So You Want to Ditch Your Landlord
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/so_you_want_to_get_rid_of_your_l
andlord_20151210/
Posted on Dec 10, 2015
yeowatzup / CC BY 2.0
"Real estate as a store of private wealth is the rotten tree that sprouts
[the] diseased branches" of homelessness, unaffordable urban real estate,
gentrification and dangerous housing bubbles, writes Jesse A. Meyerson at
The Nation. "[T]he solution is to quit pruning twigs and chop the sucker
down."
Why, Mr. Meyerson? He answers first by reviewing what private housing is.
First off, it is mostly land. That is, real estate is the most valuable
asset form in the United States, and the majority of that value is not that
of the building itself, which depreciates until it requires renovation, but
of the "unimproved" land it sits on-the location. Imagine a skyscraper
filled with sumptuous luxury condominiums, located in the center of
Antarctica: However many millions had gone into its cutting-edge
furnishings, without a community (parks, transit options, schools, shops,
etc.) around to situate it in a desirable location, that building would be
worthless as a real-estate investment. These community resources are
reflected in what is commonly called "land value," but is more precisely the
price of the location. Rather than flowing to the community that created it,
however, it is captured by individual real-estate owners.
More fundamentally, though, what we call private housing is actually public
land that government has set aside for private purposes. Land, save the bits
beneath one's feet, can't be "possessed," as a phone or a shirt can. What a
"land owner" possesses is a deed-a voucher one may redeem with the
government to marshal violence (through policing) to exclude all competing
claimants. The government established this location-exclusion program,
designating pieces of nature as being solely for the use of the deed
holders, and devoting its violent capabilities to enforcing that
designation. In the 19th century, the government enacted homesteading laws
to allow frontier settlers to claim indigenous lands as their own. If those
deeds were challenged, the federal government sent troops to back them up.
Or look at the 20th century, when the government funded highways and
commuter transit-the Federal Housing Administration extended loan guarantees
to new housing developments in order to create a massive suburban
private-housing stock. The entire apparatus by which housing is privately
"owned" is created by the government's decisions to subsidize or protect
certain interests.
Ostensibly, the government pursues the public interest, but treating real
estate as privately owned wealth, as a financial asset, has devastating
public effects. On a grand scale, treating land as an asset allows
speculators to create bubbles large enough to threaten global economic
collapse. [.]
Closer to home, private ownership of land underlies racist segregation. The
aforementioned FHA policy, for instance, designed to protect homeowners'
access to gains in their houses' location value, provided white people with
the incentive to take their capital and flee urban centers for sprawling
exurban developments, there to adopt racial exclusivity covenants, in order
to prevent black people from moving in [.]
Finally, developers have an incentive to snap up urban land and then leave
it vacant until it appreciates in value, driven by community development
around it, and then sell it. Meanwhile, residents have to live with the
social repercussions of a community riddled with vacant lots.
What then can be done? Meyerson considers exclusion fees (taxes paid to the
public for exclusive use of property), community land trusts (organizations
that give community representatives voting power over development and its
terms), and ultimately, public housing (the ownership and management of
housing by bureaus overseen by elected representatives answerable to
voters).
Many Americans are reflexively opposed to the third option-granting
government administrations authority over housing-because corruption at the
federal, state and local levels has robbed them of faith in government and
democracy itself. This is unfortunate because not all officials are bought
by private interests. A government staffed by genuinely public-minded people
remains possible-and eminently so in smaller communities where officials
fear opposition by neighbors whose votes they must obtain to win office.
In communities throughout the U.S. and elsewhere in the world we can catch
glimpses of what is possible. Meyerson tells us:
The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative transformed more than 32 acres of
land in Boston from commodity to community. Regarding how it was able to
perform this transformation, and how it has successfully resisted an
economic system that greedily militates for land to be privatized, Eliza
Parad, a DSNI community organizer, cites "the political power this
community, a majority community of color, has built since the 1970s." As the
lives of the Dudley Street neighbors testify, land removed from the private
market, de-commodified, and placed under the ownership and management of the
people who live there is land that creates and renews its own political
constituency.
Likewise, the Vienna model of public and publicly managed housing is
politically insulated, because it encompasses nearly half the city. In US
cities, the residents of public-housing projects constitute a small minority
of easily marginalized and maligned poor people, ill-equipped to do battle
with landed interests. Thus, Baltimore offers millions in tax breaks to
developers to buy up the public housing stock, while the working-class
Viennese residents of Karl Marx Court enjoy their saunas.
-Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
So You Want to Ditch Your Landlord
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/so_you_want_to_get_rid_of_your_l
andlord_20151210/
Posted on Dec 10, 2015
yeowatzup / CC BY 2.0
"Real estate as a store of private wealth is the rotten tree that sprouts
[the] diseased branches" of homelessness, unaffordable urban real estate,
gentrification and dangerous housing bubbles, writes Jesse A. Meyerson at
The Nation. "[T]he solution is to quit pruning twigs and chop the sucker
down."
Why, Mr. Meyerson? He answers first by reviewing what private housing is.
First off, it is mostly land. That is, real estate is the most valuable
asset form in the United States, and the majority of that value is not that
of the building itself, which depreciates until it requires renovation, but
of the "unimproved" land it sits on-the location. Imagine a skyscraper
filled with sumptuous luxury condominiums, located in the center of
Antarctica: However many millions had gone into its cutting-edge
furnishings, without a community (parks, transit options, schools, shops,
etc.) around to situate it in a desirable location, that building would be
worthless as a real-estate investment. These community resources are
reflected in what is commonly called "land value," but is more precisely the
price of the location. Rather than flowing to the community that created it,
however, it is captured by individual real-estate owners.
More fundamentally, though, what we call private housing is actually public
land that government has set aside for private purposes. Land, save the bits
beneath one's feet, can't be "possessed," as a phone or a shirt can. What a
"land owner" possesses is a deed-a voucher one may redeem with the
government to marshal violence (through policing) to exclude all competing
claimants. The government established this location-exclusion program,
designating pieces of nature as being solely for the use of the deed
holders, and devoting its violent capabilities to enforcing that
designation. In the 19th century, the government enacted homesteading laws
to allow frontier settlers to claim indigenous lands as their own. If those
deeds were challenged, the federal government sent troops to back them up.
Or look at the 20th century, when the government funded highways and
commuter transit-the Federal Housing Administration extended loan guarantees
to new housing developments in order to create a massive suburban
private-housing stock. The entire apparatus by which housing is privately
"owned" is created by the government's decisions to subsidize or protect
certain interests.
Ostensibly, the government pursues the public interest, but treating real
estate as privately owned wealth, as a financial asset, has devastating
public effects. On a grand scale, treating land as an asset allows
speculators to create bubbles large enough to threaten global economic
collapse. [.]
Closer to home, private ownership of land underlies racist segregation. The
aforementioned FHA policy, for instance, designed to protect homeowners'
access to gains in their houses' location value, provided white people with
the incentive to take their capital and flee urban centers for sprawling
exurban developments, there to adopt racial exclusivity covenants, in order
to prevent black people from moving in [.]
Finally, developers have an incentive to snap up urban land and then leave
it vacant until it appreciates in value, driven by community development
around it, and then sell it. Meanwhile, residents have to live with the
social repercussions of a community riddled with vacant lots.
What then can be done? Meyerson considers exclusion fees (taxes paid to the
public for exclusive use of property), community land trusts (organizations
that give community representatives voting power over development and its
terms), and ultimately, public housing (the ownership and management of
housing by bureaus overseen by elected representatives answerable to
voters).
Many Americans are reflexively opposed to the third option-granting
government administrations authority over housing-because corruption at the
federal, state and local levels has robbed them of faith in government and
democracy itself. This is unfortunate because not all officials are bought
by private interests. A government staffed by genuinely public-minded people
remains possible-and eminently so in smaller communities where officials
fear opposition by neighbors whose votes they must obtain to win office.
In communities throughout the U.S. and elsewhere in the world we can catch
glimpses of what is possible. Meyerson tells us:
The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative transformed more than 32 acres of
land in Boston from commodity to community. Regarding how it was able to
perform this transformation, and how it has successfully resisted an
economic system that greedily militates for land to be privatized, Eliza
Parad, a DSNI community organizer, cites "the political power this
community, a majority community of color, has built since the 1970s." As the
lives of the Dudley Street neighbors testify, land removed from the private
market, de-commodified, and placed under the ownership and management of the
people who live there is land that creates and renews its own political
constituency.
Likewise, the Vienna model of public and publicly managed housing is
politically insulated, because it encompasses nearly half the city. In US
cities, the residents of public-housing projects constitute a small minority
of easily marginalized and maligned poor people, ill-equipped to do battle
with landed interests. Thus, Baltimore offers millions in tax breaks to
developers to buy up the public housing stock, while the working-class
Viennese residents of Karl Marx Court enjoy their saunas.
-Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
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