The REAL Solution to the Lack of Affordable Housing Problem
Neither rent control nor its absence is the solution. Egalitarianism is.
The above photo is from this Boston Globe long article about rent control and affordable housing in Massachusetts. The Globe’s article does a decent job of describing the problem of the lack of affordable housing and the controversial history of rent control legislation in Massachusetts. I am not going to compete with the Globe article here in that regard. Be my guest in reading the Globe’s article and you will see how neither rent control nor its absence has solved the problem. Problems such as the lack of affordable housing, the lack of well-paying jobs, the lack of everything that would make life for working class people as good as it ought to be and could be—such problems are, for the rich, SOLUTIONS to the problem of how to keep the have-nots in our place, as I discuss here.
What the Boston Globe never talks about is the fundamental reason WHY ordinary people don’t have affordable housing today, which is this: the people who want affordable housing for all don’t have the real power in society.
The Globe (owned by the billionaire John Henry who also owns the Boston Red Sox major league baseball team) absolutely does not want its readers to hear about the REAL solution to the unaffordable housing problem, which is, in a nutshell, this:
But, but, but, but ….How could making squatting legal this way ever work! How could it create the new housing that is needed? How would the landlords get the rental income they need to maintain the housing properly? How would small landlords (owner occupied buildings) get the rental money they need to pay the mortgage? How would developers get paid for the cost of building new homes, and why would they even want to? This is CRAZY!
OK. OK. Hold your horses and all will be revealed.
Yes, of course, in a CAPITALIST society such as ours today, a society based on money and buying and selling things and producing things for profit to be sold to those who can afford to pay for them, then YES, making squatting legal would be CRAZY.
But the egalitarian solution I am proposing is NOT to have a capitalist society, but rather an egalitarian one that is NOT based on money, NOT based on buying and selling things, NOT based on producing things for a profit, NOT providing things only to people who can afford to buy them. This is the kind of society in which those who contribute reasonably according to ability (which includes children and retired people and those going to school and those who for some reason cannot contribute anything, but does NOT include freeloaders who can but refuse to contribute reasonably according to ability) can have—for free!—the housing that they need or reasonably desire.
In an egalitarian society (read what this is here) EVERYBODY is covered by the economic principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.” (What is “reasonable” is decided by the Local Assembly of Egalitarians, as described here.) This egalitarian economy is not based on money at all.
What this means is that everybody who does important economic work, such as building new homes, maintaining existing homes, and doing all the other things our lives rely on, is “paid” by getting, in exchange for their doing this work, membership in good standing in the sharing economy, described here. This membership in good standing is very valuable; it entitles a person to take for free what they need or reasonably desire. To obtain it is a motive people have for doing all the various kinds of work that needs to be done, including building new homes and maintaining existing ones.
In an egalitarian society with genuine democracy (again, described here), the Local Assembly of Egalitarians decides if new housing needs to be built, and if so, it tells the appropriate people that they will be members in good standing of the sharing economy if they build this new housing. Ditto for maintaining existing housing. And ditto for doing all of the other kinds of work that the egalitarians in the local community want done.
True, nobody gets RICHER than most other people in an egalitarian society. Landlords who are motivated to get RICH will not like having an egalitarian society in which there are NO RICH AND NO POOR. In fact, there will be no landlords in the sense of people who gain wealth for no reason other than claiming to own a building and having the right to make the people who live in it pay them money. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and the Boston Globe’s John Henry will hate it if we have an egalitarian society.
But the millions of Americans who want affordable housing would LOVE it. Here are photos of some of them—more than 500 of my zip-code neighbors, each holding a sign that reads “We the People want affordable housing for ALL. To get it we aim to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.” Online click on a photo and zoom in to read the sign more easily. Here’s a small sample of these people:
