One in nine homes in the U.S. are vacant. Yet the ranks of the homeless grow by leaps and bounds.
The homeless living on the streets are the most obvious sign of this trend, but there are also homeless living with friends and relatives. The homeless are living in tents, campers, and motor homes. More and more families with children are becoming homeless as they face job loss and foreclosure.
All this while billions go to the financial, banking, insurance, auto and other huge corporations!
The homeless (and those facing losing a home) don’t need a bailout. They need a place to live. This is particularly true in the Rust Belt, where industry after industry is downsizing or closing down outright, throwing once solidly “middle class” workers in the street.
As industry after industry closes, gets computerized, or moves to a low-wage country, this trend will only accelerate.
‘EVICTION BLOCKADES’
In response to this crisis, in Miami, New York, Fresno, Atlanta, Minneapolis, in cities large and small, growing numbers of homeless families are moving into recently foreclosed homes.
This nationwide movement of desperate people has caught the attention of grassroots organizations. In one city, an organization helps homeless families squat in homes recently vacated because of bank foreclosures. In another, a group petitions to use city money to buy abandoned homes and rent them to the homeless.
Housing speculators in a third city pay the homeless to sleep in their foreclosed houses to safeguard them. In yet another, protesters join arm-in-arm in “eviction blockades” to keep sheriff’s deputies from putting people out of the homes they’ve lived in and paid for over the years.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. After World War II, the capitalist owners of industry and finance developed an unspoken contract with the labor unions. In this agreement, the capitalists got a stable workforce for their factories and all the profits from their labor.
THE CONTRACT IS BROKEN
In return, some in the working class got “good jobs” with all the trimmings — house, car, camper, health plan, pension, vacations, and a shop-floor grievance system that worked. In addition, the social infrastructure was elevated and maintained — schools and libraries, sewer and water systems, highways and hospitals.
All this became “normal” for two generations of Americans. For a large section of the working class in the North, particularly in the Rust Belt, this system worked until the late 1970’s.
Then the capitalists’ began introducing computerized machinery, and robots began taking our jobs and expelling us from the factories.
To survive, formerly well-paid workers were forced to accept lower and lower pay. As this trend accelerated, fewer and fewer in the working class could afford a car or a home and now even to keep up payments.
The contract has been broken.
Thus we are thrown into a period of enormous change. The capitalists are appropriating the wealth of our society, and the working class is being dispossessed of all it has worked for over the generations.
CLASS OF DISPOSSESSED
The homelessness of millions alongside millions of vacant homes is a horrible contradiction and a glaring indicator of that enormous change. Bailouts for the corporations will not bring back the jobs. There are no jobs to bring back. Robots have the jobs.
Yet people need a place to live. The growing class of dispossessed is expressing this need by squatting in vacant homes. Any right of the banks to own the houses is being overridden by the right of the people to have a place to live.
This is not about taking someone’s home from them or paying for someone else’s mortgage — propaganda from the right. It is about keeping people in their homes and putting the homeless into houses that are vacant.
This is the end of one era and the beginning of another. Other countries guarantee their citizens a place to live. We can, too.
The next step in this process is to unite the scattered efforts to house the homeless — and to keep people in their homes — into a movement that is strong enough to force the government to provide housing for all. This is part of the long-range effort to create a new society where everyone’s needs will be met.
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