Americans, Not Democrats, Are In Danger Of Losing The House
And an invitation to 24 Hours of Office Hours
If Democrats plan to keep the House in November they better make sure ordinary Americans keep theirs.
The leading cause of inflation is higher rent. You cannot tackle inflation without addressing price gouging landlords taking advantage of America’s housing shortage.
Forget the rising cost of oil and even food. Americans, who don’t own a place to live, are sinking under the groaning weight of higher rent.
In testimony this week before the House Banking Committee, Professor Matthew Desmond, who runs Princeton’s Eviction Lab, called rising rent, “Inflation on steroids.”
A Just Society Measures Inflation By What It Costs To Rent
And we are that society. We just don’t know it.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which measures inflation each month, still counts rent as one third of the Consumer Price Index.
One third of inflation is rent!
In May, the Brookings Institute wrote a paper on how rent is weighted in the Consumer Price Index.
Housing represents about a third of the value of the marketbasket of goods and services that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses to track inflation in the Consumer Price Index.
By “housing” they mean rent and only rent.
If a housing unit is occupied by the owners, the BLS computes what it would cost the owner to rent a similar place, known as Owners’ Equivalent Rent (OER). The cost of utilities paid by homeowners is measured separately in the CPI.
This is precisely why when you ask ordinary Americans where inflation stings the most, they say, “The cost of rent.”
Inflation is rent. If inflation is up, people who rent suffer and people who own fly to Rome for the weekend.
Rent is up 15 percent nationwide this year. It’s been a good year for landlords.
But it’s been horrible for renters, especially in big cities.
One out of 10 students in New York City is homeless. That’s a forty percent increase in 10 years.
In the New York metro area, rent has spiked anywhere between 15 to 50 percent.
In Texas, rent for a one bedroom has shot up 30 percent. Oops. I mean went up, not shot up. Sorry Texas.
In Austin, rent doubled in one year. (Texas doesn’t have rent control. Shocking.)
Miami’s rent is up 40 percent.
Rent is up 40 percent in Portland, Oregon; 35 percent in
Newark, New Jersey; 30 percent in Orlando, Florida; and 29 percent in Cincinnati, Ohio.
More and more Americans are scrambling to find affordable housing. And that allows landlords to charge whatever they want. Rent control laws no longer exist. Only New York, New Jersey, California, Maryland and Washington, DC have rent control laws that are actively enforced.
The cost of rent is a national crisis
Especially for the poor, considering that half of all renters live below the poverty line. And rising rent keeps them there.
Professor Desmond told the Banking Committee this week poor people now spend half their income on rent.
And this couldn’t make landlords any happier.
Landlords are now free to charge whatever they want for apartments that they are now free to leave in disrepair.
As Congressman Sherrod Brown said during this week’s hearings, tenants, fearing a possible rent hike, have stopped complaining about rats, lead paint, and plumbing problems.
Even just the threat of eviction is a barbarous cudgel
Tenants know that eviction is the surest path to homelessness. Tenants know not to complain because any eviction, for whatever reason, makes you an undesirable candidate for future housing.
America’s Eviction Crisis
America has the highest eviction rates in the industrialized world. And the nastiest. Matthew Desmond says Americans are often evicted after only falling two months behind on rent.
This savage cruelty creates paralysis, job loss and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. Desmond goes on to warn of the health consequences from an eviction, or even the threat of one:
Studies have linked eviction to depression and suicide. Babies born to mothers who experienced an eviction while pregnant are significantly more likely to experience adverse birth outcomes, which have been shown to have lifelong and even multigenerational consequences.
Desmond suggests eviction, or threat of one, destroys our democracy. Indeed, high rents don’t just make for broken tenants, they make for broken citizens.
Communities with high rates of eviction have … lower rates of voter turnout … housing instability destabilizes and disrupts entire neighborhoods, tearing at the social fabric.
Desmond says:
The evidence is in and it’s clear: eviction is not just a condition of poverty; it is a cause of poverty.
Higher rent is not solely the cause of inflation, it is also the cause of poverty.
No money for a place to live, means no money to live.
Why Are Rents Going Up?
Think of affordable housing units like diamonds. The shortage is man made in order to extract record profits.
Diamonds, we are convinced, are rare. But that is a lie. Diamonds are among the most common gemstones on the planet.
De Beers owns about 80 percent of the world’s diamond supply. Yes, diamonds are rare, but only because De Beers controls how much is mined. They create an artificial shortage by stockpiling diamonds in warehouses to keep prices up.
The New York Times reported in 2004:
De Beers has been accused of price fixing and other anticompetitive conduct. The company, founded by Cecil Rhodes and other investors in 1880, came under criticism from United States officials during World War II for refusing to provide industrial diamonds for the war effort and faced antitrust cases brought by the Justice Department in 1945, 1957 and 1974. Those actions forced it to leave the American market, and it had to use intermediaries to get its products into the country.
Eventually De Beers pleaded guilty to price fixing so the Justice Department would finally allow them to sell in America.
In America we have a shortage of affordable housing units because we’re not building any. And that keeps apartments, like diamonds, precious.
Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, says America needs to build seven million affordable housing units right now. Yentel told Congress:
For every 10 of the lowest-income renter households, there are fewer than four homes affordable and available to them.
However, it is not in the best interest of the “free market” to build more affordable housing units. Like diamonds, it’s more profitable to charge more for the ones already available.
That’s why …
The federal government is the only one who can get those seven million affordable housing units built.
Shelter is a moral issue, not an economic one
But who speaks for the renters? Nobody.
Cities, states and the federal government conspire with landlords and builders to create this artificial shortage of affordable rental units.
Cities and states pretend to zone for low income housing. They pretend to provide tax subsidies for any realtors willing to build affordable housing in low income “enterprise zones. “
But the investors only pretend to build low income housing in order to collect the tax subsidies. Builders take the tax credit, build more luxury apartments in areas zoned for low income housing, which means there’s no room for real low income housing, and so the affordable housing problem only gets worse.
That’s why …
Jersey City, New Jersey is now, and I’m not making this up, the most expensive place to live in America. More expensive than Manhattan.
Jersey City? Yes! But why?
Jared Kushner took New Jersey tax subsidies earmarked for affordable housing in Jersey City and built luxury apartments instead.
He took from the poor and gave to the Him.
Jared worked the zoning laws.
Jersey City zoned for low income housing. Jared promised to build low income housing, took the tax subsidies and went ahead and built luxury apartments instead. And he got away with it.
You cannot create affordable housing if you leave it to investors
They will take the tax incentives, and go ahead and build whatever they want. And nobody will prosecute.
It falls upon the federal government to build affordable housing. But thanks to the Faircloth amendment passed in 1998, the federal government is not allowed to build any new low income housing units without demolishing an equal number of older low income housing units or turning them over to private investors.
The “Faircloth Limit” resulted in Housing and Urban Development financing fewer and fewer construction projects. Consequently there are 200,000 fewer public-housing units today than we had when the Faircloth amendment was passed.
Nobody is protecting the renter
Interest on a mortgage can be deducted from your tax bill, but not your rent.
Nobody is protecting the renter
Which is why Democrats will lose the House unless they save ours.
Speaking up for renters is good politics
Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush won her primary handily this week. Congresswoman Bush came to Washington in 2021 never forgetting that she and her children once lived in her car.
When the Centers For Disease Control’s eviction moratorium expired a year ago, Nancy Pelosi blamed Joe Biden, and Joe blamed Nancy.
So Cory took to the Capitol steps in a sleeping bag to remind Nancy and Joe that millions of Americans were about to get evicted.
Joe extended the moratorium, but the Supreme Court immediately ruled it was unconstitutional. Oh well.
But on Tuesday, St. Louis Democrats remembered Cory fought for them. She defeated her Conservative challenger State Senator and Minority Caucus Whip Steven Roberts Jr. by a margin of two to one.
Fighting for people who rent, even when the Supreme Court defeats you, is how you win.
Nancy should listen to Cory if she wants to keep her gavel.
Thankyou david