Hey Folks, I have an opportunity here very soon to have some say in the affordable housing situation in my town (we’ll see). While I read over the planning and studies the town has already done, I’d like to get a sense of the field for what effective policy looks like, what current left thinking on the matter is.
I don’t know what I don’t know, you know? Obviously, any advocacy I do will need to be a synthesis of the conditions of the place I live and whatever current leading thinking is on the matter, while dealing with the limitations of liberal democracy. I figured this was a good place to ask.
Public housing and rent control.
Public housing means state-owned and often built, offered to the residents at cost. To make this really move, you need a housing authority that can build. The bigger and better run the housing authority, the cheaper the housing. This cannot eliminate the financialized spiraling of real estate costs but it can ameliorate their impact and create a vision for decommodification.
Rent control can be implemented in various forms. Every argument against it is specious liberal nonsense with no grounding in the real world. At best they appeal to a cherry picked set of price controls in general enacted by countries facing serious challenges, then attribute those challenges to price controls. They ignore most cases of price controls because they are typically successful.
You can implement more complex policies like “rent to own” for housing but I think simplicity is best for a first project.
Do not expect the politicians, bureaucrats, and capitalist lobbyists present to accept your ideas. They may try and shoot them down, even, rather than just ignore common people like usual. The most you can expect from suggesting these ideas is to agitate everyone else. So plan accordingly with the goal of building an organized effort. You would ideally come with a disciplined contingent with clear messaging and you’d use this opportunity to build a list. You would be pleasant and “on” at almost all times and making sympathetic pleas when advocating for housing, ready with sympathetic examples of harm and ideally people with stories of their own horrible experiences and fears. You’d organize around your own follow-up event, ideally an educational event on this topic, and use that premise to get people to fill out lists that include contact info for that event. And that becomes your next action.
If your role will soon be to be a bureaucrat, you will find yourself massively limited. It is a useful position to have for this project but you’ll find that it will be marginal in directly changing policy (marginal is still better than nothing). That role is more useful for feeding information to an organizing effort and getting a sense for how much money is moved around by real estate vs. rent prices and how much work the state does on behalf of them.
Rent control sadly is not in the cards. The state does not allow municipalities to enact any form of rent control from my reading of the municipal powers section of the law.
Public Housing is in the cards though. They have a housing trust currently and non profit that they use to build and maintain ownership over affordable housing properties. I don’t know all the details though. They just finished building a housing unit on our main street.
They’ve done a lot to I think insolate new housing from the market but what’s might be more radical would be a community land trust.
Our states head of housing was a drunk divorced landlord Democrat, so were fuckin cooked out here.
Nice a housing authority of some kind is very useful
If rent control is not possible, maybe getting an elected rent adjustment program board set up could help. It’s basically an elected board that tenants can bring housing issues toand the board can decide to lower or waive rent in response to grievances. They generally also exist to mediate tenant landlord disputes. Often times landlords spend money to get “their guys” elected on these boards (like every elected position) but there could be some clause that landlords and their agents can’t be on the board or something like that
I have to check and see if we have a high enough population for that. We might be just over the threshold. There is a minimum required level of population before we’re allowed to do that for some reason.