Visions: Housing

Every time I walk past an encampment of unhoused people, I see something that tells me the person living in a particular tent or broken down vehicle is trying to make that space on a sidewalk or in a city park into a home.

It might be a little fence around the tent entrance. Or a couple of plants in pots. One year I saw a Christmas tree, decorated. It broke my heart.

This week I’m reading the news about the Los Angeles fires, in which many people have lost their homes. Last fall it was the people in western North Carolina, who shouldn’t have been at risk from a hurricane, and yet lost so much.

Loss from disaster also breaks my heart.

Then there are all the people living in refugee camps, people who had to flee their homes or whose homes have been destroyed by war.

All of these losses provide a reminder that everyone – everyone – needs a home. Yet we live in a world that has turned that basic need into an investment.

If you own your home – or rather, at least in today’s United States, you and a bank own your home – it’s an investment, the largest one you’ve got in most cases.

If you get in a jam and can’t pay your mortgage, you’re at the mercy of your lender.

If you rent, it’s the landlord who gets the return on investment. If you can’t pay your rent, you’re out on the street.

Your situation is always a bit precarious.

There’s a saying that goes back to the activism of the 1960s and 70s:

Housing for People, Not for Profit.

That’s not what we have, but that is what we should have. And could have.

In the spirit of coming up with audacious visions, here’s mine on housing:

Every person on this planet should and could have a home. Yes, we have enough planetary resources – even in light of climate change and overpopulation – to do this. I’ll write more about why I think this we have the resources to do this another time, but for this post I want to focus on this as a vision related to housing.

To make sure everyone has a home, houses and apartments have to stop being investments. They need to simply be places to live. Maintained, certainly. Made sturdy against possible disasters, from earthquakes to hurricanes to fires. Properly managed.

But not your retirement savings or your path to riches.

The number of homeless people in my area has grown markedly over the ten years I’ve lived here. Yet when there are programs to provide so-called affordable housing, they’re always set up so that somebody will make a big return.

There have been many new apartment buildings built in Oakland since I moved here and most of them have vacancies. None of the people living on the street can afford the rent in those buildings. Neither can many of the people working ordinary jobs around here.

This vision of a home for everyone is doable, though difficult because we are all so embedded in the current capitalist system, whether we’re landlords, homeowners, renters, or even living on the street.

As Frederic Jameson says, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

I don’t like imagining the end of the world.

So instead, my vision is of an economic system that starts with the assumption that everyone is entitled to a home, which is a step toward imagining the end of capitalism.

A home doesn’t mean just four walls and a roof. It’s something with infrastructure. It should have energy to power cooking, heating, cooling, and ventilation. It must have clean drinking and bathing water, a toilet, and connection to the sewer system.

Now in the United States, having access to that kind of infrastructure is not particularly difficult, even though in many places the infrastructure hasn’t been kept up.

In some other countries, there are large areas where there is no energy or water system. But there could be.

Water is probably more of a problem than energy, because, especially with climate change, there are lots of places where there’s too much of it or too little of it. But modern water and sewer providers – and I’ll point out that the best ones in the United States tend to be operated by local governments (East Bay Municipal Utility District is an excellent example) – are doing a great job even if they have to devote a lot of time to repairing old pipes.

With the growth of renewables, it is more and more possible to provide electricity to people without building a large grid. Many parts of the world have substantial sunshine and no grid; setting up PV systems on a local level can meet this need.

That is to say, there are lots of ways to provide the infrastructure that makes a building a comfortable home.

Now, not everyone wants or needs the same kind of home. My partner and I would like an apartment in a multifamily building where we know all our neighbors and have a community. It also needs to be a walkable neighborhood with lots of public transit, because we’re not getting any younger and don’t want to be tied to our car. (We’re working on that.)

People with large families – especially extended families – need something bigger. People who garden need a yard, and greenspace is important to us all. There’s no one right space for everyone.

But everyone needs a safe and comfortable space they call their own.

One key element in building such spaces, especially in places where people have very little, is to make sure to build what people really want and need. Throwing up tuff sheds and manufactured housing that isn’t well-made or comfortable isn’t an appreciably better solution than telling people living on the streets to go to a shelter and leave their pets and belongings behind.

You don’t build for people; you build with people.

That goes for many other things besides housing.