Fix the Housing Crisis Now: A Simple Solution That We Need to Implement

My week started with a social media post from a friend who had recently been evicted. With his children. “We are going camping” his post read.

Anyone who has rented a home while working for slave wages over the past few years knows what that means: they are now homeless.

I recently dodged a bullet. I lost not one, but two apartments during this pandemic when my landlord sold out from under me and the new owners raised rents to a ludicrous degree — one outright doubling already high rates. If it weren’t for my boyfriend swooping in like a knight in shining armor, I’d be camping, too.

The first time? Well, let’s just say I had to resort to extreme measures to keep housing. There’s a difference between sex work and prostitution, and if you don’t know what it is, consider yourself lucky. It was ugly. I have scars.

Not two days after moving into my second new pandemic place, one of my new neighbors regaled me with yet another tragic tale. His next-door neighbor, who had resided in the same home with her three kids for 16 years, recently moved into her vehicle. Her landlord sold, and she couldn’t afford the new rates on her housekeeper’s wages.

These people aren’t slackers. These people are the hardworking lifeblood of America. They are the folks who really keep this country going, as the pandemic made stark. And our nation’s leaders have completely and utterly abandoned them amid a housing crisis of crushing magnitude brought on by their poor decision-making and lack of foresight.

You’ll have to excuse my language here. I’m trying to deal with my survivor’s guilt productively, but I still have a lot of anger that our leaders meekly stand by, ignoring that this is happening — everywhere. Mainstream media won’t say it. I’m nobody, so I will. Can we please, collectively, as a society, say “fuck you” to capitalistic ideals long enough to ban corporations from buying residential housing and putting tenants on the street?

Banning corporations from owning residential housing, even temporarily, would impact the Dow Jones to be sure. However, it would also halt the rampant inflation that is making it impossible for many of America’s workers to survive. Most crucially, it would restore the American dream of homeownership to the people — those folks who genuinely need roofs over their heads. If banks could only extend mortgages based on what living, breathing, human beings could afford to pay, both new home prices and rent rates would stabilize within a matter of a few short years, if not sooner.

However, if the current course continues, every real human in America will soon be a renter, enslaved to the corporate machine not through the brute force of violence but that of a relentless and heartless economic engine that cares nothing for the flesh-and-blood occupants of this nation.

A Problem With a Simple Solution — That Our Leaders Will Never Implement — Because Capitalism

The problem is simple: corporate ownership of property. In a brilliant piece for The Atlantic, Alana Semuels writes about how the federal government incentivized Wall Street to purchase foreclosed homes by the hundreds from Fannie Mae in the wake of the 2008 crisis.

The idea was, individuals could no longer afford to buy homes, so why not turn them into renters for these corporate landlords instead?

Their plan worked — for corporations, not people who need homes to inhabit. Between 2011 and 2017, corporations purchased over 200,000 homes in some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods in America.

“Hardest-hit neighborhoods,” here, means, “places the people who teach your kids at school and stock your grocery shelves used to live.”

Everything would be fine and dandy — and these folks would still have affordable housing — if the government had also created rules to incentivize these companies to continue renting to families in need.

Of course, they didn’t. That would violate the capitalist ideal of he who dies with the most toys wins by putting a cap on what these companies could profit off the blood, toil, tears, and sweat of their tenants.

In short, the folks running the show messed up, and now people are suffering because of it.

The glaringly obvious thing to do is reverse course and incentivize people, not Wall Street, into buying residential housing. Right now, the problem is that individuals can’t hope to outbid corps with big profits. However, if those who want to buy homes didn’t have to compete against giant firms with limitless pocketbooks, we could return to the days when nearly 78% of the population owned their homes, versus less than half today.

Of course, that would mean curbing capitalism, which runs on the idea of competition. It does not matter to the current machine whether the race is fair or stacked against the flesh-and-blood participants who nevertheless have the most to lose. It chows down on whatever money feeds it, corporate or human.

That’s why our leaders need to step up to the plate and rein things in. They have a sworn duty to their citizens to do their jobs. It’s time for them to pull up their big boy and girl panties, admit they made a mistake, and undo it.

Think It Can’t Be Done? Republicans in Arizona Are Doing It for a Different Reason

Do you think our government, given our capitalist economy, can’t limit who may and may not own property? Does that violate “freedom?” Think again.

Surprisingly, the path forward to saving the American housing market may come from Arizona Republicans. This past Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee approved legislation making it illegal for the Chinese Communist Party to own property in the state.

Representative Wendy Rogers, R-Flagstaff, wants the measure to go even further. She seeks to extend the same prohibition to any member of the Chinese Communist Party.

Here’s the interesting bit. Rogers drew questions about whether it was reasonable to extend such prohibitions to individuals. The rest of SB 1342 banning an entity from owning American land, at least in Arizona? That sailed through, no problem.

I never thought I’d find myself thanking the Arizona Republican Party for anything, but I’d like to pat them on the back for this act. Thank you for showing us all that banning entities from owning American land can be done.

Now, let’s extend that principle to all corporations.

Let’s at least do it until hundreds of thousands of people now living on the street have a safe place to call home each night. Let’s do it until the only people renting are those who choose to do so because homeownership is too big of a hassle for them to manage, or they travel frequently.

Let’s do it at least until we get back to the point where renting isn’t a life sentence due to ever-rising costs.

That’s what happened to me and so many other people I know, many of whom are now unhoused. While disability intervened in my case, that isn’t the full story. Over half of all individuals earning between $30,000 and $45,000 a year are cost-burdened by soaring rents. When your monthly rent alone takes up half or more of your income, you don’t have money to save for a downpayment.

Furthermore, each time you have to move due to rising rents chips away at any meager savings you might manage to accumulate. Only a year and a half ago, it cost me $3,000 — the equivalent of four years’ worth of savings — to move. The bills are still rolling in from my most recent relocation.

Individuals who want to buy a home these days have to cross a war zone littered with landmines. However, our leaders have the power to at least not make them face enemy fire — the deep pockets of corporations bidding on the same homes — while they traverse the course.

Hit Pause on Corporate Ownership of Housing and Put People First

I’m not going to lie — as a lifelong member of “Big Poor,” I don’t know much about investing. I do know that REITs are a thing and the Dow Jones will probably take a hit if we enact such legislation.

Excuse me while I cry a river for all those poor investors.

Okay, that was sarcasm. I’m not going to shed a single tear about the Warren Buffets of the world missing out on a few extra billion. They already have more than they could spend in the next hundred lifetimes. The thought of the Dow taking a dip won’t make me miss a wink of sleep.

What has kept me up, night after night for the past several months, is the guilt I feel for having a roof over my head when so many do not. What keeps me tossing and turning is the thought of all the people I know who are suffering — I swear, I learn of a new one every day — because they can’t afford housing.

Maybe my recent near-misses with homelessness make me more sensitive to the issue than most. Still, I stand aghast as the mainstream media says nothing about this ongoing crisis.

I can’t do a thing about the people I know who are currently unhoused. I wish I could, but it’s a blue-eyed miracle that I’m writing this from my couch and not my car.

However, our leaders can. Ironically enough, Arizona Republicans have shown us exactly how it can be done. I call upon our leaders to enact legislation banning corporate ownership of residential housing in America until every man, woman, and child has a safe place to call home.

Our Constitution starts with the words “we the people,” not “we the corporations.” It’s well past time that our economic system and laws reflect this principle.