Artist, writer, and social welfare advocate (and agitator in a good sense) Molly Crabapple recently had an article in The Nation called “The Revolution Against Shady Landlords Has Begun.”
It’s an ongoing movement in New York City by many renters and advocates to change laws that would give some leverage to tenants in a housing crisis. As of 2017, almost two-thirds of all housing units in the city were rented by tenants. Half of those tenants spent at least 30% of their income on housing, a figure from city government that defines the category of being rent-burdened. A third of tenants spend half of their income on rent. Vacancies are so tight that they keep the city actively under rent regulation.
“A lease on a market-rate apartment gets us only 12 months of stability,” she writes. “After that, we’re vulnerable to whatever unconscionable rent increases the landlord feels like imposing, or we are back on the apartment hunt—or, for many low-income people, the street—again.” Politicians talk about gentrification and point at the people coming in, whether wealthy or collections of students crammed into an apartment, not those landlords who raise the rents to unconscionable levels, sometimes to pad profits and other times to effectively force people out to convert buildings to condos and flip them.
The push is for legislation that would enforce “good cause evictions,” in which someone who paid rent on time and held up terms and conditions would have to be offered lease renewals at reasonable percentages.
Crabapple reported talking to the executive of a private equity firm that bought a building and was evicting 27-year-long elderly couple that was fighting the process. Why fight? Because “you have to admit, Miss Smith likes the publicity; she likes the attention,” an executive allegedly said.
Cruel. And in the face of shifting patterns of commercial real estate that includes apartments, dumb. Vacancy rates are rising everywhere. Rent increases are slowing and even reversing in some places. Property valuations have fallen sharply. There’s a significant cost to turning over a unit and rent increases on new tenants are well down.
No hearts, no brains, at least if you take a longer view of the capitalistic system. Or learn to see that business, when truly done well, has, like art, responsibilities to principles beyond the practitioner.
At its most basis, go back to Adam Smith, who traced capitalism to a natural need for divisions of labor and then ways of enabling commerce between specialties so everyone could obtain what they needed. It is not that the twin needs of specialization and exchange are inherently evil. If anything, they are good as they can support the interests of all involved.
Capitalism itself is not inherently good or evil. Neither is communism, an extended barter system, Islamic-style investment rather than interest-bearing loans, or any other concept that enables economic and social commerce.
However, any action can be turned to ill by an individual, whether intentionally or through some misapprehension of reality or dogmatic attendance to theory in the light of contradictory reality. Can capitalism fall into this trap? Certainly. So can any other system. Those who think communism is a non-divinely inspired revelation should take a cold-eyed look at the histories of countries that embraced the system and then went off slaughtering millions and pushing many millions more into misery. There is a reason for the old joke about the difference between capitalism and communism: Under capitalism, many oppresses man, while under communism it’s the other way around.
No system can be perfect, but capitalism goes sailing off the rails—like when railway cars with toxic materials go careening, polluting whole communities—because of the actions of wealthy people who put personal gain before the needs of a system to sustain itself.
For a stable and prosperous economy, there must be actions that ensure ongoing proper function, care of shareholders and workers and customers and communities. A realizing that for the good of all, everyone must receive legitimate benefit. Customers who will return. Workers who can afford to live. Healthy neighborhoods that can support ongoing commercial activity. And, yes, shareholders, which include the biggest pension funds on which retirees depend, who can see economic improvement.
Would the wealthiest have as much as they do now? Probably not, but if that’s the price, it is a condition that societies cannot afford. The question of performance must move from what a company can do for next quarter’s numbers to how a company can bring in profits and help support proper capitalism for years and decades into the future.
This is where the view of a great artist comes in. Such people not only do the work they feel called to, but also have an obligation to what they owe to art itself. The living and breathing system is bigger than the individuals themselves. Create your works—make money from your business—and remember that there are moral and ethical obligations. When regulation comes because you refuse to, shrug your shoulders and recognize that you can only blame yourself.
Read the full article here