Evicted

Poverty and Profit in the American City

A Book Review by Cliff Edwards and Simone Hayes

Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond’s 2016 book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City examines the impact on the poor of rising housing costs and declining/stagnating incomes in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash. Many tenants now pay more than 50 percent of their incomes in rent—over 70 percent with the soaring cost of utilities included—challenging their ability to survive on a daily basis. The result: a plague of evictions. Desmond’s book documents the lives of eight individuals and their families—both black and white—in the process of eviction from their homes. There are, as well, sketches of a landlord or two, seemingly included in the interest of “fairness” to those who find themselves compelled to throw their tenants out in order to turn a profit—and landlords are an integral component of Desmond’s purported solution to the housing crisis.

Evicted has been greeted with one rave review after another from critics across the spectrum of bourgeois opinion, from the left-liberal Guardian to the plutocratic Wall Street Journal. In a review in the New York Times (22 February), Jennifer Senior described the book as “unignorable,” concluding that “it will no longer be possible to have a serious discussion about poverty without having a serious discussion about housing.” The fact that the poor, especially the black and Hispanic residents of America’s ghettos and barrios, live in dismal circumstances and are often thrown into the streets is hardly a revelation—except, evidently, to the excited reviewers. Nonetheless, when Desmond details the struggles of those who have only a few bucks left after their rent is paid, he is trenchant and compelling, perhaps informed by his parents’ eviction while he was in college.

An American City

Desmond conducted his research in Milwaukee, which he notes is “a fairly typical midsize metropolitan area,” much like Minneapolis, Baltimore, Cincinnati and many others. In Milwaukee, one in fourteen renters is evicted by court order each year. There are almost as many “informal” evictions—where your stuff is dragged out to the curb without legal authorization. One in five black female renters in Milwaukee reports being evicted as an adult, triple the rate for white women. Court records show that women living in black areas of Milwaukee are twice as likely to be evicted as their male neighbors. “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women,” Desmond writes, concluding: “Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

Milwaukee is one of many cities in racist America that are described as the country’s most segregated. During the civil rights era, hundreds of marches for integration were turned back by racist mobs and cop terror. An influx of immigration in the 1970s resulted in a segregated Latino enclave. To this day, “separate and unequal” prevails in the city. Racist discrimination, cop harassment, poverty and unemployment trap black tenants in the worst slums of Milwaukee’s North Side. Black tenants—and households with children—are most likely to have to endure broken windows and appliances; rats, roaches and bedbugs; lack of heat and failing plumbing. The slums also return high rates of profit for landlords—dilapidated property is cheap and chronically poor tenants have little choice but to accept crippling rent and horrific living conditions.

Desmond’s research includes a run-down white trailer park in Milwaukee’s far South Side. There he documented pervasive racial prejudice that obscured how much the white trailer park residents had in common with the black slum dwellers. Anti-black racism is a key ideological prop of American capitalism. Far from bestowing some form of privilege on white poor and working people, racism hampers social struggle and divides the working class, allowing the capitalist exploiters to drive down living conditions across the board.

The Making of a Crisis

With rents nationally projected to rise another 8 percent this year, the living conditions of the working poor and the unemployed are likely to shift from the excruciating to the unendurable. Democratic president Bill Clinton’s destruction of “welfare as we know it” in the 1990s means that today benefits barely cover rent for those who can even get welfare. The workfare program Clinton applied to the whole country was pioneered in Milwaukee, where it drove 22,000 desperate families off the welfare rolls. Since the 1980s, when many public housing projects began to be razed, such assistance for renters as was available from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been in decline.

In 1992, HUD instituted a demolition program under the Orwellian acronym of HOPE VI that destroyed 270,000 units of public housing—a 19 percent decrease in public housing stock. At the same time, the federal government increased the use of housing vouchers. Vouchers—government payments to private landlords—became the largest housing subsidy program. Supposedly designed to cap the rent payments of qualifying recipients at 30 percent of their income, vouchers are available only for the poorest of the poor; the average income of voucher recipients is $12,000 to $14,000 a year. Only two million renters—a quarter of those supposedly eligible for such assistance—actually receive it. With no requirement for private landlords to accept housing vouchers, the program has reinforced residential segregation. The number of people receiving rent voucher assistance has frozen, while the number in need of assistance has gone up and up.

Desmond is well aware of this history. He characterizes the current state of affairs as “one of the worst affordable housing crises in generations.” Nevertheless, he projects the sunniest optimism regarding prospects for the future: “The good news is that much has already been accomplished. America has made impressive strides over the years when it comes to housing.” Well, not quite. In 1960, American renters paid on average 19 percent of their yearly income toward housing costs. Today that figure is 30 percent.

Liberal Delusions

Desmond believes there is a simple solution to the housing crisis under capitalism. He advocates that the government provide housing vouchers to all low-income families to prevent them from paying a dime more than 30 percent of their incomes for rent. Under his scheme, landlords would be enjoined from raising rents but be guaranteed a “modest” profit, adjusted, of course, for inflation. In exchange for mandatory participation in the program and a ban on discriminatory practices, landlords would be spared a too stringent enforcement of building codes.

Further, Desmond sees guaranteed housing as a panacea for all of America’s social ills. A home, in his mind, becomes almost a heaven on earth: “The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets...the wellspring of personhood.” One is almost embarrassed to remind Desmond that there are elderly people who dine on pet food and die of heatstroke in their own homes.

Irrespective of his layering of schmaltz, Desmond’s recommendations for reform border on the preposterous. The housing crisis is a product of a society organized on the basis of private profit, and of the ebbs and flows of employment and unemployment that are endemic to the capitalist system. Friedrich Engels vividly described that process in his 1872 pamphlet The Housing Question:

“In reality the bourgeoisie has only one method of settling the housing question after its fashion—that is to say, of settling it in such a way that the solution continually poses the question anew.... No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is everywhere the same: the most scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-glorification by the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but—they appear again at once somewhere else.... The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place produces them in the next place also.”

The reality is that the capitalist system cannot guarantee its wage slaves a decent living—much less those it has tossed on the scrap heap of permanent unemployment.

For decades, the capitalist order has aggressively pursued an all-sided assault on the living standards of working and poor people. In fact, the only significant reforms providing affordable housing for working people have been ceded by the capitalist rulers in response to the prospect of social upheaval. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the legions of the unemployed were often organized (usually by communists) into unemployed councils that fought on behalf of the destitute. With close ties to the working class and broad popular support, these councils were very successful in stopping evictions of the unemployed as well as in organizing rent strikes. During the Great Rent Strike of 1932 in New York, tenants in several buildings withheld their rent and demanded reductions in prices and a moratorium on evictions. Landlords fired back with massive evictions, but protesters stopped the evictions in hand-to-hand combat with police.

The 1937 Housing Act, which initiated the construction of public housing units throughout the country, was passed during the tumultuous wave of class struggle that established the CIO industrial unions. (The landlord associations at that time lobbied for a voucher system instead.) Similarly, it was the social upheavals of the civil rights movement that led to a series of Fair Housing Acts and a significant expansion of HUD’s voucher program.

Expropriate the Expropriators!

Today public housing has been eviscerated. The voucher system is stagnating and, in real terms, shrinking, notwithstanding the growing inability of masses of people to afford housing. The fight for quality housing—and for jobs—is no less necessary today than it was in the 1930s. But the fighting spirit of the labor movement has been sapped by a trade-union bureaucracy committed to maintaining the bosses’ profits in the face of this country’s social decay. As the depredations of capitalism impel the working class to struggle, a new, fighting leadership in the unions must be forged, committed to organizing the unorganized. Building such a leadership goes hand in hand with constructing a revolutionary workers party that will act as the tribune of the oppressed and will stop at nothing less than abolishing capitalism. Those who labor must rule!

Labor militancy can forestall and, to some extent, reverse the excesses of capitalist exploitation. But without the overthrow of bourgeois class rule, when the class battles subside, the inexorable drive to increase profits will reassert itself, producing growing misery for the working masses at one pole and, at the other, obscene wealth for the owners of the means of production. As Engels wrote, “The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of subsistence and instruments of labour by the working class itself.”

Desmond’s book is representative of the same school of thought as Thomas Piketty’s much-ballyhooed Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014). These friendly critics of capitalism try to convince those opposed to the profit system’s savageries that drastic measures (e.g., revolution) are unnecessary. Their method is to identify and analyze a glaring injustice and then put forward a solution that is purportedly so modest and reasonable that it will win over the powers that be. For Piketty, the problem is the gargantuan inequality of wealth between the rulers and the ruled, and his solution is a planet-wide tax on the wealthy (see “Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” WV Nos. 1053 and 1054, 3 and 17 October 2014). Desmond’s vouchers-for-all proposal is, perhaps, a shade less delusional than Piketty’s, but it is no more likely to be implemented by the rulers of the capitalist order.

No application of persuasion or pressure will suffice to eradicate the diseases caused by the profit system. As Engels put it, “The housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution and can be abolished...only if the whole social order from which it springs is fundamentally refashioned.” A victorious working-class revolution would solve the housing crisis almost instantaneously by expropriating the property of the bourgeoisie, from the financiers and rentiers to the real estate barons. The vacant suites of all the mansions and luxury high-rise apartments as well as the almost 19 million homes in this country that sit vacant would be seized to provide housing for all who require it, including the inhabitants of the slums and the 3.5 million people who are now homeless.

At the same time, the proletarian regime would undertake an enormous program to construct integrated residential communities designed to facilitate free and equal social relationships. Quality education and access to culture, entertainment and athletics will allow the fullest development of all, while facilities and social services will be vastly expanded to free women from the drudgery of housework and the burdens of child-rearing. Initial steps toward building such communities were taken in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The early Soviet regime, insofar as it was able to amid poverty, backwardness and the massive destruction caused by the Civil War, established communal institutions, such as kitchens and laundries, specifically aimed at liberating women from the stultifying slavery of housework. The Bolshevik vision was that the international proletarian revolution would lay the basis for ending the domination of man by man and open the way for the full flowering of the human species. In comparison, the elaborate schemes of the would-be reformers of the imperialist order promise little and obtain nothing that can endure the brutalities of the decaying capitalist system.