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"Advocating Economic & Personal Change"


Homelessness

Reliable studies agree that between three and four million Americans find themselves homeless every year. Worldwide, about 500 million urban dwellers, alone, are homeless or live in inadequate housing, reports the United Nations 1996 report:  Global Report on Human Settlements, An Urbanizing World.

Do we have homelessness because the industrialized world lacks the resources or labor to build homes, apartments, or other dwellings for everyone?

No. Indeed, the sole cause of homelessness can be found clearly and simply in how capitalism works:  under capitalism, homes are built only if there is a projected market for those homes. In other words, homes are only built if it is anticipated that there will be paying customers to buy those newly-constructed homes.

Yes, that is the ugly reality.

When the capitalists who profit from home sales, such as the owners of construction companies, real estate agencies, and banks or other home-lending institutions, can make money, they see to it that new homes are built; indeed, if the market is, or is projected to be, strong, they do so without delay! When they can't make a profit, however, they do not build new homes. The number of people living on the street does NOT enter into their decisionmaking process.

Their sole interest is the green, not the "groan" of human suffering.

Immoral!

What about reform and assistance efforts such as Habitat for Humanity, a program that builds a few hundred homes a year in the United States?

These kinds of programs are well-intended, and we feel good when we participate in, or otherwise support, them. However, if we're interested in actually solving the problem, completely, properly, and permanently, we have to see things a bit more broadly. These kinds of programs, laudable as they are, provide only a drop in the bucket relative to the number of new homes needed by people in America and around the world. Building a few hundred new homes a year is only very marginally helpful, given that millions of new homes are actually needed.

In fact, in a certain sense programs like these can actually be seen as counterproductive, insofar as they mislead people into thinking that all we require to solve the housing problem is "more programs like this." We could have a hundred more programs like this (which we'd never have under capitalism, because the financial and personal reources simply don't exist), and it would not solve the housing problem completely, properly, and permanently. It would simply remain nowhere near enough.

There's more. Even those lucky enough to secure a home, new or otherwise, find the cost of construction or a mortgage a virtual financial death sentence. The profit interests of the banking and mortgage industry are so rapacious and piranha-like that you will spend the rest of your life, and your children will spend the rest of their lives, attempting to pay off that home.

Indeed, your home will become yet one more ball-and-chain shackled tightly around your ankles. And next to the cost of your children's education, it will likely be the largest and heaviest ball.

And even more. The average family cannot afford anything more than a relatively small house, on a small or relatively small plot of land, typically situated right next to another home, mere feet away. Thus, we are forced to live like sardines, each neighbor breathing down his other neighbor's neck. This does not make for a real feeling of ease and freedom in owning a home, nor for good relations between neighbors.

In sum, then, while homelessness is perhaps the most the visible, and certainly the most poignant, part of the housing problem, it is just that--merely ONE PART of the housing problem. The reality is that under our money-and-profit system, housing, like most areas of genuine human concern, is actually not a single problem, but a many-headed hydra consisting of a cluster of related problems that never seem to--and indeed under capitalism cannot--find a permanent solution.

What is needed, obviously, is not the typical ineffective "piece-meal" approach, but sweeping structural change, such as that afforded by the transition to a cooperative economic system.

In marked contrast to the depressing housing realities described above, under a Cooperative system resources would be shared fully and freely amongst and between each of us, that is, between our many brothers and sisters in the human family. Thus, we would put our housing industry completely to work building homes for ourselves until each and every one of us--EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US--had a home! A fit, proper, and safe home, built by workers enjoying completely safe working conditions, and with minimal adverse impact to our environment. When done, we'd wind down that industry for awhile, and focus joyfully as a world society on some other area of human need!

For a cooperative system, the solution to this problem is easy, organic, effective, and permanent--a piece of cake. Capitalism, however, can't even seem to find the mixing spoon!

If you care about the housing crisis, and the homeless, themselves--join One Human Family, and spread the Cooperative message!




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