The rent is too damn high(er)
Half of Us Can’t Afford Our Rent
It’s an election year. Democrats will tell us that things are as good as they can be, and Republicans will tell us that things are bad, but for all the wrong reasons. The truth is, for over 40 years, the gap between what Americans need to live dignified lives and what they actually have has been expanding for more and more people. The bipartisan shift from Reagan onward ushered in the divestment from public goods and services; the expansion of policing, prisons, military, and intelligence apparatuses; deregulation of finance, and decreased power for organized labor.
Every arena of life has been diminished by this process, often referred to as neoliberalism: the country’s physical infrastructure is crumbling, the average working class American lives a shorter life than a generation ago, and the military is so flush with cash that it doesn’t know what to do with it all. Literally, no one knows where all the money goes. The Pentagon has never passed an audit.
The rental market is no different. In January, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies released a report on the dire situation this political and economic consensus has abandoned us to. The findings are as bleak as many of us feel: affordability is at an all-time low across the income spectrum. Half of renter households across the U.S. (22.4 million) are considered cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. Among this group, 12.1 million households were severely cost-burdened, spending more than half of their income on housing costs.
The poorest renter households, those earning $30,000 or less, found themselves with a median residual income of $310 per month after housing costs alone. As a result, they scrimp on expenses such as health care and food in order to keep a roof over their heads. When that is not possible, they risk eviction to cover other vital costs. Enough people are backed into this corner that evictions have now surpassed pre-pandemic levels, homelessness is at a record high, and people 65 and older are the fastest growing demographic among America’s homeless population.
Dissolution of the Common Good
Every major religion, every political philosophy has some account of the common good. A sense that every person is part of a whole; that in some sense, your life and its outcomes are tied to mine. So, in a just society, we’d invest in and protect the shared interests of the whole, even if individually we might not benefit directly. We would pour into the development of children because they deserve that by virtue of being children, yes, but also because the persistence of the nation depends on them. I don’t blaze a fresh trail to the office every morning because my predecessors built roads that I have a responsibility to maintain through taxes because I’m not handy.
While there is a lot of debate among philosophers about the scope and limit of the common good, it feels intuitive to me that there should also be a negative account as well, one based on our shared vulnerability as human beings. Yes, I want roads and schools, but we also don’t want homelessness or lack of adequate health care, in part, because I am, like most people, vulnerable to financial misfortune and illness. It is in our collective interest to protect against being ruined by such things.
Unfortunately, that’s not the society we live in. The government serves the interests of the whole only insofar as they align with those of the ruling capitalist class. The rest of us are just sort of minimally maintained both in terms of services and salary. The crisis in the rental market is a predictable outcome of this tendency. As there is no permanent infrastructure to support the needs of the masses of poor and working class people, homelessness has reached a record high as the modest, temporary, pandemic-induced social safety net dissolved. Rental assistance programs, a lifeline for many in the early years of the ongoing pandemic, serve only one in four households that meet their income thresholds. What’s worse, the public housing supply is dwindling and decrepit with a $90 billion maintenance backlog.
Commodities can never be human rights. The profit motive is the driving force of the market, not human and ecological needs, not the common good. As of 2019, only 11% of renting households (5 million) obtained housing through a program funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The gap between what the government elects to provide and the level of need—remember, half (22.4 million) of renting households are cost-burdened—there is upward pressure on rent prices and downward pressure on quality. Beggars can’t be choosers, after all.
It’s easy to get bogged down—and depressed, frankly—in the terrible details of one feature or another of working class life today. It’s more constructive instead to see each of these headlines and studies as further clarifying what we’re fighting against. Each one is additional evidence that the inordinate prosperity of the few generated under capitalism comes from the exploitation and abandonment of the many. Basic human needs are out of reach.
The task of a liberatory faith, from whatever tradition, isn’t to cultivate nostalgia for a past that may or may not have existed (it usually didn’t) or for a people who were better than today’s supposed degenerates (they usually weren’t). Our task, instead, is to be visionaries with callused hands, both to articulate and work for another world, another set of social relations, because we believe that it is possible. We might have different views about what that world is, but we agree that this ain’t it. It can’t be.
In solidarity,
Dwayne