We must see real estate market for what it truly is: an institution rooted in settler colonialism that allows land (and the housing that sits atop it) to be distributed and controlled by those who have enough money for their preferences to matter.
With fortunes inflated by corporate welfare, wealthy real estate owners can afford to cancel housing-related expenses and debts for millions of struggling American families.
The time for political games, half-measures, and brinkmanship has long passed. Without significant and sustained congressional action, 30 million to 40 million renters are at risk of being evicted by the end of the year.
If you’re old, poor, and African American or Hispanic-Latinx, your chances of infection are especially high and odds of survival significantly lower. The economic downturn could drive the number of homeless to 800,000, an increase of 40% to 45%.
“I just don’t feel that police evicting people is a way to ‘protect and serve.’”
Right now, government money is flowing. But soon the self-appointed guardians of “fiscal responsibility” will call for cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and SNAP, while leaving the defense budget and large tax breaks for the wealthy intact.
The health, economic well-being, and very lives of the American people depend upon Congress putting people over profit and enacting a bold and far-reaching relief package now.
History, Taylor writes, is not repeating itself with housing inequality, but cyclically proceeding as an inevitable effect of a racialized system perpetuated by capitalism.
To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, what serves the class in power is viewed as the natural order and common sense, and what doesn’t is blasphemy.
On a federal and local level, candidates have bold plans for tackling affordability and equity
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