having to scrounge that money up. You know, it’s got to come from other places … It is definitely a hard place for me to live due to the rent.”
Oakland has been described as the new ground zero in the affordable housing crisis. The city’s weak rent control laws have failed to effectively stabilize rents in the city. It feels wrong to even call it rent control if a landowner can increase rents by 10% or more just by providing tenants with a written notice sixty days in advance. Locals are well aware that the city has long protected landowners over tenants. But the current housing crisis now feels like a betrayal to many who say the city has not only pandered to tech companies with tax breaks, but is also encouraging the rapid gentrification that pushes long-time residents out of the city.
Clearly, PL is not alone in his worries about rising rents; in 2018, 4,000 people competed for just twenty-eight spots in a new affordable housing development in Oakland.42 For people in the struggling class, rent is never one-third of their monthly expenses – everyone is “cost burdened” and the going rents are well beyond what many can manage. Between 2017 and 2019, Oakland experienced a 47% increase in residents unable to afford housing.43 A national renter survey in 2017 showed that one in five households had been unable to pay their rent in full within the past three months, and that roughly 3.7 million people had experienced an eviction as a result of non-payment of rent.44 The high cost of housing is forcing many older people into homelessness. According to HUD, people over the age of fifty make up 31% of those living without housing.45 Affordable housing is critical to keeping individuals and families out of poverty.
PL tells me that retirement is out of the question – he couldn’t afford to live in Oakland without a job. Although the East Bay is home, PL will need to leave if he is going to retire. However, like many people living with economic uncertainty, he can’t even imagine a place to move to. He has family in South Carolina and although it is less expensive to live there, he doesn’t think he could go back. “I couldn’t live in South Carolina, because the racial overtones are so prevalent there that it doesn’t work for a young man that’s grown up in California.” Yet California is changing in ways that make it harder for him to get by.
PL still experiences a lot of racism in the East Bay: derogatory comments, people crossing the street when they see a Black man coming toward them. “Sometimes you walk into service stations or you walk into an organization and you don’t get service as quick as other people, or you’re ignored, so that happens a lot in the Bay Area.” Even while PL experiences racism, he considers it as related to class as well. “If you’re in the upper, top middle class of Americans, I think a lot of these things are not issues for you, because you have the money, the financial backing to do what you want. But when you don’t, you know, you live in a certain neighborhood, you have to drive a certain car, you have to wear certain clothes, and those things are identifiers for certain people in America of difference, and difference is a scary thing in this country right now.”
Life as a Flashing Yellow Light
The people introduced in this chapter are quite different from each other, yet their experiences share something in common. They are hardworking people who have been pushed into the struggling class. Some by the underemployment of long hours at low-wage jobs, and some by stagnant wages in the face of rising housing costs. Even so, the people who struggle to cover their bills each month are invisible when politicians and the media celebrate gains in the stock market. As a nation, we still haven’t opened a conversation about economic self-sufficiency for workers.
We have a federal poverty line set so low that it excludes millions of families who are unable to afford basic necessities each month, even people who literally cannot afford housing. The “fair market rent,” established by HUD as a guideline to ensure that families pay no more than 30% of their income in rent, is all but meaningless. Yet this guideline is used in every calculation of economic need. Clearly, the government uses skewed measures that minimize the reported numbers of people who are struggling. We can’t begin to have an honest, national conversation about class unless we confront the real numbers and recognize that it’s no accident that millions of people have trouble making ends meet. Through a collusion of business and government, the economy systemically creates vast profits for some, through low wages and high rents. Even beyond the cost of housing, there is a lot of money being made off the backs of struggling families. In the next chapter we’ll look at just how business manages to pull that rabbit out of the hat.
Notes
1 1 In the 1890s Berea College president William Goodell Frost made the first attempt to create “Appalachia” by consolidating 194 counties in eight states. In 1921, John Campbell expanded the area to include 254 counties in nine states. The Appalachian Regional Commission redrew the boundaries of Appalachia to include regions beyond the Appalachian Mountains that share nothing with the region but entrenched poverty. Today, Appalachia stretches across 700,000 square miles and includes counties in thirteen states: Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. West Virginia is the only state entirely within Appalachia.
2 2 Even so, the US Census located a significant Shawnee community on the Little Kanawha River in 1902.
3 3 MARTIN, R. 2014. For $20 Million, a Coal Utility Bought an Ohio Town and a Clear Conscience. The Atlantic, Oct 16.
4 4 In 1965 the Johnson administration redefined “Appalachia” to include 420 counties and created the Appalachian Regional Commission as part of the “War on Poverty.” ARC ranked the counties on a scale of economic distress. The intent was to target strategies that would support economic development. ARC’s economic ranking of counties continues today and has helped to make Appalachia visible to the rest of the country as a place of poverty.
5 5 Five of these villages have populations that hover around 500; two have populations of close to 1,000 and a third has about 1,700 people.
6 6 To qualify for SNAP benefits (food stamps) family eligibility is capped at 130% of the federal poverty line. In Athens County 70% of the population earns less than this. MORRIS, C. 2017. Going Hungry in Athens County. Athens News, May 21.
7 7 INGRAHAM, C. 2014. 1.6 Million Americans Don’t Have Indoor Plumbing. Here’s Where They Live. The Washington Post, April 23.
8 8 The firefighters who battle those blazes include massive numbers of prisoners who, without adequate protection or equipment, work for $2 a day. They earn an extra $1 for every hour they are actively battling a fire.
9 9 WILKINS, D. & LOMAWAIMA, K. T. 2001. Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law, Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press.
10 10 The Laramie Treaty of 1851 created the Great Sioux Reservation which crossed the boundaries of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana. In 1874, when settlers discovered gold in the Sioux’s Black Hills, the Sioux were removed from their sacred sites and moved into a smaller area. In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the sacred lands of the Black Hills were illegally taken and that tribes were due nearly $106 million in compensation. The tribes refused the money offered for their sacred sites and continue to demand return of the land.
11 11 The Lakota and Dakota had been known by their neighbors the Ojibwa as the Nadouwesou. French traders later shortened and corrupted this name to Sioux.
12 12 STANDING ROCK SIOUX TRIBE. 2018. 2018–2022 Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy.
13 13 There are several Sioux divisions, each with a distinctive language and culture. The Dakota people of Standing Rock include the Upper and Lower Yanktonai. The Lakota people of Standing Rock include the Hunkpapa and Sihasapa.
