Tag Archives: Progress and Poverty

Henry’s Children

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The ideas and arguments of economist Henry George, developed most fully in 1877’s Progress and Poverty, are by no means obsolete or antique.

The rent is too damn high.

George discerned that the pushy barricade to our thinking, the invisible forcefield that holds humanity back,, or at least one of them, is that an economy based on rent is doomed from the start, a leaking tire that regularly rolls around to the puncture point, bringing horrible regular jounces and shocks, and anyway ultimately shredding the rubber, denting the wheel, and, if pushed relentlessly enough, eventually twisting the undercarriage and gouging the hell out of the road and leaving a broken wreck in the lane for the next civilization to have to clear off, before they can proceed up the pike.

The rent is too damn high.

For a timely and modern application of George’s ideas, considerTed Rall’s robust and readable ‘Save America, Throw The Landlords Under The Bus.’ The full article can be found at Counterpunch.org (which doesn’t allow links, and ought to.)

We can save the economy. We have to throw the landlords under the bus to do it.

At this writing, 26.5 million Americans have lost their jobs to the national lockdown necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Added to those who were unemployed before the coronavirus crisis, we will soon face jobless numbers equivalent to or greater than to those at the height of the Great Depression. What’s going to happen to them? More specifically, where will they live?

Drawing from the experience of the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the droll writer Dmitri Orlov mused on what would happen here in a similar scenario. Surviving the fall of the Soviet Union, he concluded, would be easier than it would be to make it through the then-future implosion of the United States of America.“In the United States,” Orlov wrote in 2011, “very few people own their place of residence free and clear, and even they need an income to pay real estate taxes. The real owners of real estate in the U.S. are banks and corporations. People without an income face homelessness. When the economy collapses, very few people will continue to have an income, so homelessness will become rampant. Most people in the U.S., once their savings are depleted, will in due course be forced to live in their car, in some secluded stretch of woods, in a tent or under a tarp.

There is currently no mechanism by which landlords can be made not to evict deadbeat tenants, or banks prevailed upon not to foreclose on non-performing loans.” Residents of apartments in the former Soviet Union faced hardships, but no one evicted them for nonpayment of rent. Private property rights were valued less than human lives.

Avoiding a mass-eviction scenario must be the top priority of American political leaders.Aside from mass human misery, the downsides of allowing banks and municipalities and landlords to evict large numbers of people became evident after the evictions and foreclosures of millions of homes following the 2008-09 housing crisis. Every foreclosure drags down the property value of neighboring homes. Abandoned houses become meth labs.

But let’s not forget about mass human misery. Even if you’re rich and not a humanitarian, the thought of tens of millions of homeless people wandering streets and highways, desperate and hungry, can’t possibly make you sleep soundly. Property crimes and violence designed to separate people from their possessions will soar unless we keep people in their homes, safe, fed and warm.

And don’t forget about the coronavirus. Even after two years from now, when there may or may not be a vaccine, many of the poor will be uninsured and won’t be able to afford medical care. Kicking them out of their homes will spread the virus.America needs a rent and mortgage holiday, not a lame moratorium that kicks the can of mass evictions down the road for a few months. That includes commercial rent. Empty storefronts become targets for burglary and squatters. Some become drug dens. Arson fires consume them and neighboring homes.

Until COVID-19 is in our rearview mirror, we need everyone and everything to stay put for health reasons. Afterward we want to give the economy a chance to recover. We don’t need blight. We want restaurants and other businesses to reopen. We want individuals to return to work, not starve in the streets. Individuals and businesses who can’t afford it should withhold rent from landlords and mortgage payments from banks, without penalty, until both the public health and the economic crises are over.What about the banks and landlords? I’m not suggesting that they should be stuck with the whole tab for COVID-19. Municipalities should waive real estate taxes. They should receive relief to cover their utility and maintenance expenses. Lobbying organizations for property owners point out that their members often have underlying mortgages themselves; those mortgages too should be subject to the payment holiday. Banks should receive infusions of interest-free cash from the Fed. But the U.S. can no longer afford to let these entities continue to collect real estate profits as usual.

Landlords should take the biggest bath for the simple reason that they are social and economic parasites. Value is added via the production process; landlords add no value whatsoever. If a revolution were to turn renters into homeowners by transferring titles, and abolish bank liens and property taxes and so turn homeowners into full owners, no one would miss landlords. Former renters and mortgage borrowers could easily assume the cost of maintenance that they currently pay to landlords and banks for pennies on the dollar.

You probably know a nice landlord. My father-in-law was one. I used to sublet a room in my apartment so I could make the rent, which made me a sub-landlord. But part of the reason my rent was too high was that I could sublet that room. Landlords are unnecessary at best, pernicious at worst.In part, eviction is a remedy: it allows a property owner to try again with a new tenant. In a broader sense, it is a threat to remaining renters: unless you pay me, I will throw you out. That threat is the ultimate expression of the enclosure of the commons. I own this. You do not. Therefore I can force you to leave. A depressionary spiral during a pandemic is no time to prioritize property rights. Eviction is a national suicide pact.

In 2014 a boy broke into what he thought was an abandoned house in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio. In a closet he found the mummified body of the homeowner, who committed suicide five years earlier out of despair that his $10,000 house had been foreclosed upon. He needn’t have bothered.  The bank was so overwhelmed with newly acquired properties due to mass foreclosures that it never bothered to send anyone to investigate or take possession. The guy died for nothing. The last thing we need now is a million more like him.

— Ted Rall, writing for Counterpunch.org

555 Fulton — How Phantom Wealth Kills Civilization

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PHANTOM WEALTH MUST RUN TO GROUND. The race to build unaffordable luxury buildings on spec is driving out urban working people, and poisoning the productive economy.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Chinese-developer-in-Mohammed-Nuru-allegations-is-15014321.php

Click above for information on 555 Fulton. I can’t understand much of the “inside-SF” skullduggery involved, only that it involves City building-permit corruption. There’s even a Foodie angle: implicated is Nick Bovis, the innkeeper of Lefty O’Doul’s, the landmark Geary Street dive bar just opposite the side-door of the St. Francis Hotel. But the real failure here is the huge price the City is paying for ill-conceived developments like this one.

555 Fulton Street is a “location location location” in San Francisco. It’s only a few blocks from the bustling Civic Center in one direction, and from chic Hayes Valley in the other. It’s just a short stroll up to the Alamo Square dog park; or into Japantown. It’s just a quick jog down to Market Street, where you can catch the “F” trolley down into the Castro.

In the Old Economy (pre-Tech) none of these neighborhoods were very fancy at all, with the exception of the block of “Painted Ladies” trimming the view from Alamo Square. BUT — Fulton Street itself is (was?) mostly lined with huge Section 8 housing projects, housing a large percentage of the City’s working-class African Americans. “The Western Addition” has many tough blocks, but also, of course, as proud and diverse a community history as any.

Right in the middle of all this was 555 — a block-square gated industrial compound, with a modest Modernist two-story front-office type building attached. The ground floor was open entirely on one side as a covered loading dock, surrounded by a yard spacious enough to park thirty cars or trucks. It was one of the very few mixed-use buildings in that part of town, and the tenants it attracted made it fascinating and exciting to visit. One unit held a small-batch artisanal sausage factory (Clio loved that one). One office held a group of geeky but well-heeled Tech Pioneers, who sat all day from 8 until 6 in a white room snaked with black, humming cables. They were very friendly about the dogs galloping up and down the plywood floors of the hallways, but they were preter-naturally silent themselves: no banter, no guffawing, no blaring talk-radio, no slam-dunked beer bottles thunking into the corner trash bucket. God knows what they were doing with all that humming equipment, but it seemed Very San Francisco. Other units held indie filmmakers, artists, lesbian bartenders, and an ice-cream vendor with his push-carts corralled in the yard. One part of the yard was wired off with thirty-foot high chain link, a cage-cube filled with what looked like rusting scrap metal.

It was a homely post-Industrial eyesore. But it was cheap and central and a quirky landlord encouraged the spontaneous adaption by citizen-local-residents. It made 555 a simulacrum of the diverse, creative, hard-working, entrepreneurial, un-pretentious, gastronomically-adventurous City of yore.

The architect’s original vision — I mean, the vision he saw first.

When the building was bought ten years ago by a Chinese hotelier, Zhang Li, he tore it down, and paid relocation fees to get the tenants out quickly — most had to leave the City, and many ended up in the East Bay. The gleaming, expensive new building he planned and built on spec was touted — with apparently no irony at all — as one of those trendy new urban-planning Barbie dolls, a “mixed-use building.” But unlike the old one, this new kind was fantastically modern and expensive, and would attract only one kind of user — the branded hot young up-and-coming trust-fundy hipster-striver of the New San Francisco.

Another version of what the site was supposed to be, with a grocery store downstairs.

Sadly, the site has so far missed even that sad fate, for the building sits empty, not ever quite finished, not ever quite abandoned. I understand many of San Francisco’s famous bars and restaurants have closed recently. None of the locals can afford to go, and none of the locals is even local, anymore, so that’s that. Phantom wealth must run to ground, after all.

Francisco Avila’s Adobe — Cmdr. Stockton’s HQ — Christine Sterling’s Castle in Spain — LA’s Oldest House, 1818

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Thank Western States Jewish History for this outstanding map of historic streets and sites around the Plaza. Avila’s casa is #14 on the right. Note that an ell appears stretched out lazily into Vines Street, which became Olvera Street. Maybe Francisco wanted to have an indoor tap over the Zanja Madre, which flows right down the alley. In the sleepy Pueblo property lines were fluid, and needs-based. Under American rule, the ayuntamiento realized that to participate in the new Yankee land speculation game, they’d need gridded lots. So the City hired Edward Ord to prepare a four-square survey. This started to fix LA’s modern street plan, and the Avila-Rimpau family may have had to tear down half their casa. Still, regular streets enabled the real beginnings of LA Wheel Estate. See the “Camino Para San Fernando,” now Hill Street through Chinatown, then San Fernando Road; and “Calle Aliso”, which going east, forded the muddy River at El Aliso Vineyards, then tracked through the plains of East LA towards San Gabriel Mission. To the west, Aliso was extended and in the 1950s, was turned into the 101 Freeway, obliterating the entire left-hand-side of this map. It’s Progress.
The adobe is shaded by an ancient California pepper tree. Originally Peruvian, they were first planted at Mission San Luis Rey in 1825. The tree’s pretty shade and spicy berries made it very popular with all the Californios; it has become naturalized here, and remains an emblem of Old California. It seems that Christine Sterling planted this one, maybe 90 years ago.

Music was central to life in early Los Angeles. Musician-farmers were actively recruited – “a beneficial profession” – by Gov. Felipe de Neve to be among the pobladores of LA. Music was played and sung by all classes of people daily at home. Richard Henry Dana wrote that he’d never heard people with such beautiful voices as in Alta California. And in church, the Mission Indian choirs became famous among amazed European visitors for their perfect pitch and Roman Latin in the masses and motets. Traditional Mexican tunes were at the center of all civic ceremonies and events; a wedding or a fandango could go on for a week.

The Avila Adobe curators have done a fine job of displaying the musicophilia of early Los Angeles.The guitar and castanets were caballero arts that connected a striving frontier Don and Dona with the graces of Hispanic traditional culture. Violins, concertinas, flutes and fiddles came on Boston ships and with Boston sailors to San Pedro, and brought in French and German and Italian and English classical dance music, galops and intermezzi, airs and reels. Of pianos, there were only one or two in the whole province, until the wealthy ranching period after the Gold Rush put them in many salas, where they would be eagerly shown off to visitors hoping to find someone who could play them.

COME FOLLOW THE BAND — HOW CMDR. STOCKTON MOVED IN

In January, 1847, the house served as headquarters for Naval Commander Robert F. Stockton, when he retook the enemy capital, “The Angels,” after a bloody march up from San Diego. Like most Angelenos, Encarnacion Avila had fled with her family as the Norte Americanos marched in to occupy Alta California’s capital to the martial swing of a Marine Band.

The traditonal Californio open door…

The legend goes that Dona Avila left the shuttered house in the care of a servant boy, warning him strictly not to let anyone in. As the lively marches, polkas and airs drifted down Vines Street from the Plaza, the spellbound boy, who had never heard a brass band or Yankee music before, couldn’t help himself. He crept out and drifted up to the Plaza to watch the Mexican colors torn down and the Stars and Stripes run up. Just then, Stockton’s quartermaster stalked down Vines Street, hunting for provender; he saw the open door, and peeked into the sumptuous sala. By ancient common law — the law of the unlocked door — he entered and commandeered the adobe on the spot for Stockton’s personal bivouac.

As downtown Los Angeles boomed and degenerated into “Los Diablos” in the 1860s, 70’s, and 80’s, the Avila-Sepulveda-Rimpau family reluctantly abandoned downtown (like all the old Californio families). They thus became unwitting absentee landlords of an urban slum, renting out the adobe as a cheap flop-house and more or less forgetting it existed. The City finally condemned the property in 1928. (For more on “absentee landlordism in California”I refer Patient Reader to Henry George’s “Progress and Poverty.”)

CHRISTINE STERLING MOVES IN — “MOTHER OF OLVERA STREET”

“Today I stood in the silent rooms, saw the crumbling walls, the boarded-up windows, the dirt and neglect. I remember taking from the public library a book on the “History of Los Angeles.” It was a picture of this old house labeled “American headquarters in 1847.” I walked out into the patio. The fine old pepper trees were now just barren stumps. A pile of rotting garbage replaced the flowers which once blossomed there. But in spite of it all, the spirit of those men and women who lived and loved here in this old home still lingered about the place.“

— Christine Sterling’s diary, 1928

  • Christina Sterling, late 20s
  • Olvera St., late 20s

Patient Reader might remember the story of how Christine Sterling, an educated and artistic San Francisco widow/divorcee, came upon the Avila Adobe with a sign declaring it “Condemned by Order of the City.” Remember how all her romantic swirling dreams of Old California, what Carey McWilliams dubbed “the Spanish Fantasy Past,” became crystalized in that moment, in her fight to save the Avila Adobe, and preserve Olvera Street. “I closed my eyes,” she wrote later, “and thought of the Plaza as a Spanish-American social and commercial center, a spot of beauty as a gesture of appreciation to México and Spain for our historical past.” Desperate to save the adobe from demolition, she posted her own hand-written sign beside the red-tag.
“Let the people of Los Angeles show honor and respect to the history of their city by making sacred and inviolate the last of the old landmarks and that spot where the city of Los Angeles was born.”

Recall how she convinced the Rimpau heirs to give her a long-term lease on very generous terms. Ponder how her vision became diluted and adulterated by racism and commercialism and ego. Then recall how Ms. Sterling, essentially by the same “Open Door” policy that served Stockton, subtly just moved in to the Avila Adobe when her own times got hard, and lived in its cool shady recesses until her death in 1962. She was certainly the longest-dwelling tenant the building ever knew. Since she kept it more or less open as a living museum during her residence, I don’t think anybody really minded. But it was her “cultural appropriation” that justified the actual appropriation. The acceptance of Anglo Los Angeles that it has always been the historic center of Mexican culture in America, began when Christine Sterling felt the spirits of Old California stomping around the Avila Adobe, as they always have.