A View From The Left- Bay Area Housing Crisis: No Room for Workers, Poor

Workers Vanguard No. 1104	27 January 2017

Silicon Valley Moves In, Blacks Driven Out

Bay Area Housing Crisis: No Room for Workers, Poor

For Low-Cost, Quality Housing for All!

Last December, a firetrap of a warehouse in Oakland’s Fruitvale district burned to the ground, killing 36 people—the deadliest fire in the city’s history. Many among the 100 partygoers who had come for a music and dance event were trapped in the upstairs performance space as flames raged through a building lacking sprinklers, smoke detectors and fire escapes. Known as the Ghost Ship, the warehouse, like many other unused buildings, had become home to an artists’ collective and others priced out of Oakland’s housing market by soaring rents. In the aftermath of the Ghost Ship fire, a nationwide drive was launched, not to make such “illegally occupied” structures livable, but to shut them down and throw their residents onto the streets.

Housing costs in the Bay Area have skyrocketed as tech industry nouveaux riches have flocked to San Francisco, where the median home price is nearly $1.2 million and the median monthly rent is $4,200; a single room can go for over $1,000 a month. In San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, a/k/a “Billionaires’ Row” or “Specific Whites,” Oracle chief Larry Ellison’s $40 million mansion and the similar digs of older-money clans like the Gettys have been joined by the lavish estates of tech moguls. One threw himself a million-dollar 40th birthday party on the theme “Let Him Eat Cake,” with guests dressed up as courtiers of Marie Antoinette. Meanwhile, drivers of the “Google buses” that ferry tech workers to Silicon Valley live in their cars.

Longtime tenants of rent-controlled apartments are being evicted by landlords hoping to cash in on the rental bonanza. In a city where it reportedly takes $200,000 a year to live comfortably, newly minted yuppies are fleeing across the bay to Oakland. Median rents in this once half-black city have roughly doubled to $3,000 since 2008. In a recent one-year period, over 11,000 eviction notices were issued. Two-thirds of low-income Oakland renters spend more than half their income on housing.

San Francisco’s Democratic Party administrations, which generally present themselves as the most progressive in the country, have viciously persecuted the city’s homeless population for decades. Now homeless people face the wrath of tech industry moneybags who want them swept off the streets. As one fat cat ranted in an open letter to Mayor Ed Lee and the city’s then police chief last February: “The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city.... I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day.” In November 2016, a ballot initiative, bankrolled by tech billionaires, to ban tents on public sidewalks passed. This adds another measure of pure cruelty that aims to rip away the few shreds of shelter that the homeless have. From Oakland and San Francisco to San Jose and Sacramento, sweeps to demolish homeless camps are the order of the day. In 2015 alone, Oakland authorities under Democratic Party mayor Libby Schaaf closed 162 encampments, trashing personal possessions and chasing the inhabitants from spot to spot around the city. It is a stark expression of the depravity of capitalism that the poor are denied housing and then criminalized for being homeless.

Escalating cop terror is the handmaiden to gentrification. The current targets in San Francisco are the historically Latino Mission District and the formerly majority-black Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood. Last April, cops who had been called by a so-called Homeless Outreach Team gunned down Luis Gongora, a homeless man from Mexico, near an encampment in the Mission. Four months earlier, a hail of SFPD bullets cut down Mario Woods, a young black man, in Bayview. Mary Ratcliff, the editor of the black newspaper San Francisco BayView, told the paper in regard to ongoing redevelopment schemes: “Police occupation of the community intensified to a fever pitch with gang injunctions, mass imprisonment of our youth and more targeted acts of police violence, all designed, I believe, to further push us out” (11 January 2016).

During the last housing boom swindle manufactured by Wall Street, banks preyed on tens of thousands of home buyers with sub-prime mortgage scams, hard-selling them door to door particularly in black and Latino neighborhoods. The banks made billions for themselves and triggered a global economic collapse. The mass foreclosures and layoffs that followed the 2008 financial crisis hit all sections of the working class hard, but black people and Latinos got it worst. Foreclosure rates for blacks were more than double those for whites on both sides of the San Francisco Bay. For Latinos, the rates were almost triple in the East Bay and five and a half times higher in the West Bay. Meanwhile, heavily minority low-income housing has been displaced by vast developments of luxury apartment towers, corporate offices and the like, generating huge profits for real estate magnates.

The growing desperation of many was reflected in a raft of housing initiatives that were on the ballot around the Bay Area in the November elections, most of which passed. One set of measures established bonds for “affordable housing” that at best would create small islands in the sea of rising prices. Other measures sought to impose or strengthen rent control and limit evictions, offering some protection, if only partial and temporary, to those faced with losing their homes. We support rent control and other measures that would even slightly alleviate the all-sided misery faced by the working class and poor. But the truth is that this viciously class-divided system cannot guarantee decent living conditions to its wage slaves, much less those who have been thrown on the scrap heap of permanent unemployment.

Under the capitalist order, the supply of housing, like the rest of the economy, is determined not by the needs of the many but by the profits of the few. Karl Marx’s closest collaborator, Friedrich Engels, explained the shortage of housing in his 1872 pamphlet The Housing Question:

“It cannot fail to be present in a society in which the great labouring masses are exclusively dependent upon wages, that is to say, upon the quantity of means of subsistence necessary for their existence and for the propagation of their kind; in which improvements of the machinery, etc., continually throw masses of workers out of employment; in which violent and regularly recurring industrial fluctuations determine on the one hand the existence of a large reserve army of unemployed workers, and on the other hand drive the mass of the workers from time to time on to the streets unemployed.... In such a society the housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution and can be abolished together with all its effects on health, etc., only if the whole social order from which it springs is fundamentally refashioned.”

From Urban Ghettos to Black Exodus

In capitalist America, where the forcible subjugation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of society is firmly rooted, the desperation facing the working class as a whole is magnified for black workers and poor. Once supplying a “reserve army of labor” to be brought in during economic boom times, the inner-city poor are now considered expendable by America’s capitalist rulers. During World War II, thousands of black people from the rural South were brought in to work in Bay Area shipyards. Those jobs dried up with the end of the war, and today the former factories and warehouses that once thrived in the region are also a distant memory. With the filthy rich gobbling up San Francisco real estate and the attendant spillover of yuppies into Oakland, black people are increasingly being driven out of the metropolitan Bay Area.

More than four decades ago, black people were 13 percent of the San Francisco population. Now that number is about 5 percent and falling, with most black residents living in what remains of the city’s run-down public housing. Black flight from Oakland accelerated during a preliminary gentrification drive initiated 15 years ago under then mayor, and now California’s Democratic Party governor, Jerry Brown. Today, many more are being forced out of historically black urban areas like Oakland and Richmond to inland towns like Antioch and Brentwood in the eastern Sacramento River Delta and Tracy and Stockton in the San Joaquin Valley. Oakland’s black population fell from 47 percent in 1980 to 26 percent in 2013, while Richmond’s has been cut in half since 1990.

Even when the capitalists needed their labor for the war industries during WWII, black people could not rent or buy housing outside of specifically designated areas. Racial segregation was enforced by realtors, racist housing “covenants” and Jim Crow New Deal housing policies. As one black resident of Oakland recalled, there was “such a small part of the city that black folk could live in that they were sleeping on top of each other” (quoted in Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland [2003]). Tens of thousands of units of shoddy “temporary” housing—mostly segregated—were hastily built by the federal government near the shipyards, from West Oakland through Berkeley and Albany to Richmond.

After the war, black workers were the first to be laid off. As unemployment soared, West Oakland—once an integrated working-class neighborhood—became an increasingly poor, overcrowded and run-down ghetto. At the same time, real estate developers and local commercial interests waged a racist campaign to get rid of wartime housing projects in the name of fighting “urban blight” and “socialized housing.” Hundreds of acres of homes from Oakland to Richmond were torn down to open up land for private development and tens of thousands were evicted.

At the time, the potential for integrated working-class struggle for jobs, decent wages and integrated housing was palpable. San Francisco was a strong union town, forged in large part through the 1934 maritime strike, which culminated in a citywide general strike that laid the basis for the founding of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). A key to that victory was opposition to the segregationist policies of the AFL craft union bureaucracy by the longshore workers’ leadership, which brought black workers into the union in the Bay Area. But during WWII, the ILWU leaders joined the racist AFL officials in enforcing a no-strike pledge and abandoned the fight for black rights as part of supporting Wall Street’s imperialist war effort.

After the war, workers’ pent-up combativity exploded in a nationwide strike wave. In 1946, a 54-hour general strike erupted in Oakland as employers sought to crush a union organizing drive by mostly white women department store clerks. This fight posed the need for mobilizing black and white workers in struggle for their common needs. Instead, the strike was stabbed in the back by the union tops. Conservative Oakland AFL bureaucrats opposed cooperation with the ILWU and other CIO unions, while Harry Bridges, ILWU leader and the CIO’s regional director, held back the integrated ranks of his union in the interests of his alliance with the Democratic Party. The virulently anti-Communist Teamsters president Daniel Tobin and West Coast vice president Dave Beck effectively destroyed the general strike when they ordered truck drivers back to work.

Seeking to widen the racial divide and pit white workers against the black working class and poor, the policies of federal and local governments in league with real estate developers increased segregation. Mortgages offered at a favorable rate to whites under the GI Bill were denied to black people. White workers moved out of West Oakland to better neighborhoods in the east of the city, where a number of industrial plants were located, as well as to new suburban housing divisions. Developers used redlining and Jim Crow covenants to keep blacks out of these areas. When black people began to break through the color bar in East Oakland in the mid 1950s, real estate brokers promoted racial fears to goad whites into selling low, and then the brokers resold high to blacks moving in. California’s Rumford Act banning housing discrimination was finally passed in 1963, but it was repealed a year later when developers pushed through Proposition 14.

In 1955, United Auto Workers Local 560, an integrated union of Ford assembly plant workers in Richmond, scored a notable if partial victory against the “whites only” segregation of the suburbs. With the plant moving from Richmond to Milpitas, near San Jose, the union prevailed against the die-hard opposition of big developers in building a cooperative, integrated housing development in the area called Sunnyhills. Nonetheless, Sunnyhills remained only an isolated area of integration surrounded by segregation. Unskilled black production line workers who could not afford even the relatively modest price of these houses had to commute from Richmond, West Oakland and other impoverished urban black neighborhoods.

For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Sunnyhills was seen as an example of the promise of the civil rights movement. But the pro-Democratic Party leadership of that movement pushed the program of liberal integration, the idea that black people can find genuine equality without the overthrow of the system of racist American capitalism. That program was and is a myth. It was the failure of the liberal-led civil rights movement to fundamentally challenge the desperate conditions of life for blacks in the inner cities that led to the birth of the Black Panther Party in West Oakland. While they fought with great militancy and heroism, the Panthers dismissed the one force in this society with the social power to challenge the racist capitalist rulers—the multiracial working class. Hounded by murderous state repression, the Panthers increasingly turned to their own liberal programs, such as “breakfast for children.” Many of those who weren’t killed or jailed by the state ultimately found their place in the Democratic Party.

Today, the need for quality, integrated housing and schools, medical care and jobs is all the more urgent. Any real struggle for livable homes must include the demand for low-rent, quality, integrated public housing. This must be linked to a fight for jobs for all through a shorter workweek at no loss in pay and a massive program of public works to repair this country’s decaying infrastructure. The Bay Area’s integrated unions—longshore, transit and municipal—have the ability to mobilize their own members for such a fight. As significant concentrations of black workers, they provide a crucial link to the ghetto poor and can play a leading role in the fight against black oppression. The key to unlocking labor’s power is breaking from the union misleaders’ political subservience to the capitalist class enemy and its political representatives, Democrats as well as Republicans.

The American working class as a whole will not advance in struggle against its exploiters, who wield anti-black racism to divide and weaken the workers, without taking up the fight against the vicious oppression of black people. To secure the vital necessities of life for the working class, black people and the poor will take a massive reallocation of the wealth and resources of this country. That will only be possible with the expropriation of the bloodsucking capitalist class as a whole and the creation of a workers state, where production is based on human need and not profit. What is required to lead this struggle is a revolutionary workers party forged in implacable opposition to capitalist class rule and steadfastly committed to the fight for black freedom.

When workers become the ruling class, the housing crisis, insoluble on the basis of capitalist private property, will be resolved in a straightforward way. Taking the banks, factories, transportation and land away from their profit-driven owners, a workers state will institute a planned, collectivized economy. Homelessness will be tackled overnight, simply by requisitioning the mansions, luxury hotels and real estate holdings of the former capitalist rulers so that everyone has a place to live. As society’s productive forces are rationally developed in the interests of all, poverty and inequality will be overcome.