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Imagine a news headline saying "Good news for the economy: food
prices are up for the third month in a row!" Food-owners would
celebrate, and foodless-rights advocates would protest, but nothing
would change unless the entire system of food-speculation was
curbed. <br>
<br>
Or imagine this: Dateline: Marinaleda, Spain. Municipal government
GIVES dispossessed people the land and building materials to build
their own homes, and pays contractors to provide assistance with the
high-skill parts such as plumbing. This is REAL and it's happening
NOW.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22701384">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22701384</a><br>
<br>
"In the wake of Spain's property crash, hundreds of thousands of
homes have been repossessed. While one regional government says it
will seize repossessed properties from the banks, a little town is
doing away with mortgages altogether. ... In Marinaleda, residents
like 42-year-old father-of-three, David Gonzalez Molina, are
building their own homes.<br>
<br>
"The town hall in this ... town an hour-and-a-bit east of Seville,
has given David 190 sq m (2,000 sq ft) of land. ... The bricks and
mortar are also a gift... from the regional government of Andalusia.
... Only once his home is finished will he start paying 15 euros
(£13) [approx. $26] a month, to the regional government, to refund
the cost of other building materials. ...<br>
<br>
"...[The town's] Mayor Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo is known for
occupying land belonging to the wealthy in Andalusia. ... Last
summer, he and his left-wing union comrades stole from supermarkets
and handed out the food to the poor. "I think it is possible that a
home should be a right, and not a business, in Europe", he argues.
Mayor Sanchez Gordillo pours scorn on "speculators"....<br>
<br>
---<br>
<br>
Think outside the box, and you might end up thinking like Mayor
Sanchez Gordillo. <br>
<br>
What happens when home prices and rents keep increasing while
average income levels have barely budged since 1974? <br>
<br>
What happens to the lives of people, when the health of an economy
in large part depends on relentless increase in the price of a vital
necessity that is also a fixed resource, such as the square footage
in which to eat, sleep, and wash? <br>
<br>
Meanwhile developers are building "luxury" apartments, but the
number of "affordable" units isn't specified and always turns out to
be less than first claimed. How is it that anyone has a "right" to
luxury, at the expense of others' poverty and homelessness?<br>
<br>
At root, this isn't a race issue of black and white, though the
guardians of privilege benefit mightily when it's framed that way,
and people who have common cause are divided against each other. At
root, it's a class issue of green and red. <br>
<br>
Land speculation is a broken machine running an obsolete operating
system, that's begging to get "rooted." <br>
<br>
-G<br>
<br>
<br>
=====<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 13-06-08-Sat 3:06 PM, Sonja Trauss
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAEMAOD6ghbp1_QLknD03q7H1mULffsLw0NoFFAAH8FHL241wmg@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div>I know, it's so outrageous. This line, "The notion of
smart growth — also referred to as urban infill — has
been around for years, embraced by a certain type of
environmentalist, particularly those concerned with
protecting open space."<br>
<br>
</div>
Yeah, the type of environmentalist that is an
environmentalist - what is this supposed to mean! <br>
<br>
</div>
Also I guess (I hope) these progressives don't realize that
in opposing development in Bayview, they are contributing to
keeping blacks overall poorer than whites. <br>
<br>
</div>
Putting renters aside for a minute, let's consider similarly
situated black and white homeowners, in similar income black
and white neighborhoods. If these neighborhoods are in a city
that is growing in wealth and population (like san francisco)
both homeowners should be able to look forward to their house
values increasing, right? NO. House values at first only
increase in the white neighborhoods, because the new
residents, moving to SF from all over the world, avoid living
in black neighborhoods. Here's a citation and a quotation, but
this isn't the kind of knowledge we need experts to discover
for us. Examine your own mind, you use black population level
as a proxy for neighborhood safety. You probably believe that
it is a good proxy, that you can judge the thing you can't
immediately see (how likely are you to be mugged) by judging a
thing you can see (black people around?). <br>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-size:13.2832px;font-family:serif">We
find that the percentage of a neighborhood’s black
population,particularly the percentage young black men, is
significantly associated with perceptions of the severity of
the neighborhood’s crime problem. This relationship persists
under controls for official neighborhood crime rates. <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.princeton.edu/%7Epager/ajs_quillian&pager.pdf-">http://www.princeton.edu/~pager/ajs_quillian&pager.pdf-</a></div>
The effect of this is that homeowners in black neighborhoods
(many of them black) can't expect to benefit from the overall
increase in wealth of their city in the same way white
homeowners can. That is, until, the rent in white
neighborhoods has become so egregiously high that white
people, having already filled up the industrial neighborhoods
(they'd rather live next to machines than live next to black
people!) are finally land starved enough to consider living
in, buying land in, spending money in, black neighborhoods.
Our composite black homeowner starts to get excited. "Yay, I
can finally (1) borrow a large sum of money against my now
appreciated house (2) rent my house at a high price to the new
white people moving in, retire and move somewhere beautiful in
the country or (3) sell my house at a higher price than ever
to these white developers." BUT WAIT, black homeowner, here we
have some helpful progressives, looking to protect you from
your good fortune. Screaming that you can't be allowed to be
"displaced." Nevermind that once you own your house, nothing
can MAKE you move, and if you sell or move to rent it, that is
because you would rather have the money you get from those
activities than stay in your house!<br>
<br>
</div>
<div>Lets return to renters. The bottom of page four of this
hysterical article says: "Let's remember: Building more
housing, even a lot more housing, won't necessarily bring down
prices. The report makes clear that the job growth, and
population boom that accompanies it, will fuel plenty of
demand for all those new units."<br>
</div>
<div>Right - housing prices have to do with the relative supply
of housing. If the amount of housing expands at the same rate
the population expands, the price of housing will not go up or
down. But if the population increases and the supply of
housing doesn't, then prices will go up! This article is
advocating for no new housing to be built - what if we do
continue to see more population! Things will be worse than
they are now. It will certainly be a much worse scenario if SF
has more jobs, more people, but the same amt of housing.<br>
</div>
<div>Finally, there is the projection, by developers, of how
much they are going to be charging for the new units. People
look at the new housing and see that the plan is for it to be
high priced. They don't realize that if the supply of housing
increases as fast or faster than the population increases,
that the introduction of new housing at the high price point
will cause some of the currently expensive housing to drop in
price (because people like new things, generally, better than
they like old things.) The mid level renter will see the
options available at his price point expand. If there is
enough housing growth, the supply of the lowest price housing
could expand also. If there is way too much housing growth,
the renting population of SF might just win the housing market
lottery - see developers go bankrupt and be forced to sell
their newly built condos for a fraction of the planned price,
or be forced to keep them and rent them out to anyone who will
take them. <br>
<br>
</div>
<div>Could building new housing cause people who wouldn't have
lived here move here? Can it be the sole cause of population
growth? yeah, there are more people that want to live in SF
than do live in SF, for a little while the increase in housing
will be taken up by the people in the surrounding areas that
have been wishing they lived in SF but couldn't (this is the
opposite of the displacement problem, btw) It seems mean
spirited to oppose new housing to keep those people out. If
you consider the SF community to be not just the people that
live there, but also the people that used to live there but
were already pushed out, plus the people that never even got
the chance to be pushed out, than you're an agent of
displacement when you keep new housing from being built. <br>
<br>
</div>
<div>Damn that's a long email. <br>
</div>
</div>
<br>
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