Housing Insecurity is a Feature not a Bug 🐛
We all have at least one moment in our lives where you can look back and identify a seemingly small decision that changed everything. Maybe it’s an almost-missed-connection that leads to a beautiful relationship or an impulsive decision to take an art class that unearthed a new career. I don’t know. Maybe those are all too boring and your experience with the butterfly effect is much wilder.
The letter from #4 💌
For me. This is it. Housing Authority — and my unending fascination with our housing system — started during the desperate chaos of the early pandemic. In March 2020, I was living in a two-bedroom apartment with my partner (the other contributor to this newsletter) and a roommate, and our two cats.
These were the days when everyone was baking shitty sourdough, no one was able to get their unemployment checks processed, and I was developing TMJ. The property manager sent everyone an email telling us that rent was still due on April 1st, and if we couldn’t pay with our bank accounts, we should pay with our credit cards. They even waived the credit card fee (!!) and sent us a list of places that were hiring (!!) — Kroger and the Amazon warehouse.
I remember thinking it was really not cool that our credit card debt would keep the property manager employed and help our landlord pay off his debt from buying the building. Why couldn’t he get a job?
I promptly deleted the email and went back to playing Animal Crossing New Horizons. A couple of days later we got a letter from Mario in #4 sharing his frustration with the property manager’s letter and asking if we all wanted to write a collective response. By the next week, we had formed a small tenants’ collective.
I’ll tell the full story of that tenant organizing and the lawsuit we won against our landlord in another newsletter, but housing is probably the biggest thing in my life. It has transformed my politics, my values and given me a career. And that’s all because Mario in #4 left a letter on our doorstep.
(Mario is still Mario from #4 in my phone contacts all these years later even though I know his last name and went to his wedding reception and he now lives in Chicago.)
Welcome to Housing Authority ✨
Before I started organizing my apartment building, I thought moving every few years to outrun rent prices, watching tents pop up along the side of I-5 exits was just another bug in the capitalist program we had to endure.
During the election cycle, I would hear candidates talk about how homelessness is a policy failure and that the solution is to put them in office. But despite States of Emergency for homelessness and record numbers of dollars earmarked for affordable housing developments, tenants are suffering and people are dying in the streets. Why? In the past three years, I’ve learned that our housing system is society’s connective tissue and there is no single answer.
Housing is the site of social reproduction; it’s the largest economic burden for many and the largest source of wealth, status and power for some; it provides employment for those who construct, manage and maintain it and a source of speculative profit for those who buy, sell and finance it. It is also a source of tax revenue and expenditure for the State, and a major factor in the structure and functioning of cities.1
Housing Authority is an attempt to illustrate how struggling to pay rent is a feature, not a bug, that tenants are systemically exploited and nothing will change because eviction, displacement, rent increases, foreclosure, homelessness — housing at its most violent — is the cost of doing business.
In this newsletter, we discuss fighting residential alienation, landlords, and the real estate machine from the perspective of tenants — the people who generate the most value for housing-as-investment and those who have the most to lose.
We will group our content under three major themes:
Understanding the Housing Crisis 🔍 to explore all of the many players and all of the many housing crises created by a hyper-commodified housing market
Housing Wonk Shit 🏡 to discuss policies that enable and protect property owners, landlords and developers and the ways tenants can construct better protections for themselves
Building a Better Housing Future 💭 because we deserve housing as a human right and we have to fight for it
In the end, we hope you use Housing Authority as a resource for political education and as a foundation to start building tenant power in your neighborhood and city.
If you know someone who might find Housing Authority interesting, please give it a share!
