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Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Philadelphia Agrees to Provide Community Housing Amid Unhoused Activist Push

After months of organizing that included the establishment of two protest encampments, Philadelphia’s unhoused people successfully pushed the city to agree to provide housing on a community land trust on October 14.

November 2, 2020 Lexi McMenamin SHADOWPROOF

https://portside.org/2020-11-02/philadelphia-agrees-provide-community-housing-amid-unhoused-activist-push

Camp James Talib-Dean, or Camp JTD, closed last week, and organizers and encampment participants will eventually control a community land trust through a non-profit organization in coordination with the city. They will manage 50 properties provided by the city and PHA, and the city will build two tiny-house villages, which won’t be ready until mid-2021, according to the Inquirer.

“We know that it’s the start of really targeting what we see as [the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA)] allowing private developers to come in and target neighborhoods,” Sterling Johnson, an organizer with the Black and Brown Workers Collective, told Shadowproof.

Johnson’s cousin was James Talib-Dean, for whom the encampment was named, after the 34-year-old organizer died by overdose in June following the encampment’s launch.

“This is a real intervention that focuses on liberation and racial justice,” Johnson said.

Organizers recognize the deal does not go far enough to meet the needs of all people who are unhoused in Philadelphia, and they vow to continue the fight on the heels of these tremendous victories.

Since June of 2020, two homeless encampments with radical and anti-racist politics have sustained into the fall in Philadelphia. During the summer’s uprisings over the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, organizers nationwide sought to tie the fight for racial justice to the fight for housing justice.

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Black Americans make up 40 percent of the homeless population, despite only making up 13 percent of the general population.

Philadelphia Housing Action — an organizing coalition including the Black and Brown Workers Collective, Occupy PHA, Philly for REAL Justice, and others — announced a tentative commitment from the city on September 26, consisting of housing for 50 mothers and children from the encampments in 15 city-owned units, which would be placed in a community land trust.

Camp JTD was home to over a hundred people, successfully resisting multiple eviction attempts from the city and the constant threat of police. Wealthy local residents complained that “they no longer feel safe going to Whole Foods” to the media.

A sister encampment, Camp Teddy, launched shortly after Camp JTD outside the headquarters of the Philadelphia Housing Authority in North Philadelphia, on a plot of heavily contested land set to host the neighborhood’s only grocery store, in a food desert. These encampments were run and maintained by unhoused people, with the support of housed allies.

“We’ve seen the people of this camp be able to handle three different final notices,” said Johnson.

This effort is deeply personal to Johnson and their community and they hope to provide a space for those often left out of public housing provisions.

“The only reason that we’re here is because we know that people have been hurt, and we’re not going to let it go anymore. For all the poor people, all the drug users, all the black sex workers, all the others: we’re not going to let that happen anymore,” they said.

Johnson’s conviction, and the perseverance of the encampment, is already paying off, despite the significant opposition.

On October 6, Camp Teddy secured a win of their own after weeks of expecting police violence.

“[The city] told the media the eviction is ongoing, and they won’t tell the public when they’re coming, so we were kind of in this place for over a week where every day we were just waiting for the cops to come and crack our heads open, and clear the camps out,” said Jennifer Bennetch, founder of Occupy PHA, the day after the agreement.

On the evening of October 5, in a rush to preserve the $52 million business deal for the grocery store development (which also included mixed-income housing), the city and PHA stated that they were willing to work with Camp Teddy.

Organizers secured nine vacant units in Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, currently in unlivable conditions; PHA committed to providing job training and resources to restore the properties.

Throughout the spring, and during the encampments, Occupy PHA helped move unhoused people into 10 unoccupied PHA-owned properties and restored them to code.

“They did a masterful job, and we have to give them credit,” PHA president and CEO Kelvin Jeremiah told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Remember, our ultimate goal was no different than theirs: promoting the urgency of getting affordable housing.”

Bennetch observed that the agreement allows for the Housing Authority to position themselves as heroes, as opposed to gatekeepers for existing housing options. Nonetheless, the residents of Camp Teddy are excited for the housing and possible job training.

These victories come during a year of coordinated rent strikes and other efforts to combat mass evictions, as 60 million people filed for unemployment within the last six months.

Protest encampments in Seattle and Minneapolis have produced mixed results; but there is hope the victories in Philadelphia may be instructive.

Philadelphia is a city struggling under the weight of the national housing crisis on top of all the other difficulties brought by neoliberal policies. It is the poorest big city in the country, which, due to the city’s intense gentrification, may only worsen.

The waiting list for public housing in Philadelphia has been closed for seven years, with 40,000 people on the list. Johnson pointed out that none of the housing given to encampment members was ever going to be considered for those on the waitlist.

“[This deal] is not enough housing to think of a permanent solution for everybody. We would like to get there, and we think that there’s enough housing in the city, and vacant housing, to reach those goals,” said Johnson. “We’re going to have to keep fighting for that.”

Organizers are hopeful that their recent successes are indicative of rising people power nationwide on issues of housing justice.

“I really want to connect with groups in other states and other cities where some of the same things are going on, and I want to get a coalition together and try to do a national push to stop housing authorities from selling land to developers,” said Bennetch, when looking to the future.

“[We could] try to get a federal policy where housing authorities will have to offer land that they’re going to get rid of to community groups to stay low income housing, stay looking the way it looks, and preserve the culture and affordability of the neighborhood.”

Nearly 1,000 Homeless People Died in LA in 2020 as 93,000 Homes Sit Vacant

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.

November 2, 2020 Alex Ferrer, Terra Graziani and Jacob Woocher TRUTHOUT

https://portside.org/2020-11-02/nearly-1000-homeless-people-died-la-2020-93000-homes-sit-vacant

In many major metropolitan areas across the United States, there are far more vacant homes than people experiencing homelessness.

This is true in New York City, it’s true in the Bay Area, and as our new report shows, it’s true in Los Angeles. Here, there are 93,000 vacant homes compared to just over 41,000 unhoused people.

Our report, the product of a collaboration between UCLA School of Law and the community-based nonprofits Strategic Actions for a Just Economy and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, is perhaps the most detailed look yet at the characteristics of residential vacancies situated in the broader speculative housing market in any city in the United States.

With the news that at least 959 unhoused people have already died on the streets of Los Angeles in 2020, it’s never been more critically urgent to understand how cities like LA end up with a surplus of luxury homes existing alongside tens of thousands of desperately poor families without roofs over their heads.

Our findings strongly suggest that we cannot rely on the operation of the market to fix our problems, whether it be housing or any other social need, because the capitalist market is the problem.

While those committed to pushing pro-market housing policies tend to argue that there will always be some vacancy as homes sit empty between residents, our numbers show that this cannot explain the vacancy LA is experiencing.

We found that out of 93,000 total vacant homes, over 46,000 units are held in a state of “non-market” vacancy, meaning they’re not just in between residents waiting for someone to lease or buy them. Of these, over 12,000 homes are categorized by the census as “for seasonal, recreational, or occasional use” — in other words, vacation properties for the rich that mostly sit empty.

Importantly, vacancy disproportionately occurs at the top of the market, with our analysis showing a very straightforward relationship: the higher a unit’s rent, the more likely it is to be vacant.In Los Angeles there are 93,000 vacant homes compared to just over 41,000 unhoused people.

In LA, like other booming cities, what’s getting built is in this top end of the market — the incredibly expensive homes that most Angelenos cannot afford. For example, 97 percent of the units currently under construction in the city’s downtown area fall under what CoStar categorizes as the “4 & 5 star” class, with average rents over $2,800 per month. According to CoStar’s calculations, these types of units have a massively high vacancy rate of over 16 percent, compared to a rate of under 5 percent for units not under this super-luxury designation.

A 2019 report by the city’s Housing Department comes to similar conclusions. The authors find a “dramatic difference in vacancy rates” between high-end and mid- or low-end units, and that while thousands of units are being added to the supply of high-end housing, the stock of more moderately priced units is actually falling. The city’s “hottest housing markets” have the highest vacancy rates, with neighborhoods like Hollywood and Venice potentially seeing rates as high as 15 percent. The data suggest “prolonged periods of housing units sitting idle in these neighborhoods,” which cannot be explained by the time it takes to lease-up newly constructed units.

Another important trend we document is the increasing financialization of urban real estate. According to data from the LA County Assessor, 67 percent of all residential units in the city are owned by corporate entities and other nonindividual investors, which is 2.5 times the national average. Corporate entities also own 76 percent of all vacant lots in the city not owned by public entities, accounting for 22 square miles of vacant land.

More than ever, owners in LA see housing and land as a speculative investment, an asset to profit off of in the future instead of a home to house someone now. And the consequences for ordinary people are disastrous.

Neoliberal housing advocates — like “YIMBYs” (Yes In My Backyard) and market urbanists that tend to dominate mainstream accounts of the crisis — suggest that we can build our way out of this crisis of tenancy, of people chronically not being able to access shelter. But if we look critically at what is getting built, we see that it will never provide relief for poor, or even middle-class Angeleno renters.We cannot rely on the operation of the market to fix our problems because the capitalist market is the problem.

Our data suggest the benefits of producing housing at the top will not “trickle down” to the masses. With so many units sitting vacant, the “filtering” theorized by these advocates — essentially the idea that homes at the bottom will become available and more affordable as wealthier people move into newer housing — fails to materialize.

Even if we assume that the pro-market boosters and their economic theories are right about the trickle-down effects of increasing market-rate supply, the supposed benefits will never come close to matching the scale of what is needed. Take downtown LA again as an example, which has been pointed to by local real estate journalist Steven Sharp as a model for the entire region due to its building boom. But Sharp’s own numbers reveal how weak his argument is: The coveted prize from all this building is that rents in the neighborhood have “remained flat,” while elsewhere they’ve gone up. Similarly, an article from Curbed LA earlier this year admits that despite the “incredible amount of units” built in this neighborhood over the past years, rents are just down 1 percent.

With over 600,000 households in LA spending over 90 percent of their income on rent, the poor don’t have time to wait for new construction to trickle down to lower average rents. The most vulnerable tenants need to be sheltered from the capriciousness of the market, not subjected to it. The idea that building super-luxury homes that poor people cannot afford is actually good for them is a fiction that must be dispensed with as soon as possible.

Our report ends by calling for a strong vacancy tax, among other policies the City of LA could pursue, and clarifies the legal framework that would allow cities in California to do this despite restrictions on taxing property in the state’s constitution. A vacancy tax would both incentivize owners to fill their units and raise revenue that could be put to use for social housing. Essentially, a vacancy tax would make it more unaffordable for owners to use housing as a speculative investment.

But we need to go much further, something that has been made especially clear as the COVID-19 pandemic has combined with the racialized precarity of the capitalist real estate market to create what is possibly the greatest ongoing wave of mass evictions and homelessness our country has ever seen.

We must see the 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. That vacant homes coexist alongside people sleeping on the street is a disturbing truth in many of our cities across the country. It is imperative to not only reflect on this as coincidence, but to understand both vacancy and houselessness as co-produced by the larger system.