About
From Self-managed Solidarity Unionism to a
Self-managed Society (from ZNet, June 15, 2009)
Social Anarchism, Individualist Anarchism,
the State and Leninism: A Libertarian Critique of
Capitalism
Workers Power
and the Spanish Revolution (in HTML) Aug. 2006
Anti-displacement Victory in San Francisco (in PDF)
Workers' Liberation and Institutions of
Self-management in The Northeastern Anarchist #11, March 2006
San Francisco Transit
Fight
What is Gentrification? (revised 2004)
Slaughterhouse Fight: A Look at the
Hormel Strike (from ideas &
action 1986) (with Jake Edwards and Steve Boyce)
Workers Power and the Russian Revolution Revolution and Syndicalism (Part 1)
The Capitalist City or the Self-managed City? 2004
States of Affairs The Hidden Cost of the New Economy: A Study of the Northeast Mission
Industrial Zone
[In HTML]
[[In PDF]
Origins of the Union Shop (1989)
Life at the Bay Guardian (1987)
|
Chinatown land trust helps low-income housingBy Cory Paul (San Francisco Chronicle) Just a few years ago, floor boards popped up as Ji Jian-guang walked across his cramped Chinatown apartment. His wife, Ru Mei Peng, washed vegetables in a sink the size of a shoe box. Their two adult sons — along with a daughter-in-law and grandbaby — shared a bedroom split by a bookcase. Though cramped, 53 Columbus, Room 108, was home. For nearly a decade, the Jis feared they would lose it to encroaching developers. Tenants Celebrate Conversion of Building to CooperativeMore than 200 people attended a victory celebration June 16th in San Francisco for a group of tenacious tenants who successfully fought their eviction and now are in control of their building through their coop, the Columbus United Cooperative, at 53 Columbus Avenue. This struggle goes back more than a decade ago when the San Francisco Community College District bought a 3-story brick apartment building with the aim of knocking it down to build a new community college campus. From Self-managed Solidarity Unionism to a Self-managed SocietyWhen Marx drew up a draft set of principles for the first International Working Men's Association (the “First International”) in the 1860s, he began with the statement: “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves.” Capitalism is built on various forms of oppression and structural inequality. But the subordination and exploitation of the working class remains at the heart of the system. A liberatory program and strategy for a remake of society needs to explain how workers can escape the class cage. The Shared Equity Solution: A Working Class Program for Housing
Since the 1980s efforts to increase homeownership among working class people with lower incomes have included government downpayment assistance programs and attacks on "redlining" practices of banks in communities of color. As banks sought to expand their mortgage business, they increasingly pushed lower income residents into risky adjustable rate mortgages and mortgages with baloon payments. Studies have shown that many people who were directed towards risky loans would in fact have qualified for less risky mortgages. This did lead to a small increase in the rate of homeownership — from 64 percent in 1985 to 69 percent in 2004 (58 percent in California). Homeownership has been promoted as providing more security than renting since you own and control your own dwelling. But the security becomes illusory when high debt and risky loans drive households into foreclosure. And an epidemic of foreclosures de-stabilizes working class neighborhoods as large numbers of families lose their home. Growing household debt is a symptom of the declining real wage rate in the USA. As people have a harder time making ends meet, they resort to credit card debt and use their home equity as a source of loans. From 1973 to 1998 the average hourly rate for "non-supervisory and production employees" (about 80 percent of the employed population) dropped by 11.6 percent. When people put more debt on their house through home equity loans, they are more at risk of foreclosure. As more people lose their jobs in the current recession, more families lose their houses. At the same time, homeownership is simply not affordable to a sizeable part of the working class population, though the exact extent of the problem varies from area to area. To take an extreme case, in 2007 only 3 percent of the dwellings in Los Angeles County...both new and existing...were affordable to a household with the median income. In California as a whole, only 11 percent of the dwellings were affordable to a household with the state median income. |
Links
|
