[sudo-discuss] new occuption in SF: #gezigardens

Sat Jun 8 18:41:32 PDT 2013

Imagine a news headline saying "Good news for the economy: food prices
are up for the third month in a row!"  Food-owners would celebrate, and
foodless-rights advocates would protest, but nothing would change unless
the entire system of food-speculation was curbed.

Or imagine this:  Dateline: Marinaleda, Spain.  Municipal government
GIVES dispossessed people the land and building materials to build their
own homes, and pays contractors to provide assistance with the
high-skill parts such as plumbing.  This is REAL and it's happening NOW.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22701384

"In the wake of Spain's property crash, hundreds of thousands of homes
have been repossessed. While one regional government says it will seize
repossessed properties from the banks, a little town is doing away with
mortgages altogether. ...  In Marinaleda, residents like 42-year-old
father-of-three, David Gonzalez Molina, are building their own homes.

"The town hall in this ... town an hour-and-a-bit east of Seville, has
given David 190 sq m (2,000 sq ft) of land. ...  The bricks and mortar
are also a gift... from the regional government of Andalusia. ... Only
once his home is finished will he start paying 15 euros (£13) [approx.
$26] a month, to the regional government, to refund the cost of other
building materials. ...

"...[The town's] Mayor Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo is known for
occupying land belonging to the wealthy in Andalusia. ... Last summer,
he and his left-wing union comrades stole from supermarkets and handed
out the food to the poor.  "I think it is possible that a home should be
a right, and not a business, in Europe", he argues. Mayor Sanchez
Gordillo pours scorn on "speculators"....

---

Think outside the box, and you might end up thinking like Mayor Sanchez
Gordillo.

What happens when home prices and rents keep increasing while average
income levels have barely budged since 1974?

What happens to the lives of people, when the health of an economy in
large part depends on relentless increase in the price of a vital
necessity that is also a fixed resource, such as the square footage in
which to eat, sleep, and wash? 

Meanwhile developers are building "luxury" apartments, but the number of
"affordable" units isn't specified and always turns out to be less than
first claimed.  How is it that anyone has a "right" to luxury, at the
expense of others' poverty and homelessness?

At root, this isn't a race issue of black and white, though the
guardians of privilege benefit mightily when it's framed that way, and
people who have common cause are divided against each other.  At root,
it's a class issue of green and red. 

Land speculation is a broken machine running an obsolete operating
system, that's begging to get "rooted."

-G

=====

On 13-06-08-Sat 3:06 PM, Sonja Trauss wrote:
> I know, it's so outrageous. This line, "The notion of smart growth ---
> also referred to as urban infill --- has been around for years,
> embraced by a certain type of environmentalist, particularly those
> concerned with protecting open space."
>
> Yeah, the type of environmentalist that is an environmentalist - what
> is this supposed to mean!
>
> Also I guess (I hope) these progressives don't realize that in
> opposing development in Bayview, they are contributing to keeping
> blacks overall poorer than whites.
>
> Putting renters aside for a minute, let's consider similarly situated
> black and white homeowners, in similar income black and white
> neighborhoods. If these neighborhoods are in a city that is growing in
> wealth and population (like san francisco) both homeowners should be
> able to look forward to their house values increasing, right? NO.
> House values at first only increase in the white neighborhoods,
> because the new residents, moving to SF from all over the world, avoid
> living in black neighborhoods. Here's a citation and a quotation, but
> this isn't the kind of knowledge we need experts to discover for us.
> Examine your own mind, you use black population level as a proxy for
> neighborhood safety. You probably believe that it is a good proxy,
> that you can judge the thing you can't immediately see (how likely are
> you to be mugged) by judging a thing you can see (black people around?).
> We find that the percentage of a neighborhood's black
> population,particularly the percentage young black men, is
> significantly associated with perceptions of the severity of the
> neighborhood's crime problem. This relationship persists under
> controls for official neighborhood crime rates.
> http://www.princeton.edu/~pager/ajs_quillian&pager.pdf-
> <http://www.princeton.edu/%7Epager/ajs_quillian&pager.pdf->
> The effect of this is that homeowners in black neighborhoods (many of
> them black) can't expect to benefit from the overall increase in
> wealth of their city in the same way white homeowners can. That is,
> until, the rent in white neighborhoods has become so egregiously high
> that white people, having already filled up the industrial
> neighborhoods (they'd rather live next to machines than live next to
> black people!) are finally land starved enough to consider living in,
> buying land in, spending money in, black neighborhoods. Our composite
> black homeowner starts to get excited. "Yay, I can finally (1) borrow
> a large sum of money against my now appreciated house (2) rent my
> house at a high price to the new white people moving in, retire and
> move somewhere beautiful in the country or (3) sell my house at a
> higher price than ever to these white developers." BUT WAIT, black
> homeowner, here we have some helpful progressives, looking to protect
> you from your good fortune. Screaming that you can't be allowed to be
> "displaced." Nevermind that once you own your house, nothing can MAKE
> you move, and if you sell or move to rent it, that is because you
> would rather have the money you get from those activities than stay in
> your house!
>
> Lets return to renters. The bottom of page four of this hysterical
> article says: "Let's remember: Building more housing, even a lot more
> housing, won't necessarily bring down prices. The report makes clear
> that the job growth, and population boom that accompanies it, will
> fuel plenty of demand for all those new units."
> Right - housing prices have to do with the relative supply of housing.
> If the amount of housing expands at the same rate the population
> expands, the price of housing will not go up or down. But if the
> population increases and the supply of housing doesn't, then prices
> will go up! This article is advocating for no new housing to be built
> - what if we do continue to see more population! Things will be worse
> than they are now. It will certainly be a much worse scenario if SF
> has more jobs, more people, but the same amt of housing.
> Finally, there is the projection, by developers, of how much they are
> going to be charging for the new units. People look at the new housing
> and see that the plan is for it to be high priced. They don't realize
> that if the supply of housing increases as fast or faster than the
> population increases, that the introduction of new housing at the high
> price point will cause some of the currently expensive housing to drop
> in price (because people like new things, generally, better than they
> like old things.) The mid level renter will see the options available
> at his price point expand. If there is enough housing growth, the
> supply of the lowest price housing could expand also. If there is way
> too much housing growth, the renting population of SF might just win
> the housing market lottery - see developers go bankrupt and be forced
> to sell their newly built condos for a fraction of the planned price,
> or be forced to keep them and rent them out to anyone who will take them.
>
> Could building new housing cause people who wouldn't have lived here
> move here? Can it be the sole cause of population growth? yeah, there
> are more people that want to live in SF than do live in SF, for a
> little while the increase in housing will be taken up by the people in
> the surrounding areas that have been wishing they lived in SF but
> couldn't (this is the opposite of the displacement problem, btw) It
> seems mean spirited to oppose new housing to keep those people out. If
> you consider the SF community to be not just the people that live
> there, but also the people that used to live there but were already
> pushed out, plus the people that never even got the chance to be
> pushed out, than you're an agent of displacement when you keep new
> housing from being built.
>
> Damn that's a long email.
>
>
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