Toward a saner housing policy

Socialist Review, 2001 by Mecca, Tommi Avicolli

"Las caras palidas tratan a la tierra madre y al cielo padre como si fueran simples cosas que se compran, como si fueran cuentas de collares que intercambian por otros objetos." - Carta del Jefe Seattle al Gran Jefe Blanco en Washington.1

("Pale faces treat the mother earth and the father sky as if they were simple things that could be bought, as if they were necklaces that can be traded for other things." - Letter from Chief Seattle to the Great White Chief in Washington.)

The current housing crisis in San Francisco, with its escalating rents and evictions and below-one-percent vacancy rate, is the kind of urban nightmare that exposes the obvious shortcomings of the way we do housing in America. It begs for creative solutions to providing housing for poor and low-income people that look beyond the free market and other capitalist notions.

Ultimately, it forces us to question the very way we think of this land we live on. Is it, as Chief Seattle points out in his famous 1854 letter to President Franklin Pierce in response to the chief executive's offer to buy his tribe's land, a mere trinket to be bought and sold, or is it something to be shared and treated with respect? Certainly, it's something that should be there for all of us regardless of ability to pay. The question is since we are trapped in a capitalist society, how do we manage to put ideals like these into practical solutions?

I first became aware of the San Francisco housing crisis almost three years ago when a group calling itself the Gay and Lesbian Housing Alliance put forth a ballot measure (Prop. E) to remove rent control on buildings of two and four units (about 50,000 apartments). Their logic, twisted as it was, was that it harmed seniors, people with AIDS, and others who couldn't control who lived in their buildings. In reality, they were, or represented, landlords who wanted to cash in on an increasingly lucrative housing market by evicting tenants in order to raise rents. Removing rent control was a sure way to get rid of those low-rent-paying tenants and to allow landlords in these two- and four-unit buildings to hike rents at will.

San Francisco's rent control policy, which has been in effect since 1979, allows for annual cost-of-living rent increases (usually from 1 to 3 percent) in buildings built before 1979. It also makes it more difficult for landlords to evict tenants without just cause, such as for nonpayment of rent.

While San Francisco's housing market has always been a tight one, given the limited geography of a seven-square-mile city at the tip of a peninsula, there were usually enough people moving in and out of the city to keep an adequate supply of apartments available at most times. When I arrived in October 1991, apartments were aplenty. I found one in two days. My current roommate, who was my co-worker at the time, used to move around a lot in those days, never failing to find a new place within a couple weeks. And he made under $10 an hour.

What made San Francisco such a mecca for queers, artists, and others was the fact that even with a low-paying job, one could find a cheap flat and with a few roommates, afford to be an activist or an artist and still pay the rent.

All that changed around 1995 when a boom in the computer industry to the south of San Francisco sent an influx of high-income folks into the city to search for housing. Rents soared and kept climbing. Stories abounded, many of them taking on the status of urban myths, that desperate dot-comers were bribing landlords with as much as a year's rent in advance to obtain apartments.

Housing became scarcer and scarcer-and more and more expensive.

San Francisco average rents on two-bedroom apartments have shot up over the $2,000 level according to draft results of the annual Tenants Union classified advertising survey. The average two-bedroom apartment advertised in February and March of this year is now $2,003; this is up 28 percent from the same period in 1997, when two-bedroom apartments averaged $1,724. The 1997 rents were up 37 percent from the year before. (Tenant Times, spring 1998)

By fall 2002 a two-bedroom in my neighborhood in the Castro rented for $3,000 a month.

When I joined the tenants' movement in 1997, it was already almost three decades old. I didn't realize it would consume my life and change the way I looked at identity politics. I came out in 1971 in the rush of post-Stonewall activism that took many cities by storm, including Philadelphia, where I was attending Temple University, a school for working-class kids like myself.

I was always aware of class issues but remained determined not to let them shatter the solidarity I felt with other queers. In the battle against Prop. E and in other tenant struggles that followed, I found myself pitted against queers who were protecting their interests as property owners and landlords. It was a rude awakening. Their class interest - and their desire to make money - outweighed their concern for tenants with AIDS and working-class folks. It made me realize that I had little in common with them other than the obvious.