There is a lot of talk about Super Political Action Committees (PACs). There should be, as they can raise unlimited amounts of money provided they don’t directly coordinate with campaigns. But regular PACs that can coordinate directly with campaigns are also amazingly effective in shaping policies and platforms, see the ROAD ACT. Since 2018, the number-one PAC engaged in this kind of work has been the National Association of Realtors (NARs). They have given more than the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and the American Bankers Association.
In 1968, when the Fair Housing Act was passed, NAR fought to prevent its passage, and when it could not, it realized it needed to be more intimately involved in the political process.
“You start in 1954 by saying, “N-word, N-word, N-word.” By 1968 you can’t say “n-word”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, (B)lacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N-word, N-word.”— Lee Atwater.
So since 1969, the NAR has been helping you with reformist talking points that allow so many single-family homeowners (SFH) to have their cake and eat it too. (Those cake pops at Costco ARE delicious!)
We have a homeownership welfare state, which is kind of wild.
“I want my own school district for MY kids and low taxes. Heck my kids are grown lower my taxes NOW!! Make it happen, or I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue!”
Well, red actually…possibly purple….
Reformers in suburbia are just neoliberals—who are broke and angry because they finally figured out meritocracy isn’t real.
“I worked hard, why is this happening to me?”
It’s happened to lots of people, sweetie. Possibly connecting property “ownership” and not dying under a freeway eating cat food while kneecapping unions and turning corporations into people and gutting the Voting Rights Act was a bad idea, but whatever…..
Nothing wrong with being a neoliberal, but it is not left. Not everyone is on the left, and that’s not a moral judgment; it simply is what it is.
The American Dream of the SFH with “good” schools is not the only way we can dream, but that is the only dream hegemony and its bought political representatives have pushed, which does two things: turns the social contract into a meritocracy in which you alone are responsible for fulfillig the contract (like if you took the concept of bagging your own groceries and you add in stocking, warehouse duties, and picking prouce on the weekends) and allows for society to feel that those who are renters and/or lose their homes or will never obtain one are morally corrupt.
“I worked hard and that is why I have a house.”
Of course, hon, no one has worked as hard as you.
NAR's “help” has historically been to make the real estate market work more efficiently (again see the ROAD ACT). This means deregulation; why tie the hands of the market with checks on racism, sexism, and ableism? Why have safety codes? Why have finance regulation. That’s paperwork (—and witnesses), and in their weltanshaunnng it will just cost us all money and time. We must think of the BIGGER picture, you know, men with lots and lots of money.
The sprawl, the suburb, the racism, the redlining, the stepford wives, the Auto Asphyxiation, AND the endless wars are all connected to NAR meddling in our elections (well not only them, but you know what I mean). I think we need a list of who is taking money from NAR, and I think I will make it, so we can know exactly who the dogbodies are to the men who keep our rent so very high and our communities so very divided.
Public policy should not subsidize asset accumulation through homeownership; it should instead guarantee housing security directly through social housing, tenant protections, cooperative ownership, and even explore other more imaginative decommodified forms of housing.
Another country is possible.