I watch a lot of YouTube content like this because while reviving dead theorists over and over can be interesting, applying radical analysis to what's going on RIGHT NOW is better. What does this "out of control" housing market in Florida mean for the working-class renter? Nothing good. I saw this phenomenon in the two years I lived in Tampa, 2016-2018, where my rent was hiked three times [third time I got out]; while my income remained stagnant. And there's no rent control law in Florida, so these increases can look like down payments. As the property manager over my studio apartment told me: "we can adjust the rent to the market rate of the neighborhood." The neighborhood was Seminole Heights, and just after I moved there in 2016 the blocks across my street were re-zoned for commercial spaces. Of course the first space to open in a remodeled home was a sushi restaurant. Then came a boutique bicycle shop. You get the picture.
The public housing complex about two miles from me was slated for destruction to build condos. This is happening all over the country and should be a national scandal. I talked to two of the dispossessed in the waiting room of my doctor's office one day, and they said they had been promised Section 8 vouchers, but they already knew - if you do not - how Section 8 has failed the working class and the poor. It is underfunded, by both Democratic and Republican administrations. And many landlords simply do not accept the program. The waiting lists are also outrageous.
But this rapid influx should be studied carefully. Where are these new Floridians coming from? What are their motivations to leave where they came from, and what political conclusions can be drawn from this? And the other question might be the only silver lining in this - because there will be no silver lining for workers and the poor: will this demographic shift also shift the political posture of Florida from a Red state?
And speaking of demographics. Included in how I research places I move to, I turn to the ever-reliable Grindr. That's right. The gay "dating" app. I want to see the mix of people who live in a given place. So Eureka, CA, is lily-fucking white. No go. When I moved to Tampa, there was a nice mix of Black, white, and Latin. That was 2016. I look at Grindr now for Tampa, and I might count one Black face on the feed. It's mostly white. Some Latin. Where did the Black men go?
And that's an persistent question we should be asking too. Remember in the late 80's when then vice president Dan Quayle came to visit San Francisco and as a precaution in this paranoid country, any Black man with an outstanding warrant or on parole was rounded up in the then-Black neighborhood of Bayview/Hunter's Point. Quayle had the nerve to sit on camera holding a Black child and asked "where are the men?" as an indictment of the Black family. (Footnote: like everyplace else, Bayview/Hunter's Point today is no longer a Black neighborhood, and the Black people have disappeared too].
So people disappearing from our cities is something else that should be a national scandal.
