On the urgent journey to a just and livable world, existing residential land uses are not like the circuits of a malfunctioning HAL 9000. With rare exceptions, shutting them down would make no sense and plainly would not happen under a President Biden.
Below the break is a brief left critique of "THE BIDEN PLAN FOR INVESTING IN OUR COMMUNITIES THROUGH HOUSING." HINT: While there is room for criticism from the left, there is also a lot to get excited about. Before critiquing Biden's plan however, the notion that the left, much less the centrist Biden, is out to "destroy the suburbs" needs to be exposed as both morally repugnant and factually absurd.
As we seek to form a more perfect union, the most worthy frontier of the human odyssey lies not in fragile nature or in outer space but in the previously exploited earthly space between us all.
Some whites still seek to contest, dominate, and wall off this space for those who, they subjectively think, look more like them. Some even seek to form a menacing presidential campaign celebrating this conduct. A cornerstone of Trump’s racist and sexist political strategy is scaring "white suburban housewives." (www.npr.org/...)
The left should view Trump's strategy as merely the latest installment in a dialectical struggle at shifting, vague boundaries. We are on a complex dialectical human odyssey of mutual discovery, survival, and fulfillment. This requires rejecting the pre-programmed "growth" mindset grounded in profit, accumulation, and environmental destruction. This does not mean destroying each other in the process. Through not only just laws and smart infrastructure investment but also the prefigurative actions of residents, places will be not destroyed but positively and sustainably transformed.
Global warming, the pandemic, and high unemployment expose the illusion that the enormously diverse array of suburbs are placid dominions of gated political-economic equilibrium. People who lose their homes, jobs, or healthcare, or are forced to abandon needed medication or support for their children’s college education, generally do not view this as creative destruction. And Blacks, always resisting confinement to the substandard places assigned to them by Apartheid America much less the devaluation of their freedom and very lives, finally have widespread support from white allies. While we have all always been equally human, at long last more and more whites are reckoning both that and that we are all on this human odyssey together.
This has not always been the case, even outside of the Deep South where I grew up and live. The ugliest aspects of Trumpism did not magically materialize in Upper Midwestern suburbs. Racism was always there, lurking in the shadows.
The background of suburban street could not have been more placid, with the branches in a gently moving screen across the cool lamplighted windows over the way. But against this background, the menace grew rapidly. Dozens and then scores of men and excited women filled the yards opposite, oozed into the street. Aggressive men pushed forward in the center, men whose killer faces were the more grotesque above their pert ties, their near-gentlemanly tweed jackets.
(Ch. 54, gutenberg.net.au/...)
Raised working class by a brown father and a white mother, starting school precariously white in segregated central Mississippi during the mid-60s, I always yearned for a stable life in a white suburb. As good fortune would have it, while I was in graduate school I myself once had a Kingsblood Royal moment. In the early 80s I read a copy of Sinclair Lewis's forgotten 1947 classic I'd bought at an Arlington, Virginia public library used book sale.
Reading how quickly lives in a fictional northern suburb became precarious to one not measuring up to immeasurable standards of “racial” purity changed me, a person of suppressed mixed ethnicity, for the better. This also gives me not only fear but also dialectic hope in the present precarious moment.
The book is set in fictional Grand Republic, Minnesota, the kind of place that went for Trump in 2016:
In Cass Timberlane it is described as a city of eighty-five thousand people. In Kingsblood Royal, the action of which postdates World War II, the population has grown to ninety thousand. Grand Republic is situated eighty miles north of Minneapolis and seventy-odd from Duluth, though the exact direction is not stated. "It is large enough to have a Renoir, a schoolsystem scandal, several millionaires, and a slum." The city lies in Radisson County at the confluence of the Big Eagle and Sorshay rivers; the combined stream then flows west to the Mississippi. Lewis is careful to keep Grand Republic out of proximity to Lake Superior so that there can be no easy confusion with Duluth. But his account of its growth has a familiar ring: "Grand Republic grew rich two generations ago through the uncouth robbery of forests, iron mines, and soil for wheat."
(Flanagan, JT, 1960. The Minnesota Backgrounds of Sinclair Lewis' Fiction, f.n. omitted. Minnesota History. www.google.com/...)
I still have the book, which moved me to tears as I unwittingly took one more step toward discovering my inner socialist. When a non-Black person personally associates with the experience of racial injustice in the U.S. it can be at least partially transformative. Through this work of fiction, empathy can be not only conceptually learned but also emotionally felt.
Few read the book these days, so here’s my one-paragraph plot summary: When World War II veteran Neil Kingsblood, under pressure from his arrogant father, finally researches his suspected royal white ancestry, he initially learns that his heritage might instead trace to a Native American. Hoping to banish this thought from his psyche, he visits an official with the Minnesota Historical Society and inquires on behalf of a mythical Army buddy. His relief that he isn’t descended from a Native American is immediately replaced with shock to learn of Black ancestry. Gradually he embraces human solidarity with Blacks he previously looked down on. After ably resisting, with the help of a few brave (anti-fascist) allies, a large gun-toting mob, he and his white wife are arrested and hauled off by the local police enablers of racism under color of law.
And why again this violent fuss?
"No, I think it's very doubtful that Xavier Pic was part Indian, because—now I don't know whether you'll consider it wise to tell your inquiring veteran or not; so many people do have vulgar superstitions about race; but the fact is that your friend's ancestor, Xavier, is mentioned by Major Taliaferro as being a full-blooded Negro."
Neil's face could not have changed, for Dr. Werweiss went on, quite cheerfully, "Of course you know that in most Southern states and a few Northern ones, a 'Negro' is defined, by statute, as a person having even 'one drop of Negro blood,' and according to that barbaric psychology, your soldier friend and any children he may have, no matter how white they look, are legally one-hundred-percent Negroes."
Neil was thinking less of himself than of his golden Biddy.
(Ch. 12, gutenberg.net.au/...)
WASP “protection” of suburban “values” (property and otherwise) demanded expulsion even of Neil's daughter. White violence against Blacks for not staying in their place resulted not from even a modicum of science but from a “barbaric psychology.”
This barbaric psychology was and is one of mass projectionism (in other words, Trump writ large): plainly evil harm conjuring evil harm in others—even where no physical differences were visible ("Elizabeth, aged four and always known as 'Biddy'—the enchanting, the good-tempered Biddy, with her skin of strawberries and cream, her hair like champagne," [Ch. 2]). Such were the stringent, topsy turvy legal and cultural demands of the MAGA "justice" of Neil's time.
But race prejudice is deviously shifty, holding to no set tactics or rules. In denying its own existence, often with a wink or a nod, it is ever capable of evolving to meet new circumstances. Such are the contorted racist attacks on Kamala Harris, claimed to not be authentically Black despite her lifelong self-identification as Black (www.nytimes.com/...)
Before Harris even was picked by Biden, über housing discriminator Trump was purposely hiding housing discrimination in plain sight for millions more like me in need of a Kingsblood Royal moment. Trump trusts that white suburbanites are still inclined to mass racial hysteria, albeit now supposedly about their "property values" rather than "one drop of Negro blood" in a neighbor's child. Fearful of the dialectical potential, Trump's ideological predecessors sought to suppress such "enemy of the people" moments.
While some white critics found the novel contrived, Ebony, a prominent African-American magazine, ranked it as the most important novel of the year. "The white establishment tended to view the novel as wildly implausible. Black people viewed it as profoundly perceptive."[2]
Shortly after the publication of Kingsblood Royal, a group of white supremacists sent a letter to J. Edgar Hoover encouraging the FBI to seize all copies of the book and declare Lewis' novel an act of sedition.[3]
(en.m.wikipedia.org/...)
Trump hopes to tap into prejudice and financial interests rooted in both past and present discriminatory conduct. While neighbors may no longer show up with guns when rumors of “Black-ness” arise, housing discrimination still exists by developers, landlords, lenders, and realtors (www.bostonglobe.com/...). Giving them pseudo-intellectual cover and attempting to fuel his hateful campaign, Trump screams “there goes the neighborhood” from his Twitter finger and the Rose Garden.
In working on this piece I easily found recent YouTube presentations by white residential mortgage lenders denouncing Biden and praising Trump. They made no attempt to hide their view that “low income housing” is not welcome anywhere near the suburbs where they do their lending. They don’t even want “it” (barely avoiding the pronoun “them”) in their counties, which then have to pay real estate taxes to support the schooling of “low income” students. In other words, innocent Black children are at best dead weight who should be prevented from living in would-be Section 8 housing somewhere in the currently empty spaces of towns where they lend money.
Housing discrimination is a hateful gift that keeps on giving. Systemic segregation still persists in segregated "white neighborhoods" (www.brookings.edu/...) Systemic segregation cannot be adequately confronted without systemic change.
For Biden, or Obama before him, to begin to identify even a tiny measure of needed systemic change is to be attacked with racist tropes, including the sanctimonious need for “local” control of zoning rather than having “Washington, D.C. bureaucrats tell us how to develop our hallowed surplus suburban land.”
This is States Rights redux laid over “Black children should go back to shithole Africa.” In other words, this is not only about Trump’s political interests but also about white Americans’ continuing need for Kingsblood Royal moments followed by meaningful political action.
Whether or not Trump were running for re-election, the political battle lines for a more perfect union will increasingly be neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, and even house by house, heart by heart, in suburbia of all places. Whether we like it or not, whether we like suburbia or not, Trump has merely purposely heightened existing contradictions he hopes to exploit politically. People live in cities, the countryside, and on the confusing frontier between the two. Swing states typically turn on the places that are the swingiest. The suburban political battle lines are constantly being redrawn, with the lines only gradually more subtle and segmented.
Slowly fewer so-called white people aim to purposely segregate their residences by "race," but systemic racism in housing is alive and, well, sick. We must democratically challenge suburbanites themselves (as well as rural residents) to join with all of society in forming what the apostles of divide and rule seek to avoid: a more perfect union.
Not all suburbanites are interested in forming a more perfect union, but many are. How those of us on the edge between cities and the countryside see and conduct ourselves going forward will be increasingly important.
Forming a more perfect union that includes both suburbia and working class Blacks obviously does not mean destruction of suburban neighborhoods, streets, or houses. On the path to true and deep democracy in America not every bourgeois construct can or should be retroactively eliminated, but cultural and legal barriers to equality must continue to be contronted head on.
Accepting as a given fact on the ground the bourgeois construct of suburbia also does not mean the ever sprawling, white-fear dominated, housing status quo should be the pattern for the future. Rather than expanding further into the countryside we should prospectively focus new residential construction not on building more new suburbs but on smart multi-unit infilling.
This would be a smart use of surplus land that also would be beneficial to existing suburbs, not to mention the planet, among other things, by making expanded public transportation much more efficient and viable in many communities. Sustainable infrastructure improvements are urgently needed in and from many suburbs. This would be helped not harmed by having adequate housing for all focused on infilling, allowing critical mass to be reached for many things suburbia desperately needs, like more and better bike paths for exercise and for getting to and from work. This certainly applies down where I live. (Note to some of my Trump flag-flying neighbors: I shouldn’t have to say this, but it would also be nice if black men were not chased down and shot while jogging.)
We also should avoid subsidizing more encroachment on wetlands and other natural habitat. But, with the exception of some woefully unwise existing construction in coastal sand dunes (which I wrote about recently, www.dailykos.com/...) and other highly fragile areas, the suburbs we already have are largely here to stay.
Prefigurative actions by residents are also important. With control of land should come responsibility to others and the environment. The land outside the footprint of many houses in many suburbs is used unproductively and/or unsustainably. How existing suburbs are used and changed going forward, as places of unsustainable segregated isolation or integrated human solidarity and soil sharing (www.dailykos.com/...), will be critical. It is usually easy and often enjoyable to plant native plants or wildflowers for the bees, birds, and other critters, stop using pesticides and herbicides, compost, recycle yard debris rather than placing it by the street to be picked up by waste management, grow grass where needed that does not require watering, and grow fruit and vegetables to eat and share.
We as a species are no longer working with virgin soil. Yet Turgenev’s analogy for socializing society to an unnamed farmer working virgin soil still applies.
“To turn over virgin soil it is necessary to use a deep plough going well into the earth, not a surface plough gliding lightly over the top.”—From a Farmer’s Notebook.
(www.gutenberg.org/...)
The human experiment is not fixed in time, the sum total of its variously just or unjust individual and collective experiments. The human odyssey continues. The deep plough of democratic change is still needed, including in suburbia.
If Biden's housing plan were fully funded by a Democratic Congress and fully implemented around the country, housing in the U.S. would be much more fair, homelessness would be greatly reduced, and suburbia would be better off from the status quo, not harmed.
Biden's plan is an instrument of intersectional peace, not nihilistic, as much as Trump's reality show dystopia would suggest otherwise. (Here is where I pause from the completely serious to have fun and make fun of Trump.)
Suburbia, like the feminist (prezi.com/...) Dude, abides. Bubble bath time will not be disturbed, no marmots used, and no Johnsons cut off, though please get your pets spayed and neutered.
Like the Dude at the end, suburbia will be enriched by the experience, an unintended central character in the human odyssey, getting ready for a bowling tournament but with both its teammates alive because, unlike the movie, Donny will not have a heart attack and die.
As a sourpuss leftist I have to add that, in truth, suburbia abiding is not nearly good enough. Suburbia should be confronted with the full truth: Not only are "little Lebowskis" on the way, but we've left them with a big burning mess that they will not be able to abide.
Left Democrats should not be faulted for seeing greater democratic potential for the common good in suburbia than suburbia presently sees in itself.
The right hypothesizes nostalgia to a dwindling subset of whites to whom the past was grand. It seeks to turn Grand Republic's "white neighborhoods" back to what they were in the late 40s. This "placid" vision will no longer cut it. Much of Grand Republic is without health care and unemployed or tenuously employed, one foreclosed mortgage or missed rent payment away from being thrown into "suburban street." Besides that, as should have been known all along, all white and mean is no way to be. Killer faces are not a nice look to most 21st century suburbanites.
Some who are well off under the status quo, including the millionaire yearround denizens of Grand Republic and the billionaire seasonal denizens of Trump’s new home town of Palm Beach, will always prefer to keep wearing their MAGA hats. They each only get one vote, as do the rest of us (if we are not disenfranchised).
Humans, wherever we live, should not avoid full democratic responsibilities on the human odyssey. The human odyssey requires that we discover the way to mutual survival and fulfillment. Mutual survival and fulfillment requires decent, sustainable housing for all. Below the break please see how Biden's plan measures up.
Please read Biden’s Housing Plan for yourself. It has a lot of great stuff in it. I am going to be extremely brief because I would like for you to read the plan directly. You have already read too much of what I have to say.
I am not going to attempt to fully summarize Biden’s plan or follow it item-by-item. I am purposely coming up with my own bullets on a few selected items that seem key to me. If I am wrong on anything I do not want this to be faulted to someone else, especially the candidate. I also know I am leaving out vast amounts of important stuff. Details matter, and even if one reads the Biden plan carefully and follows the links as I have tried to do, housing law involves a lot of expertise I do not have.
This is simply the good faith opinion by someone in the Deep South who loves the land, hates discrimination, homelessness, and housing insecurity, is a soil scientist in his spare time, and in his day job works with indigent people outside the area of housing. I am writing as a housing lay person who wants to see the many homeless and housing insecure people whose paths I cross have good housing. I think Biden’s plan could help many of them.
I also want to see them have their other basic needs adequately met. I am keenly aware that my state, run by Republicans, has not, for example, even passed the Medicaid expanion under the Affordable Care Act. I am glad that Biden’s Housing Plan also links to his plans to increase jobs and address climate change, each of which is also worthy of far more intelligent left critique than I am capable of making.
I will first succinctly highlight some of the best aspects of the plan in the order that makes sense to me. Accomplishing these things would be a wonderful victory for social democracy in the U.S. Then I will succinctly state where the plan most fails and how it could be improved, assuming, but not claiming, this were politically possible.
It is not the purpose of this critique to take pot shots or to be disassociated from political reality. I certainly will not present a utopian socialist alternative or an explication of housing under hypothesized non-capitalist conditions, although I appreciate the work of those who do do so. No disrespect to those who aim higher, but I will, in the present moment as I see it, try to be on the left side of the possible (the democratic socialist credo of Michael Harrington, founder of DSA).
The left should take into account political reality under challenging capitalist conditions. That is partially why, even though this Democratic presidential nomination contest like the previous one my preferred primary candidate did not win the nomination, in the general election I am all in for the Democratic nominee. But besides that, although I am no Biden fanboy I am genuinely excited about his housing plan and genuinely fearful of a continuation of the Trump presidency.
The left should recognize that Biden’s plan is based in large part on input from Black Democratic elected officials who are experts on housing issues, including Jim Clyburn, Cory Booker, and Maxine Waters. These Congresspeople are unwilling to accept any white privilege mindset as defining of their duty as legislators, have led the Democratic Party on housing issues, and have unique insights from their lives and work with affected communities. Please look at the linked legislation these caring Black leaders have sponsored and be aware of the real constituent needs represented.
We also must be mindful, as I tried to be in the lengthy portion of this piece above the break, that Trump is running on a grossly disingenuous view of the plan, and really of just one part of the plan.
Experts on regulatory processes and community development told us that the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2015 final rule on “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing,” implemented under then-President Barack Obama, did not mandate either low-income housing or rezoning.
In its published rule, HUD said of the regulation: “This rule does not impose any land use decisions or zoning laws on any local government.”
(www.factcheck.org/...)
Trump hopes that many white people will hear him, react emotionally, not examine what he is saying for truth and consequences, and not examine portions of the plan Trump does not talk about. If Biden is not elected not only may fascism reach full vigor in the U.S. and around the world but also no progress will be made on any housing issues.
Key great parts of Biden’s Housing Plan
- Fully funded and substantially expanded excessive rent “insurance,” administered as a tax credit but allowing up front payments
- Many more needy persons who use more than 30% of their income on rent would be able to get government coverage of the excess.
- The payments would be up front, in time for the rent due date, rather than maybe months after the rent due date, by which time the renter may be evicted.
- Improved affordable housing supply of existing privately-owned housing units by requiring acceptance of renters who get government housing assistance.
- Once again requiring states to consider greater zoning flexibility for multi-unit housing as a condition of receiving certain large federal grants (in other words, reintatement and hopefully implementation of the Obama-era AFFH rule).
Also significant parts of Biden’s Housing Plan, specifically focused on increasing home ownership
Note: Under capitalist conditions, increased homeownership could decrease the wealth gap and racial wealth disparities; however, all homeowners, including first-time homeowners, should prefiguratively manage the land under their private control to benefit not only themselves but also society.
- Expanded direct downpayment assistance for first-time homeowners
- Expanded federal support programs to encourage increases in affordable housing construction for first time homeowner purchase
- More aggressive and comprehensive action against red-lining, including covering lenders who are presently overlooked
- The private mortage lending company jerks whose videos I watched could be sued if they deny loans to people living in the “wrong zipcodes.”
Major flaws in Biden’s Housing Plan
- Lack of specific defined measures to end to homelessness in the U.S. to make any stated right to housing fully meaningful
- The Biden Housing Plan calls for task forcing an end to homelessness over a number of years.
- This type of approach usually means that reports will be filed but not much accomplished on the ground.
- It would be far better to democratically state the measures that are needed to end homelessness in the U.S. rather than punting to study groups.
- Wasteful, profit-centered reliance on incentivising the private sector to increase housing supply
- Humans in need should not be subjected to the dictates and whims of private profit-making investors and capitalism’s needs for outlets for capital accumulation.
- Admittedly, publicly-owned housing has sometimes been of poor design and not sufficiently maintained, improved, and staffed.
- Publicly-financed new construction of reimagined and sustainable publicly-owned housing could more efficiently, equitably, and democratically provide housing to more needy people by eliminating money passed up the food chain to capital markets and passed down the food chain to private management companies every month as profit on collected rents and fees.
- Multi-unit publicly-owned housing communities could be efficiently and humanely provided broadband and the means to increase sustainable land productivity for community use and enjoyment such as through maintaining large community gardens and groves.
- Legitimate needs for a feeling of long-term security could be addressed through long-term but compassionately flexible leases.
- Making virtually invisible undocumented persons who need affordable housing but are disenfranchised through their lack of citizenship
- No housing plan can be fair and equitable that also does not ensure needed services and citizenship for undocumented persons.
Note: This piece was first published last night for ACM at Daily Kos, but since the title didn't mention the Biden Housing Plan, many missed it. So I've republished with a revised title. Please see the original comments on the piece here: www.dailykos.com/....
