#housing equity

[atlurbanist]

This quote comes from Dan Immergluck's great book "Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta." Recommended reading.

Atlanta saw a 28% increase in its tech talent pool from 2013-18. During that boom, we missed a huge opportunity for equitable outcomes.

Instead of transforming that economic growth into critical public services such as subsidies for housing for lower-income Atlanta, the inflow of higher-wage workers just ended up driving local rents higher, hurting low-income folks the most.

I'm glad to see the city make good efforts toward affordable housing in recent years. We're moving in the right direction.

But going forward, we need to think of growth and investment as a tool for truly equitable outcomes, with measurable success. We're not at that point yet.

City leaders are constantly getting an earful of demands from the local elite about remaining "business friendly" and not disturbing the status quo of investment returns for powerful interests. They need to hear from the rest of us.

[biglilguyenergy]

Even if you aren't in or around California, because it's such a large state it often sets presidents with its policies that serve as use cases for the rest of the country.

Getting this passed there makes it much more likely that other states and localities will pass similar measures.

Rent control is on the ballot for California voters this November.

I uh, get that tumblr isn't exactly sorted by geography, but this is a huge deal.

It's a huge deal even for people who don't expect to be personally affected by it -- rent control is a protection against the poorest people living in a city being forced out, and that's just bad for everyone. When you have a city where only medium well off to rich people live, you get their service employees coming in from a suburb an hour and a half away (blech) or else you get people stacked three to a room. Or people holding down a job or three while trying to earn enough to get off the street or, well, out of their parents' place or away from the abusive partner they can't afford to break up with. Point is, a lack of housing that people can just keep living in at the same price, means a lot of bad things for society, and we probably aren't going to socialize housing within the next ten years but maybe we can get rent control back.

[alwaysbewoke]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Housing is a labor issue

There's a reason Reagan declared war on unions before he declared war on everything else – environmental protection, health care, consumer rights, financial regulation. Unions are how working people fight for a better world for all of us. They're how everyday people come together to resist oligarchy, extraction and exploitation.

Take the 2019 LA teachers' strike. As Jane McAlevey writes in A Collective Bargain, the LA teachers didn't just win higher pay for their members! They also demanded (and got) an end to immigration sweeps of parents waiting for their kids at the school gate; a guarantee of green space near every public school in the city; and on-site immigration counselors in LA schools:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Unionization is enjoying an historic renaissance. The Hot Labor Summer transitioned to an Eternal Labor September, and it's still going strong, with UAW president Shawn Fain celebrating his members victory over the Big Three automakers by calling for a 2028 general strike:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/uaw-general-strike-no-class

The rising labor movement has powerful allies in the Biden Administration. NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is systematically gutting the "union avoidance" playbook. She's banned the use of temp-work app blacklists that force workers to cross picket lines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

She's changed the penalty for bosses who violate labor law during union drives. It used to be the boss would pay a fine, which was an easy price to pay in exchange for killing your workers' union. Now, the penalty is automatic recognition of the union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

And while the law doesn't allow Abruzzo to impose a contract on companies that refuse to bargain their unions, she's set to force those companies to honor other employers' union contracts until they agree to a contract with their own workers:

https://onlabor.org/gc-abruzzo-just-asked-the-nlrb-to-overturn-ex-cell-o-heres-why-that-matters/

She's also nuking TRAPs, the deals that force workers to repay their employers for their "training expenses" if they have the audacity to quit and get a better job somewhere else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

(As with every aspect of the Biden White House, its labor policy is contradictory and self-defeating, with other Biden appointees working to smash worker power, including when Biden broke the railworkers' strike:)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/18/co-determination/#now-make-me-do-it

A surging labor movement opens up all kinds of possibilities for a better world. Writing for the Law and Political Economy Project, UNITE Here attorney Zoe Tucker makes the case for unions as a way out of America's brutal housing crisis:

https://lpeproject.org/blog/why-unions-should-join-the-housing-fight/

She describes how low-waged LA hotel workers have been pushed out of neighborhoods close to their jobs, with UNITE Here members commuting three hours in each direction, starting their work-days at 3AM in order to clock in on time:

https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1669088899769987079

UNITE Here members are striking against 50 hotels in LA and Orange County, and their demands include significant cost-of-living raises. But more money won't give them back the time they give up to those bruising daily commutes. For that, unions need to make housing itself a demand.

As Tucker writes, most workers are tenants and vice-versa. What's more, bad landlords are apt to be bad bosses, too. Stepan Kazaryan, the same guy who owns the strip club whose conditions were so bad that it prompted the creation of Equity Strippers NoHo, the first strippers' union in a generation, is also a shitty landlord whose tenants went on a rent-strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/20/the-missing-links/#plunderphonics

So it was only natural that Kazaryan's tenants walked the picket line with the Equity Stripper Noho workers:

https://twitter.com/glendaletenants/status/1733290276599570736?s=46

While scumbag bosses/evil landlords like Kazaryan deal out misery retail, one apartment building at a time, the wholesale destruction of workers' lives comes from private equity giants who are the most prolific source of TRAPs, robo-scabbing apps, illegal union busting, and indefinite contract delays – and these are the very same PE firms that are buying up millions of single-family homes and turning them into slums:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Tucker's point is that when a worker clocks out of their bad job, commutes home for three hours, and gets back to their black-mold-saturated, overpriced apartment to find a notice of a new junk fee (like a surcharge for paying your rent in cash, by check, or by direct payment), they're fighting the very same corporations.

Unions who defend their workers' right to shelter do every tenant a service. A coalition of LA unions succeeded in passing Measure ULA, which uses a surcharge on real estate transactions over $5m to fund "the largest municipal housing program in the country":

https://unitedtohousela.com/app/uploads/2022/05/LA_City_Affordable_Housing_Petition_H.pdf

LA unions are fighting for rules to limit Airbnbs and other platforms that transform the city's rental stock into illegal, unlicensed hotels:

https://upgo.lab.mcgill.ca/publication/strs-in-los-angeles-2022/Wachsmuth_LA_2022.pdf

And the hotel workers organized under UNITE Here are fighting their own employers: the hoteliers who are aggressively buying up residences, evicting their long-term tenants, tearing down the building and putting up a luxury hotel. They got LA council to pass a law requiring hotels to build new housing to replace any residences they displace:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-28/airbnb-operators-would-need-police-permit-in-l-a-under-proposed-law

UNITE Here is bargaining for a per-room hotel surcharge to fund housing specifically for hotel workers, so the people who change the sheets and clean the toilets don't have to waste six hours a day commuting to do so.

Labor unions and tenant unions have a long history of collaboration in the USA. NYC's first housing coop was midwifed by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1927. The Penn South coop was created by the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. The 1949 Federal Housing Act passed after American unions pushed hard for it:

http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Labors-Love-Lost.pdf

It goes both ways. Strong unions can create sound housing – and precarious housing makes unions weaker. Remember during the Hollywood writers' strike, when an anonymous studio ghoul told the press the plans was to "allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses?"

Vienna has the most successful housing in any major city in the world. It's the city where people of every income and background live in comfort without being rent-burdened and without worry about eviction, mold, or leaks. That's the legacy of Red Vienna, the Austrian period of Social Democratic Workers' Party rule and built vast tracts of high-quality public housing. The system was so robust that it rebounded after World War II and continues to this day:

https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-architecture-austria-stigma/

Today, the rest of the world is mired in a terrible housing crisis. It's not merely that the rent's too damned high (though it is) – housing precarity is driving dangerous political instability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Turning the human necessity of shelter into a market commodity is a failure. The economic orthodoxy that insists that public housing, rent control, and high-density zoning will lead to less housing has failed. rent control works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

Leaving housing to the market only produces losers. If you have the bad luck to invest everything you have into a home in a city that contracts, you're wiped out. If you have the bad luck into invest everything into a home in a "superstar city" where prices go up, you also lose, because your city becomes uninhabitable and your children can't afford to live there:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#yimby

A strong labor movement is the best chance we have for breaking the housing deadlock. And housing is just for starters. Labor is the key to opening every frozen-in-place dysfunction. Take care work: the aging, increasingly chronically ill American population is being tortured and murdered by private equity hospices, long-term care facilities and health services that have been rolled up by the same private equity firms that destroyed work and housing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

In her interview with Capital & Main's Jessica Goodheart, National Domestic Workers Alliance president Ai-jen Poo describes how making things better for care workers will make things better for everyone:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-12-13-labor-leader-ai-jen-poo-interview/

Care work is a "triple dignity investment": first, it makes life better for the worker (most often a woman of color), then, it allows family members of people who need care to move into higher paid work; and of course, it makes life better for people who need care: "It delivers human potential and agency. It delivers a future workforce. It delivers quality of life."

The failure to fund care work is a massive driver of inequality. America's sole federal public provision for care is Medicaid, which only kicks in after a family it totally impoverished. Funding care with tax increases polls high with both Democrats and Republicans, making it good politics:

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/4/7/voters-support-investing-in-the-care-economy

Congress stripped many of the care provisions from Build Back Better, missing a chance for an "unprecedented, transformational investment in care." But the administrative agencies picked up where Congress failed, following a detailed executive order that identifies existing, previously unused powers to improve care in America. The EO "expands access to care, supports family caregivers and improves wages and conditions for the workforce":

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/04/18/executive-order-on-increasing-access-to-high-quality-care-and-supporting-caregivers/

States are also filling the void. Washington just created a long-term care benefit:

https://apnews.com/article/washington-long-term-care-tax-disability-cb54b04b025223dbdba7199db1d254e4

New Mexicans passed a ballot initiative that establishes permanent funding for child care:

https://www.cwla.org/new-mexico-votes-for-child-care/

New York care workers won a $3/hour across the board raise:

https://inequality.org/great-divide/new-york-budget-fair-pay-home-care/

The fight is being led by women of color, and they're kicking ass – and they're doing it through their unions. Worker power is the foundation that we build a better world upon, and it's surging.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

[davidaugust]

[perrysoup]

Am I a radical because I think people should be paid fairly? Am I a radical because I think Heathcare is a right ? Am I a radical because I think the unhoused are from a failure by the state to provide them housing and support?

Am I a radical because I think all people should be treated equally?

Am I a radical because I realize equality don't mean the same thing for everyone, it means giving people what they need to be on the same level?

Am I a radical because I think that food and drink are a right?

Am I a radical because I want peace?

Am I a radical because jobs should be what you love, not what you are forced to do?

Am I a radical because I think colonization is bad?

Am I a radical because I don't ignore the benefits I have had from being a White, Straight, Male?

Am I a radical because I don't ignore the benefit I have the totalitarian policies of the US in relation to the world?

Am I a radical for speaking up against the horrors of capitalism?

Am I a radical for thinking that a single country should not determine the worlds safety?

Am I a radical for think war is bad?

Am I a radical for thinking civilians shouldn't be killed?

If that's what defines a radical, then that's what I am. And I'm proud to be one.

[busterballsblog]

Kamala Harris Is A Failure As Border Czar

[teachanarchy]

Private Equity Is Seizing Montana's Lands. What Happens To Locals?

[justbeingnamaste]

The complete incompetence of the ladies of the Secret Service are on full display. One of the agents can’t properly holster her sidearm while another fiddles around with her sunglasses trying to look cool for the crowd.

An assassination attempt was made on former US President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. It happened when Donald Trump was leading a public meeting before the elections. The bullet grazed past the upper part of Trump’s right ear. Recalling this incident, he said that he heard a whizzing sound and shots and immediately felt the bullet ripping through his skin. The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) announced that Thomas Mattew Crook is the individual identified in the assassination attempt of the former President.

After this, the security formed a human chain around him and exited the area, but the video caught the panicking situation of the women security of Secret Services deployed in the area. One of the security personnel was panicking and failed to put her gun in the holster while Trump was sitting in his car.

“Imagine if the sh**ter hadn’t been this kid but [someone] well-trained? Our enemies are looking at us thinking we can take [him] or anyone out now without a problem.”

[atmosphericradar]

Private Equity Stakeholder Project

Private equity firms increasingly own more and more of the USA. These financial firms will buy out the owners and leadership of smaller companies and businesses, and run the acquired business to maximize profit above all else. Private equity firms have control over an increasingly large pool of businesses in nearly every sector you can think of: retail, energy, infrastructure, journalism, housing, manufacturing, healthcare, and security to name a handful.

The Private Equity Stakeholder Project is a "non-profit watchdog organization" which tracks the impacts and growth of private equity firms controlling vast swaths of outwardly-separate companies. They also work to provide resources to communities and workers (the stakeholders) affected by the leadership changes private equity firms cause.

Keep an eye on PESP's work, and help support their projects. I don't know a single person who hasn't been affected by "corporate landlords", "for-profit" hospitals, "privately-owned" prisons, local news owned by "a corporation out-of-state" , or "bought-out-and-shut-down" retailers. These are all the work of private equity firms.

[ri-notafan]

TLDR; Small things can be symptoms of a bigger problem, but hope isn’t lost because education is there for everyone.

“I can’t be homophobic: I have a gay [insert relative here].”

Don’t use people like that.

We know this kind of fallacy is wrong and can be seen no matter what the topic is.

Knowing someone is gay doesn’t inherently change your beliefs or actions.

Even if you are the gay person, internalised homophobia is still a thing.

There are many gay people that have had homophobic parents what have kicked them out, disowned them, and more when they were kids; parents are supposedly folks who would love you unconditionally but that’s not true. Would you say they aren’t homophobic? They’re related to a gay person same as you though.

(There’s probably more for this part, feel free to add)

“🫢 I’ve said this before! Does that make me a bad person?”

No, not necessarily? At least not on its own in my opinion.

But even if it did, you can be educated!

Self reflection and confrontation of your own personal biases is a good starting point to unlearn some of that, and honestly educating yourself about other people and applying that information to your actions moving forward is another. There are great resources out there full of strategies and research over these topics.

It’s an ongoing, continual practice that will only be good for you and the people around you in the long run.

“😬 I’ve come to realise I’ve been an a**hole. What do I do??”

Nothing wrong with a sincere apology and a plan to be better in the future (that you actually stick to).

Sometimes it’s not feasible to apologise for a number of factors (like being a general buttwipe rather than one with a specific target) and sometimes people won’t accept your apology. People don’t have to accept your apology, but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless to do so if you’re actually going to work on yourself.

Some people might not believe that you will change and that’s fine. That bridge might be burned beyond repair. It might also not be, but it’s certainly not traversable for you now. Words won’t fix it. Anyway, the point isn’t to get people to like you, the point is self improvement after introspection.

Aside from that? It goes back to the second part in unlearning behaviours and thought processes. Keep on listening, learning, and adapting yourself in this ever-diversifying world.

[sucka99]

[ride-thedragon]

Hotd writers have like a week on set....

When I say this season wasn't keeping me hopeful, it's because they weren't there.

I wish them well, though, and I hope Hbo doesn't do too much along with y'all

The strikers won🩷🤭

[vamuelle]

If you want to be a home owner please look into local assistance for first time home buyers.

In the US there are special loans for first time home buyers as well as assistance if you want to live in a rural area ( FHA and USDA loans). Special loans are more flexible with minimum down payment and credit score minimums as well as don't have some requirements that Conventional Loans have.

Ie one thing that helped us is Conventional loans require you to work full time consistently in the same field for 2 years. FHA only requires 6 months of employment and a letter explaining your history and to have an income that can afford the loan. I didn't have the work history needed for a Convention Loan.

The Loans, Grants, and Assistance vary state to state and you may have other options if you live in a major city. (Our second grant was only for our area.)

There also may be government backed housing assistance agencies which will help you with going through the process for free or a low payment (our state requires you to do some education with them for the FHA loan, and it was free).

My partner and I recently bought a house with a FHA Loan/Grant and a First Homeowners Grant from our lender (which has the qualifications of being a low income area, low income, as well as first homeowners). We were able to forgo any down payment or closing costs and will be paying less monthly costs then the rentals we were considering month to month.

We still had to pay some things. We paid for inspection, appraisal, insurance upfront, refundable deposit and 1000 dollars at closing.

FHA loans also have the added cost of loan insurance for month to month costs, but overall is still cheaper then renting so 🤷 I am not complaining.

Another thing to expect as a lower income buyer is you likely will only be able to afford fixer uppers so expect to have a lot of initial repair costs as well as maintaining your home over time. There is assistance for those things as well but be careful of loan scams when looking for those.

If you do consider going this route, make sure to be thorough with inspections and negotiate with what you find. It is a lot of upfront costs for something you may not go with, but can save you thousands in the long run. We needed to change out knob and tube in our house and since we found it in the inspection we were able to negotiate 12k from the sellers to fix it rather than paying that out of our pockets later. We also saved over a thousand by getting them to service the neglected HVAC. You're not likely to get a seller to fix everything, but you can save a lot with negotiating.

More homeowners can stabilize communities and help rent to not skyrocket uncontrollably. Especially if the homeowners arent nimbys who only care about their property values and instead actually care about their renting neighbors. Homeowners also have more power in your local politics, so taking advantage of these programs and getting more power to disadvantaged people and communities is so important.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tom the Dancing Bug: Can Lucky Ducky find a home?

https://boingboing.net/2023/12/20/tom-the-dancing-bug-can-lucky-ducky-find-a-home.html