Waiting in line for the vaccine at SF General Hospital, late February 2021.
I was just talking to a friend who said something like, “maybe with Biden it’ll get better,” referring to housing or senior care or food quality or… I can’t remember what it was. But I have heard this sentiment plenty of times in the past couple of months, and if you read the national liberal press, from the NY Times to the Nation or New Yorker or Mother Jones, there’s a palpable enthusiasm for the FDR-like “boldness” of the Covid $2 trillion, with its new basic income for children, its extended unemployment and medical premium subsidies, etc. The long, sordid history of Biden’s opportunism is being quickly swept under the rug in favor of this new, unencumbered embrace of a post-Reagan, post-neoliberal re-energizing of the government.
Lost in all this, besides Biden’s decades of support for racist policing and his corrupt pandering to credit card and banking industries, is the role of concentrated capital in running the show. There’s no way Biden or Harris is anything but in service to concentrated capital. So to understand this moment better, we have to go beyond the immediate drama of whether or not the Democrats will take the power they hold by a sliver and expand it through DC (and maybe Puerto Rico) statehood with its two (or four) new senators, put through the voting rights acts bills that have already passed the House, etc. Any serious effort to hold, consolidate, expand, and extend their power simply requires they overcome the reticence of Feinstein, Sinema, Manchin, and the other millionaire Senators defending the Jim Crow filibuster in the name of a long-lost bipartisan comity.
But to what end would they consolidate power? What is their real agenda? Finally spending some of the massive federal budget on people below the top 10% of wealth is an easy and long overdue adjustment that may gain the current Democrats enough political capital that they can stay in power longer than their multiple neoliberal predecessors who squandered every opportunity to take care of their erstwhile base. But we still don’t see clearly what their agenda is. Which parts of capital, which futures, are they working for?
From Ocean Avenue on a recent bike ride to the sea, I caught this view…. Farallon Islands visible on horizon just left of the sun streaks.
Decarbonizing the energy economy is a worthwhile goal, whether or not one has any aspirations to break from capitalism per se. Using the pandemic to further consolidate medical capital, maybe even nationalizing parts of it through Medicare and the like, while freeing up Big Pharma and the hospital chains to continue their monopolizing (oligopolizing) ways, looks like one goal. Bolstering the concentrated power of big banks and private equity syndicates seems like another, reinforcing their control over the cash-rich spigot of housing. And maybe the leaders of those industries recognize that their legitimacy has already outlasted several moments when it might logically have collapsed. A turn toward repairing the social safety net, even expanding it modestly, is one way to relegitimize the larger system’s existence and its ongoing control by the .01%. A massive redistribution of wealth, while deserved and necessary, is explicitly NOT the goal of the current regime—the unfamiliar warmth of a shot of stimulus to the safety net already feels like more than we could hope for after four harsh decades. We’ve normalized the austerity imposed during that kleptocratic frenzy, unleashed by Reagan in the proudly greedy ’80s, and that reached its desultory zenith in the venal stupidity of the Trumpist swamp that sought to drown everything in itself.
So now there is a tepid social-democratic left minority in the Congress, claiming the mantel of a Left that wants to check the power of capital. But AOC and Sanders and the gang are all bound to collaborate with the logic of capital accumulation since they have no vision beyond that. The much-promoted “Green New Deal” is fundamentally a strategy of industrial growth and job expansion at a time when we should be reconsidering the basic logic of how our physical lives are organized. Such a consideration might lead some readers to think in personal terms, but that’s exactly wrong, as well said here by Raj Patel and Jason Moore in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things:
…your ecological footprint isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s a choice in the same way that English peasants, once kicked off the land, were “free” to find wage work—or starve. Worse yet, footprint thinking teaches us to consider the drivers of planetary crisis as grounded in the aggregations of “people” and “consumption” rather than in systematic dynamics of capitalism and empire… these modes of thought explain our present, disastrous state of affairs by consistently and significantly underestimating how the present is the product of a long past, of a bloody history of power, capital, and class, entwined in the web of life. (p. 204-205)
More industry, more economic growth, more work, are not goals that I associate with a future worth fighting for. A left agenda should be focused on work reduction, resource conservation, ecological repair, and working on a new social consensus on how we measure and self-manage our well-being as a society—and not just locally or regionally or nationally, but globally. And fortunately, there are many examples of new thinking about how we conceive of, and measure, economic life, and well-being more broadly. No matter how we ultimately shift our thinking—even if we embrace my favorite goal of radical work reduction, there is much to do. Reconfiguring how we interact with water, soil, air, and energy are fundamental to our ability to adapt to and thrive in a world that has locked in inevitable climate chaos.
But we aren’t even talking about anything as basic as that. It’s not hard to understand why, given that at least half the population of the U.S. is committed to a backward-looking White American project—based on heavy industry and centralized agribusiness, oil, cars, a segregated suburbia—that is already disappearing into history’s dustbin. Nevertheless, to gird ourselves for the deeper transformation rushing towards us, it is helpful to peruse some of the historic roots of the particular configuration of capitalism we have now, a capitalism that has promoted a process of hyper-concentration that used to be called monopoly (and oligopoly).
With the recent announcement by the Mayor that outdoor restaurant parklets should be made permanent, there is a boom in construction going on… this is Valencia at 18th.
Another long break from blogging… my last post, on the absurdity of rising rents in San Francisco’s “affordable housing,” was written as part of an ongoing organizing effort behind the scenes at various buildings subject to the Mayor’s Office of Housing rules. More to come on that.
Meanwhile, since I wrote in December we watched the final flailing efforts of Trump to promote his imaginary idea of the world beyond his cult following, and fail for good after the surprising January 6 riots at the Capitol. Watching that (later) was weird, because it looked so familiar, but in a bizarro world version—they weren’t anarchists streaming through the halls of Congress, they were ultra-right racists and Trump cultists! A lot of ink has been spilled since the November election and especially since the January 6 riots and ensuing impeachment, most of which I find terribly boring. The endless handwringing by liberals about our sacred institutions being violated seems comical at best. The vitriolic focus on Trump as the cause of it all is also wildly off-base in my opinion… the guy is an inept, failed grifter who has used overt racism and assaults on objective reality to hone his message to his cult following, but that “following” was there all along, and has been seeking a “leader” long before Trump came along to fill the role. I recommend reading “The Trump Inheritance” by Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books for a surprising look at the America First movement (and the weird 2005 tale of Trump’s first planned presidential run as a centrist with Oprah Winfrey as Veep, and a message of unity and racial tolerance!!). In the article O’Toole nails the underlying truth of the “voter fraud” myth: “The concern is not, at heart, that there are bogus votes, but that there are bogus voters, that much of the US is inhabited by people who are, politically speaking, counterfeit citizens,” referring obviously to anyone who is not a white, “real” heartland American… Anyway, I’ll come back to this topic in a later post. I’ve already written quite a bit about racism and the ongoing legacy of slavery and genocide in posts over the past year and a half… and more to come!
A gorgeous old oak tree above the Calaveras reservoir in Alameda County.
The divergent realities we are living in today, with silo-ed bubbles of media and information creating largely unintelligible worlds living side by side, is just a spectacular version of a deeper reality that shapes our assumptions and worldviews. Most of us grow up learning some version of evolution that proposes that humans started as cavemen, eventually becoming skilled hunters (and wiping out all the prehistoric big game as proof of our growing intelligence), later domesticating various animals and developing agriculture which allowed humans to settle in permanent communities. Surpluses were created, monarchies and priesthoods arose with armies to protect them, cities developed, states emerged, and eventually wheels, wagons, trains, and cars came along, then we all got popsicles, pills, and smartphones and isn’t the modern world great?
This simplified timeline of history sounds silly on its face, and of course, it is. Especially when it comes to the received story about California, and the people who lived here for thousands of years and their relationship to nature. We have been propagandized by Franciscan missionaries, Gold Rush-era hucksters, and boosterish historians ever since the beginning of modern California. We’ll dig into that in a moment.
But there’s an even deeper issue to how our sense of the world has developed, how we have come to “know” things. Most of modern sensibility takes it for granted that the plant world, vegetal life, is unconscious, unaware, essentially inert and manipulable by humans. The logic of Christian Dominion comes to mind, where supposedly God gave humans dominion over all other forms of life, which by definition are inferior to and thus necessarily subordinate to humans. But what if that logic has blinded us to the dynamic, interactive, mutualistic forms of life all around us, not just the obvious intelligence we are increasingly aware of among animals, but also among plants?
On a trail above the Russian River in Sonoma County.
In the middle of the economic crisis resulting from the pandemic, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) continues to push up rents in the properties that it controls throughout the City. A mid-pandemic announcement from the MOHCD that the annual Area Median Income would be calibrated to rise by 4% for 2020 puts even more pressure on the many properties acquired in the past decade to preserve low-cost housing.
Zillow recently reported that there was a 31% decline in the asking rent for studios in the City over last year. Zumper reported a 20% drop in the past year for 1-bedroom apartments, and a quick perusal shows that there are now dozens of 2-bedroom apartments for rent in San Francisco below $2550/month.
Rather than prioritizing the stabilization of relatively lower rents in Small Sites properties (owned by the San Francisco Community Land Trust (SFCLT), Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), and other non-profit housing agencies in the City), MOHCD has provided millions of dollars in acquisition and rehabilitation support in exchange for agreements that exempt tenants of these places from the city’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance (commonly known as rent control). The City agency has imposed agreements on the tenants of these subsidized buildings that rents will go up every year a minimum of 2% and a maximum of 3.5%, and for 2019 and 2020, MOHCD has made it clear that they expect rents to rise the maximum of 3.5%. This is more than double what tenants in privately owned properties are experiencing this year, and many savvy residents are taking advantage of the plunging market to renegotiate their rents downward.
The Shipyard at Hunters Point, “affordable” housing?
In 2020 the Covid crisis has led many renters to fall behind in monthly payments, and tenants of SFCLT and MEDA are no exception. In one Mission District SFCLT building, where there is already a deficit of $15,000 in unpaid rent from 2020 due to Covid, the City is insisting that rents be raised by a whopping 5% (insisting that last year’s 2% raise “should have been 3.5%” and thus the “missing” 1.5% is being added to this year’s maximum 3.5% to equal 5%). A 3-unit SFCLT building north of the Panhandle is being hit with the maximum 3.5% after struggling to keep the rent paid this year. A 20-unit Tenderloin SFCLT building where more than 50% of the predominantly Latinx tenants have been unable to pay rent due to Covid, many of them already months in arrears, is having the rents raised by 3.5%.
What is the agenda of the Mayor’s Office of Housing?
Isn’t it the goal of MOHCD to help nonprofit housing groups like the SFCLT and MEDA to remove buildings from the predatory private marketplace forever? Why then, would they pursue a policy of relentless rent increases on the very properties that have been successfully removed from the arbitrary and capricious pressure of the speculative market?
Properties acquired with Small Sites Funding from MOHCD should have their rents set by the Rent Stabilization Ordinance, not an automatic annual increase that only contributes to the inexorable inflation of housing costs. Tenants in these buildings should be able to count on their rents not spiraling upwards, since many are pushing the boundaries of reasonable rent burden already, and further increases will only push them into financial hardship.
San Francisco should use the monies from Proposition I to cover the unpaid rents of all the nonprofit housing agencies in town. After multiple housing initiatives have been passed during the last few years, there are millions of dollars available to preserve and expand existing low-cost housing, and the priority should be to halt the annual rise in rents since by all accounts, San Francisco’s housing costs more than any other city in the country.
The Board of Supervisors should legislate new policies that MOHCD, an executive branch agency answerable only to the Mayor, will have to follow, regarding the permanent stabilization of housing costs in the nonprofit sector. Under the current and recent mayors, MOHCD has pursued a neoliberal housing agenda, that gives support for nonprofit housing while imposing rules that ensure that “affordable” is an increasingly meaningless term. Whether new senior housing that few seniors can afford, or the many new affordable apartments that thousands of potential tenants can no longer qualify for because of Covid-related job losses, the Mayor’s Office has an obligation to arrest and reverse the cost of housing.
Stopping the transfer of wealth from poor to rich through the housing market, whether owned by private interests or publicly supported nonprofits, should be the explicit goal of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. It currently has other priorities, much more in line with the larger dynamics of the market in which it operates. Tenants who thought they were protected from rent increases and evictions thanks to the Small Sites Program are now urgently counting on political action to change the policies, values, and behavior of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, an agency that seems to be more interested in adapting to the dynamics and values of the real estate market than they are in the mission of decommodified housing which should be their primary focus.
