Public Comment

In the previous article entitled “ABAG’s 9000”, we dealt with the underlying political economy of a recent state "requirement" that Berkeley build 9000 new housing units in the next 8 years. But a number of issues were revealed that need greater discussion. One is the real nature of the law driving it. Another is its constitutionality. And finally, there is the issue of housing as a human right. How do we make that idea real, today?

You’ve probably heard of MS-13 (it gets a bit of play once in a while on cop shows). The "MS" stands for Mara Salvatrucha. It is a Salvadorian gang that formed among Salvadorian immigrant and exile communities in California during a "proxy" civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s instigated by the US. Like any gang, it had its needs, and it imposed those needs on those it thought could possibly fulfill them.

Another one has appeared in California. The name it uses for itself is “SB-35.” It too is a political offshoot of a proxy war, a war between a landlord-financial corporate collaboration (see part 1 of this series) and communities of working people and low income families struggling against exile from their homes in the Bay Area. The economic issue of this conflict is the unaffordability of housing, an unaffordability created by rent increases and the corporatization of real estate. In a city like Berkeley, though renters are the majority, rent levels remain beyond regulation because of state laws. The political issue is that of local autonomy. The landlord-financial cabal has transformed housing into an “impoverishment machine.” And into this field steps SB-35. It is the driving force behind “ABAG’s 9000.”  

"SB" stands for “Senate Bill.” It was formed to “grease the rails” for the housing industry while pretending to foster “affordable housing.” Unlike MS-13, SB-35 is made of paper. But not unlike MS-13, it seeks power over cities in California through a form of political coup. The coups are "bloodless" because the homeless, who are the primary victims of its political war, die quietly on the street, without making too much of a mess.  

Like MS-13, SB-35’s method is to override a city’s local autonomy in order to establish political control. Like MS-13, it tells a city what that city "needs," by which it means “what it needs from the city.” And it has means of punishing a city for non-fulfillment. Unlike MS-13, however, which generally uses a variety of standard guerrilla tactics, SB-35 uses the courts, and imposes conditions it calls "sanctions" for non-fulfillment. "Sanctions" are tactics intentionally aimed at destroying a political entity’s autonomy and sovereignty. We have seen them imposed mercilessly on Cuba (for 60 years), Zimbabwe (for 25 years), and other nations. Their single purpose is to starve a nation (or a city) into submission. The starvation imposed by “ABAG’s 9000” will be more unaffordability, coupled with housing over-development. It effect will be to drive more non-elite, non-white, and non-bureaucratic people into refugee and exile status.  

Where MS-13 is open about what it needs, SB-35 hides what it seeks behind hype about fostering affordable housing. It claims to force cities to build, promising to ensure “access to affordable housing [as] a matter of statewide concern,” by “streamlining” established housing approval processes. But it has not the power to require affordability since those "approval" processes already favor for-profit developers who resist anything that isn’t “market rate.” Cities like Berkeley only provide miniscule requirements for affordable housing (20%), which they actually consider a "compromise" with the developers, while giving the developers the ability to buy their way out of providing affordable units with low “mitigation fees.” 

ABAG’s 9000 will only make this glut and imbalance worse. Market rate units will increase, apartments will remain empty, real estate financial corporations will make money simply from owning those empty assets, and ward-healers will dominate virtual City Council meetings chanting “build build build.” The people of Berkeley know that there is glut of market rate housing, and that low income neighborhoods need at least 80% of its developments to be affordable. And let us recall that housing "affordability" means a tenant pays no more than 30% of their income for rent. 

To summarize what is happening here, SB-35 calls upon the department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) to do a housing assessment of the future. The algorithm, called a Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA), instructs the Assoc. of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) to propose specific "allocations" for specific Bay Area cities. ABAG saddles Berkeley with 9000 units. Since ABAG invents these housing allocations for each city (they are inventions because imagined about the future), they border on the arbitrary. Though the allocations are computer projections, and computers don’t "imagine," programmers do. As the agency doing the programming, HCS now holds each city "responsible" for its allocation. Subtext: the city does not have the right to refuse. But without the right to refuse, a proposal is not a proposal, but a demand. Hence, SB-35 becomes indistinguishable from a gang. 

The purpose of all this? With due respect to lip service given to planning, when a city fails to take the requisite steps toward fulfilling its responsibility, the state will take the city to court, get court sanctions imposed, and win the power to issue building permits ministerially (which means, “by-right”), by-passing the city’s own zoning standards. That is the substance of the coup. The point of the coup, like the point of sanctions, is to destroy autonomy. Without autonomy, "real people" in real cities become wholly ignorable. The glut makes money; empty buildings make money; increased rents make money; and housing becomes a more inexorable impoverishment machine. 

Doesn’t this sound familiar? Remember all the stories about city cops visiting bars and restaurants and collecting protection money? It was big back in the 20s and 30s. Serpico wrote about it in the 70s. The cop would approach the bar owner and tell him, “you need protection.” It was a “proposed need.” And the bar owner would know exactly what he was up against. If he didn’t fork over some bucks, his joint would be robbed a few days later, with no cops in the area, by some strange coincidence. A few businesses would be driven into the ditch that way, and the rest would pay up. It’s a protection racket. When the city reports progress on its allocations to HCD, it will simply be making its payments to SB-35’s program. Failure to report will lead to court sanctions, giving the developers the power to “rifle the joint.” 

The court, however, is a problem. Which court will it be? SB-35 doesn’t say. Presumably it will be a civil court, since SB-35 doesn’t contain provisions for criminal charges. But civil court can only levy fines (aka money). To be able to impose sanctions, which amount to a deprivation of liberty, it must be a criminal court. This smells like something unconstitutional. And that would mean that SB-35’s threat of sanctions and loss of autonomy is hype, meaningless verbiage. (We shall deal with constitutionality in Part 3 of this series.) 

Why would it be reasonable to assume the state would allow racketeering like this? For the last 20 years, Berkeley has faced displacement of its people through rent gouging and impoverishment at the hands of rent levels. Yet regulation of rents has been banned by the Costa-Hawkins Act, and the state has done nothing to repeal it. It knows that the majority of a city’s residents are renters (in cities like Berkeley). Costa-Hawkins means city government is unable to represent the interest of a majority of its residents, who are renters. And the state, preserving that law, shows that it cares nothing about whether democracy is possible in its cities. So its protection rackets fit right in. Nobody need mention the issue of kickbacks. If the state can ignore the needs of the people, it implies it is attending to the needs of the developers. When it ignores the interests of democracy with respect to renters, it does so by refusing to ensure the building of affordable housing. 

The ethics of needs assignment

To have a need is to have a problem with something that creates that need. For instance, impoverishment is a problem because it is a condition in which one does not have enough money to live a healthy and safe life. To have to choose between paying a utility bill and putting food on the table for one’s kids (and there are people in Berkeley who face this) is a condition for which a living wage is a need, and not having a living wage is a problem. A need is the name for a necessity. It is not contingent. One cannot just watch it go by, or turn it into a "maybe." If a real need is not satisfied, something bad will happen. When the need of the homeless for affordable housing is not met, they slowly die on the street. 

So the real question is, whose need is it? Does it belong to the recipient of the assigned allocation, or to the one assigning? There is a relationship between them, and it is one of power, the power to assign. The act of assigning represents a need on the part of the one making the assignment. But as a “political need,” it is a need for the recipient to accede to it. It is what those who resist it call domination, or exploitation. It is criminal that a representationist government would engage in that. 

We see this in the way the police criminalize people on the street. They approach a person, tell the person to do something the person is not doing, like lie down on the ground, and as soon as the person ceases to obey, they are guilty of non-cooperation, or non-compliance, and can be charged and handcuffed and arrested. In circumstances like that, the person is lucky not to be beaten or tased or shot. But they have been dehumanized, and their life has been disrupted. SB-35 seems to take such police comportment as its role model. 

To assign a need, and punish non-fulfillment, is to invent a future for the other. In the case of ABAG’s 9000, the allocation appears as a proposal, yet acts like a requirement. It both invents a future for a city and obviates refusal through domination. By imposing the need to build housing, the need for affordable housing will be ignored. That is the meaning of gang rule. 

In short, assignment of a need, as a violation of autonomy, is not an academic question. It refers to real people needing affordable housing, and a real state needing housing whose character is different from what real people need. Real people need lodging. The state needs a supply of housing for political purposes (the state is not going to live in any of them). The banks need houses as assets to provide value for their securities trading. Lodging, housing, houses, and assets are all different kinds of things. And only one of those things is necessary for real people: viz. lodging. All the rest are contingent. The word "need" is used for them, but it is hype. For the structures named, the word "need" refers to both a lie and a contingency. The project advertised by SB-35 to bring new affordable housing units into existence is a sham. 

What this creates is a real need on the part of the city to get out from under the domination of assigned needs. 

In our economic environment, for-profit developers prefer to only build “market rate” housing. In our political environment, the majority of the people need affordable housing and cities cannot supply that. SB-35 didn’t go to the cities and say, “let’s negotiate some agreements whereby we can meet the state’s needs for housing in terms of its real people.” It didn’t set up a situation in which the cities could say what the people really need. It didn’t give the cities the chance to say that. Instead, the state turned the issue of housing into a protection racket. 

Somehow, it decided on its own that it had a need for housing. Or perhaps it was listening to the shills who were crying, “there is a housing crisis,” when there is no housing crisis, only an affordability crisis. 

The central problem of SB-35 is not the issue of housing, but the act of imposing a future on others, and pretending that this must necessarily be a good thing. That is not to say that SB-35 could not have been a beneficial law. It would have been had it addressed the economic side of housing affordability. Instead, it chose a political and authoritarian approach. 

This points to the need for democratizing the problem of housing. (See Part 4) The fundamental principle of democracy is that those who will be affected by a policy must be the ones who make the policy that will affect them. This has to be said again and again because it differs drastically from the representationist system that most people in this country think is "democracy." 

Gang rule is the opposite of democracy. And a representative City Council exists in between the two. Representationism is rule by an elite who become elite by winning elections. But those elections are governed by a need for enormous amounts of money to buy publicity time. Renters get no representation, and the needs of the people get reduced to TV promises. Democracy has yet to be instituted. Gang rule will have to be swept aside first.