I have been watching the Left’s Marxist war on private property build steam for several years. As an owner of apartments for over 20 years, I have seen the hostility towards landlords become toxic to the point where individual property owners are deciding to get out of the business, leaving the field wide open for only the biggest real estate investment companies and the deep pockets of government-subsidized housing projects to fill the void. Renters will not be well served in the future. My own family’s tenure as landlords has a short-term deadline.
How will the average renter fare when competition amongst many rental housing owners for their business no longer exists? And if housing-for-all is a “right,” how hard will anyone have to work to obtain a place of their own? Who will get to live in the best places? How will housing be distributed? With universal rent control choking profitability, who will want the burden of being a landlord? And finally, what would be the fate of existing home owners! My guess is that they will be heavily taxed for the privilege of owning their own home, and if the hapless owner could not pay the tax, the government would assume ownership. Of course, any appreciation on the home would be forbidden.
The Marxists who love to generate envy and hate have no real love for humanity and do not understand how human nature works. They do not know the hearts of men and women who desire a home of their own. They do not understand what happens to property when it is not privately owned or when incentives to take care of it are removed.
Food, medical care, water, shelter, energy… my guess is that the next shoe to drop will be government control and distribution of the food supply affirming a new “right” to eat and who gets what. How about exercising our right to work to get what we want and need?
If you haven’t heard of Capital Research Center or seen it’s website, Influence Watch, I encourage you to check both regularly. The Influence Watch podcast has great in-depth discussions about issues you won’t find anywhere else.
Read the entire article below on the CRC website to learn what organizations are behind the movement to end private homeownership. Then try to sleep at night. It’s hard.
The Left’s Campaign for Socialized Housing
Big Philanthropy has aligned with "Homes Guarantee" advocates to end private homeownership.
Capital Research Center, by Robert Stilson August 26, 2021
Last year, the Capital Research Center (CRC) published a two-part series detailing the convoluted and overlapping networks of activist groups that were using the Covid-19 crisis to push for socialized housing in the United States. CRC noted that even though these proposals were often couched in terms of a pandemic response, they were by no means Covid-dependent.
Calls for a government-sponsored “homes guarantee” predate the coronavirus and will continue independent of it. As envisioned by the activist groups behind them and their foundation funders, these proposals would radically federalize and socialize control over American real estate.
A “homes guarantee” seeks to reconceptualize housing as a government-guaranteed social good, rather than a private asset. It calls for massive government spending on and regulation of the housing sector. The goal is to transfer as many housing units as possible from private to public or social control. Only the federal government, advocates contend, can provide the housing Americans should be entitled to. Gigantic in scope, these proposals also seamlessly integrate other left-progressive policy priorities into their platforms.
A sampling of specific proposals is illustrative. One campaign, called Homes Guarantee, details its plans in a 20-page briefing book released in 2019. The taxpayer would subsidize government-guaranteed housing to everyone, creating a “legally enforceable right to affordable housing” against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
[Homes Guarantee] advocates for a “land value uplift tax” of “as close to 100% as possible” on real estate investment appreciation and for taxation schemes that would incentivize developers to build rental properties rather than owner-occupied housing—describing this as a “significant positive outcome.”
A second and similar campaign is the Housing Justice National Platform for a Homes Guarantee. It likewise considers “private market strategies to increase the housing supply” to be “deeply flawed” and instead proposes to formalize housing as “a human right, not a commodity to be bought and sold for profit.” Specific proposals include:
Constructing “12 million new, non-market social housing units in the next decade.” This works out to building more than one new taxpayer-funded home every 30 seconds, 24 hours a day, nonstop for 10 years.
Enacting universal rent control. This is the one thing every economist thinks is a bad idea.
Enacting a federal prohibition on single-family zoning. There are fair arguments to be made on zoning, but a blanket national ban would be a tremendous infringement on what are properly state and local prerogatives.
Paying racially based housing reparations. While one should always be vigilant against insidious vestiges of Jim Crow, the wrongs of old race-discriminatory housing policies are not righted by new race-discriminatory housing policies.
“Strong regulation . . . of real-estate development and investment corporations.” Regulations are already estimated to account for up to 23.8 percent of the cost of a new single-family home and 32.1 percent (or more) of a multifamily development.
Enacting a Green New Deal for Housing. As proposed by the Democratic Party’s socialist wing, this would, among other things, “transition the entire public housing stock . . . into zero carbon, highly energy-efficient developments that produce on-site renewable energy.”
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