A Landlord ‘Underestimated’ His Tenants. Now They Could Own the Building. Josh Davis May 11, 2022, 7:44 pm
A nonprofit organization paid the landlord $2.6 million for the property in February 2022, and plans to eventually hand it over to the tenants, who will be able to buy their apartments for $2,500 each. Over the past five years, only 11 rental buildings have converted to this type of limited equity co-op, called a Housing Development Fund Corporation co-op, where tenants buy their apartments at prices set by the city, and can sell them for a limited profit.
In this case, the tenants made the deal happen without any funding from New York City, an even rarer victory. There are roughly 1,100 H.D.F.C. co-ops in the city, most converted decades ago, according to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. That’s out of about 7,100 co-ops citywide, according to Ariel Property Advisors, a commercial real estate brokerage.
Harry Zehner urges the left to challenge the ideology of homeownership.
“We want a nation of homeowners, not proletarians.”
A few years ago, I stumbled across this quote — attributed to Fransisco Franco’s housing minister, José Luis De Arrese — in Raquel Rolnik’s fantastic book, Urban Warfare. It’s important for two reasons: first, it demonstrates the very basic class-cleavaging role of homeownership. Secondly, it tells us that homeownership can be intentionally wielded by capitalists to specifically target and defeat class consciousness.
Homeownership is commonly understood through its economic functions. Capitalist economists think of homeownership as a significant driver of growth, debt-fueled consumer spending, and the basis of an asset-based social security system. Critiques of homeownership from the left are also generally grounded in economics, as Marxists highlight the dangerously speculative nature of homeownership, its integration of the working class into circuits of capital, and, as Maya Gonzalez writes, its role as a “material force representing and entrenching the divisions and inequalities within the working class.”
However, there is less debate regarding homeownership’s function on the ideological terrain. It is my belief that identifying and incorporating an analysis of the ideological role of homeownership into our organizing is crucial to building a successful communist tenant movement.
The modern history of homeownership in the US can be traced back to the late 1910s, within the context of an insurgent radical labor movement and the communist threat represented by the Bolshevik Revolution. In the 1910s and 1920s, local, state, and federal officials collaborated with civil society organizations to promote private homeownership as the bedrock of US capitalism. The prominent US senator William Calder argued nakedly: “Every assistance should be extended to enable our people to build or buy homes. Where there is a community of homeowners, no Bolshevists or anarchists can be found.” Herbert Hoover, then the Secretary of Commerce, commanded the massive “Better Homes in America” campaign, proclaimed: “There can be no fear for a democracy or self-government or for liberty or freedom from homeowners no matter how humble they may be,” proselytizing about “the primal instinct in us all for homeownership” as the foundation of a stable, patriarchal, capitalist society.
This period can only be understood as a direct response to the threat of communism — and the accompanying threats to patriarchy and private property relations — presented by domestic radicals and the newly founded Soviet Union. It was defined by blatant US government propaganda like the Better Homes in America and the Own Your Own Home campaigns.
Since Hoover’s heyday, the messaging may have gotten more subtle and implicit (ideology tends to do that, as the initial subjects of ideology become reproducers of that ideology). However, the result — mass homeownership as the unimpeachable, bipartisan goal of US housing policy — has been identical.
Across the political spectrum, homeownership remains essentially unchallenged. It’s understood as superior to renting, as a way to realize your full personhood and US citizenship. It is intimately connected to chasing the American Dream of upward social mobility. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, homeownership is “reflexively advised as a way to emerge from poverty, develop assets, and build wealth more generally.” The idea of a housing system not structured around homeownership is completely beyond the horizons of US housing policy and discourse.
The US’s fanatical devotion to private homeownership is not a natural outcome, nor is it a politically neutral one. The US government and civil society have intentionally built this prevailing common sense understanding of homeownership through decades of propaganda and hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded subsidies for homebuyers. This understanding argues that: the act of building individual wealth through home equity is a tool of social mobility; that ontological security can be found in the privately-owned home; that the gendered labor of social reproduction should be confined to the private home; and that citizenship resides in property ownership.
This understanding of homeownership does more than produce profits for the homebuilding industry. It is an important component of the US capitalist ideology that keeps the oppressed classes invested in the system and resistant to anti-capitalist critiques of that system.
If we are to take seriously the task of activating a revolutionary consciousness in the US, we must uncover the ways in which the development of that consciousness is stunted and subsumed within the ideology of the ruling classes. Then, we must work to build an alternative common sense understanding of US capitalism, while honestly and dynamically evaluating the ideological basis of our politics. We need to heed the lessons of a century of cultural theorists like Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall and Mark Fisher, who have argued that capitalism is maintained not just by force, but by consent. Churches, schools, the family, and other institutions all disseminate the ideology of the ruling classes until it becomes common sense and the exploited masses come to believe that the social order created by capitalism is not only inevitable and unchallengeable but correct and just.
As Hall always reminded us, we must purposefully engage with “the struggle to command the common sense of the age in order to educate and transform it, to make common sense, the ordinary everyday thoughts of the majority of the population, move in a socialist rather than a reactionary direction.” It is an understanding of this task that leads me to argue that the left must explicitly reject the ideology of homeownership in our work. It is essential for the left housing movement in the US to begin to think of the landscape it occupies as the terrain of ideology, and to build a counter-hegemonic housing movement, which explicitly constructs alternatives to the ideology of homeownership. We need to form a systemic critique of private homeownership that doesn’t stop at a discussion of uneven access to homeownership but attempts to smash the ideology entirely. As Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism, our “emancipatory politics” must necessarily “destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order,’ must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”
All of which begs the question: how specifically does homeownership operate ideologically?
Instilling Capitalist Values
Fundamentally, homeownership (and the promise of homeownership) helps instill a belief that wealth is privately created and therefore should be privately controlled. When we accept the framing that homeownership is a primary means of economic mobility and wealth creation, we foreclose the horizons of socialism and obscure the reality that the capitalist distribution of wealth, property, and resources is structurally violent and unequal.
Common sense understandings do not emerge out of thin air. They are intentionally constructed to benefit certain people and classes. Every presidential administration in the 20th century utilized public policy and propaganda tools to promote mass private homeownership as the path to social mobility. Throughout the neoliberal administrations of Reagan, Bush (twice), Clinton, Obama, Trump and now Biden, the promise of mass homeownership has been used to justify cuts to the welfare state in favor of an “asset-based welfare” system, wherein the growth of your home’s value replaces traditional forms of social welfare provision. As Gonzalez writes, “It became crucial to those with homes to protect their property, and to preserve or increase its value by all means possible. Homeowners thus had higher stakes in the perpetuation of the capitalist class relation … ” The pursuit and the material realization of homeownership for millions helps to cement the common sense understanding of oneself as an individual consumer and speculator in a market-based world, rather than a member of a collective capable of organizing for democratic, social ownership of wealth and property.
Therefore, the ideology of homeownership, as both the ultimate form of privatized housing and the bedrock of the American Dream, has been essential to creating a mass common sense understanding that unabashed submission to the free market is the optimal (as well as natural, scientific, and post-ideological) method of structuring social and economic relations.
There are serious consequences to a societal belief that wealth is an individual creation that is earned (or not earned) through hard work, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship. A basic building block of Marxian economics — which has played a consequential role in essentially every insurgent left-wing movement — is the understanding that wealth is collectively created by the working classes, and therefore should be collectively controlled by the working classes. Capitalism is organized around private control of wealth, production, and the surplus value created by workers. It is therefore quite useful to any capitalist system to build a common sense understanding that wealth is a private — not social — creation, the end result being that the working classes consent to the private control of wealth and the means of production. Homeownership, as the primary point of contact between speculation, asset-building and wealth creation for Americans from all socio-economic and racial backgrounds, is central to the construction of this ideology.
Domestic Bliss or Patriarchal Domination?
As Silvia Federici, Angela Davis, and legions of Marxist feminist scholars have argued, the unpaid reproductive and domestic labor performed by women in the home is essential to the reproduction of capitalism. In the words of Federici: “the exploitation of women has played a central function in the process of capitalist accumulation, insofar as women have been the producers and reproducers of the most essential capitalist commodity: labor-power.” Engels, in his landmark book The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State, powerfully links the development of private property and the patriarchal family unit, arguing that capitalism necessitates a union of the two in order to function.
Therefore, the ideological centering of homeownership as the site of domestic bliss and family life serves a very material purpose within US capitalism. Mass homeownership carries with it deeply held cultural beliefs about women’s role in society, specifically that women should be confined to their private homes in order to carry out the domestic labor and the duties of social reproduction. Of course, the significance and character of these meanings have changed over time. In the 1920s, when Hoover and his ilk were propagandizing the virtues of the owned home, they were responding directly to radical anarchist and Bolshevik ideas about reproductive freedom, free love and women’s labor. Homeownership was indelibly tied to the idealized vision of a (necessarily white) breadwinning father, domestic mother and obedient children. In the post-war period, domestic work was cast as a patriotic, anti-communist duty, coinciding with the rising prominence of homes-as-assets. As Gonzalez writes, “the home became not only the commodity which physically contained all the others, but was also a worker’s main asset — the commodity for which all others were sold, and eventually the one which also purchased all the others.”
In contrast, in the 1970s, as Black women became the targets of “predatory inclusion” and the unwitting owners of crumbling, debt-laden homes, their role as caretakers of these homes was emphasized in order to lay blame at their feet instead of with HUD and the structurally racist real estate industry. The mass media and government officials consistently emphasized the irresponsible nature of Black female homebuyers, creating, in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s words, a “dysfunction discourse” that helped engineer the persistent moral panic about the state of Black inner cities in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
Building on Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism, Helen Hunter argues that “domestic realism” — wherein “the isolated and individualized small dwelling (and the concomitant privatization of household labor) becomes so accepted and commonplace that it is nearly impossible to imagine life being organized in any other way,” serves to reinforce gendered hierarchies and divisions of domestic labor. The practice of mass homeownership reifies the domestic sphere — a crucial site to imagine, reinvent and revolutionize gender roles in a collective and egalitarian manner — as the natural, post-ideological arrangement for social reproduction.
I’m not the person to sketch a socialist feminist vision of housing, but such a project certainly includes a radical break with the unpaid domestic labor in the home which is central to the ideology of homeownership. It is almost certainly a vision that demands cooperative, socialized domestic work and compensation for previously unpaid domestic labor. It is also almost certainly a vision that is incompatible with mass private homeownership, which necessarily confines domestic labor to the individual home, rather than socializing domestic labor.
Black Homeownership and The American Nightmare
There are two histories of homeownership in the United States: white homeownership, and homeownership for everyone else. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of the essential Race for Profit, puts it best: “The quality of life in U.S. society depends on the personal accumulation of wealth, and homeownership is the single largest investment that most families make to accrue this wealth. But when the housing market is fully formed by racial discrimination, there is deep, abiding inequality.”
In its modern form (roughly from the 20th century onwards), the public policy and propaganda supporting homeownership have been intentionally constructed to benefit white families. Hoover’s propaganda campaigns in the 1920s and 30s always depicted white families as the ideal, patriotic, capitalist homeowners. In the New Deal and post-war eras, subsidies for homeownership were granted to white families and excluded Black families. Redlining, restrictive covenants, and mob violence all kept neighborhoods segregated and severely devalued Black homes throughout the mid-20th century. When homeownership financing was finally extended to Black families en masse in the 1970s, it was structured in order to reap profits for realtors — in stark contrast with the white-wealth building intent of previous government homeownership programs. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, Black homeowners were pulled into the maelstrom of debt-fueled neoliberal capitalism in order to be exploited by subprime loans and Wall St chicanery. The nature of the racially exploitative housing market was made clear once again in the aftermath of the 2008 housing crash, as Black families were disproportionately impacted by foreclosures and subprime loans. The racial wealth gap widened in the aftermath of the crisis.
In 2021, 75.8% of white families owned their home, compared to just 46.4% of Black families. In 2019, the median white family was worth $188,200 while the median Black family was worth just $36,100. The racial wealth gap is an undisputable legacy of chattel slavery, redlining and Jim Crow capitalism. It is one of the clearest expressions of the structural deficiency of the American Dream.
And yet, even as it is widely acknowledged on the liberal-left wing of the American political spectrum that unequal access to wealth-building through homeownership is at the core of the racial wealth gap, analysts consistently suggest further investment in homeownership as the only possible solution to the problem. For instance, in their highly influential 1995 work, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality, Oliver and Shapiro lay out, in extensive historical detail, the processes by which Black communities have been denied access to wealth-building through homeownership and then go on to argue that individualized asset-based welfare systems — primarily operationalized through homeownership — are a promising potential solution.
In 2020, Bernie Sanders ran on probably the most left-wing housing platform attributable to a popular, major party, presidential candidate in decades. He advocated for reinvesting in public housing, cracking down on racial discrimination and expanding community land trusts. Still, he argued that “the American dream of homeownership is simply out of reach,” and therefore “we need to substantially expand federal programs to make sure that Americans throughout the country have the ability to buy their first home.”
Rather than look to egalitarian horizons wherein racist private property relations are dismantled and land is redistributed — rather than challenge the notion that Americans should be constantly interpellated as consumers and speculators — further investment in capitalism is argued to be the only solution to the problems created by hundreds of years of capitalist exploitation.
As Taylor writes, this outlook belies a “magical belief that homeownership will ever be a cornerstone of political, social, and economic freedom for African Americans.” It is a core component of the ideology of Black Capitalism, which James Baldwin once described as “a concept demanding yet more faith and infinitely more in schizophrenia than the concept of the Virgin birth.” While the methods of extending homeownership opportunity may be critiqued, the underlying assumptions — that individual asset accumulation through homeownership is the key to social mobility and that private property (the basis of the US settler-colonial nation-state) is an inevitable feature of human social organization — are rarely, if ever, questioned.
Conclusions
I would argue that, even for most contemporary left activists and movements who do act on a theory of change grounded in a systemic analysis of US capitalism, it is typically seen as pointless to waste energy trying to contradict a deeply held American value like homeownership. The project of outright rejecting private homeownership is either considered not politically expedient or not considered at all.
I don’t want to discount that the ideological terrain has shifted in the US left housing movement, especially since the 2008 housing crash. There has been an increasing emphasis on social housing, as exemplified by popular proposals like the “National Homes Guarantee,” or the Peoples Policy Project’s “A Plan to Solve the Housing Crisis Through Social Housing.” In these plans, private, speculative homeownership takes a backseat to decommodified, socialized conceptions of home and housing. In “The National Homes Guarantee,” the authors refer to homeowners as “bank tenants,” highlighting an increasingly mainstream skepticism about the liberatory promises of homeownership. In the past few years, the community land trust and cooperative housing models have gained prominence in cities and rural areas alike to combat rising housing costs, gentrification and speculation. The wave of insurgent tenant movements spurred on by the COVID-19-induced housing crisis and rising consciousness of private homeownership’s exploitative nature in the wake of the 2008 housing crisis also provide important context.
However, these developments alone do not constitute an intentional, counter-hegemonic, ideological thrust against homeownership and the American Dream. Socialized housing, after all, if promoted like many other goals of the US left — that is, alongside their antagonists — will always maintain a subordinate position. It is ultimately unproductive to shirk from direct confrontation with the ideology of private homeownership, in the same way that it is unproductive to argue for expanded public transit while refusing to attack highway funding or to argue for the deployment of renewable energy without tackling the systemized overconsumption at the root of the climate crisis.
So, despite the promising emergence of more radical challenges to the ideology of homeownership, the promotion of homeownership as a cure to wealth inequality, racial inequality and other social ills remains a near-hegemonic line of thinking. The acceptance of this thinking is fundamentally naive. It is naive to view private homeownership as a neutral concept, one that we can pluck from history and promote uncritically in the present day, while ignoring its historical role in maintaining race, gender and class domination. A continued uncritical embrace of homeownership in the rhetoric and praxis of the left — and in particular, the discourse which argues that homeownership can be a tool of social justice through wealth accumulation — does little to “destroy the appearance of a natural order.” Rather, it reinforces the common sense understanding that wealth should be built and controlled individually, that individual advancement is a preferable alternative to collective power-building, and that private property relations should reign supreme.
Fundamentally, the ideology of homeownership disseminates and enforces the ideology of the ruling class and undermines any discussion of overturning private property relations. As a result, as the ever-relevant W.E.B. DuBois’ wrote, the US is “not simply fundamentally capitalistic,” — it has “no conception of any system except one in which capital was privately owned.” Homeownership, particularly within the neoliberal cultural hegemony that still holds so much sway over our lives, helps preclude the possibility of a collective political subject and instead interpellates each of us as consumers, speculators, and market subjects above all else. For women, private homeownership continues to promote a domestic-centered lifestyle, consigning them to do unpaid and underappreciated work. For poor immigrants, Black communities, women, and other economically marginalized groups, homeownership is central to the endurance of the American Dream, inducing buy-in to the system of US capitalism by arguing that anyone can make it in America — and if you fail, it’s your fault.
. . .
The urban rebellions which gripped the nation and incited a genuine ruling class crisis in the summer of 2020 illustrate that, despite what the suffocating, “pervasive atmosphere” of late capitalism may lead us to believe, it is indeed possible to smash common sense ideology like that of homeownership. The spontaneous rebellions which broke out in Minneapolis and spread quickly across the country thrust us headfirst into a radical political moment, where the shackled horizons of neoliberal capitalism melted away in the face of a mass movement.
The various abolitionist currents and slogans present in May of 2020 went through complex processes of creation, co-option, revision, and moderation. But fundamentally, what emerged on the other side of the rebellions was a popular, revolutionary, if fractured, horizon. The ideology foundational to the neoliberal carceral state and its self-conception of social order — that social ills (particularly in Black and brown communities) cannot be solved through social and economic restructuring, but must instead be met with the violent force of prisons and policing — has become contested terrain. Many people who just weeks before the rebellions would scoff at the sheer lunacy of abolishing prisons or the police were suddenly proselytizing about the social causes of crime and the true role of the police and prisons in protecting property, whiteness, and US racial capitalism.
I don’t mean to romanticize the moment. What I want to emphasize is that radical horizons are possible only if we challenge the entrenched common sense understandings that undergird US capitalism — and crucially, that a large part of the ideological success of the abolitionist movement last summer was due to their preparation. Organic intellectuals like Mariama Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis, and organizations like Critical Resistance and Black Lives Matter, had been building the foundations of an abolitionist movement for years and were therefore prepared to seize the moment. Contrast that with the extremely fractured and weak state of the US left during the 2008 financial crisis, where the left — and the housing movement in particular — was ill-prepared to offer a systemic critique of homeownership, the American Dream, and neoliberal capitalism more broadly.
Homeownership must be connected to the broader political economy and ideology of contemporary capitalism. We need to assert that US capitalism’s ideological permanence draws strength from and is reproduced by housing systems and private homeownership in particular. What does this specifically entail for the left housing movement in the US?
We need a politics of housing that attacks capitalism at its roots in private property relations. A counter-hegemonic housing movement must be rooted in a radical turn towards socialized land, communal domestic labor and decommodified housing. Rather than continue to center private homeownership as the route toward social progress, we must reject private homeownership and embrace democratic, tenant-controlled social housing models like community land trusts, cooperative housing, Native American communal land holdings and public housing. Importantly, we have to actively work against the common sense understanding — which has been reinforced through the very real experiences of eviction, landlordism and poor housing quality within the rental market — that security of tenure, personal space and realization of citizenship can only be achieved through homeownership.
Through this radical break with the ideology of homeownership we can assist in forging a revolutionary common sense understanding, one which argues that:
the American Dream is a farce that only serves to reinvest potentially revolutionary energy back into the system;
private property is inherently violent and anti-egalitarian;
wealth is socially created and therefore should be socially controlled;
poverty is endemic to capitalism, not individuals;
domestic labor should be socialized and women should not be consigned to unpaid labor in the home;
the persistence of a permanent, racialized underclass of the unemployed, drug addicts, “criminals” and homeless people is a consequence of systemic failure, not individual deficiency;
and in the final analysis, we are members of a collective subject that can and must organize for our collective present and future.
I neither have the space nor the wisdom to offer a concrete vision of what this actually looks like. This article is intended to be a suggestive intervention, a critique on the terrain of ideology. But, as Paulo Freire reminds us, praxis is more than critique. Praxis is “reflection and action upon the world in order to change it.” This is just a reflection — an important one, I believe, but one that means very little until it is translated into action.
One important and concrete step we can all take towards building this new politics is to join and commit ourselves to principled, revolutionary tenant organizations. I organize with Brooklyn Eviction Defense, a communist, autonomous tenant organization. Through a variety of tactics, we help stop evictions (legal and illegal, because all evictions are violent and unjust, regardless of whether the state has sanctioned them), intervene in cases of landlord harassment, help tenants organize their buildings and much more. Our organizing work is rooted in a material struggle against the everyday violence of private property and the intertwined ideological struggle to activate a revolutionary tenant consciousness. We struggle daily against entrenched common sense understandings of homeownership and private property. We believe it is critical to hold a strong political line in favor of abolishing rent and private property. We are far from perfect, but our commitments give me hope that through principled struggle, we can smash the old politics of housing and forge a new, revolutionary common sense.
Plus, what to know if you are considering buying a foreclosure.
Despite billions of dollars in federal rental assistance flowing to cities and states, the number of evictions sought by landlords is climbing back to pre-pandemic levels in cities across the country, as wage growth continues to lag behind inflation and millions of people struggle with the rising cost of basic necessities.
An estimated 35 percent of respondents to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest Household Pulse Survey said they are either “very” or “somewhat” likely to leave their home in the next two months due to an eviction. Only about 11 percent said they applied for and received rental assistance through federally funded programs typically administered by states and cities, which are charged with distributing around $46.5 billion in aid to landlords and tenants. A larger Pulse survey found that nearly 25 percent of renter households are “slightly confident” or “not confident at all” in their ability to pay the next month’s rent.
These federal figures are just estimates extrapolated from surveys, but if they are anywhere close to reality, a growing wave of evictions could displace millions of people as the cost of living spikes.
Until recently, employment gains and support from temporary pandemic aid packages shielded the working class from the harms of inflation, according to Shawn Fremstad, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. However, corporations continue to raise prices on consumers, and Congress failed to extend safety net programs such the expanded Child Tax Credit that kept millions of people from going hungry last year.
“But it is now clear that corporate greed is hitting the working class head on,” Fremstad said in a statement this week. “According to the Census Bureau, just over one in three adults (about 34 percent) now report difficulty paying for the usual household expenses, the highest level we’ve seen since early 2021.”
Across the six states and 31 cities tracked by Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, landlords filed for more than 10,247 evictions in the last week alone. In Texas cities — Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth — landlords filed for 37,000 evictions in the first three months of the year, according to a Texas Tribune report based on the same data.
In Dallas, eviction filings plummeted during the height of the pandemic to as few as six per week, but filings skyrocketed after local and federal eviction moratoriums were lifted months ago. More than 1,000 filings were recorded in Dallas during one week this month alone. Similar reports are surfacing in cities across the country as pandemic social aid dries up.
And the housing crisis goes beyond eviction. Thanks in part to a broken social safety net and low wages for workers across multiple top industries, nearly one in three U.S. households can only afford to pay $600 in rent per month or less, resulting in many families grappling with crowded or dangerous housing conditions.
The United States was facing a housing and eviction crisis long before the pandemic forced businesses to shut down and put millions of people out of work. Even before the pandemic, many were charged rent they could not afford, according to housing justice groups. Prior to 2020, more than 3.6 million evictions were filed each year in the U.S.
Falling behind on rent can be a slippery slope toward losing a home, especially in red states with few legal protections for renters. When facing an eviction, only about 3 percent of tenants are represented by an attorney compared to about 81 percent of landlords, according to the National Coalition on the Right to Counsel. However, many evictions are never even challenged in court, according to Greg Pollack, a staff attorney at the Right to Counsel Coalition.
“They just leave. If they try to fight alone, they will lose, and they know it,” Pollock said in an interview. “Half of the people involved don’t even go to court for something that can make them homeless, lose their children, lose their job.”
Even the filing of an eviction, regardless of the outcome in court, can remain on a tenant’s record for years.
The burdens of this crisis are extremely uneven. From 2012 to 2016, Black tenants on average were served eviction notices from landlords at nearly twice the rate of white renters, and low-income Black women were disproportionately targeted, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Fortunately, Pollock said concerns about housing during the pandemic have amplified efforts in multiple cities to guarantee tenants the right to legal representation and set up eviction diversion programs that aim to resolve disputes between tenants and landlords with the goal of preventing an eviction hearing in court. Tenants unions have also organized to collectively challenge landlords and fight evictions across the country.
Washington State, Maryland and Connecticut established “right to counsel” programs that provide legal counsel to tenants facing eviction based on income, and similar programs were recently established in New York City, San Francisco, Newark, Boulder, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Louisville, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Toledo, Seattle, Denver and Cleveland, according to Pollock.
“There are now 16 jurisdictions that have right to counsel. There were zero in 2017,” Pollock said.
Other cities attempted to thwart and eviction crisis by passing new protections for renters, but Pollock said these efforts suffer from “enforcement problems.”
“Often tenants have to file an affidavit of some kind, they don’t know how to do it, and landlords can challenge it,” Pollock said. “In the cities that don’t have a right to counsel, some of the eviction diversion programs and other efforts have helped, but sometimes they are hampered by the fact that there are no lawyers there to make sure that laws are actually followed.”
Even in cities where tenants have a right to counsel, the infrastructure behind many of the new programs is still being built. Pollack said there are shortages of defense attorneys for tenants across the country. A federal moratorium on evictions was thrown out by the Supreme Court last August, and most local moratoriums have expired. Local courts are filling with tenants facing eviction, with in-person hearings replacing the onerous Zoom calls that previously slowed court proceedings and locked out defendants without internet access during pandemic lockdowns.
Still, advocates know a right to counsel can keep many people in their homes. In New York City, 84 percent of tenants with legal representation stay in their homes; in Cleveland, 93 percent of represented tenants avoid an eviction or involuntary move, according to Pollock.
Many tenants are unable to appear in court due to work, family and other obligations during the daytime. In cities without a right to counsel, these tenants are often forced out of their homes without a chance to assert their rights. Legal representation from right to counsel programs instantly fixes that problem, with attorneys appearing in court and filing paperwork on behalf of tenants.
Pollock said advocates are encouraging more law students to become tenant’s attorneys in hopes of building a “pipeline” from graduate law schools to state and local programs that guarantee legal defense for tenants.
“We view this as a cutting-edge civil rights fight, which it is; we view this as part of the fight for the right to housing,” Pollock said.
While the land relationships that dominate this society have implications for every relation in society, the recent crisis of gentrification and forced removal in low income Black communities, along with the volatile boom-bust real estate cycles, has made the struggle for adequate housing the most pronounced battleground in an increasingly intense war over the vision for the future of how we relate, prioritize and manage access to land. . . .
A report from Reuters. “With the Fed poised to hike further, the MBA forecasts that total mortgage originations will fall 35.5% this year, with a 64% decline in refinancings. ‘We have a classic case of a mortgage boom to bust cycle,’ said Gerard Cassidy, Head of U.S. Bank Equity Strategy at RBC Capital Markets. ‘As the rates go higher the refinancing business is cooling, which it always does, and is going to force a massive shrinkage in the mortgage banking business.’”
National Public Radio. “Last month, Fannie and Freddie began accepting desktop appraisals nationwide for all eligible transactions. While some questioned whether remote appraisals could be accurate, they kept deals on track at a time of wariness over in-person interactions. ‘They [Fannie and Freddie] understood they needed to keep the flow of money going and without the appraisal, [it] was going to stop the mortgages,’ said Sandra K. Adomatis, vice president of the Appraisal Institute.”
From WNDU on Indiana. “It’s a sure-fire sign of how hot the housing market is. The crowds at St. Joseph County’s Sheriff Sales are growing. ‘I had 34 sales that day and I think all but three went, sold to, you know, outside people,’ said Lt. Paul Weisser with the St. Joseph County Police Civil Division. The one-hour auction took in more than $1 million. Many of the homes sold for far more than was owed on the mortgage. ‘It’s sad to see people lose their homes but then, you know, it’s good that these investors are willing to keep these houses going, and instead of let them go down, and you know, so that part is good to see there are investors out there trying to make things better for us, you know,’ Weisser said. An additional 28-foreclosed homes are on the docket for the next sheriff’s sale May 19th.”
From The City on New York. “Squeezed by higher property taxes, soaring energy costs and unpaid rent during the pandemic, landlords of regulated apartments are hoping for the biggest increase from the city Rent Guidelines Board in at least a decade. The research also showed that 6.5% of rent-stabilized buildings in 2020 were ‘distressed,’ or had costs higher than their gross income. The percentage of distressed buildings rose one percentage point between 2019 and 2020, the report found. More than half of the distressed buildings in 2020 were in Manhattan.”
“For an eight-unit building she owns in The Bronx, Valentina Gojcaj is facing a 40% increase in her tax bill for 2022 over the previous year, she said. Many buildings are barely breaking even. For her eight-unit building, Gojcaj’s said her annual revenue is $144,000 if all the apartments are occupied and the rent is paid on time. Her actual expenses for 2021 on that building were $38,000, the property tax bill for the coming year is $57,000 and her mortgage is $48,000, leaving a cushion of $1,000.”
The Inter-Mountain. “A closer look at the numbers by LendingTree tells a more patchwork tale. Yes, the market is hot in some states. In others, there is considerably less demand. The online lender looked at the number of homes sitting vacant in each state and found that West Virginia has the fourth-highest vacancy rate in the country, at 18.12% of our 896,570 housing units. Homes in certain markets in the state — Morgantown, Wheeling, Charleston and Martinsburg, to name a few – don’t last long once listed for sale. But overall, West Virginia is struggling with vacant homes.”
From WFTS. “According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the state of Florida leads the nation with 1.68 million vacant houses. However, just because they are not occupied, doesn’t mean they’re not owned. ‘When you say 1.6 million vacant homes, that means to me there is someone controlling the market artificially,’ Tampa Bay area real estate agent Louie Talacay said. Jen Simmons is frantically trying to move to Tampa Bay from her home in New Jersey. On the surface, it appears there is a sea of empty homes for Simmons and her family to move into, but in reality, they are fighting tooth and nail to win out on just one.”
From USA Today on California. “Ron Wyghtman has watched L.A. and his small corner of Venice change drastically over decades. The 66-year-old remembers when the city saw violent crime reach historic highs in the 1990s with gangs, murders and a crack epidemic. It got safer. But now, Wyghtman says he sees it both backtracking and moving toward a new crisis. Tents and a disheveled RV now line his streets. Feces often mark the black fence that surrounds his small community. The sounds of emergency sirens echo during the dead of night and in the middle of the day.”
“Misty Keyser, 51, hears sirens almost every evening along Venice Boulevard in L.A.’s Venice neighborhood. She says for years she’s watched in frustration as leaders statewide and in the Greater Los Angeles area promise change that never comes. Instead, she says, lower-income homes were replaced by mansions and vacation homes, only further crippling the state’s housing crisis. ‘It just feels like it’s only getting worse,’ she said from the stoop of her one-story bungalow. ‘I don’t know what is needed, but we need change. We have people living outside like a Third World country. I mean, that just sounds insane. How is it still happening?’”
From CFJC Today in Canada. “Right now in B.C., buyers are at risk. Out-of-control bidding wars are putting pressure on people to waive standard conditions just to have their offer considered. Sources in the industry say that as many as 70 per cent of offers made in B.C. over the past year were without conditions, meaning people are waiving home inspections or financing approval. Even in Kamloops, realtors say more sales are being completed with no conditions.”
“One family in Nanaimo found out the hard way just how risky that can be. After paying over the asking price and waiving an inspection on their first home, they found out it had damage that would cost up to $100,000 to repair. This could easily happen to any family throughout B.C.”
The Vietnam Investment Review. “The unprecedented cancellation of the Tan Hoang Minh private bond issuance has caused an uproar in the market. The cancellation occurred after the bidding process to buy a land lot in Ho Chi Minh City’s Thu Thiem Peninsula for a record $106,521 per square metre late last year. The company soon thereafter decided to pull out of the transaction in January, forfeiting millions of dollars in deposit money.”
“SSI analyst Trinh Thai stated, ‘Some are concerned that Tan Hoang Minh might face default risk from the scandal, which could trigger a domino effect in the property sector as seen with Evergrande in China. We might need to wait for the response by Tan Hoang Minh to see how it could resolve its obligation balance to pay off debt holders in the event claims from investors come due.’”
“On the flip side, bondholders are concerned about whether their investment money will be lost and, if so, how they will recover their funds from the cancellation.”
From Bloomberg. “China’s worst Covid-19 outbreak in two years is prolonging the country’s property slump, starving stressed developers of cash and weighing on the economy. ‘One major loser amid lockdowns is the property sector, which is now in the darkest moment with lots of defaults and consolidations,’ said Larry Hu, head of China economics at Macquarie Group Ltd. ‘I’m now worried about being fired,’ said You Zheng, a 26-year-old real estate agent who had been handing out leaflets to passers by with his mask on for months. ‘It was difficult enough last month when prospective buyers were afraid of being locked in a compound during apartment viewing. Now who knows when sales can resume.’”
From Stuff New Zealand. “REINZ ambassador for Palmerston North Andy Stewart said this doesn’t necessarily mean a prolonged drop. ‘I think what we’re seeing here is a correction. We need to think about this as being the norm, as opposed to the increases in the past few years which have been abnormal. It’s a buyer’s market at the moment and so sellers need to be attuned to what the actual price of their house is. Otherwise, these properties are just left to sit.’”
“Stewart went on to say that even with this drop in prices, most buyers were already property owners, with first home buyers still struggling with increased deposit criteria and interest rates. ‘First home buyers are almost non-existent here.’”
“Youm mortgage advisor and director Craig Seton expressed a similar sentiment around first home buyers, saying the increase to a 20% threshold for first time borrowers remained a difficult obstacle to overcome. ‘It’s getting really hard to get a loan above 80% and so that deposit is really hard for people to put together.’”
Systemic risk in the property sector and early signs of Japanification threaten both its economy and alliances
Collapses of local junk bond prices signal that even tougher times lie ahead
Eminent domain has long been used to displace working-class people of color in Los Angeles, as in many cities. In a twist, a group of LA tenants is campaigning to use eminent domain to save themselves from eviction.
Hillside Villa tenants gather in front of their building in 2020. (Courtesy of Hillside Villa Tenants Association)
After trying to get an appointment for months, Rene AlexZander and four of his neighbors went to Los Angeles city councilmember Paul Krekorian’s office in December 2021. There, they met with Krekorian and members of his staff to discuss an unprecedented proposal: that the city acquire their building through eminent domain.
Krekorian heads up the committee that is currently reviewing the proposal. “I’ll never forget it,” AlexZander said of the meeting. Krekorian’s deputy chief of staff Matt Hale “looked at me and said, ‘We have to consider what’s best for the taxpayers.’ And I said, ‘We are the taxpayers!’ I called him out. I said, ‘What you’re saying right now is very insulting to us. You try to make us seem as if we’re not significant, when we really are.’”
AlexZander is a twenty-year tenant of Hillside Villa, a 124-unit affordable housing development in Chinatown, Los Angeles. The olive-green building with bright red wrought-iron balcony railings built in 1988 sits in view of several imposing new luxury apartment towers, a reminder of the recent wave of gentrification that has swept the area. For more than three years, AlexZander and his fellow tenants have waged an extraordinary fight to not only remain in their homes but to convince the city to purchase their building using eminent domain, a solution they argue would prevent displacement and create permanently affordable housing.
The thirty-year affordability covenant on the building (a condition of the tax credits and subsidized loans given to the developer in the 1980s) is set to expire, and the landlord, Tom Botz, has announced massive rent hikes that would mean de facto eviction of most tenants. Their fight for eminent domain offers a powerful template for other tenants looking to decommodify housing in hyper-financialized cities.
Eminent domain is a law that gives the government the right to seize, or expropriate, private property for public use, while compensating the property owner. The City of Los Angeles has a long, painful history of using eminent domain for highway expansion, stadium construction, and “urban renewal” efforts — usually displacing communities of color while benefiting corporate developers.
A glaring historical example is the Battle of Chavez Ravine, which resulted in the displacement of eighteen hundred families and the construction of Dodger Stadium. The land, previously held by Mexican-Americans who had gravitated there due to housing discrimination in other parts of the city, was acquired by the Los Angeles Housing Authority, primarily through eminent domain, in 1949.
The area was slated for public housing designed by modernist icon Richard Neutra that would hold thirty-six hundred units. However, with the 1953 election of conservative mayor Norris Poulson, who vehemently opposed public housing construction — and after years of the real estate lobby accusing the Los Angeles Housing Authority of communist infiltration, culminating in a referendum that banned public housing construction in the city altogether — the plans for public housing were abandoned, and City Council approved the sale of Chavez Ravine to Dodger owner Walter O’Malley in 1957.
LA County police removing resident Aurora Vargas from Chavez Ravine as she fights eviction. (Herald-Examiner Collection / Los Angeles Public Library Collection)
There’s also the case of Bunker Hill, a once-exclusive enclave of Victorian mansions (and home to Angel’s Flight, the 298-foot funicular known as the “world’s shortest railway”) that became a working-class neighborhood during the interwar period. When City Council voted to purchase the “blighted” land through eminent domain in 1959 and then sold it to private developers to spur a “renaissance” of Downtown, a total of 7,310 units were razed.
Today, Bunker Hill houses a collection of luxury residential buildings, concert venues, museums, gleaming office towers, and hotels (including John Portman’s postmodern landmark Bonaventure Hotel), and heavily policed privatized plazas. These are just two examples of the City of Los Angeles using eminent domain to benefit for-profit projects with little concern for people who lose their homes and are displaced as a result — all of which raises the question of what the city believes constitutes “public use.”
The Hillside Villa tenants argue that eminent domain, rather than being used to benefit corporate developers, should be used to ensure that tenants are able to remain in their homes in a city that is growing increasingly expensive and unsustainable for working-class residents like them. In Los Angeles County, which has an average median rent of $1,773 for a one-bedroom apartment, 75 percent of households were rent-burdened (spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing) even prior to COVID-19, while nearly half were severely rent-burdened. Meanwhile, the number of unhoused Angelenos continues to increase, reaching 66,436 in the 2020 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count — a number that is expected to rise significantly when the eviction moratorium expires.
By fighting for the use of eminent domain to secure their right to stay put, Hillside Villa tenants are reclaiming the law in a system that is otherwise set up to protect and benefit private developers and landlords, enforced by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the Sheriff’s Department who carry out evictions, police private property, and clear encampments. To confront the growing and intersecting homelessness and affordability crises, housing must be decommodified and reclaimed as a public good and human right, not a commodity for profit maximization — and eminent domain can help get us there.
Hillside Villa tenants at the Housing Not Cops March, April 8, 2021. (Courtesy of Hillside Villa Tenants Association)
Arriving at Eminent Domain
Initially, the Hillside Villa tenants weren’t pushing for eminent domain. They spent months trying to get their city councilmember, Gil Cedillo, involved, only to see their landlord, Tom Botz, renege on a deal with Cedillo where the city would forgive a loan worth millions of dollars in exchange for a ten-year extension of the affordability covenant. “After the whole 10-year deal went to trash, Cedillo completely shut us down,” said Leslie Hernandez, who moved to Hillside Villa as a young child and has lived there for thirty years. “He told us, ‘Well, there’s nothing else that we could do.’ But before that, we had begun working on eminent domain.” They began to tirelessly lobby a reluctant Cedillo to introduce the motion to City Council. He ultimately did in January 2020.
After receiving notice of the upcoming rent increase in 2018, the tenants, who organize in Cantonese, Spanish, and English, formed the Hillside Villa Tenants Association with support from Chinatown Community for Equitable Development and Los Angeles Tenants Union. They meet weekly in their courtyard (although currently on Zoom due to the Omicron surge), and describe each other as more like family members than neighbors.
Many have lived in the building for decades, including some tenants who were displaced when their apartments were seized through eminent domain in the 1980s to facilitate the Los Angeles Convention Center expansion. Some have lost their jobs during COVID-19, and others have passed away. Some accepted “cash for keys” deals from the landlord and moved out, fearing potential eviction.
Over the years, the tenants have staged countless protests, including in front of the homes of city councilmembers and in front of their landlord’s Malibu residence. They’ve also arranged sit-ins at City Hall and protested in front of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, which is built on land seized through eminent domain during the Bunker Hill clearing.
It has been an exhausting three-year effort, but as the tenants see it, they have no choice but to continue. Sonia Rodriguez, who has lived at Hillside Villa for nine years, said (in Spanish): “We’re fighting for affordable housing because, in my case, I have a daughter and also a grandson. And I just wonder what’s going to happen to them if this place stops being affordable.”
The upward of 200 percent rent hikes announced by Tom Botz, which would bring the rent to market rate, reflect both the catastrophic consequences of the financialization of housing that has made Los Angeles one of the least affordable cities in the United States and a center of the nation’s homelessness crisis, as well as the disastrous public-private partnership paradigm that has shaped affordable housing construction over recent decades.
Between 2010 and 2019, rents in Los Angeles County increased by a staggering 65 percent, while median household incomes went up by 36 percent — a significant discrepancy that doesn’t account for the economic devastation experienced by many renters as a result of COVID-19. Meanwhile, more than five thousand affordable units in Los Angeles County were converted from affordable to market rate between 1997 and 2018, and nearly nine thousand units have affordability covenants set to expire over the next eight years, putting even more pressure on renters as each lost affordable unit is accompanied by another low-income household in need of an affordable home.
The expiring affordability covenants stem from the government’s approach to affordable housing construction that relies on private developers to build or rehabilitate rental housing for low- and moderate-income tenants through subsidized programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). Under LIHTC, state governments are issued tax credits by the federal government and award them to private developers who must meet certain income and gross rent standards for a percentage of units. That percentage of units — for instance 20 percent of units that are occupied by tenants whose incomes are 50 percent or less of the area median income — must be made temporarily affordable, meaning the gross rent does not exceed 30 percent of their income. After a fixed period, the property owner is free to increase the rent to market rate, as Tom Botz wants to do with Hillside Villa. The tenants who cannot afford to pay market rate — with few places to go in a city in need of nearly five hundred thousand affordable homes — are kicked out, allowing landlords to increase their profits.
It’s worth mentioning that affordable housing landlords like Tom Botz often receive additional taxpayer money through the Section 8 voucher program, in which tenants pay 30 percent of their monthly adjusted gross income in rent, while the government covers the rest of their “fair market rent.” Both Section 8 and LIHTC, products of the neoliberal shift in federal housing policy, serve as vehicles for a massive transfer of money from the public sector into the private for-profit housing market (states must only award ten percent of LIHTCs to nonprofits). The annual budget for the LIHTC program alone is around $8 billion, while the Housing Choice Voucher Program budget for 2022 is $30.4 billion.
Privatized affordable housing is folded into for-profit developments and built when and where it suits developers. Yet the provision of housing is incompatible with a public-private approach in which profit accumulation outweighs consideration of housing need; the use value of a place to live (a basic human need) is fundamentally at odds with its hypothetical value as real estate, as Peter Marcuse and David Madden write in In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. To address the crises affecting housing in any meaningful way, housing must be decommodified and removed from the speculative market.
This can be accomplished through measures that include universal rent control and an expansion of the public housing stock. However, Nixon’s 1973 moratorium on public housing construction, which has essentially remained in place ever since — its current iteration is the Faircloth Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for projects that increase the number of units owned or operated by Public Housing Agencies as of October 1, 1999 — precludes such an expansion, making an appeal of the law paramount to any consequential housing policy proposal. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had attempted to secure a limited exemption of the amendment in Biden’s faltering Build Back Better Act.)
In the meantime, eminent domain presents a unique opportunity for decommodification and for socialized housing governance structures, although in the case of Hillside Villa the post-expropriation management structure has yet to be determined. City Council would first have to pay market rate for the building, which is appraised at $46 million. As several organizers point out, that would amount to a mere fraction of the ever-increasing LAPD budget ($1.76 billion in the fiscal year 2021–2022). And, considering the price of privatized and temporarily affordable housing construction, preserving affordability is actually cheaper than building the same number of new units; $480,000 per unit (2019 figure, so likely even higher now) versus $370,000 per unit under the Hillside Villa proposal.
A delegation of Hillside Villa tenants trying to get a meeting with Paul Krekorian, October 15, 2021. (Courtesy of Hillside Villa Tenants Association)
The Potential of Eminent Domain
The Hillside Villa Tenants Association has shined a light on the inherent flaws of the privatized affordable housing program, while giving City Council an opportunity to break with the history of exploitative and dispossessive eminent domain use. They’ve also shown that organizing around eminent domain to decommodify and ensure permanent affordability has the potential to be a radical path forward for tenants at risk of displacement in Los Angeles and other cities, particularly in light of the moratorium on public housing construction in the United States. And they aren’t the only ones pursuing this path.
In Berlin, the Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen campaign won a successful referendum to expropriate privatized housing from corporate landlords in September 2021, although so far, the new municipal government coalition, led by Social-Democratic Mayor Franziska Giffey, is refusing to implement it. There was also a proposal to expropriate vacant housing in California and make it affordable. And, in 2013, Green Party mayor Gayle McLaughlin pursued a strategy of acquiring and refinancing “troubled loans” through eminent domain to prevent another wave of foreclosures in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis in Richmond, California, though ultimately the effort was unsuccessful. There are other examples of organizing to reverse the privatization and commodification of energy and water services after decades of neoliberalism, pointing to the possibility of a wider movement coalescing around reclaiming public infrastructure and provisions — including housing — through expropriation.
After a series of delays, requests for information, and dodging of tenants, the fate of Hillside Villa is currently in the hands of the Budget and Finance Committee under Paul Krekorian. If Krekorian’s committee decides to move forward with the proposal, and City Council votes to invoke eminent domain, the ramifications could extend beyond tenants securing the right to remain to potentially reshaping the way the city approaches expiring affordability covenants — but hopefully more fundamentally, how it approaches the provision of housing altogether.
While many critics, predictably, have argued that the proposal is too radical, too impractical, and too expensive, Leslie Hernandez says: “It’s just about keeping it affordable. We’re not asking for anything free.”