Coming Attractions + Archive Articles
Photo by sprentstrike_0289 CC BY-SA 2.0
The plan for this new newsletter is to send out posts on the 1st and 15th of each month. But the plan also includes most of the articles shared here first being published in outlets that have a bit more circulation than this newsletter. (At least, more circulation so far . . . we are just getting started! 😊 )
Those publications and their editors have their own timelines, of course. So I will also send alerts when articles get published on dates between the scheduled bimonthly posts. Now, as the newsletter ramps up, there seems to be value in sharing what is in the pipeline. I’ll also share some links and snippets of articles published in the months before this newsletter launched.
Coming Attractions
Religious Traditions and the Human Right to Housing. This is an approach to housing advocacy and writing that has deep appeal to me and many others. I have an article on the Roman Catholic case for housing as a human right that is accepted and ready to be published in Commonweal magazine.(An excerpt: “Social housing sees housing as a human right, an approach that lines up completely with the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, Catholic Social Teaching, and papal encyclicals. Meaningful Catholic advocacy for social housing has already bloomed, partly due to the credibility of Catholic organizations and individuals who directly provide housing to those in need.”)
A similar article on Judaism and the human right to housing is under review by a publisher now. (An excerpt: “Rabbi Jill Jacobs, a Conservative rabbi writing on “Judaism and the Homeless,” says that Jewish law, halakah, includes the rights of the poor to housing. ‘(Jewish sources) specifically define housing as one of the obligatory types of tzedakah. The Bible commands that a poor person be granted ‘sufficient for what lacks, according to what is lacking to him,’” she writes. ‘Sufficient for what he lacks’–this is a house.’”)
Special thanks to Rabbi Aaron Spiegel and Alex Slabosky of the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance and Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism for guiding my research on this article.
Coming soon: articles on how Islam and other religious traditions embrace the human right to housing.
Public Housing Can be Great, Actually. Despite decades of demonizing rhetoric and an intentional blockade of funding for necessary upkeep, public housing in the U.S. has long been a lifeline for low-income people, especially Black and Latino families and the elderly. There are nearly two million people living in U.S. public housing, benefitting from cost control and renter protections that no other housing program in the U.S. can match.
Public housing thriving in nations like Finland, Singapore, and Austria. And housing experts like Alex Schwartz, author of the foundational volume Housing Policy in the United States, point out that most U.S. public housing is in decent condition. All of this is why public housing residents and advocates in groups like Save Section 9 are fighting to get necessary repairs made. They also want to preserve their homes from attacks by the real estate lobby and other for-profit interests that have a long record of starving U.S. public housing of needed support.
An excerpt from my forthcoming article: “It’s not rocket science,” says Jackson Gandour, author of a new Human Rights Watch report. “Fundamentally, public housing in the U.S. needs money to achieve its potential. It can be done: other governments are doing it well every day, and even the U.S. experience shows it is well within our capacity.”
President Biden Can and Should Take Dramatic Action on Rents. “As of now, the Biden administration is dangerously silent on the single biggest line item in Americans’ budgets: their rent,” says Tara Raghuveer of the People’s Action Home Guarantee Campaign. That silence will end soon, if People’s Action and over 200 advocacy groups get their way. They have drafted a proposed executive order for Biden that would, among other provisions, require rent control on the 12-million-plus rental properties backed by federally-guaranteed mortgages and launch serious investigations of rent-gouging and landlord price collusion.
Advocates say this bold Biden action is called for by rising rents’ contribution to inflation (housing costs are far and away the top expense for most U.S. households), the consolidation of rental property by national and even multinational corporations, and the major role that federal government subsidies and guarantees play in the business models of corporate landlords. Article coming soon!
Who Really Benefits From Our Housing Tax Dollars? Due to underfunding of our housing programs, three of every four U.S. households eligible for federal rental assistance—including almost all of our eviction court clients--go without any help. Yet there is a long list of generous tax benefits that benefit corporate landlords and the wealthiest homeowners.
Landlord rewards include the lower capital gains tax rate, a tax deferral scheme called 1031 exchanges, opportunity zones tax benefits, and depreciation. (“I love depreciation,” Donald Trump said in a 2016 presidential campaign debate. And no wonder, since it was a major reason the real estate tycoon avoided paying any income taxes for 8 of the 10 years between 1985 and 1994.) The wealthiest homeowners enjoy mortgage interest and property tax deductions, along with a capital gains exemption.
These breaks for corporations and the richest individuals far exceed our investment in housing for those who need it. For the non-accountants among us, this article will lay out those benefits and their costs to those who struggle for a safe, secure place to call home.
End of an ERA. As recently as a year and a half ago, almost all of the clients who we see in eviction court were safely housed. They were using some combination of CARES Act stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, expanded child tax credit, and maximized food stamps to make ends meet. Together with a national eviction moratorium, our nation extended a lifeline to tens of millions of Americans. The Eviction Lab at Princeton University estimates that these programs prevented more than three million eviction cases
More broadly, we achieved the remarkable result of poverty rates actually dropping during a pandemic. Not coincidentally, it was the first time our shared prosperity began to resemble that of other industrialized nations where housing is a human right, and subsistence needs like healthcare and childcare are guaranteed.
Then, one by one, we allowed all of these protections to drift away. The last one remaining has been the Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) program, but it too has come to an end in our community and many others across the country. This forthcoming article reflects on how we have refused to learn the positive lessons of our pandemic response. As a result, we are leaving millions of families without a roof over their heads.
Tenants Rising. I’ve had the privilege of teaching and writing a bit about successful social movements. Predicting when a movement will rise or fall is a tricky business, but one characteristic is clear: winning movements are led by those who are directly impacted by the targeted injustice. The lessons of the civil rights movement, the labor movement, the anti-apartheid movement, et al. demonstrate that real change only happens when those most affected are leading the push. Fortunately, there are many bold, creative tenant-led campaigns going on around the nation. I look forward to writing about them in the coming months.
Archive Articles
“How Activists are Making the Human Right to Housing a Reality” This article was published in October by the terrific media organization Waging Nonviolence. If you have not checked out Waging Nonviolence, a nonprofit dedicated to providing original reporting and expert analysis of social movements around the world, I encourage you to do so. This article lifted up some current housing justice campaigns and the inspired legacy they are building on.
An excerpt: “ Activists using tactics ranging from occupying vacant buildings to canvassing to pushing ballot initiatives have won commitments for expanded affordable housing support in cities like Minneapolis, Oakland, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Baltimore and Los Angeles. Community activists are engaged in current housing campaigns in Las Vegas and New York. Rent control advocacy is ongoing in California, Florida and Michigan, with a recent rent control victory in Minnesota.”
“Lessons from Eviction Court” There are many terrific advocates and scholars focusing on our housing crisis. I learn a great deal from all of them. If there is anything special that this newsletter can offer to the discussion, it comes from our clinic’s weekly exposure to one of the crisis’s most tragic and compelling scenes: eviction court. Witnessing the struggles of our clients forces us to focus on desperately-needed subsidized housing for the most poor.
This is not to say that challenges like homeownership access are not important. As long as homeownership remains super-subsidized by the government and the chief source of wealth that Blacks have been historically denied, it matters a great deal. But eviction court won’t let us forget that need #1 is affordable, secure housing. And the millions of people who simply cannot afford their rent prove that the market will never meet that need.
This article in Common Dreams lays out ten lessons we have learned from the experience. An excerpt: “Other nations use their housing resources differently. Instead of looking at housing mostly as a tool for the rich to get richer, their top priority is to guarantee housing for all who need it. Their example proves that we can get vouchers or subsidized homes or apartments for Ms. Jones, her kids, and everyone else who qualifies.”
Jacobin and Common Dreams Articles. I am deeply grateful to Jacobin and Common Dreams editors for publishing so much of my writing over the years, including many housing articles in the past two years. All my articles for Jacobin can be found here, and the Common Dreams articles are here.
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