Public Comment

The existence and growth of homelessness in the US and the world loudly imposes a question; how can housing not be a human right? How could a self-respecting society not provide housing for all the people composing it? There are a few Constitutions in the world in which housing is named as a human right (e.g. Venezuela). What is preventing it from being named a human right in most other countries? Is it not time to speak about this? Does the existence of homelessness suggest that human existence is not the primary concern for human society?

Rights

Let us begin with civil rights. The Constitution provides that government shall make no laws abridging freedom of speech, religion, press, the right to bear arms, security in one’s home, etc. When we speak about civil rights, we reason logically from these constitutional clauses. They describe relations between individuals and political (legislative) power. They represent how the Constitution, the source of political structure, sets limits on its own power. Nevertheless, those limits are often self-indulgent. For instance, the police have SWAT teams and no-knock warrants that are legally and existentially in violation of civil rights. If rights can be violated, then they exist only as politically bestowed. When the Constitution bans their abridgement, it implies that abridgement was imminently possible.

Human rights exist as characteristics of people, and thus of relations between people. The Declaration of Independence opens with a reference to human rights declaring them "inalienable." But the Constitution amends that to say, “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” If deprivation is possible under certain conditions, then the right is not inalienable. And again, life and liberty are violated by the police all the time. To handcuff a person without warranted arrest and without due process is a violation of human rights. When a cop shoots a man in the back, it is intentional murder. So what are we really talking about? To disrespect a person’s human rights is to demean their humanity. To demean the humanity of the homeless, as so many neighborhood home-owners tend to do, is precisely to invoke housing as a human right.

The right to property is more complicated. There is a contract clause in the Constitution that says. “No state shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts.” Contract is a relation of agreement between two people, or two legal entities, involving exchange and price. Pollution cannot be stopped without purchasing the polluter’s compliance. Sale of land cannot be rescinded except with negotiated compensation. All disputes over property devolve to issues of cost. To speak about the money expended when a marriage ceremony in Afghanistan is bombed by US airplanes becomes a way of not thinking about the many dismembered bodies.

When property rights crash against human rights, it is property rights that win. If a small town in Illinois decides that a black family should not be allowed to buy a house in it because that will reduce real estate values for all, the sale is voided. When property owners complain about a homeless encampment, it is the encampment that is razed, and not the owners penalized for harassing or illegally molesting the homeless. So how are we supposed to speak about "human" rights at all?

If property is a relation between contracting parties, is the same true for life and liberty? It is against power that the deprivation of life and liberty banned. Why is that ban of less concern or import than the sanctity of contract? How did that hierarchy come to exist? Either it represents a huge hypocrisy central to this society, or the sanctity of contract is a mistake. If property is a relation between people, then so is life and liberty. But they are not mediated by cash. Does housing relate to rights only through cash, or does it have a direct relation to life and liberty?

This problem extends deep into this society. Private prisons are institutions that assist government in depriving people of their liberty (with due process). They do it for profit, which transgresses rights insofar as property becomes the location of power, and not simply its instrument. They have transgressed the constitutional equity between human and property rights. Once power locates itself in property, property holds clear hegemony over the right to life and liberty. The police, who have established their insular power and impunity to kill on the street and get paid for it, have stepped across that boundary as well. How are we to rectify this transgression, to render this society a democracy and not an autocracy of property rights?

For housing to be a human right, it would have to stand with life and liberty, rather than with property. Nevertheless, housing has a cost. The act of making housing a human right would subordinate that contractual aspect to its human dimension; in other words, it would invert the hierarchy, and be an instance of giving human rights hegemony over property rights. It would undo the hierarchy that the sanctity of contract has imposed on life and liberty. Government would have to take responsibility for housing as it does for life and liberty. In short, it would produce a situation in which the recognition would be unavoidable that this society has yet to found itself on human rights. That is, it has yet to become a democracy.

The dichotomy between democracy and autocracy

The idea of government taking responsibility for housing has been the subject of this series articles (on SB-35). We have seen that, in terms of that law, the government of California has acted like a classical protection racket, while at the same time being in conflict with its own state Constitution. In that sense, it enacts an autocracy of property rights, which is in evidence all around us in the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. It is precisely that gap that people are calling in question by demanding affordable housing. Affordability is the nickname for that gap.

Confronted with the coincidence of two governmental systems, the autocratic and the democratic, what marks their conflict is their inversion of procedure. In one system, political decisions are made, and then there is outreach to explain those decisions to the people, and get feedback on what is already an accomplished fact. In the other system, there is outreach to the people first, with discussion on issues and on the resolution of problems. It produces thinking and awareness, and often consensus on the basis of which decisions can then be made. The first system is one of autocracy, government acting first and on its own, and then imposing itself on the people. The second system is that of democracy in which the people discuss what they need and expect elected representatives to manifest those needs as governmental enactments. 

It is this dichotomy of systems that is exemplified by SB-35. It is an ordinance that imposes a housing responsibility on the cities of California, and then calls for discussion. The alternate process would involve discussion of real urban needs (affordable housing, an end to police brutality, care for the homeless as constituents of a city, etc.), and then call for representatives to represent their many resolutions. Thus, neighborhood people would be involved in making the political discussion that would then affect them. 

Autocracy is the system enacted by the corporate structure. A board of directors makes decisions, and the corporation then goes out and sells those decisions to the public and to its own lower level managers and workers. This is the path of economic enterprise. It is no longer “private enterprise” because corporations are not owned by individuals. Indeed, it is the corporations that own the individuals that work for them insofar as they turn those individuals into managerial machines for the operation of the corporate structure. 

What SB-35 demonstrates is that our political system is an autocracy, like that of corporate operations. State governments, even though elected, act as boards of directors, making decisions, and then selling those decisions to the public. We have seen the malfeasance of this in SB-35’s concept of "proposed needs," a concept that violates common sense. 

Furthermore, this government operation clearly obeys the interests of the rich minority, the developers and the real estate financial corporations, over the interests of the communities. In providing enormous opportunities for the rich (mainly corporate entities), the legislature becomes their agent, functioning within the process by which the rich get richer. It thus also operates within the hierarchy of property rights over other human rights. 

It is in direct opposition to this autocracy of real estate corporatization that the demands of the people and the communities can no longer be ignored, but are instead a direct demand for democracy, a demand for democratization of housing development, which ultimately becomes a demand for housing as a human right. The idea that housing is a human right concretely marks the difference between autocracy and democracy in the US today. 

A word about the relationship of "rich" and "poor." There is a mythology that says the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It is mythic because it simply presents itself as an observation on the human condition. But in that, it is wrong. The rich get richer because they impoverish the poor. That impoverishment is the machinery by which the rich get richer. When society becomes an impoverishment machine, it produces both wealth and destitution inseparably. The rich get richer by making the poor poorer. With respect to housing, this myth asserts that homelessness is produced by a housing shortage rather than by rent gouging and arbitrary increases in rent levels, which become the machinery that is throwing people on the street. 

The nature of corporatization  

But how did we arrive at a situation in which the corporation took over not only the economy but the structure of politics as well, and imposed their version of autocracy on even electoral processes? By taking over the economy, they have ensured that the rich (themselves) get richer, and done so by perfecting their impoverishment procedures. 

The essential fact about the corporate structure is that it operates in securities markets. Whatever corporations do in production, even in its most direct manufacturing form, it is overseen and dominated by what happens in the securities markets. Companies succeed or go bankrupt according to what happens in those markets, even if their product is good, and their production is profitable. We saw that happen to the Nummi plant in Fremont in 2009. 

This situation evolved over the last 50 years out of the multinational corporate crisis in the 1970s. Multinational corporations made their first appearance as part of the Marshall Plan (1950s), and found they could operate more smoothly by having headquarters and charters in several countries at the same time. The key to its success was the international dollar, which enabled currency transfer and exchange on a stable basis. 

The system went into crisis in 1973 when the dollar came off the gold standard. US militarism, Cold War bases, and the War in Vietnam had drained US gold reserves. The multinational corporations (MNCs) realized they needed a way of controlling politics in other countries that didn’t depend on the US military. Thus, they developed a centralized form of global financial operations. 

This centralization of financial operations, in the context of a global dispersion of production (which occurred in the 80s) produced a profound division between the financial economy and the productive economy, in which the former was predominant over the latter. Production even became internationalist, with production assembly lines strung out through many countries. The result was the emergence of two other branches of economy, service (locally oriented), and logistics, the transport of goods, machines, and information from one place to another. Ships, planes, trucking, warehousing, computer communications, and the movement of money has become the bloodstream of the economy. Logistics doesn’t produce or finance, nor does it add value to commodities. But it has become essential to all economic processes. 

The way housing has reflected this corporate evolution  

Housing reflected this process as it developed. During the settlement of the continent, housing was built as lodging for farmers and townspeople. As the need was filled, houses got bought and sold. The resulting market in houses turned houses into commodities. After World War II, the housing boom brought different funding schemes into existence, and mortgaging became an industry of its own. It marked a separation between housing finance and housing commodification. Along with housing markets, what could be called a rental market developer that had financial implications far beyond mere owner debt and income. As with the separation between corporate finance and corporate production, housing rental markets became independent of the character of the housing, and rent were charged that had nothing to do with the actual house or its features. This was concomitant with the rise of subprime mortgages during the 2000s, and led to the crisis of 2008. Subprimes were invented to attract mortgage "buyers" who weren’t really ready for house ownership. The resulting overproduction of mortgages led to massive foreclosures on housing and the more general crisis of that year. 

In the wake of that crisis, a new form of financial corporation emerged, one in which houses were bought up in great quantities from banks and foreclosure auctions and impoverished owners, and became the substance of a new form of financialization. A corporation like Blackstone or Compass does not care if a house is occupied or not. It uses its ownership as pure asset value, as the underlying value for its corporate securities. Then, it makes money on the variations in price of those securities. So this sets housing into its last corporate phase as asset for financial corporations that don’t care what happens to the houses. 

In Berkeley, more market rate housing is going to be built, even in the face of a glut, and the financial corporations will get richer while more people will be priced out of the rental markets and be thrown into homelessness. 

In effect, these real estate corporations have become extractive, mining the “raw material” of low income communities like a kind of mineral. Low income properties produce higher value gains (capital gains), with higher development profits because they buy into low property value communities. 

In a sense, housing has become the orphan of the economy. It is produced by an industry that has only corporate customers, a debt structure that lends itself to endless speculation, an economic niche that locks housing into asset value, and which is economically separated from its social function as housing. It is not in the productive economy, nor the financial, nor the service economy. For that reason, it ends up in the logistics economy, simply as place, location, a space in which people can live, or go to when they get off work. 

If housing were to become a human right, it would be resurrected from its orphan status, and placed on the map (rather than the ledger) as a social factor. Many know this. It is government that has to catch up with that fact. What will this entail? 

Housing as a human right  

What does this idea signify in a society in which property rights take priority over human rights. 

Housing cannot be a human right as long as houses can be considered commodity property. In order for housing to be a human right, houses must enter a different relation to persons and to state power. They must escape being something that can reduce other human rights to lesser status. They must be that form of social property that prevents property rights from oppressing and impoverishing people. That would mean to strip way the intervening modes of economy, such as commodity, mortgage, and corporate asset, and bring housing back to earth as the human right to lodging and home. 

Let community begin again in such a resurrected human space. This is not a juridical or judicial or commercial consideration. It is an ethical issue.