Found here. My comments in bold.
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This long article nothing more than an unbroken string of unsupported assertions, building one upon another. As such, we have deleted long portions of it so as to focus on the parts that interest us.
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NA: You quote [NAACP leader] Roy Wilkins’s testimony to Congress, where he says he thinks of education as a priority, and other people assume jobs are the most important issue, but when he talks to people on the street, they care most about housing.
KYT: This was a critical reason why I wrote the book. In books about civil rights, there’s very little written about housing—I think because we don’t have a happy ending. Housing more than any area shows the abject failure of capitalism to solve the problems of African Americans. (This statement speaks to the title of the article, finally, after thousands of words where she ironically discusses the many failures of government.
This statement about capitalism is like a disconnected factoid, because there was absolutely no discussion about why the problems she has outlined are the fault of capitalism.)
Housing is so foundationally tied to racism in its conflation of race, risk, and property. The Kerner Commission, the government commission set up to investigate why riots keep happening in the ’60s, found that the top three reasons were: police brutality, poverty and unemployment, and substandard housing. (Notice that none of these is capitalism.)
And yet the issue of housing is never taken as a central catalyst of the Northern civil rights or the Black Power insurgency of the 1960s and ’70s. The precipitating factor in these riots was always an incident of police violence. But what was the underlying reason? It’s rats mauling children to death. (Living in government housing is not a feature of capitalism.)
NA: Do you think there’s a political and/or academic re-fixation on housing now?
KYT: It’s impossible to get away from, because you can’t solve the housing issue on private terms. As long as there is a price on shelter, it will be inaccessible to millions of people. (An undocumented statement, and quite false. Pricing does not exclude anyone.
Pricing is a manifestation of the market, which includes, unfortunately, government meddling. A well-regulated market would minimize government intervention, which always unbalances supply and demand because pricing with this meddling is not based on what someone will pay for housing.
Generally, unaffordable housing is found in leftist strongholds. Zoning, impact fees, open space requirements, housing density regulations, subsidized housing, environmental regulation, egregious building code requirements, and a host of other factors artificially drive up housing costs above what the market would naturally offer.
Couple that with social programs that play havoc with family structure, employment, and wealth accumulation, and the result is people living in government-enforced destitution. After all, if a person living in a government hovel and receiving subsistence welfare benefits wants to move to another city or state, they cannot. They receive just enough to get by, but not enough to seek out opportunity elsewhere.
It is interesting that the solution to "problems" like these is to redistribute more wealth to the poor, which ironically leaves the housing pricing "problem" intact.)
Compound that with the federal government’s resistance to public housing, and you end up in a situation where a significant portion of the population can never be adequately housed. When it’s just left up to the market to determine the floor on housing prices, it will go as high as humanly possible. (This is not a description of capitalism. Capitalism is the willing exchange of value between parties. Capitalism is characterized by how supply responds to demand.
Capitalism has not existed in any substantial way, particularly among the poor, for decades. Their lives are characterized by government support.
If we really want to examine the reason for high housing prices, we need to analyze why the supply is low. In fact, government has deeply meddled with the housing market for decades, an activity the author wants to increase. Yet for some reason it is capitalism that is causing the problem. This is a non-sequitur.)
That’s what we’re experiencing now—historically high rents, historically high levels of housing insecurity. Fifty-one percent of people are paying 30 percent or more of their income on rent.
We keep talking about a housing crisis—is it a crisis if it’s been in this state for the last hundred years? I don’t think it’s a crisis. I think this is housing under capitalism. It’s insecure, it’s unstable, it’s every person for themselves. (Clearly she has no clue what capitalism is. Her straw man capitalism is always to blame.
Indeed, does she ever give credit to capitalism for its many successes? Her cheap cell phone and computer? Her ability to fly anywhere in the world in a matter of hours? The great variety of meats, vegetables, and consumer goods available to her mere minutes away from her home? The truly astounding achievement that is the modern automobile?
Capitalism only comes up when the Left thinks it has failed. By the same token, socialism only comes up to trumpet its benefits. This is a classic case of confirmation bias.
Lastly, life itself is every person for themselves. Every person has an obligation to meet the challenges of life with all due diligence. Great personal satisfaction and self-esteem is derived from overcoming obstacles, meeting challenges, and succeeding in making a life for one's self. The author appears to think that everything needed ought to not be priced. She never documents this position.)
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