Socialized Housing

If maintaining a viable postal service for all is an important service, why not housing? The answer is somewhat obscured but fairly simple why our various so-called leftists and avowedly right-wing elected officials wring their hands over the homeless and housing but do very little to solving the problem. And I read many years ago in college how our US Army Corps of Engineers can go into a remote backwater and in a few breaths construct a workable bridge over which to carry supplies. But we cannot provide truly decent shelter for the poor, the unemployed, the underemployed.

So why not Housing for the growing numbers of people, families, children, working adults, even middle class? There is no means-test for buying a US postage stamp. We do not ask for a tax return before selling someone a stamp to send a letter. Why should there be means-tests for the paltry excuse for available, affordable Section 8 housing? It's because Section 8 housing is intentionally kept to a bare minimum, and less than that. Section 8 feeds the myth of a "deserving" poor as separate from an undeserving poor. Section 8 further hides the working poor from our sights. Section 8 housing is only meant to keep a few of the many homeless in shelter. We have no such paradigm for postage stamps.

And yet our postal system stares us in the face with the obvious solution to housing that no politician dare enact. The postal system is government run, and this is an anathema to any private enterprise. Federal express and UPS are private shipping companies. It's not hard to imagine a country where FEDEX and UPS controlled our political culture and sponsored the elimination of the US Postal System to increase their clientele. It's not hard because so much of our political culture is run by private, for-profit interests where our basic needs are sold and traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Eliminating the postal service would give FEDEX/UPS the lion-share of the market, and it would cost us several dollars just to mail a letter, more if the letter be mailed to a remote area out of FEDEX's service area. Imagine this. You don't have to, because this is what we have with our housing. FEDEX owns the houses, pays or political culture to maintain its monopoly, and reaps the profits.

Not coincidentally, one of the first logical acts the Cuban Revolution implemented in 1959 was to cut rents in half. Housing was not socialized, but the Revolution clearly recognized as clearly we we seem to deny our property system that it is unworkable. We here in the US seem to think this arrangement came from the Heavens. The Cuban Revolution knew it came from landlords, many Cuban, many living in the US.

I was moved the other day when hearing Fidel in 1968 expound on the various facets of underdevelopment. He covered the ones known to most well-read intellectuals, but he touched on a new one: that underdevelopment is a psyhological problem. So one of the challenges of a successful revolutionary process is to enlighten the people to discard their futilistic thinking, that not much is possible, this-is-the-way-it-is thinking. I would say this is the biggest problem facing underdeveloped peoples and countries.

Why can't our city and state governments, which levy taxes on us, buy apartment buildings and houses and trailor parks and duplexes and lofts? Who said these must be the domains of private interests only motivated in profits, even to the point of keeping them empty!?

There is no law of nature that dictates this.

Our elected government should buy properties for the public use, rent out these properties at a low cost to those who choose to take that route as easily as those who choose a US stamp over a UPS fee. I as a lifelong renter should have the choice of renting with my government for a low, no-frills apartment or choosing a private concern, which might want to offer an array of bells and whistles.

But as I said, this is not the case because our property system owns our city councils, city assessors, mayors, and state governments. How did this come to be so? The end of feudalism and the beginning of the "modern" [i.e., capitalist] era was marked by a series of Enclosure Acts in Europe. Land-Lords discovered they could earn more money by selling surplus goods rather than fulfilling their feudal obligations and giving them to their tenants, the serfs. The serfs were thrown off the land, literally onto the streets. Police powers were instituted to keep the poor off the land. In Britain, after peasant revolts, laws were passed that mandated a homeless person show his means of livelihood or be thrown in jail. So from the beginning, the state created the problem then penalized its victims.

Among the "classic" causes of homelessness - lack of affordable housing, unemployment/underemployment, mental illness, substance abuse, poverty, mental health law reforms, evictions, and foreclosures - socialized housing models would address several of these at once. Without high rents to pay, an otherwise low-wage worker [with socialized health care of course!] could well afford a decent place to live. Of course, if or high-wage brethren wish to partake of socialzed housing that would be their right too as well as accessing a socialized health system.

Bottom line, with a working model of public/private mail service in our midst, such a model of housing is not unrealizable. Arguably, housing services are much more vital than mail services. Our elected politicians, in the pockets of a private housing monopoly, are in a fix: they dare not anger their politcal funders by robbing them of a captive audience of customers. Further, banks fearful of losing profits will make arguments against such a measure. But faced with publc anger over the sight of homeless encampments, like the one that used to be in front of San Francisco's beautiful City Hall, public servants are stuck finding cracks in a paradigm to fill a huge population of people.