No Affordable Housing But Tons of Luxury Housing. Why? Because We Live in a Fake Democracy, a Dictatorship of the Rich. But Harvard Magazine Says It's Because Regular People Are Selfish!

We are rained-upon with such elitist explanations for our problems, all designed to cover up the real explanation: class inequality

Below is a five minute video talk by yours truly about the real democracy we need instead of the fake democracy we have. One obvious feature of our fake democracy—a dictatorship of the rich—is the fact that tons of luxury housing is being built while there are millions of people deprived of affordable housing.

Most people are furious about this and believe we need to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor. Here online are photos of 500 of my zip code neighbors saying this.

If these people knew that they were part of the vast majority in this egalitarian revolutionary aspiration then they would be taking concrete steps to make such a revolution happen, like this. But alas, they do NOT know they are part of the vast majority (read why this is so here); they believe they are a tiny and hopelessly weak minority. They feel hopeless. This is why they are not yet organizing and building the egalitarian revolutionary movement in the way I suggest YOU do here.

The ruling class tells us that the chief cause of the lack of affordable housing is that ordinary people are greedy and selfish. The argument goes like this (you can read it, for example, in this Harvard Magazine article).

The Harvard Magazine article says that the reason there’s not enough affordable housing for the demand (and hence why housing and rent are so expensive today) is because zoning laws don’t allow sufficient housing to be build in the places where people want to live (near where they work.) Zoning laws, for example, only allow single family homes on lots large enough to have four homes, etc. And the reason the zoning laws are like this is because of NIMBY—Not In My Back Yard: people don’t want their neighborhood to become less desirable due to higher density housing and loss of green space (parks, nice back yards, landscaping, etc.) and so forth. People, in other words, are greedy and selfish.

This is a big lie! It is a lie told by the rich who have utter contempt for the have-nots.

The fact is that so-called NIMBY people have very reasonable desires. The problem is not NIMBY people. The problem is that the jobs that people want to live near are all concentrated in small geographical areas, resulting in the need to either a) not have enough housing near the jobs built for those who work there, or b) building the needed housing by making the density higher than desirable and eliminating green space to the detriment of the current residents.

And the REASON jobs are so concentrated in small geographical areas, instead of more spread out so it would be easy to build the needed housing without infringing on the reasonable desires of current residents, is because the people with the real power in our society—the rich—want them to be that way, because it enables them to make greater profits, and they don’t give a damn that geographically concentrating jobs this way forces the have-nots to endure absurdly high home and rent costs (often going homeless) and to make unfair demands against NIMBY home owners. In fact, pitting current NIMBY home-owners against those suffering from the lack of affordable housing is a kind of divide-and-rule of the have-nots, which the rich LOVE.

This is the truth that Harvard Magazine and all the mass media censor.

In a genuine—egalitarian—democracy the people with the real power would be those who are not motivated by greed (maximizing their profits to get richer and richer) but rather by mutual aid—making things good for everybody equally.

In an egalitarian society with GENUINE DEMOCRACY (described here), people could arrange for economic enterprises (what capitalists call jobs) to be located in a more spread-out manner.

In an egalitarian society with no rich and no poor there would not be luxury homes for some and homelessness (or inferior homes located far from where one works) for others.

Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to make affordable and good housing for all who contribute reasonably according to ability.

My letter to Harvard Magazine reads as follows (who knows if they will print it?)

"Home Affordable Home" by Jonathan Shaw covers up the actual cause of the absurdly high rents and prices of homes. Shaw covers up the actual cause by focusing on the down-stream part of the problem while ignoring the up-stream root cause.

Specifically, Shaw notes the down-stream fact that NIMBY-enforced zoning laws to prevent excessive housing density and to preserve green space (perfectly valid concerns, by the way) limits the amount of land on which housing can be built, thus creating too little supply for the demand and hence high prices. But Shaw ignores the upstream fact that causes the downstream fact, namely this. The reason there is such limited geographical area for housing close to where the jobs are (and hence where people want to live) is because jobs are so concentrated geographically; and the reason for this is because the wealthy people who control such things want it this way because it makes for greater profits and they don't care that it causes the down-stream problem of unaffordable housing for regular people.

And the reason--going further upstream now--that wealthy people control the location of jobs is because we do not have a genuine democracy in which ordinary people--who value equality and mutual aid rather than making rich people even richer--have the real power. In a genuine democracy people could more geographically spread out economic enterprises in a manner so that everybody could live in a nice home in a neighborhood close to where they worked with green space and not too-high density, and not be accused of "evil NIMBY-ism" by the likes of Jonathan Shaw.

John Spritzler, ScD Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Class of 1992