Thread by @aldatweets

.@AOC is right: housing & climate crises are our gravest dangers. A #GreenNewDeal can tackle them together w a real housing guarantee:
10 million public, no-carbon homes in 10 years
US history & Red Vienna show how
Can't fight climate chaos w-out a home
jacobinmag.com/2019/02/green-…

Ten million homes is an incredibly reasonable number, based on both the amount of construction already happening, and meticulous methods of financing, as laid out in this wonderful @PplPolicyProj report peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/04/05/a-p…

Another thing that's hugely important here. The jobs situation in this country sucks. It is hammering working people. But the housing situation is worse. For renters (and most owners) it's where class struggle bites - from @pewresearch

What's more, & I cite @KeeangaYamahtta a lot bc her work is *so good* on this
1. housing is at the CORE of apartheid in this country
2. it is specifically public-private partnership in home-building that's fueled this
3. hence my call: sidestep the market!
dissentmagazine.org/article/how-re…

So jobs for racialized workers and investment in racialized and front-line communities is indispensable for climate justice. But it's not enough! You have to directly tackle the housing system that is evicting, shutting utilities off on, and foreclosing black and brown people

An intersectional analysis points in one direction: housing justice is climate justice. And you gotta break the market's stranglehold

Now there’s a lot to say about existing public housing issues in US. But we’re thinking big now so lets talk about what we could have. Here’s what non market housing in Vienna looks like - some classic public some new cooperative

Here’s the classic Karl Marx Hof, whose 1200 apartments surrounded gardens, fountains and play areas, and included notnjust cultural facilities but even a dental clinic (yep-I was there!)

Here- literally - is how they funded it. Yep- about a third of funding for public housing built in Red Vienna years came from luxury taxes

Oh, but that was the past, you say. Really, now? Bc rn in Vienna, roughly one third of housing is public, roughly one third co-operative, roughly one third market. And yes—the residents of the most working class, public housing-dense neighborhoods vote against the fascists

Oh, but that has no relationship to the USA! That's just Europe! Is that so? Bc it turns out that a beautiful Jewish socialist co-op in Manhattan's Lower East Side has a pretty familiar look it, amirite?

Indeed—the Amalgamated Dwellings were designed by one Roland Wank, a Hungarian immigrant who studied briefly in Vienna, and traveled to the US in 1924. And before you think a thread on the Green New Deal has turned into an architectural history lesson, guess his next job

Yep: chief architect of the Tennessee Valley Authority. The very immigrant who brought the Karl Marx Hof vision to Manhattan designed gorgeous dams (and build excellent workers' housing) throughout rural America tva.gov/About-TVA/Our-…

Same guy. And he was not perfect; the TVA was racist. As I write in the piece: "Wank’s work crystallized all that was good in the New Deal — and all that was rotten. The New Deal didn’t just reproduce Jim Crow, it hardened it."

But there is a lesson here: It's all about the built environment. You can't decarbonize the energy grid and you can't abolish white supremacy without going all in on literally building a better world

Last thing, bc not going to spoil the very end of the essay (pls read!)
@AOC gets it. She gets that being serious means going fast and going big. When you do that, early decisions have last consequences. We gotta get this right from the start. Climate justice is housing justice

*lasting consequences

*surround. still there [weird doomist freudian slip]

*over one million housing units a year (he learns not to slip in factoids late in ed process), thanks to those who caught

Late addition: if you'd like to hear me about all this—literally—@DougHenwood kindly had me on his fantastic podcast: player.fm/series/behind-…