In Defense of Housing, Review

Book Review, "In Defense of Housing" Peter Marcuse, David Madden

By Joseph Homer

In their recent book “In Defense of Housing,” Peter Marcuse and David Madden chart the history of housing in urban New York as a way to help us understand the social significance of housing as well as provide a critique of the currently-popular formulation of the problem of 'affordable housing crisis.'

Marcuse and Madden begin with an appreciation of the importance of housing in the everyday lives of people and its role as an anchor and as a sanctuary. On this view, “Housing is the precondition both for work and for leisure” (12). While the world outside might be contested and unequal, one's domicile might very well provide the kind of refuge that each of us needs. Moreover, the analysis considers the psychological consequences of having one's housing be under threat. The fear of housing insecurity may force people to stay together when they might like to part, people to stay in jobs they dislike and exacerbate anxieties experienced in other aspects of their lives (67) In this way, the fear of losing one's housing or the stress involved in having to keep it create dual traumas for many.

“For the oppressed, housing is always in crisis. The reappearance of the term 'housing crisis' in headlines represents the experiences of middle-class homeowners and investors” (10). Marcuse and Madden also assert that the “housing crisis is not a result of the system breaking down but of the system working as it is intended,” to drive up prices, create scarcity and discourage development if there isn't any economic incentive.

This book is primarily concerned with the treatment of housing as commodity, as 'real-estate' instead of as necessary place of refuge. On this critique, there is a “conflict between housing as lived, social space and housing as an instrument for profit-making – a conflict between housing as home and as real estate” (4) . We see this problem play out today in the affordability problem: developers seek to build high-end properties, but the market fails to create incentives for the development of solutions around low-income and affordable housing. For Marcuse and Madden (and for the rest of us), “what needs defending is the use of housing as home, not as real estate.” (11).

And yet, even state-sponsored building and building incentive creation has long been bound up with problematic housing practices and attempts to preserve the capitalist system. While creating the framework for widespread housing ownership, federal housing programs such as the Federal Housing Administration and laws like the Glass Steagall Act and other New Deal initiatives “ used redlining, discrimination, and restrictive covenants to entrench racist patterns of land use and to exclude African-Americans from home finance, creating unjust housing patterns that continued to have destructive consequences far into the future.” (24) Restrictions like this hardly disappeared in following years, and the lost wealth involved with not being able to own a home still plagues communities today. Aside from outright racism, most housing policies are driven by the demands of private developers, and this has been the case since the postwar boom years and led to a “state-supported system dominated by private ownership” (25). Importantly, the state is often depicted as a benign actor which acts on the behalf of the poorest and stands as a counterpoint to private development, that is the myth of the benevolent state (140). But an analysis like this is itself hollow: in so many cases, “the actual motivations for state action in the housing sector have more to do with maintaining the political and economic order than with solving the housing crisis” (120). That is, if the state did not act, it would have to deal with an even worse problem of social instability, and so the incentives for addressing the housing crisis may just as well be reformist as anything else.

While the tenant movement is nearly non-existent in Modesto, there is a long history of radical tenant organizing in older, urban places like New York. These tenant movements date back decades to overcrowded tenements in the late 19^th Century, the efforts of which created cooperative housing developments in New York as well as strong community organizing groups dispersed throughout the New York urban area (115). Moreover, housing movements such as these are made up of people of all walks of life, and in some cases, they have had great impact on city and state actions (147).

It is crucial that we come to some new consensus on how we think the significance, ownership and development of housing. This is crucial as “housing preeminently creates and reinforces connections between people, communities, and institutions, and thus it ultimately creates relationships of power” (89). And so, neglecting the relations of power bound up with the production, ownership and development of housing is akin to neglecting the realities of power. Marcuse and Madden suggest several palliatives for us, although some of these are a bit clouded and need testing. First, they encourage us to “decommodify and de-financialize the housing system” (201). They suggest we do so in many ways, some having to do with rent control and others with public housing. Importantly, they also recommend that we consider cultivating “community land trusts,” or ownership situations in which a “nonprofit corporation holds land in trust and offers permanently affordable limited-equity, long-term leases to residents (209). Other prescriptions involve democratizing housing management and housing policy and seeing the housing struggle as part of a larger political and economic struggle created by the depredations of Capitalism (211, 212, 213). Moreover, they criticize the all-too-easy action of creation housing rights which are not enforced or fail to have the impact they intended.

So what does this mean for us? Modesto can certainly learn from some of these lessons, and as it grows as a town, it must take care not to invite the kinds of development that would inhibit the fair sharing of public space and the ability even of the poorest to have a place to find their refuge and rest. Remember, there are people living downtown already, and building them out might very well reproduce the kinds of inequality of ownership and power described here. And now is the time to make sure it does not happen.

Joseph Homer is a local organizer, fundraiser and homeless advocate who was worked with several community-based organizations to call attention to and highlight inequalities. Please reach out to him if you are interested in our Friday political chats or getting involved in activism or organizing work Email - jhomer42@gmail.com.

Control

Control is the illusion of the uncomfortable
With the unceasing floating of our place
In the world
And I feel its waves washing me out
to somewhere
Unknown
But I can swim
I can swim
I can swim
I do not where
Where i will go

I do not pretend to know the map of what comes
Its contours and its markers
Even as my body's every anxious knot yearns for its every detail
My heart wants to know who I will love
My arms and head want to know what they will work
I am uprooted
But not without roots
I am displaced
But not without place
I love her deeply, still, but I know our task
I know it “may not always be so”
I bow before the sublime vastness of the world
and Being
and all that I am yet to know, yet to understand
(Even Knowing is Controlling)
And I give it away finally, as if I ever had it
As if it were something to hold, exchange and give
But we learn now, and we learn and we learn
Until we know Or until we have figured it out

Still, I place one foot after the other
I wake every morning
Sometimes reluctant to meet its newness
But I feel,
But I feel
I am strong
I am brave
I am me

Recovery

We mistake but we recover

We live and learn and

hurt and struggle

We create and destroy

Create and destroy

Search and destroy

Are created and destroyed

With the cuts and scars and the bruises

                the backhanded compliments,

                the absent presence

of each passing moment

of each day, of each love

We strive

We stumble and

We recover,

Indefatigably

We are continually inspired and

continually traumatized

Torn down,

Built-up

By the world and

By our images of others

as much as

                of others themselves

                those we love,

                       With all of the fibers of our being,

                                With every artery and vein coursing warm blood

                                         Every sinuous connective issue,

Worn down by the grinding of the machine

Of

                those we cannot stand

(A difference that makes a difference?)

We live in defiant testament to the

                Overwhelming

Forces that envelope us,

         have enveloped us

                 will envelope us

Edifying always, annihilating always

Like water on the falls

Each moment

With each touch

Each sucker punch

Resist worry, resist hate,

Resist always

 your body’s

urging 

     to fear

to seek out something, seek out someone
to blame,
for the pain of the world, 

            scapegoated

to give in

to give up

                (Blockade always, others from the sting)

Of what will sting,

This is part and parcel,

This is the road,

This is it

Embrace the joys, 

      discard the pains

The infinite fleetingness of the

always present

Remember always

Overcome, overcome

                If something deep within you

Cannot allow the inhabitation

          of the present

Of the now, then the almost-here may

                Clothe and comfort you as a warm friend,

As family you haven’t seen since when

                Or may ignite you to something

Un-seen

Our senses may betray us,

                Our last lines of defense

But we always meet and overcome
      meet and overcome

It is in our very nature,

                Something primal

                Something deep within us

     That no scalpel can remove

We, us

                We must live,

                We must strive

                We must be

How The Other Half Banks, 2016, Mehrsa Baradaran Book Review

How The Other Half Banks, 2016, Mehrsa Baradaran

Book Review, Joseph Homer

Towering, national, corporate banks were not always the dominant monoliths that they are today. But as ‘big-banks’ edged out their local, community-lending competitors, lower-income clients, whom they no longer banked, had nowhere to go but to a growing payday lending industry (Baradaran 8). Chronicling this history of banking, Mehrsa Baradaran’s “How The Other Half Banks” begins by reviewing key founding-father concerns about federal banking and its relation to power and goes on to describe big banking’s near-total abandonment of the non-rich, non-corporate public. She reviews current banking practices and suggests alternatives that may very well provide credit opportunities – opportunities to live and thrive – for all.

Banking, in her view, has long been bound up with morality, democracy, and opportunity. Importantly, Baradaran explains that the under-banking of the poor is, in part, bound up with a deep-seeded but misguided moral conceit: that the ‘poor’ are unable to bank themselves, and they cannot handle or manage their finances, not to mention complex financial services (Baradaran 115, 119). Likewise, she shows how a landscape once covered by community banks concerned with the banking needs of its local inhabitants was eventually supplanted by that of a concentrated, centralized system of a few national banks. This trend was the direct result of increasingly-deregulated industrial and market forces, fierce cost-cutting competition, and decisions to systematically bank only debtors seen as lucrative (Baradaran 7, 53, 57, 64). This trend, enabled by financial deregulation, dried up easily-accessible credit sources for the hard-of-luck, and fueled the payday-lending industry, which has since unscrupulously and predatorily banked those abandoned by mainstream banks (Baradaran 8). She observes these unwinding and seemingly-irreversible trends as indicative of a troubling development in our democracy, one that strikes at its egalitarian tenets and especially the notion that, if we work hard, we may each have the resources necessary to live fulfilling lives. In the place of banks that have failed and neglected most of us, she suggests that we re-create a public option in banking, returning to the roots of what, in large part, gave rise to our democracy and the strength of America in general: the Post Office (Baradaran 9).

Postal Banking could bank those willfully abandoned by big banks and usuriously exploited by fringe lenders. This high-interest industry, while serving a market need, preys upon desperate citizens in complicated financial situations: those grappling for the rescuing ropes of credit only find the entrapping chains of endless cycles of debt, exorbitant interest-payments and hidden fees (Baradaran 10). Given this reality, she urges us to consider Postal Banking as an alternative. Not only had it been a success in the United States in the earlier part of the century and had contributed to our victory in Europe; it is also widely practiced and popular around the world (Baradaran 9). Perhaps most importantly, however, is the fact that we already have the infrastructure to make it a reality, with postal outposts inhabiting even the most remote American corners (Baradaran 9, 205). As private for-profit banks and their payday-lending counterparts continue to abandon the public-at-large in spite of being funded and routinely rescued by it, Postal Banking might well provide a new path to social solvency and equality of access to credit.

Baradaran provides an interesting look into the history of debt in the particulars of the United States as well as a defense of those struggling in poverty, and reminds us of the importance of creating financial opportunity for all. Moreover, she provides us with a meticulously-argued case for why we must do so: it is incumbent upon us to put this idea into action, and what is at stake is the very financing of the American Dream (Baradaran 10).

Joseph Homer: Bee fails to ask right questions about homelessness (letter to the editor)

Re “ ‘No panhandling’ signs installed to educate public” (Front page, June 6): Again and again I read articles unfairly representing people experiencing homelessness, misunderstand their plight and interviewing only the people who often put them in difficult situations.

Did the article interview any homeless people about how panhandling is the last means they have to make enough to stay in a hotel bed and not on concrete? Did the article describe the terrible deficit of available and affordable housing the county has? Does the article highlight how many of the people panhandling perhaps can’t work, are barred from work or who are doing the best they can to get by in an unforgiving economy? No. Again, The Bee – like so many others – furthers a moralized, incomplete understanding of homelessness as the result of poor individual decisions, i.e., drug abuse and alcoholism, rather than the direct and unequivocal result of an unfair economic system which radically underserves its population.

Precarious economic conditions cause homelessness; lack of a support network causes homelessness; inability to deal with emotions and difficult situations cause homelessness. If you want to know what causes homelessness, ask the person down the road: they will know

JOSEPH HOMER, MODESTO

Read more here: http://www.modbee.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article82391977.html#storylink=cpy

Everybody Out

One of my favorite non-regular events are fire drills. Unlike other somewhat-predictable events, fire drills disclose a telling weirdness that forces us to relax momentarily. When we are drilled on our response time to a non-existent threat, we are forced to leave our normal routine and mill about one another nonchalantly or sometimes with concern but almost always with little to entertain ourselves but each other.

Being outside in such a non-purposive way is unfamiliar and a little strange to us, and some even attempt to break the coda of the drill as quickly as the disturbing calm sets in. It’s as if we don’t know what roles to play when we leave the scripts of working with or spending leisure time about one another.

And the pause reminds us also of the rhythm and pace of our lives lived, always doing, working, playing, being, never-ceasing. It is the exception to the rule of the world of work and a world based on the production of something, the creation of value. Evidence of the specific way in which we govern and inhabit space and occupy our lives.

Eventually, we brave the awkwardness of losing our roles or wimper in their temporary bereavement, but often we recover, and we move forward, reprising our scripts and routinized selves.

And we do so as if nothing had happened in the first place, but for it, for the experience, we know each other better, and for a brief moment, see one another as actively-coping beings and not finished, finishing products. In the process, we inevitably, if implicitly acknowledge our basic meaning-seeking, meaning-creating selves that inhabit a shared, everyday-created, everyday-reconstituted world.

Hi, my name is Joseph Homer...

…and my hobbies include looking at new school course catalogs and pretending I live in New York