Housing Justice is one of the most relevant, touchstone issues of our time–worldwide, nationwide, statewide, and in Albuquerque.
Shelter from environmental elements is a human lifesaving necessity. Having a place of home is also necessary for human wellbeing.
Anytime a human being doesn’t have reasonable access to shelter and the opportunity to create a home, then society is unjust.
In the far past, humans found or built their shelters from what they had surrounding them in their immediate environment. Over hundreds and thousands of years, paradigms and actualities of house and home have developed (for worse and for better). People sought materials through trade (if they had the means). As well, significance and purposes additional to shelter were associated to houses–comfort, status, artistry, and even such things as gender roles.
The lack or inadequacy of housing has always been a tool of, and an indication of, the presence of systemic oppression. Consider the housing violence of feudal serfs, of keeping women “in the kitchen,” of American slavery and sharecropping, of the industrial and early immigrant age, of urban housing projects, and of indigenous reservations and housing projects (among other housing and oppression histories; they cannot all be enumerated here).
On the other hand, few things are as healing and as indicative of freedom, justice, and prosperity as when and where there is the experience of house and home.
These days, obtaining a dwelling is an exercise in navigating a slew of barriers. No one is allowed to build their own structure without permits and without following exact building and zoning laws. Housing is a for-profit market, a commodity, a luxury instead of a natural flow within life and community. Wages, even those far above minimum wage, do not permit obtaining either a purchased or rented dwelling; the math simply doesn’t work. And, in our culture and market, there often remain discriminatory class barriers to house and home (including but not limited to race; so-called non-traditional families; and citizenship status).
Homelessness is violence. Poverty is violence.
John Acosta (artist) in a speech on March 18, 2023 at the Grow the Future mural unveiling (Albuquerque).
Nothing humans do systemically is essentially real or inherent in the world or universe. All of our systems are invented systems. We choose and dedicate ourselves to theories and values; our behavior and institutions then arise from those ideas and beliefs.
The conditions individuals and families in our society currently face regarding obtaining and keeping a place to live are ultimately based on our ideas about being human and being a community and what house and home is and who can have them and on what rules of access. If there is so much difficulty relating to housing then it directly reflects on the ideas and values we hold collectively and suggests that our paradigm lacks imagination and compassion. The call, then, is to more creativity and love as we make housing choices for ourselves and as we design and execute concrete policies within our social decision-making bodies.
An Outline of the Current System of Housing
A description of the current mores of housing cannot be offered without reference to capitalism.
Housing is capitalism captured.
Capitalism is where ownership, capital, and ease of access (ability to meet price) is held by the few (the capitalists). Capitalism posits and requires a massive class of workers/servers and consumers/debtors/renters/subscribers–the many that are the material for the ownership and ease of the few. Human beings and the natural ways of life are reduced to economic utility and assigned price that rarely has any correspondence to natural effort nor holistic understanding and living. In capitalism, social decision-making, emerging reality, and personal worth is determined by the presence, direction, and application of capital (money) (NOT by mutual community decision-making [i.e. voting which means VOICING] nor by natural living and justice).
In the current system, a house is a product.
It is expected that you will be housed as one of the employed masses. It is expected that you will be a consumer of a dwelling (from a landlord or mortgagor). The purpose of a house within capitalism is not home and living; the purpose is the harnessing of this fundamental aspect of life into the project of the maintenance of capitalism and the flow of money to the few. (Capitalism is the harnessing of ALL aspects of life into a product with a price. PRODUCTion.)
In order to obtain any product, monetary price must be tendered in order to have the access ticket. In order to meet the price, it is expected that, first, one rents one’s body, soul, intellect and creativity, and most of the time of their week/life to a capitalist (i.e. employment) or to wear oneself out in their own enterprise (i.e. small business owner). The value of you renting your body depends on what is trending (or forced to trend) in the market, not on your level of actual work (effort over time) nor of your intrinsic value as a human being.
After renting your body and time in order to receive a wage or salary on that, the assumption is that the pool of credit (i.e. money) you have received from employing yourself within capitalism (i.e. to a specific capitalist) then allows you to expend out the same token back into capitalism (i.e. other specific capitalists) in order to be dispensed from them your needs and desires, including a dwelling.
Keep in mind that as a consumer NOT the capitalist within the capitalistic system, you will not own your home–you will rent or debt it. (A mortgage is a form of rent, not of ownership.)
There may be alternatives to housing outside of capitalism and consumption. However, capitalism is not going to advertise nor provide amenable means for anyone to live outside participation in capitalism. Thus dignified and prosperous alternatives are inaccessible to many (i.e. require privilege many do not have).
This flow called capitalism (“you rent your body to me and then in any case I get returned what I gave you as you consume from me”) is suspect when plainly understood even if those employed tend to enjoy a reasonable match between their employment (body rent) and their expenses (consumption and rents). We could tell ourselves that the few who fall through the cracks into houselessness were by some lack of (capitalistic) virtue on their part–an anomaly to a system believed to be generally functional and good (acceptation of the advertising).
However, in the last few years, more than ever our mainstream system excludes a greater portion of persons from obtaining a dwelling within or by means of that system. A greater and greater number of individuals submit to full time employment and yet do not receive enough credit for that service that allows them to apply to a dwelling for themselves (much less a family)–and would not receive enough tokens even if they could be employed for 24/7. Or if they manage to prioritize their system credits toward a dwelling, there is nothing leftover to apply toward additional needs. That math amounts to employment slavery and epidemic-level houselessness (and pressures to find and create barely sufficient workarounds that fall without what the system purports to deliver).