Hank is right: it's not easy¶

Hank is right: it's not easy. It's simple, but certainly not easy.

The simple explanation at the root of the housing crisis is that housing is treated as a commodity. Just like in real life, the roots are tangled and branching and dirty, but the commodity form is at the center. https://t.co/0ISQ7RzYUy In turn, commodified housing is one manifestation of the most powerful tools of maintaining capitalist hegemony: the theft of the commons. Housing is something that is non-negotiable for survival, just like food, water, and medicine: the means of survival. All class societies rely on some degree of alienation of the majority from the means of survival in order to compel production on behalf of the ruling classes in control of those means of survival. At some level (obfuscated by layers of superstructure) this requires violence. Under capitalism, the enclosure of the commons is so comprehensive that it is next to impossible to survive without contributing to the capitalist mode of production. That is, the vast majority MUST work for a wage in order to purchase access to essentially ALL means of survival. Under this paradigm, where housing is both something used to generate capital directly and the primary means of survival which the working classes must work in order to access, it is impossible to abolish homelessness through building MORE commodified housing. The commodity form is so naturalized in our society that its persistence is taken as an immutable fact of life. Calls to even meagerly combat capital's grip on the means of survival are seen as "intellectually lazy," and "solutions" that maintain that dominance are "realistic." Yes, slogans like "Just give people houses!" are oversimplified. The path to decommodification is complicated, fraught with violence, and certainly doesn't obey the prescriptions of a legal system designed to enforce the theft of the commons.

But we need to start somewhere. We start by challenging the conceptual paradigm inflicted on us, that housing is something to be bought, sold, temporarily leased, and taken away as punishment for poverty. This is not an immutable fact of life: it is a legally, culturally, and violently reproduced status quo. It's not intellectually lazy to have a historically-informed ideology, with a horizon beyond our cloistered present. It's not idealism to reckon with the impermanence of the material forces that shape our society. It's not childish to strive to build the future.