Capitalists have no need to provide houses to workers whose labour power is not required or who can be replaced by workers who will live in little boxes. We have a choice. Either we accept that we are to blame for choosing to feed the family rather than starve to pay for a house, or we kick out those who are responsible, the capitalist class. Only a socialist society can provide adequate housing for all. Squat! Occupy! Expropriate!
After the publicity that even the mainstream media have given it, the only people who still deny there is a housing crisis in Aotearoa are those who own multiple rental properties. Thousands of NZers are living in unhealthy overcrowded and overpriced rental accommodation or in caravans and garages- if not under bridges or in shop doorways. It has recently been confirmed that a majority of those in inadequate accommodation are families: their children are thus exposed to the risks of such deadly illnesses as rheumatic fever. A crisis that was predictable under capitalism became inevitable given the neo-liberal government's commitment to reliance on the "invisible hand" of market forces. That same commitment is bound to render ineffective any measures it may reluctantly permit itself to relieve the crisis.
Most prominent amongst the deniers is the PM John Key, who would never have risen in the world without the assistance of a state house. His contact with reality is inversely correlated with the number of mansions he now owns. Although he eventually found it expedient to acknowledge that the level of homelessness was unacceptable (!), the ministers he appointed to the two housing portfolios remain securely in office and have not deviated from their mission to sell off state housing to profiteering developers and ethnically cleanse the neighbourhoods in which they are located. Tauranga is the latest to face the onslaught. The denial of a housing crisis is analogous to the denial that overstocking of agricultural land is responsible for the contamination of town water supplies. The government's flagship policy of deregulation is responsible for both.
Key's government has meanwhile blamed the environmentally protective town planning regulations (inherited from Labour) for a crisis it denies exists. Its nonexistence has not stopped the government from taking maximum political advantage by bullying Auckland Council into accepting a Unitary Plan described by one councillor as a 'deregulatory hurricane.' Its first pathetic attempt to cope with the non-crisis was to legislate for 'Special Housing Areas', giving them exemptions from environmental protection regulations. Besides opening up land for building high-value housing for the wealthy, these have been seized on by developers to get their hands on environmentally sensitive protected areas such as Ihumatao. And since the Unitary Plan was adopted developers have been relieved of any obligation to supply a miserable quota of affordable housing. When developers demonstrate a preference for constructing high-valued dwellings over affordable ones they are just doing as capitalists always do- maximising their profits.
Whether the SHAs and the Unitary Plan should be regarded as an ignominious policy failure or an outstanding success depends on who benefits. The denial of a crisis is a tacit admission that these policies are successful in achieving their objective of giving developers the freedom they demand.
The phenomenon of land banking, where investors ignore the use value of houses as dwellings and treat them as assets - valuable purely for their ability to appreciate in exchange value - demonstrates how clearly that crisis is a characteristic feature of the capitalist system, where failure to invest in unprofitable production leads to speculation in such assets (see Review of The Long Depression in this issue).
Whatever it’s immediate causes, the crisis’ origins can be traced to falling profitability and the consequent need for capitalists to seek sources of profit other than industrial production, and compete with one another in unproductive markets such as real estate market (not to mention state assets such as education and health systems.) This boosts the prices of land and houses even as wages are kept low by competition for work within a labour force rendered surplus to productive requirements by disinvestment in production. So it is no surprise that since the 2008 recession the ratio of house prices to median income has risen from about 3:1 to 9:1.
Although homeless families and state tenants facing eviction are the first to bear the brunt of the crisis, there is a growing realization among younger citizens that (with the exception of those standing to inherit property from wealthy parents) their entire generation will be denied the opportunity of ever owing their own homes. Many, though, have yet to realize that with the sell-off of state houses there will be nothing left to moderate private-sector rents and prevent them spiralling up beyond even what the more highly paid workers can afford. Already the housing crisis is threatening to become a crisis of teacher recruitment as teachers are moving away from Auckland's prohibitively high rents. While Generation Zero, for example, is calling for more houses to be built, there is no demand that the majority of these be state houses, nor is there any call to defend existing state houses and their tenants.
Douglas Rushkoff in Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation recounts the history of American cities and how they have been shaped and grotesquely distorted by capitalist interests. Suburbia was invented by an unholy alliance of real estate, road and rail building and banking capitalists who whose profiteering was facilitated by the creation and nurturing of racial prejudice with is attendant segregation. Their interests converged with those of industrial and mercantile capitalists who in an age of labour shortages wished to create a stable pool of docile labour. Thus was the ideology of home ownership glamorized and promoted as a way of chaining workers to their employers. It is hardly coincidental that the current worldwide shortage of affordable housing follows on the 2008 financial crisis and the consequent surplus of employed labour.
In Aotearoa the state housing programme of the first Labour governments mitigated the malign effects of the pre-1940s housing shortages, but this was shackled by refusal of the Bank of England (whose governor was ideologically opposed to what he condemned as 'communism') to advance adequate finance. And although subsequent National governments found it politically expedient to continue to continue the state housing programme initiated by Labour, they have mounted a relentless ideological campaign to undermine its popularity by stigmatising state tenants as being unfairly privileged vis a vis private sector tenants in the working class. This enabled them to place all sorts of restrictions on access to and tenure of state housing and has culminated in the current government's mass sell-offs and phasing out of income-related rents.
The latest ruse in the campaign of defamation has been to use the presence of P-residues in state houses as an excuse for eviction. Scientists have now pointed out that such residues are seldom present in dangerous concentrations. Evictions are far more likely to have adverse consequences for the tenants' health.
Not only has the lure of home ownership become a mirage, it has become a distraction from the only realistic prospect of housing the world's working class, which is through freely available state houses with secure life long tenure and income-related rents. Solidarity is the most effective weapon the working class has in its struggle with the capitalists: Most of the gains the working class have ever made have been achieved through strike action, and solidarity has been the essential ingredient of success. "The workers united will never be defeated".' "United we stand, divided we fall" are the watchwords. If the current generation of the working class has forgotten this it is a lesson that must be re-learned. The capitalist class knows this, and in its effort to remain supreme constantly seeks not merely to divide and isolate the workers but to set them up to fight amongst themselves. The stigmatization of state tenants is a case in point.
What solidarity means in the struggle for affordable housing is for employed, unemployed and beneficiaries, state and private sector tenants to support one another's struggles. Neither can win without the assistance of the other. If the government can be defeated in its plans to sell off state houses, private sector tenants will benefit by having lower rents.
The way to use the solidarity weapon is by mounting mass pickets to prevent the eviction of existing state tenants and the sell-off of state houses. Unions must organise support with pickets, transport, and industrial action. Court action can be useful to mobilise support, but courts exist primarily to defend the same property interests that have created the crisis and to enforce anti-worker laws.
· For Affordable State Housing available on demand to the employed, unemployed and beneficiaries with lifelong secure tenure and income related rent!
· Rent control of privately owned houses!
· Sufficient number of State Houses to supply need!
· No sale of State Houses to developers, Social Housing or Iwi Housing!
· Repossess State Houses sold to developers without compensation!
· Capital gains tax on privately owned dwellings.
· Resist evictions! Squat vacant housing! Occupy! Expropriate!
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