There Shall Be No Needy, Part 6: What makes a home?

As a former tenant and a longtime landlord, as someone who worked at an agency that prevented eviction and as a member of a city commission against housing discrimination, I have been acutely aware of issues around housing and homelessness. In There Shall Be No Needy, Rabbi Jill Jacobs shows that you don't have to have had my life experience to see those issues as Jewish issues. They are deeply rooted in Jewish experience and Jewish text.

I don't altogether buy her argument that "the lack of a secure home" because of exile has created a Jewish sensitivity to homelessness. The two situations are not comparable. At most, when we reflect on how distraught our ancestors were on being expelled from the land and how much it disrupted their whole society, we can understand that losing one's apartment or house, today, is not just a personal tragedy. That is important to realize, I agree.

Here are some other, stronger points that Jacobs makes about the search for housing justice being rooted in Jewish values:

• Rabbinic texts assume that even poor people who have no food have homes. (Again, how deeply this is a criticism of contemporary American life, where that assumption is invalid!)
• Poor people cannot be required to give up their homes to receive assistance (tzedakah). Instead, the rest of us are under an obligation to make sure they can live in those homes in dignity.
  
• There is a model of what permanent housing is NOT: the sukkah. Houses that let the rain in, that have no heat, that are unsafe to live in for extended periods of time, are not homes, and providing such housing is not justice.
• There is a model of what a permanent home IS: the kind of place where we must affix a mezuzah. She summarizes Maimonides' definition; it must be of adequate size, and:
  

A permanent home, in Rambam's description, must have doors and a roof so that the residents be protected from the elements and from other potential dangers, such as robbers. Finally, just as a sukkah should be constructed with the intention that it be temporary, a home must be constructed with the intention that it be a permanent dwelling place. According to these requirements, it may be that transitional housing, FEMA trailers, shelters, and other nonpermanent or unsafe residences would not qualify as homes... (144)

•  The commandment to build a guardrail around a flat roof shows "a house should protect people, to the greatest degree possible, from all potential danger. Concern for human life must, literally, be built into the fabric of the house." (145)
• Landlords have a deep and broad responsibility to ensure the place they rent out is safe and secure. We also have an obligation to prevent homelessness. This is not like renting out an animal (or a car). We have a commanded role to play in creating housing stability.
• The federal government has had a long, evil history of creating racial segregation in housing and evicting poor communities en masse from their neighborhoods. (For a much more detailed discussion of this history, I recommend The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein.) Therefore, we as a country must do teshuvah, repentance, for the sin of creating a racially biased housing crisis, creating homelessness and not preventing it.
  

Happy Days Are Here Again?

At 55, I watch the stock market more than I used to.  Oh, not its daily ups and downs, which are like my cats chasing each other around the house: something spooks them and off they go.  But I have a graph in the back of my mind. I'm aware that my hopes of a retirement with Rona partly depend on the value of our retirement accounts.  When the line is going down, as it did in the Great Recession, we have to exercise patience.  When it's going up, we get to wonder how two children of working-class parents can grow up to be secure, even at a modest level.

That's why I take personally the question that James Surowiecki raised in a recent article in The New Yorker: "Boom or Bubble?"  The stock market has been going up, even though employment, housing, and income equality have lagged behind.  Is this really sustainable? 

The answer I get from reading the article is: unfortunately, yes.

The value of stock is based on the triumph of corporate power.  The last time what we now call "the 99%" could consistently force the wealthy to share the wealth we all created was when I was a teenager.  Since then:

• Corporate tax rates have fallen dramatically (and so have the rates that rich people pay as individuals).  
• Corporations have gone global. A study of "American" corporations that Surowiecki cites found "they got forty-six per cent of their earnings from abroad."
• Partly as a result, corporations have broken the power of unions and forced wages down.  (Retirement benefits, too.  If we had pensions instead of 401ks and IRAs, stocks would be lower, and we wouldn't care.)

And one more thing that Surowiecki doesn't mention but his colleague Elizabeth Kolbert makes clear: raping the planet is good for profits.  If the companies that our financial advisor has invested us in were to pay the full environmental cost of just the energy they use, then they--and we--would have far fewer dollars in our accounts.  But that is just what I would like to see.

I would like to see fewer new products and more days when the air is clear.  I would like to see lower profits and more social benefits.  We and the vast majority of other Americans would lead happier lives if corporate taxes went up instead of the stock market--and we used that tax money to pay for universal health care and a more generous retirement benefit for all.  No boom, no bubble, just lives of useful work and pleasurable leisure with friends, followed by an old age not hampered by concerns about my investments, your children's future, the fate of our earth.

Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis (ed. Harris & Gorenflo)

 
This is really three books in one.  "Share or Die" is the theme of several essays in the book, and you will find inspirational stories about how people pool resources, from housing to knowledge, in order to live better than they would otherwise.  You'll also find how-to tips about educating yourself, choosing a roommate wisely, and starting worker co-ops and housing co-ops.  Implicit in these essays is a critique of consumption as a lifestyle and of capitalism as a system that demands consumption to survive.

Another set of essays focus more on the "Get Lost Generation," the Millennials or Generation Y, who came of age expecting that a college education would allow them to do it all, have it all, and change whatever discomforted them in the world they inherited.  Society fostered some of these expectations.  Others seem to have been mass delusions.  In any case, the Great Recession dashed a lot of hopes and made young people re-examine the value of a college education, a job, owning a home, marrying (since none of them have turned out as expected, at least since the Great Recession). 

If you are white and from a middle-class background and a member of this generation, you will probably find yourself or people you know portrayed in this book.  For a late Baby Boomer like me, it offers a chance to listen in to conversations and soliloquies I might not otherwise hear.  I do think a limitation of the book is that it doesn't solicit the voices of Black, Latino, and/or immigrant youth.  I have worked with people from those cohorts, and I think they would have a whole different set of concerns (and express shared concerns in a very different way).

The least developed set of essays in the book deal with the "age of crisis" we live in.  When I was in my twenties and attending graduate school, I provided personal care to an old leftist who had suffered a stroke.  One day, I told him that the undergraduates I taught didn't know about Vietnam or Watergate. "They have no sense of history!" I exclaimed.  "Neither do you," he retorted, and reeled off a series of important events from the first half of the twentieth century that I had barely heard of.

So, I am not in any position to blame the writers of this book for exaggerating the unique quality of the age they live in--but that is what they do.  There is no sense that protest began before Occupy Wall Street.  There are no references to the long history of cooperatives in this country, let alone Mondragon, in Spain.  And few of these writers consider that some of the wonderful experiments in collective living, collaborative consumption, and political activism they are engaged in might not survive when they need enough income to raise a child, or health insurance for themselves, or money and leisure to afford to take care of an aging parent.  (The essay "Get on the Lattice" by Ahlander and Kofman is a notable exception.)

We should all read this book--and share it with others.  Then, we should invite friends and strangers to a potluck dinner and discuss what it means to each of us.  That way, we can take up the challenge this book poses and carry it further.

Here Comes the Neighborhood

I distinctly remember that early in Rona's real estate career, a prospective client told her, "We don't want to live in no multi-cultural neighborhood." She heard the word multi-cultural pronounced with such distaste, she instantly knew it was code for, "We don't want to live with no niggers." Rona invited these buyers to find themselves another agent.

Things have changed. Today, it might be a lot harder to avoid living in a neighborhood where your neighbor has a different race than you do. The Boston Globe published a map showing the diversity of different neighborhoods in the city, and only a few are islands unto themselves. I wish they would have extended the map into Somerville and Cambridge! Still, it tells the story: most of us now choose to live in neighborhoods where there are "enough" people "like me"--but not too many. I think that's a sign of progress.

We Can Still Win the War on Poverty

Ronald Reagan once said, "We fought a war on poverty and poverty won." Ronald Reagan lied.

1. Poverty did not win. From 1963, when Lyndon Johnson took office, to 1968, poverty declined dramatically. The number of people in poverty stayed at that reduced level until 1980. All that changed when Reagan was elected. "The average number of people living under the poverty line during the eight years of the Reagan administration was 33.1 million, 25 percent more than the 26.2 million living in poverty during the previous administration."
2. Reagan fought on the other side. It's not just that he propagandized against poor people. Reagan actively cut programs that helped families and individuals get out of poverty. Let's take just one example: housing. Reagan cut the federal investment in housing from $74 billion to $19 billion in constant dollars. Reagan's cuts almost single-handedly created the homeless problem as we know it today; then he said on Good Morning America that people sleeping on the streets "are homeless, you might say, by choice." If there really were a war on poverty, Reagan was a deserter and a traitor. But...
3. There never was an all-out war on poverty--"rather a collection of small projects aimed to improve education and community development, such as Head Start and the Job Corps," as Peter Edelman points out. "A complete war on poverty would involve much more: ensuring a quality education for every child, the guarantee of good jobs, universal health coverage, quality child care, adequate housing assistance and a safety net for those not in a position to work. In other words, a jobs and income strategy."
   

The so-called war on poverty remains to be fought--and it can be won.