Housing is broken for everyone but the rich

Against Landlords by Robin Rendle

This feeling isn’t rage though, it’s simply injustice. A sensitivity to an unnatural thing. A force you might not understand, but you feel it in your bones.

The way to fix the housing crisis then is to follow the money and call this thing for what it is: a grave injustice, social violence, an untenable situation that we all experience and only few profit from.

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The Insurance Apocalypse Conversation America Won’t Have by Hamilton Nolan

Because state governments do not have enough money to actually pay out the claims in the event of a serious disaster in a highly populated area, what we are really dealing with is sort of the paper fiction of insurance—just enough to keep the real estate market pumping and stave off immediate exodus, with the implicit knowledge that in the worst case scenario, these (red, socialist-loathing) states will run to the federal government for a bailout, and then keep on doing the same thing.

As Wall Street has long proven: if private companies know that they will be bailed out in a worst case scenario, they will take more risk. Why cut your own profits to hedge against a risk that will not be your responsibility?

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Observation #1 by Meg Conley

The average minimum wage in the Denver metro area is $14.17 an hour. The average housing wage for a two-bedroom apartment is $35.84 an hour.

See also: Affordable, Attainable Housing is the Solution for Almost Everything

When I see the bare dirt, I remember that growing food on empty islands, medians, and lots is illegal in many cities. Guerilla gardening is treated as an occupation of public lands, met with force. Cops supervise city workers as they rip up tomato plants, cut down fruit trees, and dig up corn stalks. They’ll tell you it’s because the food goes unpicked, drops, and rots. But growing food is difficult, and the people who tend the plants don’t forget the crops.

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Let Yourself Be Haunted by Alexis Madrigal

From that vantage point, you can look down 7th and see all that was destroyed in the midcentury. What had been the very center of Black life and culture in the East Bay has been turned into logistics infrastructure on one side and a hodgepodge of buildings in disrepair on the other, as BART screeches overhead.

… Why was this done? How?

And the answer I came to, over and over in this research, were these invisible systems, these ideas that were placed over the top of the land—ways of thinking about race and risk, about property and ownership, about the collective of the state and the individualism of the nation.

See also: Theft of the land

Monopoly was Originally Satire

Went to The History of Exclusion on the Eastside