SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
department of housing and urban development
Ocasio-Cortez, Smith Push Bill to Create Social Housing Authority
"Because we believe that housing is a human right, like food or healthcare, we believe that more Americans deserve the option of social housing."
Sep 18, 2024
"It's becoming nearly impossible for working-class people to buy and keep a roof over their heads. Congress must respond with a plan that matches the scale of this crisis."
That's according to U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), who on Wednesday introduced the Homes Act in a New York Timesopinion piece and an event with supporters of the proposal on Capitol Hill.
"Because we believe that housing is a human right, like food or healthcare, we believe that more Americans deserve the option of social housing," the pair wrote in the Times. "That's why we're introducing the Homes Act, a plan to establish a new, federally backed development authority to finance and build homes in big cities and small towns across America. These homes would be built to last by union workers and then turned over to entities that agree to manage them for permanent affordability: public and tribal housing authorities, cooperatives, tenant unions, community land trusts, nonprofits, and local governments."
"Our housing development authority wouldn't be focused on maximizing profit or returns to shareholders," the congresswomen continued. "Rent would be capped at 25% of a household's adjusted annual gross income. Homes would be set aside for lower-income families in mixed-income buildings and communities. And every home would be built to modern, efficient standards, which would cut residents' utility costs. Renters wouldn't have to worry about the prospect of a big corporation buying up the building and evicting everyone. Some could even come together to purchase their buildings outright."
In addition to establishing the new authority under the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the bill would repeal the Faircloth Amendment, which prevents the use of federal money for building new public homes. Under the new plan, construction would be funded by congressional spending and Treasury-backed loans.
"In New York, the average worker would need to clock in 104 hours a week to afford a one-bedroom apartment," Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement. "This country is staring down a full-blown housing crisis. A crisis where affordable housing is slipping out of reach."
"This bill would create more than 500,000 jobs and create 1.25 million affordable housing units," she noted, declaring that "everyone deserves a place to call home."
It's not just New York City where lower-wage people are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Smith pointed out that "more than 90% of workers cannot afford a modest one-bedroom apartment. Americans across the country are bidding for homes against the wealthiest financial firms and they're losing."
"We have a severe housing crisis," she stressed. "The private market cannot meet this moment on its own. The Homes Act meets peoples' needs through social housing."
As Jacobin's Samuel Stein wrote Wednesday:
The housing system sketched out in the Homes Act looks nothing like what we are used to in the United States. Though we have an important social housing legacy, we have never normalized decommodification as the cornerstone of our housing system.
Introducing legislation like the Homes Act does not accomplish that goal in and of itself, but it offers us a concrete depiction of what that transition could look like. It also highlights the severe disjuncture between what our housing and urban planning system does right now—promote private profits in real estate while minimizing the public provision of housing—and what we need it to do.
The goal of legislation like this is not to pass it immediately, since no sober person would expect the current U.S. Congress to line up in support. Nor is the goal to supplant the messy work of organizing with the schematic and technical language of legislation. Instead, the point is to inspire organizing: to show that the status quo is not the only way our housing could operate, to give tenant organizations a concrete and affirmative vision to build toward, and to offer socialist candidates for office a platform to run on.
The bill to create a social housing authority—introduced less than two months out from the U.S. general election—is backed by the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and its affiliates from across the country.
"Working families are being forced to make sacrifices in order to pay the skyrocketing cost of keeping a roof over their heads, while corporate landlords and Wall Street executives are getting even richer," said CPD co-executive directors Analilia Mejia and DaMareo Cooper. "This legislation provides a clear alternative to for-profit housing. It creates a framework to make community-owned, permanently affordable green social housing a reality."
Advocates from both sponsors' states also spoke out in favor of the bill.
"In Greater Minnesota, counties and towns don't have staff to build affordable housing projects, financing is another huge issue. We don’t have as many philanthropic organizations or financial institutions as urban areas," explained Noah Hobbs, policy director at One Roof Community Housing in Duluth. "This bill is the first real investment we've had in years. We're incredibly proud to endorse this legislation."
Aisha Hernandez, secretary of the Coalition to Save Affordable Housing at Co-op City in the Bronx, said that "cooperative housing gave me the ability to co-own my home. A few years ago, my neighbors and I came together to ensure our housing stays affordable, that our management is working in the interest of homeowners and prevent any corporate takeover of Co-op City."
"We are co-owners, not at the whims of corporate landlords," Hernandez added. "I want my fellow Americans to have the same access to housing that co-op has afforded me. This bill has the ability to do that. So let's get it done."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Watchdog Memos Show a Trump 'Utterly Indifferent to the Public Interest' in First Term
The group's leader said the media should "cover the Biden vs. Trump election as a comparison between how each president administered the immensely important executive branch."
Jun 24, 2024
The Revolving Door Project on Monday released a set of reports on corruption and mismanagement in executive agencies during the Trump presidency, calling on the media to focus on presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump's poor governing record as he campaigns to retake the Oval Office.
The new reports, called "retrospective memos," show that Trump's executive branch was rife with cronyism and corporate influence from 2017 until 2021. RDP, a watchdog group focused on the executive branch, released the reports as a way to fight "Trumpnesia" and focus the political discussion on the governance records of Trump and President Joe Biden, a Democrat seeking reelection.
"Donald Trump's most important legacy as president wasn't what he said, or even what bills he signed, but how he turned the federal government into a favor machine to benefit his family and cronies," Jeff Hauser, RDP's executive director, said in a statement. "The media should not focus on the aesthetics of this week's presidential debate but rather cover the Biden vs. Trump election as a comparison between how each president administered the immensely important executive branch."
"It's important to revisit how poorly he ran the executive branch his first time round."
RDP issued eight memos, covering disaster management, the environment, financial regulation, housing, immigration, labor, education, and transportation.
Each provides evidence of a Trump administration that was "utterly indifferent to the public interest," as Timi Iwayemi, RDP's research director, said in the statement.
In many cases, Trump appointees were hostile to the original aims of the agencies. they served.
Mick Mulvaney, Trump's choice to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, tried to roll back rules limiting predatory payday lending—a practice that "preys on the working poor," the financial regulation memo says.
Mulvaney—who's now suggesting a "revenge-a-thon" against Trump's foes—also appointed political cronies and failed to undertake the enforcement actions against companies that were the CFPB's raison d'être. A 2019 feature in The New York Times Magazine was titled, "Mick Mulvaney's Master Class in Destroying a Bureaucracy From Within."
Trump's National Labor Relations Board was led by Peter Robb, a management-side lawyer who was the Reagan administration's lead attorney on litigation dealing with the air traffic controllers' strike of 1981, in which the federal government fired about 11,000 workers and banned them from being rehired. Like Trump's Department of Labor, which was ultimately run by the son of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the NLRB under Robb was pro-management—and reportedly dysfunctional.
Other federal agencies were hardly more committed to serving the public interest in the late 2010s.
"Trump's Interior Department advanced the interests of extractivist industry on public lands while refusing to account for how its actions would worsen climate change," according to RDP's environment memo. "The Trump administration auctioned off over 10 million acres of land and water to oil and gas drilling, including by drastically reducing the size of national monuments like Bears Ears in Utah, a sacred homeland to five tribal nations, in order to open them up to development."
The Department of Housing and Urban Development, run by former presidential candidate Ben Carson, was plagued by "handouts to friends and family," a series of "deadly budget cut proposals," and a "war on fair housing," according to the RDP's housing memo.
Trump's disaster management choices were particularly consequential. The Federal Emergency Management Agency " horrifically" mismanaged the response to two consecutive hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico in 2017, which got minimal—and very delayed—relief compared to Texas communities that were hit by a hurricane during that period.
RDP's catalog of Trump administration failures is designed to clarify the stakes of the 2024 election.
"The series serves as a reminder to the public that the president's primary responsibility is to direct the vast apparatus known as the executive branch of the federal government," RDP said. "Sadly, former president Donald Trump either neglected this responsibility or wielded it in favor of corporations throughout his four years in office."
Iwayemi said "Even as current conversations wisely focus on Project 2025 and Trump's promise to leverage executive power to harm political enemies, it's important to revisit how poorly he ran the executive branch his first time round as a cure to the public's apparent Trumpnesia."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Biden Rent Increase Cap Shows the Tenant Union Movement Can Win Nationally
The new rent cap heralds a shift in tenant organizing in the U.S. from building power in local struggles to influencing federal policy.
Apr 17, 2024
For the past several years, tenant unions from disparate locations like Kansas City, Missouri; Bozeman, Montana; and Louisville, Kentucky have been canvassing door-to-door, lobbying at the White House and Congress, and convening loud, passionate demonstrations in their home communities and at the national headquarters of corporate landlords. They have earned admiring profiles in The New York Times and Time Magazine and have been featured on National Public Radio. What they have not done is win a tangible federal victory for renters.
After tenants demanded cancellation of rent and mortgage obligations in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the government instead issued $46 billion in Emergency Rental Assistance to landlords with no strings attached, filling the coffers of serial evictors and institutional slumlords with notorious health and safety records. After tenants called for renter rights to be enshrined in federal law, the Biden administration’s early 2023 Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights was so lacking in actual policy to accompany its lofty language that the nation’s landlord lobbyists gleefully claimed victory.
“Over the past several decades, the federal government has not only abdicated its responsibility tenants, it has actually become the financial enabler of some of the worst landlord business practices,” says Tara Raghuveer of the National Tenant Union Federation.
But, as of last month, that may be changing.
That is when the Biden administration announced it would impose a cap on rent increases on Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) housing. The 10% annual increase limit is far higher than the 3% cap that tenant unions have been pushing for, and the limitation to the LIHTC program leaves out a great deal of other federally financed and subsidized housing. But the new rule could apply to over a million households. And perhaps more importantly, it shows for the first time that the tenant union movement can make its power felt on the national stage.
“For many of these landlords, rent-gouging, evictions, and poor conditions are part of the business model, and what makes their business model work is the favorable terms they receive from our federal government.”
“It’s a huge win, and it wouldn’t have happened if not for tenant unions beating the drum for the past several years demanding that every dollar of federal financing and subsidies be conditioned on tenant protections,” Raghuveer says. “The federal government is finally recognizing its responsibility to protect tenants from price-gouging.”
It seems the landlord lobby agrees. The same organizations that cheered the words-only Biden Blueprint a year ago have joined together to bitterly criticize the new rent cap.
“You’re discouraging the creation of supply,” the CEO of the National Housing Conference complained to The Washington Post.
Landlords were particularly disturbed by the Biden administration explicitly dismissing their increasingly discredited argument that rent limits decrease the supply of affordable housing.
“We’ve seen no evidence that this limitation—even those much lower than 10%—have limited the supply of new affordable housing nationally,” said Department of Housing and Urban Development spokesman Zachary Nosanchuk.
The new rent cap also heralds a shift in tenant organizing in the U.S. Although tenant unions have traditionally built their power through local struggles, laws passed by state legislatures in places like Missouri and Kentucky put ceilings on local housing reforms. At the same time, federal financing plays an enormous role in the housing industry. In 2022, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, or FHFA, which manages both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, purchased $142 billion in mortgages issued by banks to multifamily landlords, thus assuming the risk of nonpayment. So tenant unions argue that this federal government largesse should come with conditions, specifically limits on rent hikes, obligations to keep the housing clean and safe, and promises not to evict tenants or not renew leases except for good cause. These types of tenant protections on federally backed housing could apply to over 12 million rental units, nearly one in three renting households in the country.
Winning these conditions and ensuring that the new rent cap is fully enforced are the next steps for the tenant union movement looking to build on the momentum of this win.
“For many of these landlords, rent-gouging, evictions, and poor conditions are part of the business model, and what makes their business model work is the favorable terms they receive from our federal government,” Raghuveer says.
“The rent is too damn high, and the government is in business with our landlords.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular