I get extremely pissed off when the discussion of the housing crisis occurs with no linkage whatsoever to climate crisis.

There's just so much to unpack here.

Thread 1/n https://twitter.com/DemSocialists/status/1197348805642989568

The narrative goes something like this: "Too many people want to live in crowded coastal cities where the only new housing being built is unaffordable luxury condos, which sit vacant to be used as investment vehicles for rich foreigners, while displacing existing residents!"

2/n

It's just... so frustrating. For so many reasons.

- People SHOULD want to live in large, dense cities; *they're the most sustainable built environment we have*.

- And it just so happens that the cities which haven't been decimated by suburbanization... are on the coasts!

3/n

- "Unaffordable luxury condos" for the most part these new multifamily midrises are just basic living spaces: unfurnished studios & 1-3 brs, w/ new appliances b/c they're new buildings. How exactly is that luxury? Two possible answers:

4/n

- "luxury" means they're built w/ bougie amenities like private gyms, game rooms, lounges, etc... but really common spaces don't cost that much extra to build compared to the handful of additional dwelling units that could be built instead... or

5/n

- "luxury" means market-rate rents. Leaving aside absurd cases like SF where a studio costs $4k/mo, for the most part the target income for market rate housing is at or just above median income for the area. There's a BIG difference b/w making $50k a year & a billionaire

6/n

- you can demonize the petty bourgeoisie all you want to but surely one of the goals of socialism should be to raise everyone's standard of living at least to that of the reasonably well-off, & build enough new homes at that standard that everyone can live comfortably? No?

7/n

- but even in a world where we can't get there right away, market-rate housing still has two key benefits: it prevents the well-off from siphoning away the housing stock that's affordable to those with low incomes, & it can be taxed to provide revenue for public housing.

8/n

- the only way you could see that as a bad thing is if you want the end goal of revolution - no matter how far off it may be - more than you want to build accessible, just, & resilient systems for those who are hurting here & now.

That strikes me as a misplaced priority.

9/n

- "sitting vacant" has been thoroughly disproven, so I don't feel the need to dwell on it, suffice to say that in most US cities the vacancy rate is extremely low & is caused by short-term unoccupancy during the gaps b/w leases & during renovations.

10/n

- but even beyond factual data, widespread vacancy totally clashes w/ a landlord's incentives. This should be obvious, but landlords don't let property sit vacant when they could lease it out, unless leasing it out would require expending resources. That's bad rent-seeking.

11/n

- "investment vehicles for rich foreigners" lol ok maybe at 432 Park Ave, but not the 3-to-10-story apartment complexes going up around the USA that are what's usually derided as "luxury housing."

- but you know where housing-as-an-investment is really a problem? Suburbs.

12/n

- this is one of the things I understand the *least* about this argument: you're deriding new development as "luxury vacant investment vehicles" & saying "commodification of housing is the problem,"

...and not applying those critiques to suburban homeownership? What???

13/n

And this is where I'm going to abandon trying to deconstruct the argument.

Here's the reality: we need to completely decarbonize by 2050 if we're going to keep global warming below 2.5C. Earth is our home, and in that sense climate change is the ultimate housing crisis.

14/n

How are we going to decarbonize? Well we sure can't do it just by changing our energy sources from fossil fuels to renewables while keeping our current consumption patterns which were built around fossil fuels. We need to reduce the amount of energy we consume per capita.

15/n

One of the reasons we consume so much energy in the USA is our sprawling suburban built environment. Suburbanites consume 2-4 times as much energy to heat, cool, light, & bring water to their homes as their urban counterparts, in addition to driving cars for every journey.

16/n

If we want our species to survive, Americans will need to deconstruct that wasteful sprawl. This means building tens of millions of new, high-density, multifamily, transit-oriented homes in cities across the USA, and wholesale abandoning or upzoning the suburbs.

17/n

What's the obstacle to that? Mainly, suburban homeowners who have used their houses as investment vehicles in addition to dwellings. @DemSocialists are correct to point to the commodification of housing as the problem, but they point to the wrong expression of that.

18/n

Homeowners & landlords exploit the land they sit on to enrich themselves without doing any labor. Landlords are easy to see b/c they charge rent, but homeowners accumulating property value over time are no less of a culprit. Land owners are a bourgeois class.

19/n

Any socialism which exempts from its scrutiny landowners as a class - instead focusing on "developers," or "luxury apartment landlords" or "speculators" without deconstructing the much more widespread & harmful mode of suburban homeownership - is not an effective socialism.

20/n

Likewise, any discussion of housing which seeks only to end homelessness by pairing vacant homes w/ ppl who need them, without fundamentally grappling w/ the fact that the majority of our existing housing stock is unsustainable & unjust sprawl, won't solve any crisis.

21/n

We need new housing. Specifically, we need new 4+ story urban housing w/in safe walking distance of transit. We need it to completely replace sprawl within 30 years.

At that point, how it's financed matters less than that it gets built at all. Revolution can come after.

22/22