#nimby

[yipyipallyall]

[typhlonectes]

[drogonea]

HI EVERYBODY :D (/DISSAPOINTED IN HUMANITY)

So (⌒‐⌒) y'all mighta heard about this little fiasco we have goin on in Seattle boutta little neighborhood called ✨️LAURALHEARST✨️ and their HOAs tiff with the local childrens hospital?

So apparently its not just the hospital rudely flying dying children in helicopters over their (median price $2,171,500) homes they gotta issue with ( ￣▽￣)°📃 theyve got an Entire Publicaly Availible List of greivances featuring gems such as:

"3. Sarah Davis (p. 16)  writes in September 2020 that "we are past Covid" (ma'am we were six months in). Then argues that more surgery rooms are "outdated and unnecessary" because, and I quote, we are "meeting doctor's via zoom." yes let's zoom the pediatric heart surgery.

2. Teresa Holland (pp. 78-79)  opens by establishing her bona fides: Children's Hospital Guild member since 1985, helped raise "$1,000,000 and $1,000,000s of dollars" for the Uncompensated Care Program (so kids without insurance can get treated), nine years on the Guild board… "but this support stops today."

then proceeds to write "ANOTHER PROMISE BROKEN BY THE HOSPITAL" in all caps approximately seven times. 35 years of fundraising for sick children, ended by a parking garage being slightly visible from her daughter's house

1. Susan Murdoch (pp. 45-48) the grand champion. spends a whole paragraph thanking the hospital. her son has autism. 14 years of weekly speech therapy at Children's. sees an excellent neurologist at the Autism Center. learned to swim at the Therapy Pool because they helped him overcome his fear of water. her other kids have had surgery there. they've dashed there with fevers. they donate every year.

then, I swear, the next paragraph:

But none of this has anything to do with the need to compromise on the plans put forward by the hospital for the next stage of expansion

translation: the hospital was wonderful when it was saving MY kid. but please don't expand it for the next one. got mine 👍" (commentary by u/eclipsegum)

Please peruse at your leisure using the link from the reddit post

Maybe enough public opinion might encourage the city to Upzone the neighborhood :3

[necarion]

My parents have a very nice house, that's about 2000 sq feet, on a lot that's about a quarter acre. The street they live on has about 8 such lots on either side, for 4 acres on their block (not including the houses accessed from the other sides). If you were able to construct actually-dense housing there, yeah you could make everything tiny apartments. My SF home is 600 sq feet, which is reasonably large for the city. If you just turned the whole street and built dense apartments, you could fit about 250 apartments plus corridors per floor.

But if you could build dense and whatever you wanted, and make them "luxury" at 2000 sq feet, or heck call it 3000 because you are giving up back yards, that comes to about 50 huge homes *per floor* per block. Each of these could easily house 4-6 people in comfort, so 300 people per level. You then build up to a reasonable height (10 floors, maybe) and you're at 2-3000 people living on one block.

And people innately recoil at that, oh my god so much density! But 3000 sq feet is a *huge* American sized home! You're getting 500 apartments per block that are larger than my parents suburban home! And what if you build to 20 storeys? 5000 people per block is totally reasonable here, enough so that you then go "okay, the block over is actually just a small park for people to gather at, and the first couple floors are common areas and a swimming pool and playground and shops and so forth.

Being able to build up, and not have to waste space on backyards people frequently under utilize (and front yards and setbacks they absolutely *do* under utilize, you can fit so many people and still not crush people. In reality, you wouldn't build a whole block of 3000 sq footers, you'd still build a bunch of studios because some people would rather have something cheap and small because they'd prefer to be out doing other stuff than hanging around inside, and that's okay.

But my views on density changed a lot when I realized that my hometown of 100,000 people could live with 1000 sq ft per person per home in under 0.2 sq miles (if you built to 20 storeys).

That doesn't feel particularly dystopian to me...

[onlytiktoks]

[felixswarren]

How the Cops Ruined Local Car Camping by Giving Terrible Advice! 🚓🍩

TL;DR: While car camping with my husband and two cats after we were evicted in the summer, some policemen kept trying to get us out of their city by telling us to park in the neighboring city. The city we were in had a no car camping ordinance and the city they told us to go to did not. The advice the police gave us and many other homeless people ended up being very bad and having real consequences for anyone who took the advice. I will tell you our story. Also, I am accepting tips on ko-fi to help my family through this, if you would be so kind as to help support us or boost the signal. Now, onward! Into the exciting life of living in various parking spots!

(You can read about some of our other adventures in this group of tagged posts. I've been trying to document our homelessness journey as best as I can while we're still on it, because I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be able to remember most of this after we get back into housing. Also, this happened in the Portland, Oregon area, and I'm going to be vague about which cities for reasons that will be obvious.)

So, we got evicted back in June and moved into our vehicle. We spent the first month just trying to figure out where it was even okay for us to be. Having done some research, there weren't very many places in First City, the city we'd lived in and gotten married in and paid taxes in for years, that we could sleep in while in a parked car. There were also not very many places we could sleep in unhoused at all. And we had two cats. So where were we going to stay? The answer is... kind of in Limbo.

We figured out a couple libraries and municipal parks we could park at and spend time at during the day. At night, we stayed in some parking spots that were open 24 hours for overnight parking for commuters, and made it look like we weren't actually in our car. Security DID check for that sort of thing. Basically we had to move our vehicle, full of ourselves and all our cats and possessions, about every 12 hours or less. We had to do this while also getting all the rest of our business done, like applying for jobs and trying to figure out how to do an interview under these conditions (my husband), or writing and making art to try to fundraise (myself), or keeping ourselves and our cats out of the summer heat, or cooking food pantry eggs without a kitchen.

And, to be honest... we were kinda killing it. Like, we worked a routine out that would keep us all fed and clean by using the services available to us. We were even getting some actual sleep, which was difficult at this stage because without storage options available to us we didn't have enough room that both my husband and I could lay down while sleeping. We had figured out how to clear enough space that he could fit in a person-sized cave in the back of our hatchback SUV, and we did this by putting the litter box in the driver seat while parked, with the food and water in the footwell. I slept up front in the passenger seat, and yeah, that's a really liberal usage of the word 'slept.' I'm a claustrophobe so I needed more room to move around than the back of the SUV offered at the time. Also having the passenger door there right next to me really helped, even if most of the time at night I couldn't open it because I was afraid to get caught by security.

Our strategy, such as it was, involved signing up for local support services during the day and not getting caught car camping at night. This was our short-term plan, and we hoped at the time it was going to be very short-term but it ended up lasting longer. The next step was going to be scoring a spot in the Safe Parking Program, which allows car campers to park in designated spots in First City and gives them access to storage units and better support services for finding housing. Then from there we'd try to get housed. We figured that once my husband got hired somewhere we'd start renting again. Until then we just needed places to sleep and places to do work towards getting employment and funding. You know, with wifi and electricity and stuff.

Okay, you've got the shape of the situation. Now let's drive to First City Library and park. The thing about parking at the First City Library is that it's not allowed from 10 PM to 7 AM, so like, that's when we didn't go there. THIS IS A SIMPLE RULE AND WE FOLLOWED IT. The library opens at 10 AM on most days, so there's this 3 hour window in the morning where the signs posted at the parking lot say that it's fine to be parked there, but you can't actually go outside yet. So often we'd go there around 7:30 AM and I'd crawl into the back and sleep until about 10 or 11 AM, and my husband would read in the passenger seat or go out and do husband things. Until the library opens there's nothing you can do but wait in your car (which other people in the parking lot also did) or hang out in the park (which is open at 7 AM) or go to a neighboring business or take a bus or something. And to us, that meant that one person sleeping in the car while it's parked, or even both people if someone fell asleep in the passenger seat, was just another form of us waiting in our car for the business to be open.

So we went on thinking that until the cops came up. On their bicycles. The First City cops have several ranks and the ones that drive around in squad cars are different than bike cops. Bike cops are Community Outreach, which they told us, and they told us they were hear to help.

The first time, I was sleeping in back when they came up, and my husband was in the passenger seat. So I just stayed quiet in the back of the vehicle while my husband talked to the cops. I had barely had any sleep and was enduring a lot of anxiety at the time, sometimes paranoia attacks it was so bad. (They were 30 minute or longer periods where I worried about everything in increasingly illogical ways.) So I wouldn't have been able to say anything to them anyway and probably would have had caused a scene. The two cops talked to my husband for about 10 minutes and he explained that we were parked waiting for the library to open, that we were on the waiting list for Safe Parking and that until a slot opened up there wasn't much that we could do besides just stay out of the way as best we could. They got our information and our vehicle's information and reminded my husband of the car camping laws. Mostly the experienced officer (Sackler) talked and what seemed to be the junior officer (Purdue) just observed.* And then they left, and we didn't see them again for a couple of weeks.

* We only caught the name of one of the officers, which is coincidentally also the name of a famous druglord, so I am aliasing both of them with references to the Sackler family, who got the USA pretty deep into the opioid crisis via Purdue Pharma.

So, you would not think that the library parking lot would be such a monitored place, but it was regularly patrolled by cop cars, and we spent a lot of time wondering if it was about us. And as it turns out, yes and no. It was about every homeless person, which included us. Our vehicle was identified as a camping vehicle, and even if it wasn't, they knew the signs. One of the things they explained to my husband was how they knew that we were camping in our car. I thought at the time they were explaining to us how to be more on the down-low and less visible while we were waiting for our Safe Parking Spot.

But instead it turns out that they were really obsessed with the appearance of the parking lot, in a very specific way. They did not want it to look like people were camping in their cars there. It was not specified why they did not want this. There was a lot of parking available at the library because this was one of three parking lots you could use for library parking. There were many spaces available all the time. We weren't in the spaces that were nearest the library either. Pretty much any other people who were living in their cars and happened to park their cars at the library stayed out of the way just like we did. Car campers parking at the library were causing no obstruction to anyone whatsoever and not disrupting the services in any way.

By the way. Inside First City Library, the staff were barely enforcing anything when it came to disruptive behavior and noise. So if someone had a complaint that they couldn't use the library's services due to other people's presence or behavior, it wouldn't have been because someone's car was parked in the parking lot and there happened to be someone inside of it who happened to be asleep. The library was already pretty unusable INSIDE, and it's because librarians literally would not shoosh anyone in the building. (Don't bother thinking up excuses for them. We went to several other libraries in the area and they all handled noise and obstructions just fine. First City Library's employees in particular were neglecting this duty for some reason. First City doesn't have more homeless people or more crime or anything, they're just fucking jerks.) And as for why we were parking so much at First City Library, it was a simple matter of gas money and distance. We couldn't afford enough gas to regularly park other places that made us drive more.

So a couple weeks later we got talked to by the bike cops again. We had committed the crime of Looking Like We Were There All the Time. Basically we parked in the same space all the time because it was a spot with maximum shade next to a curb that meant we could unload/load things easily and also just stay more out of the way. And that meant that it sort of looked like, from some people's PoV, we were staying overnight, even though we never stayed in that parking lot at night, except for this one time our car battery died and we just couldn't get the battery until the next day, and we literally asked the library staff what to do and they said it was fine to leave it there overnight. Otherwise, we didn't even stay in the same spot all the time. We moved it around a bit. But yeah, someone looking at us could assume that we just kept the vehicle parked there and slept there and lived there without moving it, if they really felt like assuming that, but I don't really see why anyone should give a shit.

It's 1,935 words into this essay and now, I'm gonna go off into a rant. Why the hell does anyone care whether a vehicle looks like someone in it is camping? There are so many ways you can look like this without actually camping. Having sunshields/visors deployed apparently means you could be camping. Sleeping in the passenger seat can look like you're camping. Having a lot of stuff in your vehicle can look like you're camping. But those things are all things you can do without camping and without ever having intended to camp. If someone is looking at their phone while sitting in a parked car checking emails and getting business done, and they fall asleep while on their phone, are they camping the moment they fall asleep? Is it not camping if they don't have many possessions in their car? If they put their stuff in a storage unit and slept in the passenger seat of their car would they be camping then? What about the mass and density and amount of objects inside the car--if those values fluctuate, when does the car become a camping car and when does it not? How can non-hazardous objects and people inside a car be harming people outside of it?

So yeah they told us that Second City allowed car camping and we could go over there. Purdue talked to me, Sackler talked to my husband, and we were far enough apart that it was two separate conversations. Sackler was the senior officer and seemed to mostly repeat his points and wait for his partner to be done talking to me. Purdue just kept going on. And on. And on. I would tell him what services in First City Library I was using and he would say that Second City's library is probably nice too. And that First City was a beautiful city and he understood why we would want to be there. But Second City allowed, you know, our sort of people to be there. So why don't we just move along?

Because both the cops had a wonderful opportunity to share with us! There was a grocery store with a big parking lot in Second City. Car campers were parking there and Grocery Store's owner was letting them. We were told to keep this on the down-low and not let the "secret" get out. We were also told that it wasn't a guarantee and that the store's owner could change their mind and call the cops to kick us out any time he wanted. And the cops were acting like this was the perfect solution for us and it would be great and we should go right then and do it.

Well, we didn't, because it was a bad idea. It seemed obvious on the face of it that these two cops had told other people besides us about Grocery Store, so our assumption was that the owner would change their mind in a month or two, or maybe even sooner. So we thanked the officers (UGH) and sent them on their way. Finally. And then we proceeded to wait I think about another month before finally our Safe Parking Spot was available...

In Second City. Which, yes. We moved to anyway. And its library is much better! I love Second City Library and the services it provides and its wonderful staff. I love Second City! The people are friendly and it's a nice place.

But let's talk about Second City's famous business... Grocery Store. We got an update on it. And you know where this is going. Yeah, the owner stopped letting people camp there. We found this out from a contact in Second City social services. We had told them before that First City police were telling people to go to Second City Grocery Store, so they gave us an update on the situation.

Yesterday we found out that the parking lot got overwhelmed by people coming from First City who were told to go there and thought it would be a good idea. They were just following instructions from cops. And not only did they not get to stay there when they were told they should go, but because they went there, they made it so the people already there could no longer camp.

I wanna be clear. There's a LOT of people living in cars right now. It is a problem because it means they can't get in housing and they're in need of assistance. But that does not make THEM problems. The people living in cars or tents or on street curbs or under bridges or in the woods are NOT problems. The problem is that they have to live in those places. The solution to the problem is more affordable housing and consistent, accessible assistance for those in financial need. The amount of money that charities and the county are spending on Safe Parking wouldn't be necessary if we had reasonable housing policies in this country. And you can quote me on that.

Okay. I have taken you on quite a romp. While you're here, I'd like you to consider supporting me via my tip jar or patreon, so I can continue doing this vital journalism/comedy/airing of grievances. I would really like you to know what is going on out here in Homelessville. I would like you to know what these services that you probably support with your tax dollars. I would like you to know what it's like to actually receive those services. And I would like you to use your local library, which is a way of supporting it, because if they're utilized more they typically get more budget allocated to them! Also the library is great. Books are awesome. Now stay warm, take care of your animals, and make sure to hydrate.

[40ouncesandamule]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The housing emergency and the second Trump term

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveill ance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/11/nimby-yimby-fimby/#home-team-advantage

Postmortems and blame for the 2024 elections are thick on the ground, but amidst all those theories and pointed fingers, one explanation looms large and credible: the American housing emergency. If the system can't put a roof over your head, that system needs to go.

American housing has been in crisis for decades, of course, but it keeps getting worse…and worse…and worse. Americans pay more for worse housing than at any time in their history. Homelessness is at a peak that is soul-crushing to witness and maddening to experience. We turned housing – a human necessity second only to air, food and water – into an asset governed almost entirely by market forces, and so created a crisis that has consumed the nation.

The Trump administration has no plan to deal with housing. Or rather, they do have plans, but strictly of the "bad ideas only" variety. Trump wants to deport 11m undocumented immigrants, and their families, including citizens and Green Card holders (otherwise, that would be "family separation" and that's cruel). Even if you are the kind of monster who can set aside the ghoulishness of solving your housing problems by throwing someone in a concentration camp at gunpoint and then deporting them to a country where they legitimately fear for their lives, this still doesn't solve the housing emergency, and will leave America several million homes short.

Their other solution? Deregulation and tax cuts. We've seen this movie before, and it's an R-rated horror flick. Financial deregulation created the speculative mortgage markets that led to the 2008 housing crisis, which created a seemingly permanent incapacity to build new homes in America, as skilled tradespeople retired or changed careers and housebuilding firms left the market. Handing giant tax cuts to the monopolists who gobbled up the remains of these bankrupt small companies minted a dozen new housing billionaires who preside over companies that make more money than ever by building fewer homes:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91198443/housing-market-wall-streets-big-housing-market-bet-has-created-12-new-billionaires

This isn't working. Homelessness is ballooning. The only answer Trump and his regime have for our homeless neighbors is to just make it a crime to be homeless, sweeping up homeless encampments and busting homeless people for "loitering" (that is, existing in space). There is no universe in which this reduces homelessness. People who lose their homes aren't going to dig holes, crawl inside, and pull the dirt down on top of themselves. If anything, sweeps and arrests will make homelessness worse, by destroying the possessions, medication and stability that homeless people need if they are to become housed.

Today, The American Prospect published an excellent package on the housing emergency, looking at its causes and the road-tested solutions that can work even when the federal government is doing everything it can to make the problem worse:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-tackling-the-housing-crisis/

The Harris campaign ran on Biden's economic record, insisting that he had tamed inflation. It's true that the Biden admin took action against monopolists and greedflation, including criminal price-fixing companies like Realpage, which helps landlords coordinate illegal conspiracies to rig rents. Realpage sets the rents for the majority of homes in major metros, like Phoenix:

https://www.azag.gov/press-release/attorney-general-mayes-sues-realpage-and-residential-landlords-illegal-price-fixing

Of course, reducing inflation isn't the same as bringing prices down – it just means prices are going up more slowly. And sure, inflation is way down in many categories, but not in housing. In housing, inflation is accelerating:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-03-08/inflation-housing-shortage-economy-cpi-fed-interest-rate

The housing emergency makes everything else worse. Blue states are in danger of losing Congressional seats because people are leaving big cities: not because they want to, but because they literally can't afford to keep a roof over their heads. LGBTQ people fleeing fascist red state legislatures and their policies on trans and gay rights can't afford to move to the states where they will be allowed to simply live:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/business/economy/lgbtq-moving-cost.html

So what are the roots of this problem, and what can we do about it? The housing emergency doesn't have a unitary cause, but among the most important factors is fuckery that led to the Great Financial Crisis and the fuckery that followed on from it, as Ryan Cooper writes:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-housing-industry-never-recovered-great-recession/

The Glass-Steagall Act was a 1933 banking regulation created to prevent Great Depression-style market crashes. It was killed in 1999 by Bill Clinton, who declared, "the Glass–Steagall law is no longer appropriate." Nine years later, the global economy melted down in a Great Depression-style market crash fueled by reckless speculation of the sort that Glass-Steagall had prohibited.

The crash of 2008 took down all kinds of industries, but none were so hard-hit as home-building (after all, mortgages were the raw material of the financial bubble that popped in 2008). After 2008, construction of new housing fell by 90% for the next two years. This protracted nuclear winter in the housing market killed many associated industries. Skilled tradespeople retrained, or "left the job market" (a euphemism for becoming disabled, homeless, or destroyed). Waves of bankruptcies swept through the construction industry. The construction workforce didn't recover to pre-crisis levels for 16 years (and of course, by then, there was a huge backlog of unbuilt homes, and a larger population seeking housing).

Meanwhile, the collapse of every part of the housing supply chain – from raw materials to producers – set the stage for monopoly rollups, with the biggest firms gobbling up all these distressed smaller firms. Thanks to this massive consolidation, homebuilders were able to build fewer houses and extract higher profits by gouging on price. They doubled down on this monopoly price-gouging during the pandemic supply shocks, raising prices well above the pandemic shortage costs.

The housing market is monopolized in ways that will be familiar to anyone angry about consolidation in other markets – from eyeglasses to pharma to tech. One builder, HR Horton, is the largest player in 3 of the country's largest markets, and it has tripled its profits since 2005 while building half as many houses. Modern homebuilders don't build: they use their scale to get land at knock-down rates, slow-walk the planning process, and then farm out the work to actual construction firms at rates that barely keep the lights on:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-the-homebuilder

Monopolists can increase profits by constraining supply. 60% of US markets are "highly concentrated" and the companies that dominate these markets are starving homebuilding in them to the tune of $106b/year:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3303984

There are some obvious fixes to this, but they are either unlikely under Trump (antitrust action to break up builders based on their share in each market) or impossible to imagine (closing tax loopholes that benefit large building firms). Likewise, we could create a "homes guarantee" that would act as an "automatic stabilizer." That would mean that any time the economy slips into recession, this would trigger automatic funding to pay firms to build public housing, thus stimulating the economy and alleviating the housing supply crisis:

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialHousing.pdf

The Homes Guarantee is further explained in a separate article in the package by Sulma Arias from People's Action, who describes how grassroots activists fighting redlining planted the seeds of a legal guarantee of a home:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-why-we-need-homes-guarantee/

Arias describes the path to a right to a home as running through the mass provision of public housing – and what makes that so exciting is that public housing can be funded, administered and built by local or state governments, meaning this is a thing that can happen even in the face of a hostile or indifferent federal regime.

In Paul E Williams's story on FIMBY (finance in my back yard), the executive director of Center for Public Enterprise offers an inspirational story of how local governments can provide thousands of homes:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-fimby-finance-in-my-backyard/

Williams recounts the events of 2021 in Montgomery County, Maryland, where a county agency stepped in to loan money to a property developer who had land, zoning approval and work crews to build a major new housing block, but couldn't find finance. Montgomery County's Housing Opportunities Commission made a short-term loan at market rates to the developer.

By 2023, the building was up and the loan had been repaid. All 268 units are occupied and a third are rented at rates tailored to low-income tenants. The HOC is the permanent owner of those homes. It worked so well that Montgomery's HOC is on track to build 3,000 more public homes this way:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/affordable-housing-montgomery-county.html

Other – in red states! – have followed suit, with lookalike funds and projects in Atlanta and Chattanooga, with "dozens" more plans underway at state and local levels. The Massachusetts Momentum Fund is set to fund 40,000 homes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/affordable-housing-montgomery-county.html

The Center for Public Enterprise has a whole report on these "Government Sponsored Enterprises" and the role they can play in creating a supply of homes priced at a rate that working people can afford:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-fimby-finance-in-my-backyard/

Of course, for a GSE to loan money to build a home, that home has to be possible. YIMBYs are right to point to restrictive zoning as a major impediment to building new homes, and Robert Cruickshank from California YIMBY has a piece breaking down the strategy for fixing zoning:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-make-it-legal-to-build/

Cruickshank lays out NIMBY success stories in cities like Austin and Minneapolis adopting YIMBY-style zoning rules and seeing significant improvements in rental prices. These success stories are representative of a broader recognition – at least among Democratic politicians – that restrictive zoning is a major contributor to the housing emergency.

Repeating these successes in the rest of the country will take a long time, and in the meantime, American tenants are sitting ducks for predatory landlords, With criminal enterprises like Realpage enabling collusive price-fixing for housing and monopoly developers deliberately restricting supplies to keep prices up (a recent Blackrock investor communique gloated over the undersupply of housing as a source of profits for its massive portfolio of rental properties), tenants pay more and more of their paychecks for worse and worse accommodations. They can't wait for the housing emergency to be solved through zoning changes and public housing. They need relief now.

That's where tenants' unions come in, as Ruthy Gourevitch and Tara Raghuveer of the Tenant Union Federation writes in their piece on the tenants across the country who are coordinating rent strikes to protest obscene rent-hikes and dangerous living conditions:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-look-for-the-tenant-union/

They describe a country where tenants work multiple jobs, send the majority of their take-home pay to their landlords – a quarter of tenants pay 70% of their wages in rent – and live in vermin-filled homes without heat or ventilation:

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/terms-of-investment/

Public money from Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac flood into the speculative market for multifamily homes, a largely unregulated, subsidized speculative bonanza that lets the wealthy make bets and the poor pay their losses.

In response, tenants unions are popping up all across the country, especially in red state cities like Bozeman, MT and Louisville, KY. They organize for "just cause" evictions that ban landlords from taking their homes away. They seek fair housing voucher distribution practices. They seek to close eviction loopholes like the LA wheeze that lets landlords kick you out following "renovations."

The National Tenant Policy Agenda demands "national rent caps, anti-eviction protections, habitability standards, and antitrust action," measures that would immediately and profoundly improve the lives of millions of American workers:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JF1-fTalW1tOBO0FhYDcVvEd1kQ2HIzkYFNRo6zmSsg/edit

They caution that it's not enough to merely increase housing supply. Without a strong countervailing force from organized tenants, new housing can be just another source of extraction and speculation for the rich. They say that the Federal Housing Finance Agency – regulator for Fannie and Freddie – could play an active role in ensuring that new housing addresses the needs of people, not corporations.

In the meantime, a tenants' union in KC successfully used a rent strike – where every tenant in a building refuses to pay rent – to get millions in overdue repairs. More strikes are planned across the country.

The American system is in crisis. A country that cannot house its people is a failure. As Rachael Dziaba writes in the final piece for the package, the situation is so bad that water has started to flow uphill: the cities with the most inward migration have the least job growth:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-10-18-housing-blues/

It's not just housing, of course. Americans pay more for health care than anyone else in the rich world and get worse outcomes than anyone else in the rich world. Their monopoly grocers have spiked their food prices. The incoming administration has declared war on public education and seeks to relegate poor children to unsupervised schools where "education" can consist of filling in forms on a Chromebook and learning that the Earth is only 5,000 years old.

A system that can't shelter, feed, educate or care for its people is a failure. People in failed states will vote for anyone who promises to tear the system down. The decision to turn life's necessities over to unregulated, uncaring markets has produced a populace who are so desperate for change, they'll even vote for their own destruction.