California is home to Hollywood
and Disneyland, sun and sand, and… nearly
one-third of all unhoused people in the entire nation.
Compare this to the fact that 12 percent of the
nation resides in the Golden State and it
becomes clear that there is a serious problem of
housing that undercuts the Left Coast’s liberal
reputation.
An extensive
study of the state’s struggle
with homelessness by the Benioff Homelessness
and Housing Initiative at the University of
California, San Francisco (UCSF) paints a
detailed picture of the problem, and it’s not
pretty. Homelessness is thriving at the
intersections of racism, sexual violence,
overpolicing, and more. The report’s authors
explain, it “occurs in conjunction with
structural conditions that produce and reproduce
inequalities.”
Contrary to the popular
perception that good weather fuels voluntary
homelessness and consists largely of transplants
from out of the state, the report points out that 90 percent
of the unhoused had been living in California
when they lost access to housing. And,
three-quarters continue to remain in the same
county.
The problem also manifests in
systemic racism, with Black and Indigenous
people over represented among the unhoused
compared to their populations. More than a
quarter of all unhoused people in California are
Black, and yet only 5
percent of the state’s overall
population is Black.
Homelessness also fuels sexual
violence that disproportionately impacts
unhoused LGBTQ people and women. More than
one-third of transgender and nonbinary people
experiencing homelessness reported being victims of sexual
violence, while 16 percent of cisgender women
did so as well.
And, nearly half of all
the study’s participants (47 percent)
report being harassed by police. Law enforcement
routinely subjects California’s unhoused
population to violent police raids, dehumanizing
searches and seizures of property, forced
relocation, and incarceration. The unhoused are
disproportionately criminalized by a system that
pours a significant amount of tax dollars
into policing rather than into
affordable housing. Increasingly, cities are
simply making
it illegal to live outdoors, as if criminalizing
homelessness will magically make the math of
housing affordability work out.
The UCSF report is neither the
first, nor will it be the last one to explore
the extent of homelessness in California. And
while it makes clear how serious the problem is,
the main question remains: how to solve it?
There are several policy
solutions put forward including rental
assistance in the form of housing vouchers, an
exploration of shared housing models, mental
health treatment, and even a
progressive-sounding monthly income program. But
these are merely metaphorical band-aids being
applied to a gaping, bleeding wound. None of
them address the fundamental reason of why there
are more
than 171,000 people without housing in
California.
Interestingly, the UCSF study’s
main author, Dr. Margot Kushel, honed in on the
core issue in an interview with the San
Francisco Chronicle when she said, “We have
got to bring housing costs down, and we’ve got
to bring incomes up… We need to solve the
fundamental problem—the rent is just too high.”
This is a nationwide
problem and California is merely
on the front lines.
So, how to bring housing costs
down? The federal government sees a shortage
of homes as the problem, treating
it as an issue of supply and demand: increase
the supply and the price will fall. But there
is no
shortage of housing in the nation. There is a shortage of affordable
housing and as long as moneyed interests keep
buying up housing, building more won’t be a fix.
Since at least 2008, hedge funds
have been buying up single-family homes and
rental units in California, throwing a
bottomless well of cash at a resource that
individuals need for their survival and pushing
house prices and rents out of reach for most
ordinary people. This too is a nationwide phenomenon, one that was
extensively outlined in a 2018
report produced by the Alliance
of Californians for Community Empowerment
(ACCE), Americans for Financial Reform, and
Public Advocates.
That report makes it clear that Wall
Street hedge funds see housing as the next
frontier in profitable investing. Once these
funds buy up homes and apartments to rent out,
they cut the labor and material costs associated
with maintenance, and routinely raise the rents.
And why wouldn’t they? Their
bottom line is profits, not safe, clean, fair,
affordable housing. In 2000, the average
American renter spent
just over 22 percent of their income on
housing. Today that percentage has jumped to 30.
Hedge fund landlords are likely celebrating
their success at getting “consumers” to fork
over a larger share of money for their
“products.”
The only way to stop hedge funds
from taking over the housing market is…
[drumroll] to stop hedge funds from buying up
homes.
To that end, the ACCE
report calls on local
municipalities and state governments to offer
tenants the first right of refusal in purchasing
homes, along with appropriate supports, and then
offer nonprofit institutions like community land
trusts to have the second right of refusal to
purchase. It also calls on the federal
government to “not incentivize speculation, or
act to favor Wall Street ownership of housing
assets over other ownership structures.”
The other end of the problem is
that incomes are too low. According to Dean
Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy
Research, the federal minimum wage ought to
be $21.50
an hour in order to keep up with
the rise in productivity. But it’s not. It’s a
horrifyingly low $7.25
an hour. And while nearly half
of all states have pushed that wage
floor far higher to about $15 an hour, it
doesn’t come close to what’s needed. Even
the few
dozen cities that have forced the
minimum wage past their state requirements don’t
get to $21.50 an hour.
Yes, individual incomes are
rising because of worker demands on employers,
but they are not
keeping up with inflation. And even though government
officials admit that rising wages
don’t fuel inflation, the Federal Reserve sees rising
wages as the problem, countering them with higher
interest rates.
Putting together these pieces of
the puzzle, one can only conclude that our
economy is designed to keep ordinary Americans
living hand to mouth, running on an endless
treadmill just to keep from falling into
homelessness.
The rent is too damn high—to
cite affordable
housing activists—and wages
are too damn low. That is the nutshell
description of an economy that is simply not
intended to center human needs.
Passing laws to prevent hedge funds and
other large businesses from buying up
homes and apartments and raising the
minimum wage to at least $21.50 are
hardly radical ideas, but they offer
course corrections for an economy that is
running roughshod over most of us.
Rather than tinkering at the edges of the
problem and putting forward complex-
sounding solutions that don’t actually
address the root of the issue, wouldn’t
society be better served by redesigning
our economy to make homelessness
obsolete?
This commentary was produced
by Economy
for All, a project of the
Independent Media Institute.
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