Introduction to Housing Commodification (Part 1)

Last newsletter in this series, we talked about the generalized plight on the furry working class that is housing commodification. But, how did we get here? Each country is unique, of course, and needs to be assessed on its own merits, but we are here to discuss how things got this way in the West more generally, and the actors that perpetrated that.

Housing in the West has always been tied to private interest. Mercantilism and feudalism both tied the right to own land and live on and extract resources from that land to private wealth and ownership. Capitalism is simply another chain link in that vein of thought. While the entire history of the relationship between housing and worker rights is far to large for one newsletter to cover, we can focus on that last link, and how it got to be this bad.

In the first and second industrial revolutions, property was something afforded to the wealthy, with workers often being forced to pay extortionate rents and few had the mobility to purchase their own homes, ensure safety in their housing, or choose where they lived (1). In a further evolution of this, company towns began to spring up. Pullman in the US had one of the most famous company towns at the time. This allowed a company to, under the guise of providing better housing conditions for workers, to exploit that housing as a part of employment, and exercise surveillance, union busting, outside-of-workplace discrimination, and more. It was a method the company used to exact full control over their workers lives, and restrict their rights to control and ensure the safety of their communities. Following this, came the Great Depression. An economic recession that hit the working class the hardest, despite being caused by grandiosity in the capitalist class. Workers lost their employment, their home, their savings, and more in an era where there were few to no safety nets for them. Homelessness skyrocketed as people traveled across the country in search of work. New housing was hard to come by for most, and cities began to lose populations restricting their abilities to provide public services like transit and infrastructure upgrades.

Out of this darkness comes, at least in the US, the New Deal. A forward attack on the capitalist ruling class in order to rescue the workers from the dire conditions they were in. Massive governmental programs designed to provide jobs for those in need building national parks, buildings, infrastructure, and more. A guaranteed minimum wage designed to be the minimum amount of money required for someone to afford to live. Social security, corporate wealth tax, FDIC, and more were all created in this time. The results were immediate, after a decade of struggling, workers had options, a safety net, mobility. Capitalists were being taxed up to 90% on their wealth, monopolies were being destroyed, and most importantly for this topic, housing became an exercisable right by the working class.

As WW2 consumed the world, a lot of production turned to the war effort in nations like the US, and in countries embroiled in the fighting like Britain, housing was being destroyed faster than it could be built. Many carpenters and architects were drafted by the war effort in the US, and bombs rained down on Britain, leading to a critical housing shortage by the end of the war. Not just in those two countries, but across the entire conflict from Germany to the USSR. People in the US had developed extensive savings funds from the war, given that they could not spend their money due to rationing in many cases, and thus created a highly mobile working class of people who had the desire for housing and a better life for themselves. The money from victorious nations in the war also poured across Europe in varying ways allowing for massive reconstruction efforts to take place providing new housing to workers who had been without.

For the first time, it seemed, that workers in the 1950's had at last gained control over their human right to housing in the West and in Europe. Housing was affordable, accessible, widespread, higher quality than ever before. A worker from a factory and a worker from a grocery store could both afford to support themselves and their family with a home in many cases. Battles were still to be fought in other areas, such as worker rights to unionize, the battle against racism, McCarthyism, and more, but housing had been firmly grasped by the working class and it was consolidating that control. Communities formed through collective dialogue, cities competed for who had the best living conditions, new roads and transit were being built en masse, and so much more.

Yet, that's not our world today. We live in an era where home ownership is becoming ever more rare. Where workers can't afford rent even though they work 80 hours per week at two different jobs and drive for Uber in the remainder. Where private equity buys land rights, and chooses not to exercise them to create artificial scarcity. Where the only housing being built in most communities is "luxury" developments. Clearly there's more to tell of this story...

In Solidarity,

FurInform

Additional Sources:
https://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/dps/pdfs/dp99893.pdf
https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=p4B4QkdkTJsC&pg=PT273&redir_esc=y
https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/post-war-homelessness
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355118216_Modernity_and_housing_production_in_France_after_WWII