, an aberration which can be “solved” with policy fixes, new legal protections and, most insidiously, the market. The system is not in crisis; the crisis is the system!

It's all about class power? Always has been.

What we’re observing here is the all too familiar dissonance between capitalism’s economic theories and its economic realities. Despite what free-market proselytizers and “market optimists” alike want us to believe (as if there’s any functional difference between the two), capitalism is a system whose outcomes are ultimately determined by the balance of class power. Landlords, developers and financiers, who are single-mindedly driven by a desire to extract as much profit as possible out of tenants, do not submit meekly to the “laws” of supply and demand. 

To imagine that rent prices hinge on supply and demand rather than class power is completely ahistorical. Time and time again, capitalism has demonstrated an inherent tendency towards monopoly, cynical market manipulation and organized class warfare. 

Understanding the balance of class power as the condition of our exploitation is simultaneously key to grasping that our exploitation can only be limited and abolished through the exercise of our own class power as tenants. We’re engaged in a class war which only one side is consciously fighting. Our choice as tenants is whether or not we want to fight back.

If the future came on a platter…

The common sense which commands our collective reflexes does not permit us to think of revolution. After all, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

So it’s natural that we’re derided as unrealistic for striving towards the abolition of the landlord class, and by extension the abolition of capitalism — but are we the unrealistic ones?

Our critics (liberals!) — on all issues, not just housing; think climate change, for instance — position themselves as “realistic” for arguing that handing the reins to organized capital will alleviate the conditions of the working class. Don’t we have hundreds of years of experience telling us that the exact opposite will happen? We can look to our cities as they are right now to understand that control of our buildings and neighborhoods by profit-motivated landlords, financiers and developers is a disastrous arrangement.

There’s nothing realistic about giving capital the freedom to roam where it wants and praying that it will magically change course and defy its five hundred year history of ravaging indigenous and working class communities for profit.

It's nonsense. Don’t listen to these people — they are the ones being unrealistic. 

And yes, to organize towards community control of our buildings and neighborhoods is a tremendous, daunting task. But let’s remember that we don’t organize simply because we believe in a political program. To struggle, to think — to really think! — to learn, is nothing less than the process of being alive. To not be in the struggle is a much more demoralizing proposition.

So let's get to it! Landlords and developers, and the financiers that back them, are tremendously well organized. To beat them, we have to turn to the only method by which we have historically won: that is, through our militant organization. If history has taught us anything, it's that we can only win by out-organizing our class enemies. 

Check out the Autonomous Tenants Union Network to see if there’s an existing organization in your area. In New York City: the Crown Heights Tenant Union, the Ridgewood Tenants Union, Brooklyn Eviction Defense and Tenant Union Flatbush; nationwide, the aforementioned Los Angeles Tenants Union; Tenants and Neighborhood Council (TANC) in the Bay Area; Stomp Out Slumlords in DC; and many more are doing incredible, principled work. 

You can find some resources and thoughtful reflections on tenant organizing here, here, here, here, here and here.

I like to think of this essay as a small contribution to uncovering the shape of the conjuncture, as Stuart Hall would call it. There is, of course, much more to be uncovered (and much more that has already been uncovered!), such as: the relation of tenants in the imperial core to the global anti-imperialist movement; how the tenant movement can resist settler-colonialism and aid the struggle for indigenous sovereignty; feminism and the tenant movement; the homeless industrial complex; and the ideology of homeownership, to name a few.

None of this work is easy. But, as Eduardo Galeano reminds us: “If the future came on a platter, it would not be of this world.”

How the Media Legitimizes Gentrification

By Noah Streng

Republished from Michigan Specter.

If you’ve ever seen an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones or any other “house-flipping” show, you’ll know that like all reality TV shows they depict dramatized situations as a way of increasing the stakes and encouraging viewers to keep watching. However, when watching these types of shows, it is important to recognize what narratives they are promoting. Whose voices and stories do they center? What underlying assumptions are left unchallenged?

In the strange world of reality TV, there’s an entire genre dedicated to “home improvement” where wealthy individuals will buy homes in “rundown neighborhoods’’ and “make them beautiful again” (all while making a significant profit for themselves, of course). These shows like to promote the idea that the house-flippers are courageous underdogs venturing into an uncharted and dangerous land to save target homes from the scary, filthy people who live in them. Euphemisms like “up and coming” and “transitional” are often used to describe low-income, minority neighborhoods starved for investment.

In a dramatic scene from an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones, the gentrifiers are seen “scouting” a house that they bought and breaking through a window because the doors of the house are locked — a sign that people have been staying there. The scene depicts the gentrifiers as being frightened by the possibility of encountering a squatter and being disgusted by the house’s “filth.” However, what’s never asked or included in these shows is questioning why the person living in that house needed to squat in the first place.

Did the state fail to provide them affordable housing? Are they suffering from a mental health issue and lack insurance? Did they get evicted from their former home? Instead of analyzing the root causes of this person’s housing insecurity and seeking to address it, the squatter is demonized as singularly responsible for their failures. Not only that, but the content of these characterizations is highly racialized, contributing to the white supremacist and colonial themes of the show.

These shows almost never consider the perspective of the tenants evicted by gentrifiers who rip their apartments out from under them. In some cases, there will be depictions of scary, drugged-up squatters who are illegally occupying the gentrifiers’ new passion project. In an article titled ‘We Bought a Crack House,’ house-flippers Catherine Jheon and Julian Humphreys detail their “brave” story of buying a house for $560,000 and encountering the tenants — whose home had just been sold by their landlord without consent — still living in the house when they arrive. Some of the home’s residents are experiencing problems with drug addiction, and are even caught by the gentrifiers using crack in an upstairs room.

What’s not mentioned here is how poverty, and these people’s recent condemnation to homelessness by their landlord, may have influenced their decision to use drugs to cope with the immense hardships they face. When Jheon and Humphreys ask the former tenants to leave the home so that they can start renovating, the tenants refuse, citing that they have nowhere else to go and that this is their rightful home. Jheon writes about her frustration with this, as every day she can’t renovate the home is money lost. In the end, she and Humphreys bribe one of the tenants to leave the house and call the police to forcibly remove the rest of them.

This is a classic example of how law and the media intersect to legitimize the violence of colonization and gentrification which continues in our cities today. The poor are demonized and gentrifiers are portrayed as innocent white saviors who are just trying to make a living — but they are doing so by displacing poor, housing insecure black and brown people. The police advance these projects of colonization by using their monopoly on violence to aid gentrifiers in their mission of displacing community residents so that their house can be fixed up and eventually sold to a rich white family.

While seeming innocent on their face, these shows can have devastating effects on the lives of the millions of people in the United States who experience housing insecurity. Not only do these television networks make money off of stories of tragic displacement of poor people, but they frame these stories in a way that valorizes gentrifiers and legitimizes a landlord’s right to hoard property and force destitute people into homelessness. Oftentimes, the excuse that gentrifiers will use when evicting tenants is “it’s our house now.” However, this statement is highly ideological and reinforces the social dynamic between property owners and the property-less in our capitalist society.

Who controls housing is not something that is natural or written in the stars. It is a power arrangement forged by the deliberate decisions of actors within an economic system that prioritizes profit over human life. House-flipping shows are just one part of the larger media trend of legitimizing societal oppression.

TV companies make political decisions when they choose to only highlight the voices of landlords, realtors, and house-flippers over tenants and the housing insecure. The depiction of low-income, predominately black people as filthy, dangerous, and lazy — rather than victims of a violent, exploitative, and racist economic system — feeds into the narrative that gentrification is good for society at large. How the media depicts people’s interactions with the law and frames which laws are just has real consequences. When the media chooses to center the story of the colonizer over the colonized, it legitimizes the displacement, land theft, and systemic impoverishment that millions of people face every day.

The False Narratives Around Rent Control

[Photo Credit: Caelie Frampton via Flickr]

By Ashvin Pai

Republished from Michigan Specter.

The landlord-renter dynamic is one of the most complex and interesting social frameworks of modern capitalism. It is arguably the most divisive and inflammatory economic relationship present today. One can virtually guarantee that every renter has had a landlord they hated and conversely, every landlord, a tenant they despised.

In purely monetary terms, the rental housing market is one of the largest in the United States, netting in well over $100 billion in 2020, with most of this value managed by giant real estate companies (Ann Arbor’s own McKinley manages a $4.6 billion portfolio with over 34,000 apartments). It is in this backdrop, with these stakes, that the policy of rent control is being judged for its worthiness. It should come as no surprise, then, with so much capital threatened by affordable housing policies, that rent control has been the target of a relentless smear campaign.

Rent control, a robust package of policies aimed at increasing housing stability for the poor 一 including things such as restrictions on condo conversions and caps on rent increases 一 has historically enjoyed massive support among urban renters. However, for almost 75 years, status-quo economists have enthusiastically maintained the stance that rent control is a failed policy. These views have proliferated so widely into the public opinion that current conversations around rent control, liberal and conservative alike, treat it as an issue on which economics has reached a universal consensus. However, to put it mildly, the premise of this discourse 一 that economics has “proven rent control wrong” 一 is wildly inaccurate. Indeed, rent control, as a policy to promote housing stability for the poor, is an effective and efficient one that must be adopted.

A cursory search of rent control in the news reveals the critical nature of current conversations around the policy. Many mainstream news outlets have published pieces actively arguing against the policy when it gains popular support in communities. For example, in 2019, when London mayor Sadiq Khan called for progressive housing policies, the BBC released a fact-check article claiming “standard economic theory is that rent control does not work” and cited a Stanford study in a claim that “[rent] controls helped accelerate gentrification.”

In the United States, when several rent control laws seemed poised to pass in New York and California, The Washington Post published an op-ed in which author Megan McArdle argued that “every economist agrees that rent controls are bad.” In a similar vein, the recent ‘No on 21’ campaign, in opposition to California’s Prop 21 housing amendment, garnered the endorsement of 28 local newspapers including the Pasadena Star-News, Orange County Register, and Los Angeles Daily News, whose editorial boards all published the same opinion that rent control reduces homebuilding and land values, and forces properties off of the rental market.

The San Francisco Chronicle went even further, saying that rent control was “overwhelmingly rejected by experts and refuted by research.” The ‘No on 21’ campaign itself, which ultimately received a cease and desist letter for misleading voters, was funded by real estate giants Blackstone, Essex, and Equity Residential among others. Unsurprisingly, Prop 21 was rejected by California voters in the 2020 election.

Understanding that there is a large corporate and political interest in blocking rent control policies is easy enough. Using a technical analysis to point at specific points where these arguments go wrong is a little more difficult. The fact of the matter is that opposition to rent control has a long-standing economic tradition, with many famous economists from Milton Friedman to Assar Lindbeck coming out against it. It is upon this perceived economic consensus which rent control opposition stands. Reading the articles mentioned above, it becomes clear that while they offer some specific arguments against rent control, the real message they are pushing is essentially the same: economists have found the answer for rent control 一 it doesn’t work.

This begs the question, Where can one find this economic consensus? There is certainly some truth to this claim as economic papers, studies, and essays against rent control policies date back almost 75 years. Many people cite Friedman and George Stigler’s 1946 Roofs or Ceilings? as the original work that kicked off rent control opposition. Through the lens of free market analysis, Friedman and Stigler make a theoretical argument against rent ceilings, concluding that rent ceilings allocate space haphazardly, use that space inefficiently, retard new construction, and cause future depression in residential building. The next big study, Edgar Olsen’s 1972 ‘An Econometric Analysis of Rent Control’ continues in a similar vein, developing a more complex mathematical model to derive several inefficiencies surrounding rent control. Most notably, Olsen asserts that rent-controlled housing deteriorates suboptimally; that is, rent-controlled housing deteriorates faster than in the absence of controls and that only a free housing market can attain the optimal path of deterioration.

Several empirical rebuttals of rent control exist as well. The majority of these center around the effects of rent deregulation in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1990s. The most widely cited may be David Autor’s 2014 study, which empirically found that the removal of rent control caused a property appreciation of $2.0 billion between 1994 and 2004 in the Cambridge housing market. Henry Pollakowski’s 2003 study of Cambridge’s deregulation found to a similar effect that a significant amount of post-deregulation investment 一 16 to 24%, in fact 一 would not have occurred without deregulation. Pollakowski even claims that rent deregulation helps the poor as housing investment is not relegated to high-income neighborhoods, but instead equally spread across all socioeconomic boundaries.

For some time, studies of deregulation in Cambridge were the only empirical analyses of rent control and oppositional economists found that they were relying too heavily on theoretical arguments. This call for more empirical research led to Rebecca Diamond’s 2019 analysis of rent control in San Francisco, arguably the study most widely cited in the modern rent control discourse (referenced in both the BBC and ‘No On 21’ campaign articles mentioned above). One of the biggest conclusions of the study was that “rent control contributed to the gentrification of San Francisco’’ by incentivizing landlords to convert existing rental properties into condominiums. Many saw this as the final nail in the coffin for rent control, whose advocates often tout it as a policy to keep gentrification at bay.

Fortunately, despite these studies, political support for rent control is still alive and well. Perhaps even more importantly, that this political support remains IS justified. This is because, upon closer inspection, there exist several issues with the conclusions that the studies mentioned above have reached. That the conclusions of these studies have glaring issues is no light matter; these are some of the most widely cited pieces in the modern policy discourse surrounding rent control, and are authored by highly respected economists.

They say that the beginning is the most important part of the work. Thus, it only seems natural that a criticism starts there as well. Enter Friedman’s Roofs or Ceilings? While Friedman’s theoretical rebuttal of rent control may prove convincing to some, the truth of the matter remains there is little empirical evidence to back up his conclusions. Consider, for example, Friedman’s claim that rent control policies cause a slump in housing construction.

Much evidence suggests that this is simply not the case. In a report on the effects of rent control from 1978 to 1994, Berkeley, California’s planning and development department found “no evidence that rent control had any effect on construction of new housing.” More broadly, data indicates that, between 2007 and 2014, the cities in California’s Bay Area with rent control “produced more housing units per capita than cities without rent control.”

These results carry over to the East Coast as well. John Gilderbloom’s 30-year survey of over 70 New Jersey cities with rent control found that, in the period between 1990 and 2000, moderate rent controls had no significant impact on new constructions in the rental market. Conveniently, Gilderbloom also refutes Olsen’s analysis that rent control results in faster-than-optimal housing deterioration. In the same New Jersey study, it was found that there was no significant relationship between rent controls and the percentage of housing with working plumbing — widely accepted as a reasonable indicator for rental housing quality.

In Roofs or Ceilings? Friedman claims that his arguments against rent control are hedged in the interest of alleviating the housing crisis. In his view, the removal of rent controls would help the housing market perform more efficiently, in turn, helping the individual find the housing they desired. Thus, one could reasonably assume that if rent deregulation did not help the poor find affordable housing, Friedman would be against it.

So what actually happens when rent controls are removed? One only has to return to the example of Cambridge, Massachusetts to see the stark effects of ending rent controls on housing stability for the poor. Immediately following rent decontrol, tenants of previously controlled units saw a sharp increase in rents. This was accompanied by a significant increase in residential turnover, the number of transactions on the housing market, as people were no longer able to afford to live in their homes.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that these transactions were happening primarily between poor individuals and large real estate speculators as housing investment in decontrolled units more than doubled on an annual basis — a far greater injection of capital than individual purchases could possibly contribute. So in Cambridge, at least, rent deregulation did not result in a more equitable housing market that helped the common person — the outcome Friedman was supposedly advocating for.

However, for some odd reason, proponents of rent deregulation ignore this and continue to dogmatically equate increased housing investment with economic success. Referring back to Autor and Pollakowski’s praises for deregulation, one finds that they are built on this exact premise, treating housing investment as the foremost metric to be concerned with rather than equitable housing or long-term housing security — the actual problems that common people in the housing market face. That such a blatant false equivocation is so unscrupulously made (most notably when Pollakowski cites equally distributed housing investment as evidence that deregulation helps the poor) is incredibly concerning and raises questions about the supposed good-faith standing of these studies, especially when their ultimate denunciations of rent control are made with no hesitation.

Similar inaccuracies extend into the aforementioned Diamond study of rent control in San Francisco. That this study in particular contains said inaccuracies is especially important as it has become one of the most widely cited in recent years by advocates of rent deregulation. One of the biggest claims Diamond makes is that rent control fueled gentrification in San Francisco by incentivizing landlords to “[convert] existing rental properties to higher-end, owner-occupied condominium housing.”

However, this critique ignores the fact that, historically, constructing new low-income housing without government subsidies is a largely unprofitable venture. In other words, with or without rent controls, landlords have no incentives to provide affordable housing when they could be making much higher profits catering to wealthier demographics. Thus, claiming that rent controls are somehow an incentive for condo conversions makes absolutely no sense as, in a deregulated market, these landlords would skip straight to condos anyway. The deeper insinuation that rent control contributes to gentrification is demonstrably false as well. Indeed, it seems the opposite may be the case; when Boston neighborhoods repealed their rent control laws in the mid-1990s, they saw a multitude of socioeconomic changes that signified gentrification, including a significant increase of rents and home prices.

Notwithstanding, even if rent controls act as an incentive for landlords to convert to condominiums, this observation is still not a valid critique of rent control laws. This is because rent control advocates have always proposed restrictions on condominium conversions as a feature of their policies. Thus, Diamond’s findings only suggest that there exists a political climate around rent control which allows for landlords to game the system through loopholes such as condo conversion — a political climate that studies such as hers feed into. Indeed, the hard data of the study itself shows that “beneficiaries of rent control are between 10 and 20% more likely to remain at their [home address],” and that rent controls helped protect populations from personal shocks that required them to change residence. In other words, even this incredibly popular study, which presents itself as a critique of rent control, conclusively found the policy accomplished its main task of increasing housing stability for poor renters.

Another theme present among critics of rent control, academics and news outlets alike, is that they misunderstand what the purpose of rent control is and what specific policies it entails. Historically, rent control has not been proposed as a simple price ceiling on rents, as Friedman critiqued it. A 1988 article in the Harvard Law Review defined rent control as “a regulatory scheme combining rent [regulation], a warranty of habitability, eviction restrictions, a moratorium on condominium conversion, and residential zoning restrictions,” emphasizing that “the full scheme [was] necessary to ensure rent control’s efficacy in a gentrifying market.” Even today, many rent control advocates don’t even focus on absolute rents, rather placing more emphasis on controlling rent increases. Thus, an analysis of rent control as a simple price ceiling is a pointless exercise. (Somewhat ironically, rent control is often used as the default price ceiling example in introductory economics classes.)

Furthermore, even with all these policies, rent control’s main aim is not to create affordable housing or improve housing quality for the poor, the grounds upon which Olsen, Autor, and Pollakowski took the most issue. Rather, rent control advocates envision it as a policy to ensure housing stability and protect people from being forced out of their homes by price increases. In his testimonial to the Jersey City Council, J.W. Mason, assistant economic professor at the City University of New York, said exactly this, advocating for rent controls on the grounds that renters “have a reasonable expectation of remaining in their homes in terms similar to the ones they experienced in the past.”

By no means does this mean that rent control ignores housing creation or housing quality. It may well be that with increased housing stability, renters will gain more political power against landlords and real estate companies. This increased political oomph could very well be the catalyst for higher ambitions of more affordable and quality housing. However, because these aren’t the main goals of rent control, critiques of the policy along these lines are fundamentally flawed.

When judged on its own terms, it becomes clear that the data on rent control is overwhelmingly in its favor. In terms of benefiting its intended constituency, rent control is generally successful. A study of rent control in Santa Monica found that lower-income tenants experienced a significant reduction in shelter costs, gaining proportionately more from the rent control law than their higher-income counterparts. Additionally, there was no significant evidence supporting an argument that rent control had unintended effects of providing disproportionate benefits to middle- and upper-class renters.

Rent control also effectively protects against forced mobility. A literature review done by Manuel Pastor, Vanessa Carter, and Maya Abood found that home mobility driven by factors of force can be countered through rent stabilization measures. Of course, some economists, such as Friedman, have seen low levels of mobility among renters as an inefficient allocation of housing. This view ignores the numerous external benefits of housing stability. Housing stability has wide ranging beneficial effects on communities; much research has been done linking evictions with higher levels of anxiety, depression, and trouble making social ties.

What’s worse is that already marginalized communities experience these types of evictions at higher rates; in Milwaukee, black women account for only 9.6% of the population but make up 30% of evictions. The curbing of forced evictions through rent control policies clearly has the potential of greatly improving mental health and alleviating financial stresses for already struggling communities. Additionally, housing stability has many effects on the academic success of children, with findings suggesting a significant negative relationship between residential moves and high school completion. Conversely, housing stability has a significant positive correlation to increased school attendance for children. With these facts in mind, it quickly becomes apparent that the effects of housing stability lie beyond solely the monetary realm, creating cascading effects which results in healthier and more vibrant communities.

These effects don’t take much time to manifest themselves either. Because rent control targets the private housing market, it can take effect on a large amount of housing with very little cost in very little time. Furthermore, it is extremely cost-efficient for governments to implement; both Berkeley and Santa Monica’s rent boards do not rely on general city funds and as little as 26 full-time staff are able to oversee over 25,000 units.

This low-cost implementation means that rent control is significantly cheaper than other affordable housing policies. For example, Berkeley’s rent control program was able to stabilize 19,000 units for just $4 million dollars. In comparison, it would have taken $20 million to provide housing vouchers for a little over 2,000 units, and $220 million to build or rehabilitate 2,000 units. This type of data makes it unrealistic that a lack of government funds is a reason to not implement rent controls. The implications of this argument are quite stark; in the eyes of policymakers, allowing the housing crisis to go on is seen as justifiable and even desirable because it results in less government spending.

As the housing crisis grows worse, the need for policies such as rent control becomes more immediate. However, with this urgency, one can expect a greater oppositional narrative and an increased effort to execute the smear campaign against affordable housing. The current perception of economic consensus around rent control as ineffective is flawed at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. Much of the traditional literature all the way from Friedman to Diamond misunderstands the aims of rent control, makes false equivocations which result in flawed conclusions, and isn’t backed by empirical data.

Despite this, the message that rent control is a failed policy is being continually pushed out to the public in the language of these studies and essays. Economists such as Mason, Levine, and Gilderbloom, among others, are thrown by the wayside in the desperate appeal to authority that decontrol advocates invariably resort to. It is dangerous to pretend that there are no political motivations to these decontrol studies when they have such clear flaws.

It is dangerous to pretend that the free-market economics criticizing rent control aren’t ultimately biased toward what is best for giant real estate corporations. With the large successes that rent control has had in creating housing stability, it is important that the false narratives around the policy be challenged whenever they are brought up. The data is clear: rent control works.

Seven Theses on "Re-opening the Economy": Further Notes on Viral Dialectics

By Bryant William Sculos

1.  The economy is not—and never was—closed or shutdown.

At the peak of the global economic shutdown, it is likely that less than 50% of the economy actually shutdown. And for most of the initial “lockdown” period, much much less than 50% of the economy was inactive. Unskilled workers, sometimes having their hours cut, sometimes increased without overtime pay, magically became “essential workers.” While there is national and regional global variance, this is nearly universally true. Of course, many millions—if not billions—have lost their jobs around the world. Some of these are entertainment or hospitality/comfort service workers, but many are truly essential care and educational workers. The real backbone of the capitalist economic system has been endangered, hyper-exploited, or otherwise cast off. The stock market thrives all the while. Maybe, just maybe, we should actually shutdown this foundationally unjust world order.

2.  The cure is worse than the disease.

The shutdown—and this weird post-shutdown partial shutdown period—has caused enormous harm to countless people. Actually, we could count them, but the people who make those decisions about what to count (and what counts) don’t care enough. It is because of the literal insanity of our system that people are literally being driven insane, into the depths of emergent and exacerbated mental illness. People are killing themselves because of the responses to COVID-19. But that isn’t because we shut down, but rather it is because of how we shutdown, without coming close to addressing long-preexisting social inequities that were barely below the surface—if below the surface at all. This is no cure at all. The most vulnerable are either dead or more vulnerable; the safe and secure are, for the most part, at least as safe and secure as they were before.

3. The disease is worse than the cure.

An economy isn’t a thing that is capable of caring. In the midst of a mass pandemic where likely well-over a million people have already died, we should care about something that has never cared about us? How could it? Economies are systems that reflect the distributions of power and then the character of the values and priorities of that society. The responses to COVID-19 are perfectly in-line with the systemic values of capitalism. As the infamous graffiti reminds us, capitalism is the virus. A COVID-19 vaccine won’t change that. There is a vaccine for capitalism, and it is up to all of us to find it (really, to create it, in practice) together.

4. Yes, the economy is more important than your grandma.

And it always has been. It is more important than you too! It shouldn’t be though. It doesn’t have to be, but if we look at the absolutely wretched state of elder care in the US and around the world, we shouldn’t be surprised to hear actual alive human beings—elected officials and policymakers no less—suggest that grandparents should be willing to sacrifice their lives on the altar of capitalism. Think about that. These people have been made completely fucking psychotic. Then again, before COVID-19 too many of us accepted this basic logic on a daily basis.

5. We really should compare this to the flu.

Not that COVID-19 is as serious as the seasonal flu—a mistaken thought I had and quickly abandoned in early March 2020. And yet, seasonal flu is an enduring civilizational challenge that we too easily accept as intractable, beyond what we’ve achieved thus far with the existing vaccination protocols. We have, occasionally more than 50% effective, vaccines that people need to take every year. Still, we have hundreds of thousands of people dying annually from the flu. Perhaps millions are saved, yes. But how many billions of dollars are made by the health care companies that make and distribute these vaccines? Vaccines that—while better than nothing—are still wildly inadequate. There are political-economic lessons we must learn from how the flu is treated, and we must refuse to allow the same things to happen with COVID-19, a much more serious problem.

6. Don’t let them bring evictions back.

We should be paying more attention to the fact that right now, in many places (but, perhaps, most notably in the US), evictions are effectively non-existent. As banks, landlords, and local sheriffs still try to find a way to evict people, we should fight to get the prohibition against eviction accepted as a new political norm—even if the result of such a struggle is a compromise that simply makes it harder for people to be evicted.

7.  Physical distancing is new. Social distancing has been going on for a while. Since the late 1700s probably.

With the urbanization associated with the industrial revolution people have, over the past several centuries, lived increasingly close to one another. Physical proximity has increased along with the development and spread of global capitalism. During that same period, humanity has become increasingly socially-isolated. Family ties are less. Friendship bonds, while they may be maintained in more mediated form through social media, are perhaps stronger and more significant than ever before. Still, these bonds are not as powerful or enduring at this stage of historical social development as family bonds were prior to the advent of global capitalism—however oppressive and violent they indeed were. COVID-19 has merely exacerbated a problematic sociological pattern that was already with us. One wonders whether social ties will experience a jump in strength once COVID-19 is under better control, epidemiologically and medically speaking (likely only possible once mass vaccination is achieved).

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is the founding curator and editor of LeftHooked, a monthly aggregator and review of socialist writing, published by the Hampton Institute, where he is also a contributing editor. He is a visiting assistant professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University. Bryant is also the politics of culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power and co-editor (with Prof. Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (originally published with Brill and now available in paperback with Haymarket Books).

In Defense of Tenants: An Interview with Omaha Tenants United

By Devon Bowers

This is a transcript of a recent email interview I had with the organization Omaha Tenants United about their beginnings and the activism the group engages in. Catch them this month in Heartland News, which is running a front page story on OTU and allowing them to write monthly updates from then on out.

Talk about how the organization formed and the work that you all do.

A group of us were aware of housing issues like tenant mistreatment and gentrification, and were inspired by other socialist organizations that help tenants, like those in Seattle or Philadelphia. From initial meetings where we discussed housing issues and read the state tenant-landlord statute, we came up with potential items to organize around. We began to focus particularly around the issue of "slumlords," or low-rent, low-maintenance landlords who skirt legality and mistreat tenants, largely getting away with it due to non-existent local enforcement and a tenant population of marginalized and low-income people, like refugees or immigrants.

We met our first tenant through Feed the People, an organization devoted to food distribution some of us were members of at the time. Since he had moved in to his apartment six months earlier, he did not have hot water despite repeated maintenance requests, with the landlord saying it would cost thousands of dollars and weeks of work. We met with the tenant, and after we went over portions of the state tenant statute and discussed the tenant's options, he made the decision to take a more direct approach to resolving his dispute with the support of our organization. We drafted a demand letter citing the various parts of the statute that the landlord was infringing upon, and demanding that steps be taken to resolve the issues or face escalation. The tenant then signed the letter, and we went together to his landlord's office to deliver it. The landlord wasn't home, but after hearing about the large group who delivered the letter, he contacted the tenant, angrily demanding to know what was going on. The tenant sent him a picture of the letter and explained our involvement. Less than 24 hours later, a maintenance crew repaired what turned out to be only a broken gasket, and the tenant had hot water.

We built our approach on this experience. We try to establish contacts among the working-class people in our neighborhoods, and learn from them about the situation of tenants in the city, particularly tenants of slumlords. Through this process we identify situations we can help resolve through forming demands of landlords, and stepping in to back the tenant up in a confrontation or meeting. It's important to our mission that we serve to empower the tenant themselves rather than be seen as performing a charitable service. Our first tenant, mentioned above, was shocked when we proposed delivering the demand letter as a group with him. He had assumed that we would deliver the letter ourselves, and was delighted to take for himself the action of delivering his demands to his landlord with our support. Typically, non-profit organizations who work in working-class communities are seen as doing things for working-class people or on their behalf.(just to clarify, we're not a "non-profit" in the 501c3 sense, nor do we have any desire to be. We merely use that phrase to draw a line of demarcation between how we operate and how many other organizations do (especially 501c3 nonprofits) and the perceptions surrounding them) We want to work with tenants to support them in doing what they are already capable of doing, and through this process, we hope that the tenants will learn more about their own power and the power of an organized working-class community.

Recently, we helped a tenant win a big fight against one of Omaha's most notorious slumlords in which we occupied the slumlord's office with about 20 people and were able to get over $1,000 in made up move out fees waived and $500 of the tenant's deposit back. (Do you want us to go into greater detail about that here? We recently did a long write up on that story at our Medium which I highly recommend reading. Not sure if you want to just link that or if you'd like us to make additional comments on it here. Definitely the biggest victory we've been a part of so far.

What problems do many of the tenants deal with? Would you say that the legal system is biased in favor of landlords?

A recurring problem is a lack of proper maintenance in a tenant's home. A landlord will only put in to a building what they can get out in profit, and a slumlord, already working with crumbling buildings and tenants paying low rent, lacks motivation to make any repairs at all. Living in such a building often comes with the mentality that "well, at least the rent is cheap," and slumlords take advantage of the expectation that better maintenance is just something that one has to pay more for, rather than a housing right. As a result, many tenants are living in conditions that are not merely uncomfortable, but actively dangerous to their health.

The legal system is definitely biased in favor of landlords. While there is a state statute that outlines a tenant's rights and what a landlord owes them, the only enforcement to be found is in the courts, which tenants with low income and little time cannot afford. In addition, city housing laws were drafted essentially directly by the landlords themselves, and even the ensuing weak laws are not enforced. The statutes are also written in an obtuse, self-referential way that is not easy for a busy person to understand, much less take action based upon. As a result, after reaching some familiarity with the statute, our strategy has been to outline areas in which an offending landlord is in infringement of the statute, because while a tenant can't necessarily afford to go to court, the landlord knows that it is better for them to concede a small maintenance request than to go to court for a case they most likely know they will lose.

How do landlords utilize pricing for their own financial benefit (ie increasing prices in Silicon Valley to kick out current tenants and price gouge techies?)

Gentrification is a continual problem in the city. Landlords will redevelop housing, and/or demolish and build new housing, raising the prices, which cause working-class people to be kicked out of their own neighborhoods. Occasionally a slumlord will allow a property to deteriorate to the point that it is considered "blighted," attracting public funding for redevelopment. Slumlords have used the money they've drained from working-class tenants in dilapidated buildings to redevelop or bulldoze those buildings to make way for a higher-paying demographic.

How do you help people understand that landlord-tenant relationships are not alright and are predatory?

People we talk to already understand that they are being mistreated by their landlord, and that their friends and neighbors are too. But this is seen as the way things are. We don't need to show them that landlords are exploitative, but we can help them to fight back, showing them that it doesn't have to be that way.

It's a matter of class consciousness. The relationship between landlords, particularly slumlords, and tenants, is one of the most obvious examples of class struggle we have. These landlords are profiting by charging working-class people to live in places that they would never sleep in themselves, a property that they rarely maintain, for the most part receiving passive profit for owning a place where others take shelter. It brings up the question of private property. Anyone can see this is unfair, and we try to systematize it when we have conversations with tenants. We don't want to get caught up in individualizing the systemic injustices to a given landlord, focusing on how they are evil individually; rather, we try to have conversations in terms of landlords as a class, and us, the working people, as a class that can fight back through organizing together.

First and foremost, we are an anti-capitalist organization that believes the renter-landlord system, and more generally private property as a whole, should be abolished. In the meantime however, we recognize the need to help tenants get what they can under the current system. We hope these experiences empower our fellow tenants and other working class people to begin to fight back and get organized so that the way can be paved for more fundamental revolutionary change.

Explain the day in the life of someone who is battling their landlord.

For a tenant working with us, a large part of it is about just getting to know us. When we're essentially doing cold calls (knocking on doors of places we know have problems, there's a natural hesitancy from people when random strangers walk up to your door asking about your living conditions, let alone trying when they're trying to convince you to take a big step in actually confronting your landlord about them. So we make sure to take a lot of time attempting to build a relationship with the people we interact with. This helps us build trust in each other, and feel more confident working with each other. Ultimately, we of course want to get them confident enough that they're willing to take the steps needed to get their problems resolved.

Since OTU has kind of blown up, however, we've received a big influx of people reaching out to us with issues they're already having via our Facebook page, so this eliminates some of the initial awkwardness and need for agitation, since they're obviously already agitated enough to feel the need to reach out. At this point, we set up a time to meet in a semi-public place, and learn about their situation in greater detail. Here you sometimes sort of face the opposite issue that we do when cold calling. The people who reach out are typically already pissed off and wanting to do something fast. We really have to be careful to not over promise anything, or lead them to believe that we can just magically help them fix things.

We like to be sober and honest about what our odds are, and if it's something that we might not have the capacity to deal with, we have to be honest about that and be willing to say no to certain cases. In either situation - whether it be a cold call or someone who has reached out to us - we try to be sure to walk people through exactly step by step what all of their options are, so they aren't blindsided by anything later on. We try to explain some possible outcomes, and how we would respond from each one. Based on where the tenant is at in terms of willingness to act, and based on what the situation is, we try to formulate a plan and proceed from there. While many people would maybe like to go straight to the big confrontation method like we did in our story about notorious local slumlord Dave Paladino, we generally try to escalate as necessary.

This means first setting up a meeting with the landlord, the tenant, and maybe two OTU representatives max to read off the tenant's demands in a more low-key setting and seeing how the landlord responds. There's of course always pushback, but we give the landlord a deadline by which we expect these changes to be made. If they're not made in the amount of time given, we escalate things from there. The important part is that at all steps in the process, the tenant is taking the lead.

We don't want to get out ahead of the tenant and get them into a situation they don't feel comfortable with, and on the other hand, we don't want to hold back the tenant or discourage their own initiative, even when we may have to be frank about a situation or explain how being too rash might jeopardize the entire process. We take a lot of influence from Mao Zedong and movements inspired by him that apply what is known as "the mass line", which essentially means everything we do is informed and enacted in a way that is "from the masses, to the masses."

In what ways can people learn more about your organization?

You can find us on Facebook at Omaha Tenants United. We also have Medium, where we'll be publishing our longer-form material summarizing our work and stating our positions on things. We will have our Points of Unity out soon which explain our beliefs that we expect people to uphold in order to join. While we are a multi-tendency organization, we do ask that anti-capitalism be at the forefront of one's politics (amongst other things), and that people are willing to regularly commit time to disciplined work.