A measured response to “deregulate the housing market”
How the state makes the housing market (and how we can unmake it) 💭
Hi friends, on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, let’s remember the true, radical history of the Civil Right’s Movement and what is possible when we organize.
Today, I want to discuss an often-heard complaint that there is too much state in housing. This is a comment I see all the time in my TikTok videos about housing, they are usually from house flippers, people who work in housing development and landlords.
“Deregulate the housing market” is one of those knee-jerk arguments that just fall out of people’s mouths without any thought because everyone in America has neoliberal brainworms.
What is neoliberalism? 💸
It’s a known fact that I cannot help talking about politics. It occupies so much of my brain, even when I’d much rather be having a fun and chill time, I just start arguments.
One of these occasions, sometime in like 2019 while visiting my best friend in Seattle, I remember sitting in the backseat of the car, slightly carsick, arguing nonstop about nazis and neoliberalism and horse training with my friend’s boyfriend. I’m not trying to drag anyone here, I like this guy a lot, but he’s so easy (fun) to argue with.
Most of the details from argument have been lost to time, but one thing he said stuck with me: neoliberalism is too broad to be discounted altogether.
The collection of policy reforms that form the basis of neoliberalism includes eliminating price controls, rolling back labor protections and defunding public programs among many other seemingly disparate things. Different market economies implement these policies in different ways, both across industry, but also country to country.
Like best friend’s boyfriend suggested, that is indeed broad and criticism of neoliberalism can appear inconsistent because of that. Some programs are cut, like public housing whereas others are bolstered, like police budgets. Some public funds are committed to private companies but other organizations are prohibited from using public funds.
Even the people who are writing “good housing policy” are operating from a place that assumes neoliberalism. And this is reflected in our housing policies when they feature complicated tax mechanisms, programs that compete for general budget funding and only offer changes in market incentives.
An example of this kind of market incentive policy is a policy that the Oregon Housing Alliance endorsed for the upcoming 2023 Oregon Legislative session. It’s called the Supply Incentive Tax Credit1 that will reward landowners with a large tax credit if they sell their investment properties to the current renter occupant, a nonprofit landlord, or another purchaser who makes under 100% Average Median Income in order to “encourage the return of existing homes to the homeownership market.”
However, when you zoom out, the ideology becomes clear. The assortment of policies all support one thing: maximizing and protecting economic growth. Anything (except itself) that hinders this economic growth is treated as a threat and should be met with violence. And quite literally. The first broad reforms that became neoliberalism started after the 1973 Chilean coup.2 And we all know how that went.
The irony of [neoliberalism’s] insistence on the reduction of state regulatory authority belies the deep need for state institutional support not only legitimating neoliberal governance in the face of sustained hardships but also to rescue financial institutions during periods of inevitable financial crisis. Liberal capitalism has not historically shown a capacity for either self-regulation nor the ability to function without state support.3
Despite what trickle-down economics tells us, economic growth does not translate into meeting the actual needs of people within our society. AND! Neolibralism creates the need for “welfare programs” because it is so bad at meeting the actual needs of people within our society. And the existence of those welfare programs become the precicent for large state intervention.
If you were around during President Obama’s big bank bailout in the late aughts, you saw this in action. The subprime mortgage crisis was created because of years of policies that deregulated the financial industry and the state had to intervene to keep the economy functioning.
Deregulating the housing market is a myth 🦄
Deregulation is an important strategy to maximize real estate growth both in terms of building new developments and reducing costs within the real estate market. In headlines and op-eds, developers and proponents of austerity policies bemoan homelessness prevention programs, regulations that prevent them from building dangerous apartment buildings, and tenant protections that require them to clean out black mold, maintain fire codes and provide bike storage.
If you’re interested in learning more about the chokehold neoliberalism has on our media and society at large, I definitely recommend checking out the podcast Citations Needed by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi. Episode 173 is a recent favorite of mine because it discusses the history of the deserving and undeserving poor (a rhetorical strategy to normalize extreme poverty) and how to sell police crackdowns on homeless people to well-meaning Democrats.
It makes sense, if they didn’t have to spend as much money building and maintaining housing, if they didn’t have those pesky regulations, they’d be making more money — and that is all neoliberalism wants. But what the free market ideologues seem to forget is that the markets require the state to function.
The state plays a critical role in every single aspect of our housing system from the use of land, infrastructure for supply chains and materials, the means of enforcing contracts and property rights, and the legal relationships that validate buying, selling and speculation.
When the Yes In My Backyard developers are saying we need to get the state out of housing, they mean fewer land use restrictions in Black neighborhoods and not getting ride of state enforced property rights.
We can unmake it and remake it 💭
I’ve had so many conversations with my co-workers who are policy wonks and lobbyists, other organizers, and just randos online or at the bar about how solving the housing crisis feels so impossible. Our list of grievances is never-ending, and we seem to get beaten down with every new evolution of neoliberalism and every new election cycle.
And that is by design. Capitalism depends on our one-missed-paycheck-from-destitution in order to survive. The state is not a neutral institution — don’t believe for one second that I am a reformist. But we continuously affirm the state’s existence (and our oppression) through our acceptance of the conditions the state creates.
On the topic of unmaking the conditions the state has created for us and remaking new ones that work for us, I’ll offer a few things.
We gotta believe that it is possible.
Educator and co-editor of Octavia’s Brood, Walidah Imarisha, talks about our imagination and the act of imagining a future where we are taken care of, where our housing is beautiful and environmentally sustainable and accessible to everyone, as the foundation for this work.4 We have to live in the delusion.
So imagine a world where you didn’t have to worry about rent — let yourself have that moment of tender daydreaming. What would that enable you to do in the rest of your life? How would you spend your time differently? How would that change your relationship to work?
We won’t get what we want by relying on the state.
When it comes to justice, the state is unreliable at best and actively dangerous at worst. Bills that are introduced at the start of a legislative session are very different than the same bill numbers that end up getting passed. And even if things are illegal, we know that doesn’t stop them from happening. America hasn’t seen a substantial tenants movement since the 1930s when tenants in New York and San Francisco demanded public housing and better living conditions. And knowing our history of injustice, we aren’t going to see substantial improvements in the housing crisis without another one.
We can’t ignore the state.
I’m not a leftist that is going to police whatever form of struggle you choose to engage with, but the state is here to stay for a while longer, that is a fact. Despite what neoliberalism will have you believe, the state is very intertwined with our daily lives. The electoral political machine is a part of our material conditions and is a site of political movement. No, we are not going to vote in communism, but the state provides a nexus for organizing that is accessible and an opportunity for further radicalization. Let’s tax the rich, build socialized housing and fight landlords.
Supply Incentive Tax Credit from the Joint Task Force on Addressing Racial Disparities in Home Ownership. Prepared by The State of Oregon’s Legislative Policy and Research Office, October 2022.
Social Welfare Responses in a Neoliberal Era edited by Cory Blad and Mia Arp Fallov, pg 4.
Better Futures: Visioning In A Time of Crisis, Walidah Imarisha, Allied Media’s AMP Speaker Series, , June 2022.
So imagine a world where you didn’t have to worry about rent — let yourself have that moment of tender daydreaming. What would that enable you to do in the rest of your life? How would you spend your time differently? How would that change your relationship to work? Love it!!