Renters Unite!

I'm happy that I'm still able to read two books a month.  I did finish this book, Renters Unite by Jacob Stringer, in May.  So it's the second book I read in May.  Yet in the context of this blog, it counts as a June post.   

I received Renters Unite, which deals with tenant organizing, from the publisher. I then prioritized it because I'm interested in the issue.

                                                   

While doing research on Renters Unite for this review, I learned that single room occupancy residency hotels (SROs) don't exist anymore.  I did live in one briefly some time ago.  The lack of SROs has probably increased homelessness in the United States.  I would think that tenant advocates would want to keep such an option available.  People who live in hotels have different payment arrangements than tenants who live in an apartment or a room in a privately owned home. They pay the manager by the week rather than by the month, and probably have no clue who the hotel owner might be. I would think it's unsustainable to actually live in a hotel on a permanent basis.                                                     

The author, Jacob Stringer, is British.  This is why I am bringing up his use of the term "neoliberal". The American term "liberal" and the British "neoliberal" could be considered opposites in terms of the American political spectrum.  The American liberal is on the left side of that spectrum, and the British "neoliberal" is on the right side of the American spectrum.   In fact , it seems to me that British neoliberalism is the equivalent of the laissez-faire capitalism of the author Ayn Rand. ( The last time I dealt with Ayn Rand on this blog, it was in a post dealing with a collection of essays on Joss Whedon TV series here.)

I discovered that the UK has a Libertarian Party which would have been neoliberal.  According to the Wikipedia article dealing with this party, in 2008 Libertarian Party UK sent all the members of Parliament  a copy of George Orwell's 1984 with the note "This book was a warning, not a blueprint." 

There was a tenant union in Crown Heights, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. I know something about many of the Jews who resided in Crown Heights.  The Hasidim (a type of Jewish sects that emphasized religious zeal rather than scholarship) who lived in Crown Heights wouldn't have been involved in tenant unions.  Their leaders, known as Rebbes rather than Rabbis, would not have approved of such a secular activity. 

One of the ten demands of the Sindicat de Llogators, a tenant organization in Spain, was that empty properties must become public housing.  I expect that most, if not all, empty properties would be in poor condition.  They would require a great deal of work to become habitable.  So they would either continue to sit empty, or the government would sell them to private parties who would build expensive housing with high rents.

Another of the ten demands is ending property speculation "by legislating its tools out of existence".  The most important tool of property speculation in this era is the internet.  I don't think it would be a good idea to legislate the internet out of existence.  So long as the internet continues to exist, doing away with websites where property speculation takes place would be a game of whack a mole.  For every property speculation website that is made illegal, a hundred or a thousand more would pop up.  

Then there's the demand that private landlords must charge the same rent as the government charges for public housing to poor families in danger of eviction.  The landlords would claim that they'd go bankrupt.  They won't have enough funds for property taxes or making repairs if they charged the same rent as is charged for public housing.  They would sell their properties to the government, and move to a country where they could charge as much they wanted.  That country would probably be the United States.  

                                                   

                                                "Rent is both the result of inequality

                                                     and a multiplier of inequality!"                                                                                                          

                                                                 Jacob Stringer 

 

Later in this book I read about MST, Brazil's Landless Workers Movement.   They believe that land occupations improve people's lives.  They're converting jungle that is owned by no one into privately owned plantations where they can grow crops for export.

There is no consideration for the multiplicity of species that have lived in that jungle for countless millennia, and the impact on indigenous peoples who have also lived in that jungle.  The destruction of the jungle also has a huge impact on climate change for our entire planet.  We actually needed that jungle. So what seems like a wealth multiplier for Brazil has devastating impact on all of us.