________________________________________________ A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E http://www.ainfos.ca/ ________________________________________________ By The Leveler Editorial Collective As of January 1, 1999 the law of the State of California mandates "Vacancy Decontrol" for apartment rents. The State Supreme Court, almost simultaneously, ruled that Rent Control is not a taking of private property "rights' written into the Constitution by the Aristocratic landlords who authored it. At the same time, people earning less than $25,000 after California State deductions have had a renters tax credit restored to them by the State for the tax year ending December 31, 1998. What does all this mean? For renters, "Vacancy Decontrol" means that landlords can raise the rent on an apartment as much as they like when a tenant moves out. In Los Angeles County, rent control amounts to a 4% per year limit on increases in rent or 8% per year when utilities are included in the rent. For those who toil at or near the minimum wage, the fact that rents have been fairly stable since the 1994 Northridge earthquake has been meaningless because they are still over 50% of a persons income! The practical result of this is that families are forced to "underconsume" housing. In other words, they live in overcrowded conditions because high rents force them to live in a smaller apartment than they need for their family. Families of 4 persons typically live in one-bedroom apartments, for example. In suburban cities with housing policies which only fund low income housing projects for elderly persons, the problems are even worse. The 1990 U.S. Census identified large areas of Los Angeles with "overcrowded" or "severely overcrowded" rental housing. "Overcrowded" means one or more persons per room, not including bathrooms and hallways. A one bedroom apartment (Bedroom, Kitchen, Living Room, Dining Area) with 4 people living in it is considered "overcrowded." One and a half persons per room (6 persons living in a one bedroom) is considered "severely overcrowded." In the inner city where large areas are severely overcrowded, the result has been a markedly diminished quality of life for the poor. The most obvious example is severe shortages of classroom space in public schools and bussing which sends high school and middle school students on daily 1-2 hour trips to schools in the San Fernando Valley! Rent control has not kept greedy landlords from charging more than most Working Class people can afford. If it had, there would have been a chorus of Rich landlords petitioning City hall for legal license to charge more rent. Instead, the challenges have been court challenges in yuppie enclaves like Santa Monica and West Hollywood where more renters are Middle Class and have more "leisure" time to fight City Hall for rent control. Neo-Liberal capitalist economists argue that not letting a landlord charge what they like (the so-called "market" price) is a "subsidy" because tenants should have to pay the highest price possible before enough of them are forced to move to a smaller and cheaper apartment ("underconsume" housing) to make it hard for landlords to find tenants willing to pay the rents they charge and they end up with a lot of vacant apartments. But, just what do they claim is being "subsidized?" Of the money paid in rent, only a fraction goes to the upkeep of the building where you live. A significant portion of rent in newer buildings goes to pay a mortgage (money borrowed by the landlord to buy or build the apartment building). Usually, over 50% of that is usury: Interest or "rent" on the money borrowed from the bank. The bank gets that money for doing nothing! On top of that, a significant amount of the rent goes to pay property taxes and some is taken as "income tax" from the landlord. While renters are paying the landlord's taxes, the landlord has the interest on their mortgages subsidized by government income tax write-offs which only benefit Middle to Upper Class property owners. This is because you have to have a Middle Class income to even qualify for a home loan. For home "buyers," this means they pay rent on the money they borrowed for the home for at least the first10 years of the mortgage when over half their payment is interest or rent. The exception to this is landlords. The tenant pays their mortgage rent and gets nothing! (It is important to note here that the $68 per year tax write-off for low income renters is insignificant next to the mortgage subsidy provided to property owners) If we were to assume that the real cost of living in housing were that a person must fix the home when it breaks and keep it in a healthful condition, and that, if property and income taxes only paid for services like fire protection and utilities instead of subsidizing the rich the way they do now, then the true cost of shelter would only be a fraction of current rents. Under capitalism, the supply of affordable housing is intentionally kept low to force renters to compete for housing based upon their ability to pay. This artificially inflates the cost of housing because a landlord may ask a much higher rent than the cost they pay to keep up the housing because there are no cheaper alternatives. The landlords also have an unwritten understanding that they will charge comparable rents in the same neighborhoods and not compete for tenants. This is because every landlord is so greedy to get as much as they can for the rent that they want to charge more if others charge more so long as people are still willing to pay. The forced scarcity of housing in communities (especially, cities) means that landlords extort the difference between the true cost of housing and their "market price" based on the fear of being homeless and a police and legal system put in place to make homelessness a crime punishable by persecution or imprisonment. The banks get a piece of the action by renting money to the landlords to buy or build rental housing. At the same time, the landlords pay taxes or cops and courts to penalize homelessness and protect their "property." So, landlords are correct in stating that rents are a subsidy, but they are a subsidy of the landlords, not tenants. They are extortion. They are theft! Because capitalist landlords (most apartments are nor owned by companies which own many buildings) and bankers use the money they steal through the rent they charge to buy government influence, they are able to maintain the system. The rent system was begun in the Middle Ages when armed gangsters established themselves as "protectors" of villages which paid them protection money: more so to keep their protectors away than any real threat. The gangsters built forts and eventually accumulated enough wealth to create private armies. In exchange for agreeing to protect the wealth of the Church, they got the Church to declare them to be kings and "nobles" chosen by god (all the rubbish about "chivalry" was invented by the kings in the 1700s as a propaganda campaign to make them popular with working people who were beginning to question why they needed kings). They then used their armies to seize control of land which had been used in common by village-dwellers for centuries. The armies forced the villagers to give a portion of what they grew to the "nobles" or "land-lords" in order to use land that was rightfully theirs. Through inheritance, this property was inherited by the eldest son of the land-"lord." The power of the Church to tell ignorant poor people that they would be damned to hell for not obeying the Church was used to give the kings and "nobles" the authority to pass laws on how land they had stolen would be used. By the end of the Middle Ages, land-"lords" had taken over all the common lands and had a monopoly on food production, they were so powerful because of the money they extorted in rents that they were able to demand power independent of kings and eventually form parliaments or legislatures to replace the government of kings. The vast wealth accumulated by generations of rent-taking by land-"lords" became the financial basis of the capitalist system as landlords began to "rent" wealth which they were not using to others. The money financed colonialism and industrial sweatshops. It also created a "Middle Class" of persons whose wealth was based on borrowing and lending money (capital-ism) or working as managers for capital-ists. The problem of affordable housing has existed ever since working people lost control of their own land. The "Market" which landlords imagine exists, is nothing more than the limit of what people are willing to pay while still keeping enough of their wages to pay for food, clothing and other necessities. Historically, landlords have tried to squeeze workers from one direction while employers squeeze them from the other with wage cuts and fees for things like renting the tools they have to use to do the work. Rent has never been a "Free Market" because the coercive power of government is used by landlords to determine the conditions under which people must find and maintain shelter. These conditions include paying extortion to the landlord, the bank and the government which protects them. Our lack of democratic control over our own communities means that the system continues to "subsidize' the leisure of wealthy landlords and Middle Class landlord wannabees through the rent system. That "subsidy" is the difference between the value of any labor the landlord puts into the upkeep of the property and any utility costs and the total rent charged minus the rent the landlord pays on the mortgage and protection money paid to the government as taxes. That subsidy is, in truth, money which is stolen from tenants. The rent system, like the wage system, is not a "Free Market" because both parties to the arrangement are not equally free to refuse an exchange which they do not approve of. In the wage system, we must work or starve. In the rent system, we must pay or go homeless and face government repression. The landlord, like the employer, maintains enough scarcity so that they can set the so-called "Market Price." They use the coercive power of the government to preserve this privilege. So long as this economic system and the political system which protects it exist, we will always have housing shortages and high rents. So, what is the alternative? First, decent housing depends upon renters having democratic control over their own housing. Some cities like Seattle now have Renters' Unions where tenants have organized to force their landlords to spend more of their rent money to keep the buildings safe and sanitary, even using Rent Strikes to pressure intransigent Slum Lords. But, this is only the tip of the iceberg of what is possible and what is necessary. We can organize our own Community Credit Unions where our money is only lent to build housing or start small businesses in our neighborhood. This will allow us to circumvent racist banks when we want to build affordable apartments. We can organize housing trusts (a trust is a fund administered by a community-based collective which is used to build housing. The money originates in the community. The Trust does not accept money from capitalists or the government) which build housing for use not profit and organize apartment buildings as self-funding co-ops where rent only goes to pay the mortgage (loan), taxes and upkeep (without government we would only pay for public services and utilities - there would be no taxes). Community Credit Unions could make zero interest loans with the apartments as collateral. Rebuilding our communities also means that we need to resist gentrification so that all or hard work isn't stolen from us by rich people who invade our neighborhood and try to take over once we start to make progress undoing the damage done to it by the capitalist system. One way to do this is to fight against absentee landlords by using the financial power of the community to identify and collectively buy properties owned by outsiders. This can include the conversion of abandoned office and warehouse buildings into housing and other community-oriented uses. We also need to begin pressuring the government to relax zoning restrictions so that larger apartment buildings can be built and to eliminate fees and regulations which are barriers to participation in the economy by low income persons. We also need to fight for decent community services like trash collection, sewers and streetlighting and oppose the efforts of millionaire politicians to sell everything off to the capitalists. While there may be no government like no government, it is still important that we RESIST the efforts of the capitalists to use the government as a weapon against the Working Class by passing laws and imposing fees that reserve the economy for the rich. By organizing ourselves, we are returning power to the community. By financing ourselves, we are resisting exploitation by the landlords and capitalists. These things are necessary building blocks to a society where we can abolish capitalism, the rent system and the government which protects them and restore democratic community control over our own housing. ******** The A-Infos News Service ******** COMMANDS: [EMAIL PROTECTED] REPLIES: [EMAIL PROTECTED] HELP: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://www.ainfos.ca/ INFO: http://www.ainfos.ca/org
