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OP/ED - In 1858, Abraham Lincoln gave his famous speech declaring, "A house divided against itself, cannot stand." He was, of course, referring to a nation divided over slavery. While one must use great care making analogies to slavery, we can say that a community, a city, or a state cannot thrive when it is divided against itself.
Yet the housing crisis is just such a divide between those who experience the daily anxiety that they will not have a place to live in the future and those who are perfectly comfortable. And then there are those such as the corporate landlords who thrive on the misery of the dispossessed and think nothing of trying to squeeze even more from the stone that is the poor and working people of Los Angeles.
Slavery was defended by Protestant clergymen who imbued it with religious significance. Landlords give a quasi-religious halo to themselves by glorifying the free market above the necessity for shelter.
Slavery was portrayed as the natural order of things much as the real estate market – unconcerned about human need – somehow is assumed to have mystical powers to provide for every need.
Labor first raised the image of wage slavery in the 1830s. Today, millions of renters in California are indentured servants to their landlord masters. They earn so little beyond what they pay for rent that they can't afford food or medicine. Their indenture to their rent prevents them from ever getting a leg up to climb out of poverty and misery.
Every generation must grapple with the particular injustices that rear their ugly heads in their time. Income inequality is our crucible. In just one generation, shelter has been transformed from a necessity to a privilege. Concentrations of wealth that dwarf even the Gilded Age are today's norm. With these concentrations of wealth come enormous power. And as resources bleed out of our communities, people’s ability to resist is even further weakened.
Housing is a moral issue. Depriving a human being of shelter on the altar of profit and greed is a moral outrage that corrupts our entire system. Whether it is money in a garbage bag to bribe a city councilperson to get all of the rules waived or just the everyday control that Big Real Estate exercises over all of government, the result is the same - more pain and suffering for the voiceless. The corrupting influence of payoffs large and small brings Los Angeles to where we are today - the homeless capitol of America amid vast ostentatious riches. From our graffitied skyscrapers to our homeless encampments to our street sweeps, we symbolize a society that is willing to inflict misery on the many to guarantee kings ransoms to the very few.
Such concentrations of power and influence are a grave danger to our democratic system today. Great masses of people are completely disenfranchised because money not only talks but shouts and drowns out everything else. It is very easy to be cynical that the current imbalance will ever change. However, even greater injustices like slavery saw their own demise.
We can't afford to get discouraged. It is inevitable that the current state of economic inequality will have a reckoning. It is our job to make that happens sooner rather than later because a huge measure of pain and death is meted out every day.
(Michael Weinstein is the president of AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the largest global HIV/AIDS organization, and AHF’s Healthy Housing Foundation.)
