SAN FRANCISCO
Soaring costs, profits
trigger housing crisis
By
Saul Kanowitz
San Francisco
In
the San Francisco Bay Area, the struggle to find and afford adequate housing
has reached a crisis point. Soaring rents and home prices signal a campaign
to drive low-income renters and working-class homeowners out of the area.
Many longtime working-class neighborhoods--such as San Francisco's Mission
District--have been targeted for gentrification.
The
conversion of rental apartments into condominiums and live/work lofts--aimed at
filling the needs of the capitalist boom--is pushing poor people out of the
city. Landlords have used a state law called the Ellis Act to evict tenants and
convert entire buildings into high-priced
condos.
In
1999, 209 Ellis Act evictions were filed in San Francisco, affecting 881
apartments. That compares to 116 evictions affecting 291 units the year before.
As
landlords kick out tenants, fewer and fewer apartments are available for rent,
creating a dramatic housing shortage. This shortage has pushed the median rent
for a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco to nearly $2,000 per month.
Housing
becoming
unaffordable
A
recent report by the California Budget Project, "Locked Out: California's
Affordable Housing Crisis," puts some hard numbers on the crisis working
and poor people experience
daily.
The
CBP report states that between 1989 and 1998, the cost of housing rentals in the
Bay Area rose 38 percent, while in Los Angeles it rose 14 percent. During this
time the median income of renter households rose just 9.6 percent.
The
median income for renter households in 1998 was $27,401--less than half the
annual income required by banks to purchase a
home.
The
Federal government defines affordable housing as costing 30 percent or less of a
household's income. In 1999, if your household included a full-time janitor and
a part-time food-service worker in San Francisco, your household income was
about
$24,900.
Affordable
housing for this family should cost $623 a month. But according to the CBP
report, the median price of a two-bedroom apartment in 1999 was
$1,939.
Even
in rural counties where housing costs less, the average two-bedroom apartment
was $483 per month. For this to be considered affordable housing, a full-time
worker would need to be earning $9.28 per hour--that is, 161 percent of
California's minimum
wage.
For
tens of thousands of farm workers working on California's huge agribusiness
plantations, and many other workers, $9.28 an hour is not an easily obtainable
wage.
A
commodity under
capitalism
How
has this startling disparity between expenses and wages arisen?
Like
everything else in capitalist society, housing is a commodity. The sale of
housing is no different than the sale of food, clothing or TVs.
Housing
is built and placed on the rental or sales market to make profits. Karl Marx and
Fredrick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, "No sooner have the
laborers received their wages in cash, escaping exploitation by the
manufacturer, than they are set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie,
the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker,
etc."
As
long as human relations are based on capitalist property relations, housing will
be built primarily for profit, not for habitation. If it is more profitable to
build single-family homes and condominiums, that's what the bosses and landlords
will build--even if what is really needed is multifamily dwellings. This is what
Marxists call the anarchy of production.
The
CBP report states: "During the 1980s, for example, California added an average
91,682 units of multifamily housing per year, 45 percent of new housing built.
Between 1990 and 1999, the state added an average of 28,089 units per year of
multifamily housing, just 25 percent of total housing built during the decade
and a 69-percent drop from the levels of the
1980s."
This
shift away from multifamily dwellings to individual units is a result of the
massive cuts in federal money spent on public housing. During the Reagan
administration, the federal government reduced annual spending on construction
and maintenance of public housing by 80 percent, from $32 billion to $6 billion.
Money
spent on public housing represented a concession from the ruling class to the
working class--a form of "social safety net" for poorly paid or unemployed
workers. Public housing, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, social
security, welfare benefits and public education were conquests of the union
struggles of the 1930s and the civil-rights movement of the 1960s.
With
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist countries,
and labor's retreat at home, the U.S. bosses no longer felt the need to protect
themselves by offering this safety net to counter the benefits guaranteed
workers in the socialist countries, such as affordable housing, free healthcare
and education for
all.
Resistance
on the rise
Resistance
to the housing crisis has taken several forms in San Francisco. Artists have
waged creative protests upon eviction from practice studios. Rallies have been
held at government agencies responsible for approving building permits. A
referendum, Proposition L, was put on the November ballot, aimed at slowing the
gentrification process. Prop L seeks to put teeth into existing legislation
meant to protect renters from greedy landlords and developers.
At
the moment the real estate investors, bankers and landlords seem to have the
upper hand. Over 70 percent of San Francisco residents are renters--the
overwhelming majority of them workers. The social weight of the working class
has not yet been felt in this struggle.
A
citywide mass march of renters demanding an end to evictions and conversions and
a rent-rollback could help make capitalist politicians enforce existing laws and
write some new ones.
Eviction
defense squads comprised of hundreds of neighborhood residents, mobilized to
prevent sheriffs from putting people on the street, would quickly dampen the
real-estate speculators'
zeal.
As
long as the private property rights of landlords, real-estate investors and
banks hold great social and legal weight, unaffordable, substandard housing and
homelessness will be realities of daily life for the working class. But it
doesn't have to be that
way.
The
workers and peasants of Cuba, for example, outlawed landlords and bosses. The
1959 socialist revolution there guaranteed housing for every resident. No Cuban
pays more than 10 percent of her or his income for housing--a truly affordable
amount.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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