Housing is a Human Right

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:

1. Immediately declare a state of emergency and continue and expand all protections against evictions and foreclosures put in place during the Pandemic.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. Allocate sufficient resources to expand the Right to Counsel program to cover every municipality in the state.

6. Expand state and federal rental assistance for low- and moderate-income households,including for the unhoused.

7. Enforce equal protection from environmental and health hazards in housing.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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