by Nate H.
The prolific modernist architect and urban planner Le Corbusier once said that houses are “machines for living in.” He believed the sole function of a house should be to enable its inhabitants to thrive.
For renters in New Jersey, houses are quickly becoming machines for bleeding us dry.
According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, over 50% of New Jersey’s renter house- holds are rent-burdened and the problem is most acute among the state’s most vulnerable. There are only 45 available and affordable housing units for every 100 New Jerseyans defined as “very low income” (making 50% of the area median income).
Once an essential part of the American Dream, housing has become just another commodity for investors to squeeze profits from. Affordable homes are increasingly unavailable on the market because investors are buying up properties with the intention of turning them into AirBnBs or hiking the rents as high as they will go.
In Newark, investors account for nearly two-thirds of residential real estate sales. Hudson County recently made national news after residents complained of rent increases as high as 40%, and in 2019, AirBnB spent over $4 million in a failed bid to overturn an ordinance limiting short term rentals in Jersey City. (Ed: See What’s Wrong With Airbnb, written by NNJ DSA chapter comrades about this campaign!)
To compound the high cost of existing housing stock, new housing construction is also increasingly investor-driven instead of community-driven. As a result, most of the new construction we see is in private, luxury developments, often in working class, minority neighborhoods (see the massive projects underway in Jersey City’s Journal Square neighborhood or the horrifying rebranding of Hackensack as ‘The Sack’). These projects are clearly being built with future, more affluent residents in mind and not the current members of the neighborhood who are at risk of displacement.
The real-estate funded “Yes In My Backyard” or ‘YIMBY’ movement argues that this is not a problem at all. They believe that we need housing policies that attract private investment into the construction of new homes to achieve what they refer to as “housing abundance.” They insist that all new housing construction, regardless of its target consumer, will lead to greater affordability through a process called ‘filtering’. The idea is that as wealthy people move into the new luxury housing, old homes become free for others to move into, and so on, in a process reminiscent of ‘trickle-down’ economics.
Many YIMBYs position themselves as progressives, with some YIMBY groups even trying to enter DSA. It should be clear that anyone pushing Reaganite economic policy as a solution to the housing crisis is not a friend of working people.
As socialists, we understand that the cause of the present crisis is not that there is too little private investment in housing, but that there is too much.
As long as housing is an investment vehicle, it will never be affordable. A home should be a place where we rest, not a place that makes an increasingly smaller number of us rich.
To truly achieve housing abundance, we should follow a two-pronged strategy. The first step is to attack the idea of housing as a commodity from which to profit. We can do this by organizing with our fellow tenants, engaging in rent strikes, and forcing reforms that weaken capital’s ability to profit from housing. The next is to win massive public investments in housing, which should include upgrading existing public housing, taking over private housing, and building new public units.
The Fair Share Housing Center has identified 1,100 parcels of at least 0.5 acres currently owned by the state. They recommend choosing parcels in areas that have good access to transportation, are at low risk of flooding, and where the housing crisis is most acute to target for subsidized housing development. Why not go further and make these developments fully public?
To be fair, the current state of public housing in the United States may not engender confidence in such a plan. Our existing public housing is often seen as a crime-ridden symbol of urban decay. But that is not the result of anything inherent to the housing itself, but rather the neglect and dis-investment driven by racism and the profit system. The reality is that public housing in the U.S. was set up for failure and never meant to challenge real estate capital. It is reserved for those with very low incomes, ensuring that there is not enough money for maintenance, and its construction was paired with slum clearance so that the supply of available units did not actually increase.
Public housing can and does work in cities like Vienna, where 60% of the population lives in government owned housing, and rents are lower than any major city in Europe. Contrary to the post-Reagan consensus, public resources can provide an equitable and decent standard of living.
It is time for New Jerseyans to realize that we can do better. To demand that we do better. Instead of begging for crumbs from for-profit developers, we can have abundant, livable housing that is democratically controlled and permanently affordable.