the housing crisis¶

The reason it wouldn't fix the housing crisis is because the state is an apparatus of the ruling class. The gating of the means of survival is a structural necessity of the capitalist system, meaning housing cannot ever be freely distributed if capitalism is to survive. https://t.co/NgNG2OCZrk In a capitalist society, the state works to advance the interests of capital itself, and in the arena of housing, that means calibrating access in whatever way it determines to benefit capital the most. Sometimes this DOES mean building some public housing, but never enough. The role of social welfare programs in the capitalist system is to manage the "dregs" that the system naturally produces, rather than allow a latent oppositional class to grow and fester. This class presents a number of threats to the state's stability. The most obvious is that this class of dispossessed, desperate individuals -- seeking out ways to survive and with no particular allegiance to bourgeois laws and norms -- set up criminal enterprises and informal economies that threaten the sanctity of bourgeois hegemony. Marxists will often overemphasize the counter-revolutionary aspect of the state's involvement in managing the lumpen masses ("they're afraid of us getting organized!"), but this is generally a subordinate priority. Revolution is rare, "crime" is omnipresent. All this to say, one of the many ways the state has of maintaining its grip is to allow some trickle of access to the means of survival that don't involve oppressed classes seizing it from outside the system and building anything oppositional. But that must be dosed carefully. The state cannot EVER provide enough housing to "fix the housing crisis," because it's not a crisis: it's the normal functioning of capital. Survival can never be guaranteed, otherwise production on behalf of the capitalists cannot be compelled in exchange for survival. The state will only ever build enough public housing to maintain a baseline capable of helping manage the most precarious. This practice was only ever a supplement to other means of enforcement, such as policing, and the state is much more amenable to the more overt repression.