Treating shelter - a human right and necessity that sits just above food on the hierarchy of needs - as a commodity inevitably pits the creation and maintenance of wealth against the survival of the people for whom a home is a place to live, not an asset.
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(If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:)
pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax…
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pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax…
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American prosperity has historically come from two sources - intergenerational wealth accumulation through family homes; and gains made by organized labor that increased wages and improved working conditions.
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Both kinds of mobility were unevenly distributed on racial lines, but of the two, the more universal was always labor protections, not extreme measures to increase property prices. For 40 years, we've been whittling away at labor rights and going all in on property prices.
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Convincing middle-class people to accept extreme measures to drive up the prices of housing (and thus the value of their single major asset) rather than labor rights - including adequate pensions, affordable education, and universal health care - was a clever gambit.
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It split working people, convincing those who'd bought their homes with their labor gains to betray the next generation of workers, in the name of defending their kids' futures, which were riding on huge gains from property prices, not employment.
gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-…
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gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-…
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But the people best poised to benefit from soaring property prices weren't family homeowners - they were super-rich property speculators, who used the army of middle-class simps for "investors" to dismantle eviction and rent protections while gobbling up whole neighborhoods.
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This is particularly visible in NYC, where speculators use rent-gouging and the savings of slum conditions to extract high profits that can be used to stave off legal consequences for their criminal conduct, in the market with the second-highest rents in the country.
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NYC documentary filmmaker @JeffOSeal investigates this phenomenon with enormous humor and substance in "This is New York City's Worst Landlord," a three-part, 60-minute Youtube documentary.
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Seal's goal is to meet all 100 of the 100 worst landlords in NYC, as determined by the city's public advocate watchlist, an annual leaderboard that names and shames the individuals who hold thousands of families' peace and prosperity in their hands.
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But the point of the doc is that none of these people can be found. As the tenants of their buildings can tell you, neither they nor their property managers answer the phone - not when the ceiling caves in, not when vermin run across your sleeping child.
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They hide behind LLCs and get their mail at anonymous private mailboxes. They own dozens of real, solid buildings but are themselves as immaterial as ghosts. Seal takes it upon himself to track them down.
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He holds a telethon where he and his friends call all 100 landlords. He speaks to their tenants. He stakes out their PO boxes. He crashes their offices, doorsteps them, tries to hand out trophies and plaques commemorating their top-scoring performances as terrible landlords.
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He does all this and more, like going undercover at a landlord convention where a contractor promises him that they can run jackhammers until any rent-control tenants move out, and a landlord explains how he harasses tenants' rights organizers.
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They call the cops on him, high-powered lawyers threaten him - like a housing advocate's version of Roger and Me. The movie ends with the pandemic, the looming eviction crisis, and groundbreaking NY tenant protection laws voted in despite Cuomo's advocacy for landlords.
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The eviction moratorium is about to expire. When it does, a bomb will go off for families - a bomb that destroys their homes, sends them to live in their cars or shelters or on sofas, slipping into a situation few escape.
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Seal is very funny, and incandescently angry, and the story he tells couldn't be more timely. It's a hell of a way to spend an hour.
Image: Carl Mydans, 1935, Farm Security Administration — Office of War Information Photograph Collection (LOC)
loc.gov/item/201775881…
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Image: Carl Mydans, 1935, Farm Security Administration — Office of War Information Photograph Collection (LOC)
loc.gov/item/201775881…
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