Piper Winkler is a founding member of Harvard Students for Bernie: A College Democrats Subgroup.
Bernie Sanders is now in his second run for the Democratic primary nomination for president.
Two Sundays ago, organizers from City Life/Vida Urbana, a Boston community-based organization for economic, racial, and social justice, staged a die-in in the heart of Harvard Square to demand rent control, among other forms of housing justice. As a method of resisting gentrification, displacement, and housing insecurity, the die-in has profound significance. It rejects the narrative that for thousands upon thousands of American people every year, a commodified housing market — which puts a prohibitive cost on what should be a human right — is anything but fatal. By its own nature, this market dispels the evidence of its impact upon low-income individuals and communities. The crisis of housing insecurity is frequently a story of neighbors scattered to the four winds by no-fault evictions and of landlords enacting prohibitive rent increases in order to make space for new, affluent tenants, forcing out the former occupants. In 2013, an East Bostonian named Keylin Chicas had no choice but to move to the more affordable suburbs when her landlord hiked up the monthly rent by $550, and the average monthly rent in East Boston has only risen since then.
Because I am a Boston-based activist for housing justice, it is clear to me that the status quo of a commodified housing market depends upon the fragmentation of low-income communities. It is a status quo that, every year, directly causes the deaths of thousands of people forced into homelessness. These deaths are not counted or addressed; they are accepted as a normal outcome of our housing system. Yet for those like me who regularly mourn the loss of friends and community members as a result of this system, it is impossible to forget that human lives are considered second to profit in a country with almost 1.5 million vacant homes. In the 2020 presidential election, we have the opportunity to wrest control from a presidential administration that proposed reducing HUD funding by $9.6 billion and interning unsheltered people experiencing homelessness. This opportunity is nothing short of an ethical imperative. Yet a mere end to these unmitigated attacks on human life and safety will not change a market that places a price tag on a human right. To do this, we need national rent control, a vast expansion of our affordable housing stock, and a plan to end homelessness. We need President Bernie Sanders.
In 1986, John Davis, housing aide to the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, observed a conversation between the mayor and the owners of Northgate Apartments, the city’s largest affordable-housing complex. The owners had discovered a loophole in the federal program that subsidized the affordable apartments, one that would enable them to convert the development into luxury housing. Then-Mayor Bernie Sanders, however, had other plans. By Davis’s account, he retorted, “Over my dead body are you going to displace 336 working families.”
The deciding factor in this battle was a battery of progressive housing policies, championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.). It is unlikely that Northgate Apartments would be under protection today as a long-term affordable housing complex if the Sanders administration had not ushered in ordinances to require a notice of two years before owners could convert their rental properties to condos, enable tenants to buy their units, and ensure that any destroyed unit of affordable housing would be replaced with a new one. It is unlikely that Northgate would be tenant-owned today if Sanders had not collaborated with state-level leadership to raise $12 million, which allowed for the complex to be purchased from its owners and refurbished, and if the city had not provided funding to hire an organizer who would help create the Northgate Residents Association. If none of these actions had been taken, Northgate Apartments would likely have been converted to another luxury housing development.
The story of Northgate is currently playing out in every major city across this country. We do an injustice to the low- and middle-income tenants of this country when we are content to assume that the mayors of these cities will look every enterprising landlord in the eye, listen to their proposals for more luxury apartments and fewer housing opportunities for working families, and say, “Over my dead body.” We need bold housing policy at the national level, and Bernie Sanders rises to this challenge as the presidential candidate for housing justice.
Sanders’s Housing for All is the most comprehensive and progressive housing plan in the history of American politics. It begins by declaring housing a fundamental human right. In service of this declaration, the plan includes the full funding of the Section 8 program to eliminate waitlists, the banning of no-fault evictions, the abolition of exclusionary zoning ordinances, and the creation of a National Fair Housing Agency to end housing discrimination. Under the Housing for All plan, $32 billion will be spent over five years on ending homelessness by expanding McKinney-Vento homeless assistance grants and the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund.
The rationale underlying this visionary suite of policies reiterates the seriousness with which Sanders centers his slogan, “Not me, us,” as the linchpin of his campaign. Informed by Sanders’s own upbringing in a working-class household, plans like Housing for All demonstrate his sensitivity to the stranglehold that issues of economic and social inequality continue to exercise over working families. In the case of Housing for All, Sanders tweeted about how his own family gained financial stability that was afforded to them by rent control. “That most minimal form of economic security was crucial for our family,” he shared. “All families should have that.”
This is why Sanders introduced a plan that would extend housing security to millions of working American families like his own. In Housing for All, under the “Protect Tenants” section, Sanders includes a provision to “enact a national cap on annual rent increases at no more than 3 percent or 1.5 times the Consumer Price Index (whichever is higher) to help prevent the exploitation of tenants at the hands of private landlords.” Rent control is a powerful means of countering displacement and protecting low-income communities. For instance, Jacobin writers Amee Chew and Katie Goldstein have observed that the residents of rent-controlled apartments in Manhattan were ten times as likely as their counterparts in market-rate apartments to have inhabited their units for over twenty years. They argue that when rent control is used to prevent housing from becoming unaffordable, it enables tenants to invest more of their income in local businesses, and it ensures that renters like Keylin Chicas are not forced out of their communities by an all-powerful profit motive.
Through diverse policy avenues, Sanders’s answer to the affordable-housing crisis is nothing short of the “big solution” that Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted and head of the Princeton-based Eviction Lab, prescribes. It reaches beyond Housing for All to emphasize the implications of a right to sustainable, secure housing on environmental justice and criminal justice reform. In his Green New Deal, Sanders declares that among those who “have borne and will bear [the burden of climate change] disproportionately” are “communities of color [and] working class people.” It is no coincidence that these groups have also been the greatest targets for discriminatory and profit-motivated housing practices. This is why Sanders’ just transition for workers in the fossil fuel industry includes five years of housing assistance; it is also why the Green New Deal promises to “[b]uild the 7.4 million affordable housing units to close the affordable housing gap across the country and guarantee safe, decent, accessible affordable housing.” In a nation committed to the health and wellbeing of its people and its environment, sustainable, environmentally friendly housing should not be reserved for the wealthy. A similar commitment to racial and economic justice through housing affordability is visible in Sanders’s Justice and Safety for All plan, which calls for the decriminalization of homelessness as a necessary part of criminal justice reform. This plan introduced Sanders’ proposal to end homelessness in five years with an investment of $32 billion. When the three richest Americans own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent, people should not be terrorized by law enforcement for the crime of being homeless.
Matthew Desmond concludes Evicted with a damning truth. “This cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering — by no American value is this situation justified,” he writes. “No moral code or ethical principle … can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.” Half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck; for them, homelessness is not a far-removed tragedy but an ever-present threat. If an individual experiencing homelessness joins the waitlist for Section 8 housing in San Diego at the time that I am writing this, she will, on average, wait eight to 10 years before being given a housing voucher. For her and for many of the 80,000 other people currently on the San Diego Section 8 waitlist, that wait would meet its quickest end with Bernie Sanders taking office as the President of the United States in 2021, when he would fully fund the Section 8 program to eliminate waitlists. This time difference is nothing short of a matter of life or death.
Many of our homeless brothers and sisters will not live to see the election in 2020 if our housing system is not decommodified now. And many more would still be with us today if Sanders’ plan had been implemented years ago, as it should have been. We will never cease to mourn them. When I told Bernie Sanders this during a question-and-answer session in Hooksett, New Hampshire, several weeks ago, I saw clearly in his eyes that I had told him something he already knew. Knowledge is meaningless when it is not used to bring forth necessary change. Housing policy is a litmus test for the Democratic presidential candidates’ ability to translate their knowledge of the affordable housing crisis into a plan for equity and justice. Of these candidates, only Bernie Sanders demonstrates a consistent record and a vision for the future that passes the test.
Image Credit: Flickr / Shelly Prevost