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Fran Quigley directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law.
The United States is a global anomaly in our collective delusion about the power of charity to address human suffering. A far better approach would be to guarantee inalienable economic rights and structure society around their fulfillment.
The US spends far less on social programs than comparable nations, and red-tape barriers ensure that millions who qualify for help never receive it. Republicans are further eviscerating the safety net when we should be repairing and expanding it.
To prevent economic collapse amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the government unleashed the power it always had. New programs caused hunger, evictions, and child poverty to plummet. Why not just continue them? Because employers thrive on desperation.
America’s packed eviction courts and overflowing homeless shelters are the result of decades of deliberate policy choices. We once made better choices rooted in a commitment to providing decent, affordable housing for all. It’s not too late to reverse course.
In New York City, working-class tenants are often victimized by predatory landlords. Their horror stories show the need for radical housing reform inside and outside the city.
We recognize extortionate prices for lifesaving medicine or bottled water after a natural disaster as price gouging. Landlords want us to believe that rent hikes forcing people into homelessness are just the market at work, but that’s not true.
Corporate landlords and private equity investors are overtaking the US housing system. As renters face increasingly excessive rent, a new National Tenants Bill of Rights aims to provide them with basic rights and protections.
Across the US, labor unions are starting to ally with tenant organizers around affordable housing and tenant protection campaigns. The efforts reflect a growing sense of shared interests — and shared corporate enemies.
Confronted with a deepening housing affordability crisis across the country, some US legislators are turning to the successful social housing programs of countries like Austria and Singapore. We spoke to two of them, from Hawaii and California.
Today’s gentrification is not an accident, nor is it simply the effects of shifting preferences for urban living or the so-called invisible hand of capitalism. It’s the intentional, predictable result of policy choices. And we can halt it in its tracks.
Vienna’s social housing triumphs show that when governments invest in housing as a human right, they can combat homelessness and inequality. It is an inspiration for what cities can accomplish if they elevate human needs over the pursuit of private profits.
Across the United States, housing developers are receiving huge amounts of public money to spur displacement of longtime working-class residents. A proposed Louisville, Kentucky, ordinance would stop that.
Across the United States, we’re in the middle of a brutal housing crisis. We need rent control to get us out of it.
In mobile home parks around the country, millions of tenants and owners are being mercilessly exploited and regularly evicted, often by giant Wall Street firms like Blackstone.
We’re in the middle of an affordable housing crisis. We can’t solve it without drastically increasing government funding for public housing.
Millions of renters are suffering immensely right now as they face down imminent evictions in a housing market that has seen rents skyrocket in recent years. Joe Biden’s recently announced renters relief plan won’t do much to aid them.
Rents are too high. Joe Biden should issue an executive order to lower them.
When housing is a profit-making venture rather than a human right, we’re perpetually stuck in an evictions crisis. Right now, that crisis is particularly dire. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The Supreme Court has chosen to side with landlords over the millions of renters on the edge of eviction. The tidal wave of pain that will soon descend on the nation is hard to comprehend.
Even before the pandemic, America was in the midst of a massive housing crisis. Now, it’s far worse. Our housing agenda has to include investing in public housing, universal rent control, just-cause eviction, and a broad push to decommodify housing.