Our state and nation are in a housing
emergency requiring immediate action. It is unacceptable that
workers, retirees, and the disabled have been forced to live in their
cars, hospital emergency rooms, or spend weeks waiting for beds in a
shelter, just so corporate landlords can jack up rents to increase
their profits.
Housing is a human right, not just a
commodity. Every human needs housing in order to exist in a safe
and secure space where they are protected from the natural elements
and can be in a stable location with other people. However, in our
country housing is used by corporate landlords, large and small, to
make profits at the expense of millions of people needing a place to
live.
People are struggling to find decent,
safe housing with affordable rents or mortgages. Some people crowd
into housing units or couch surf to try to get by while others are
pushed into homelessness.
As a result of racist practices like
redlining, people of color suffer the most from unaffordable and
inadequate housing, including segregated communities, environmental
racism, low-wage jobs, inadequate educational, health and
recreational facilities, and attacks by police.
In 1948, the United Nations
overwhelmingly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
which clearly stated that all people have the right to a standard of
living adequate for the health and well-being of themselves and their
families. This right includes the right to housing and the right
to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, old
age, or other lack of livelihood. These expressed rights are the
basis of over 70 international agreements.
The human right to decent and
affordable housing is linked to all the struggles we as workers and
oppressed people face within the
Capitalist System which maximizes profits for the corporate ruling
class over the needs of the people and planet.
It is time to bring housing as a human
right to the forefront of today’s struggles on many levels:
community, state, and nationally.
In the spirit of this crisis, we offer
the following program: HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT!
Housing Crisis in
Connecticut
Connecticut is facing a steadily
worsening crisis of affordable housing, exacerbated by corporate
greed and historic prejudice. We are
the tenth least affordable state for
affordable rental housing, with year over year average rent increases
anywhere from 12 to 27% over the past 5 years. Working
families in our state are increasingly overburdened with rental
payments or left completely without housing. Indeed, four of the
five largest cities in Connecticut have made it to the list of top
100 metro areas in the United States for highest rates of eviction.
When rents go up, working class
families in Connecticut’s cities and towns often cannot move
because of the lack of available and affordable options. Working
class families looking to buy a home are being priced out of that
opportunity.
Twenty percent of all housing is
purchased by institutional investors, like Blackstone and UBS
Realty Investors, solely for the purpose of reselling them.
Researchers at the Joint Center for Housing Studies explain that
these conditions “can also give incentive for apartment owners who,
seeing growing demand among high-income households, can transition
modest-priced units to higher rent levels, thus depleting the supply
of lower-rent units and putting further pressure on low- and
middle-income renters.”
This perverse incentive structure leads
to a chronic issue of housing affordability. According to the
National Low Income Housing Coalition, Connecticut lacks an
estimated 89,000 affordable homes that are available to renters
with extremely low incomes, who make up one third of renters in the
state. Of these renters who have been able to find housing, 68%
spend more than half of their monthly income on rent, as compared
to federal guidelines that call for 30% of income. The Communist
Party USA calls for housing to cost no more than 10% of a household’s
income.
Prior to the implementation of the
Right to Counsel law in 2021, less than 7% of tenants had legal
representation in eviction cases, compared to 80% of landlords.
Those without a lawyer were twice as likely to be evicted. A recent
evaluation of Right to Counsel found that 76% of tenants who got a
lawyer were able to avoid an eviction judgment and 71% were able to
avoid an involuntary move.
For the first time in 10 years,
homelessness is on the rise in Connecticut. Only one third of
people calling 2-1-1 for emergency housing get placements in
shelters, the remaining two-thirds are left in crisis.
The burden of high cost rentals, poor
quality housing and evictions is borne disproportionately by Black
and Latino residents, who represent a larger share of low income
renters and are more than twice as likely to be evicted as white
renters. All four of the highest eviction rate cities in
Connecticut also have the highest percent of Black or Latino
residents.
Female renters, often head of
households, account for 56% of eviction filings. Members of
the LGBTQ+ community, as well as the
undocumented, are among the most disastrously
discriminated against by landlords.
Housing is essential to the security
and prosperity of our state, and the livelihood of working class
families and people of color.
Despite efforts over decades, many of
the racist zoning policies historically put in place to uphold
segregation and exclude housing affordable for working class families
and people of color remain.
“Exclusionary zoning” in wealthy
towns, including type of dwelling restrictions, lot size, and parking
mandates, floor requirements, deed restrictions, and occupancy
limitations make it more difficult to create affordable housing,
putting pressure on rents everywhere and often leaving people of
color in substandard living situations.
An EPA analysis of environmental safety
hazards in residential areas found that more than 9,000 federally
subsidized properties sit within a mile of Superfund sites.
Superfund sites are areas that are so polluted they require a long
term clean up response to hazardous material.
People Before Profits
in Housing
The housing crisis is embedded in the
crisis of capitalism. The unjust inequalities of this system were
exposed during the pandemic. During the Pandemic, 12 Connecticut
billionaires seized $15 billion in new wealth while essential workers
and low wage workers, many of them women and people of color, were
left struggling to survive, working long hours but unable to make
ends meet. The soaring cost of housing intensified this desperate
situation.
The fight for equal access to
affordable quality housing is a constant struggle when housing is a
commodity on the “free market.” The profit motive tramples the
basic right to quality affordable housing. So the fight for housing
as a human right shows the need for a bigger vision and socialism,
where housing is a human right and costs are a fraction of income.
The fight for housing is a fight for
democracy and a change in priorities to protect the rights of renters
and individual homeowners.
In Connecticut this underscores the
need to curtail the financial investors and their profits. At the
state and local level, policy that limits the acquisitions and
permits of mega investors and places tax surcharges on large
acquisitions by mega investors can help preserve quality of life for
working class communities. As well, policy is needed to protect
renters from price gouging by enabling tenants to organize and give
them power on oversight bodies that control rent increases and
prohibit retaliations.
The housing crisis makes clear the need
for large scale public investment in housing that is affordable,
sustainable, and accessible to working class people including those
most vulnerable. It brings out the need for national priorities that
fund human needs and not the bloated military budget.
The Communist Party USA in Connecticut
and nationally has a long history of participating in and organizing
for safe and affordable housing. These actions include fighting
housing evictions during the Great Depression, working for integrated
housing, and demanding adequate, safe and affordable housing for all
working families.
The Communist Party considers that
today’s housing crisis demands a multi-racial united front of
workers and their unions, civil rights organizations, youth, seniors,
community organizations, and others. The inhumane and insatiable
greed of corporate property owners and financiers must be halted.
In Connecticut today, a movement is
stepping forward to claim housing as a human right. For example, this
legislative session, the mobilized workers outnumbered landlords
five-to-one in the longest public hearing in living memory at a
hearing for the cap the rent bill. This reflects the fact that
72% of the public supports capping the rent. For the first time in
Connecticut’s history, rent caps were publicly discussed and
seriously considered. As one mother testified to the state
legislature: “It is stressful and inhuman not to find affordable
housing, because it is a human right to have a roof and stay in the
community. Displacement is abusive much more for children.” This
is just the beginning.
Emergency Ten Point
Program
We call on the State of Connecticut and
all local municipalities to:
Immediately declare a state of
emergency and continue and expand all protections against
evictions and foreclosures put in place during the Pandemic.
Enact a 2.5% annual rent cap,
coupled with rules preventing rent increases from one tenant to the
next and a prohibition on no-cause evictions.
Eliminate systemic inequalities
and discrimination; enforce anti-discrimination laws against
redlining and other harmful practices by large landlords and
lenders; require municipal zoning laws that allow for multi-family
and affordable housing units; enact rules that seal eviction and
foreclosure records so landlords cannot use that information to
discriminate against tenants who enforce their rights.
Require representative fair
rent commissions in all municipalities and give standing to
tenant unions before those commissions; defend the right to organize
tenant unions and enact rules that require the recognition of
those unions by their landlords.
Allocate sufficient resources to
expand the Right to Counsel program to cover every
municipality in the state.
Expand state and federal rental
assistance for low- and moderate-income households,including for
the unhoused.
Enforce equal protection from
environmental and health hazards in housing.
Increase real estate conveyance
taxes and fees on the large investors buying up single family
and rental properties and use those funds to create affordable
units.
Enact the Equity Agenda put
forth by Recovery for All to tax the rich and provide relief to
renters and homeowners. The Equity Agenda would increase revenue
by $1.24 -1.44 billion per year through a 2 mill statewide property
tax on commercial and residential properties worth more than $1.5
million, a 5 percent surtax on capital gains for people earning more
than $500,000, raising the corporate tax rate, and a 10 percent
digital advertising tax on companies earning more than $10 billion.
It would create three new tax brackets with higher tax rates for
people earning more than $1 million, $10 million and $25 million.
The agenda includes tax relief for the poor and middle class by
spending annually: $49 million to maintain the state’s income tax
credit; $250 million to double the child tax credit to $500;
$180-240 million to double the property tax credit to $600; and
$180-240 million to provide property tax relief to seniors.
Make a historic national public
investment in affordable housing by reallocating funds from the
excessive military budget to our communities as part of a just
transition to a green, peace economy.
Issued by
Connecticut Communist Party USA - April 2023
Circulate widely.
For copies or additional
information, questions, and comments, kindly write to:
CT-CPUSA@pobox.com
