American housing is in crisis.
Right now, up to 12 million Americans are behind an average of 5,800 dollars on rent
and risk eviction.
With eviction moratoriums soon to expire, we are facing an unprecedented wave of evictions
and foreclosures that will crash straight into millions of struggling families across
the country.
But the truth is – this crisis didn’t begin with the pandemic.
In fact, housing has been in crisis for a very long time.
Even before the pandemic, in places like New York[a][b] or Los Angeles or San Francisco,
median rents for even one-bedroom apartments could approach 2,500 dollars a month – or
more.
About a third of people in Los Angeles spend a majority of their income on housing.
In New York City, about 20 percent of all renters pay most of their income to their
landlord.
And in my district, Astoria, about a quarter of residents have to spend most of their paycheck
on rent.
[c][d]
And the crisis isn’t just in big cities: in 95 percent of ALL[e][f][g] U.S. counties,
workers making the minimum don’t make enough to afford a one-bedroom rental on their own.
The Harvard Center for Housing Studies warns of “a new normal” for housing in the United
States, in which nearly half of all renter households spend almost a third of their income
rent.
That’s why even before the fallout from the coronavirus started to hit, more than
half a million Americans nationwide were already homeless, millions more were on the brink
of losing their housing, and countless families were struggling every month to make ends meet.
At the root of all this suffering is the fact that in this country, housing is treated as
a COMMODITY, not a right.
It’s a consumer product, just like clothes or cars, that private businesses can sell
on the market to make a profit.
And if someone isn’t able to pay – either because their landlord raised their rent,
or because they can’t work for one reason or another – they’re not able to stay
in their homes.
If they’re lucky, they can live with friends or family, or maybe in transitional housing
for a bit.
But for a lot of people, they have nowhere else to go – and they end up sleeping on
the streets.
In December 2019, the number of people sleeping in homeless shelters in New York reached 19,000
people [h][i][j][k][l][m][n][o]– an all-time high.[p][q][r][s][t][u][v][w] 100,000 New
York City students are homeless – that’s more than 10 percent of the entire student
population.
Why do so many people end up homeless?
It’s not because there aren’t enough homes to go around.
There are plenty of empty homes.
No.
It’s because housing people IS NOT the primary goal of developers or landlords.
Their goal, simply put, is to make a profit.
And it’s much more profitable to build luxury apartments for the rich than decent homes
for the poor.
This gives us a big shortage of homes for ordinary working people.
For every 100 households that are extremely low income, there are only 36 affordable and
available homes.
As a result, we have plenty of housing for the rich.
But poor and working-class people don’t have nearly enough on the market.
So we have people scrounging to make ends meet or sleeping on the streets right below
luxury condos and uninhabited apartments.
This is a TERRIBLE way to organize a housing market.
It might be profitable for landlords and developers, but it’s not efficient or beneficial for
the rest of society.
In fact, housing doesn’t have to be seen as a market AT ALL.
In other countries, housing is considered a fundamental right, like education or healthcare.
That means the government goes to significant lengths to guarantee everyone has a home,
and the market plays a much smaller role in the construction and distribution of housing.
So let’s hop across the pond – and about 100 years back in time – to take a look
at just one example of how an alternative housing model got started, in beautiful Red
Vienna.
At the end of the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, leaving behind a number
of successor states – including modern-day Austria, home to the former imperial capital
of Vienna, the fifth largest city in the world.
Despite being the seat of an empire[x][y], the chaos of the war and decades of neglect
had left the working class of Vienna in desperate circumstances.
Inflation was rampant, jobs were scarce, social services were non-existent, and hundreds of
thousands of people were crammed into decaying tenements where overcrowding, disease, and
violence were rampant.
So it’s no surprise that in 1919 – at the first elections ever held in Austria where
all adult citizens could vote – the Social Democratic Party swept into power at the municipal
level on the promise of dramatic social and economic reform.
And they delivered.
The new government of Vienna implemented a huge range of services, including public healthcare
and public childcare.
They built high-quality hospitals, schools, and recreational facilities.
But their crowning achievement was an ambitious program of social housing, what Americans
call “public housing,” that began in 1923 and saw sixty thousand new apartments constructed
in the first year of its existence – built by the government and financed by taxes on
the rich.
[z]
But these weren’t the kinds of apartments you might picture when you think of public
housing in the United States – drab high-rises plagued by chronic neglect and underinvestment.
Residents could enjoy leafy courtyards, wide open spaces, and plenty of natural light.
They had shared laundries, state-of-the-art kitchens, food co-ops, bathhouses, pharmacies,
lecture halls, schools, and swimming pools.
These apartments were designed to be both beautiful to look at and beautiful to live
in, fostering a sense of shared community among the people who lived there.
And the best part was that because the city didn’t have to worry about making a profit,
just about paying off their maintenance costs, these homes were both much nicer AND much
cheaper than what workers had previously known.
In 1926, the average rent in Viennese social housing was about FOUR PERCENT of a monthly
wage.
The first fifteen years after Austrian independence saw its capital transform from a symbol of
urban blight into a beacon of socialist governance.
It became known as “Red Vienna,” after the official color of the socialists who had
pioneered these changes.
And even though Red Vienna fell in 1934 when the country was seized by fascists – who
did what they could to roll back social housing – that commitment to good, cheap housing
remained after the Second World War.
Today, an astonishing 62 PERCENT of all city residents live in social housing, with the
average monthly rent falling somewhere between 400 and 600 dollars a month, with subsidies
for lower-income tenants.
That’s a FRACTION of what people in America pay.
Unlike in the United States, where public housing is treated as a worst-case way to
house the very poor, Vienna’s social housing residents are extremely diverse.
Everyone except the top fifth of the population is eligible to live in social housing.
This means there’s broad appeal across many segments of society – which creates the
foundation for its political popularity.
THAT is how the majority of people in Vienna enjoy something that’s considered almost
utopian here in New York: affordable housing that isn’t just cheap, but DESIRABLE.
Housing that isn’t just four walls and a roof, but a real home – with a sense of
stability, safety, and community built in.
Now, of course, this is only one example of an alternative framework for housing.
And Vienna has not fully removed housing from the domain of the market.
Residents still pay part of their earnings in rent to cover operational costs, and a
sizable chunk of the population lives in private housing.
But it’s an actually-existing alternative that shows us what a step toward a better
world could look like.
If we want to end the housing crisis, the solution has to be moving toward the full
DECOMMODIFICATION of housing.
In other words, moving away from the status quo – in which most people access housing
by purchasing it on the market – and toward a future where we guarantee high-quality housing
to all as a human right.
So, how can we do it?
We can start by making sure people who access housing on the private market have ironclad
protections against abuse and exploitation: preventing landlords from increasing their
rents too sharply, requiring that evictions be approved by a judge, and giving tenants
a right to renew their lease.
But to go further, toward the Vienna model, we’ll have to go beyond the market.
We can establish community land trusts to gradually buy up housing on the private market
and convert it to community ownership.
We can give tenants a right of first refusal to buy out their landlords when buildings
go for sale.
And we can fully commit to a new era of social housing, ending subsidies for luxury housing
development and using our wealth to build beautiful, high-quality social housing projects
that offer good homes and strong communities to everyone.
We won’t decommodify housing overnight.
But we know what we have to do, and we have history to guide us.
And we know how we'll get there
Through the movement of the multi-racial working-class organizing for the better world we know is possible.
And we've already begun
I’m Zohran Mamdani, Assemblyman for New York’s 36th Assembly District in Astoria,
Queens, for the Gravel Institute.