How Wage Suppression has Created a New Housing Crisis
It has been quite a while since I last wrote about neo-liberalism due to the focus on the 2016 Presidential election. I fully expected to continue this series shortly thereafter, but the current disarray in our government has taken the spotlight. It is weird because I have had a rough draft for this essay sitting in my draft folder for some time and it is quite often I am reminded as to how timely the issue addressed in this essay is.
For those who may be interested in previous essays on this subject, here are the links to those essays.
Week 1 - The Curse of Neo-liberalism
Week 2 - Neo-liberalism Part 2
Week 3 - The Neo-liberal Myth of Meritocracy
Week 4 - Characteristics of Neo-liberalism
Week 5 - Neo-liberalism - Obama and the Clintons
Week 6 - Neo-liberalism - The Legacy of Bill Clinton
Week 7 - Neo-liberalism - Lack of Empathy
Week 8 - Overview of the Impacts of Privatization
Week 9 - The Rule of the Market
Week 10 - Effects of the Neo-liberal Push for Deregulation
Week 11- Cutting Expenditures for the Social Safety Net
Week 12 - Neo-Liberal Commoditization of Education
Week 13 - Impact of Neo-Liberalism on Higher Education
Week 14 - Neo-liberalism and Our Crumbling Infrastructure
Week 15 - Why Our Infrastructure Deficits Matter
Week 16 - Neo-Liberalism and the Elimination of the Concept of Public Good or Community
In one of my first essays in this series on neo-liberalism, I referenced an excellent article titled What is Neoliberalism? This article was written by Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia and published by Corp Watch. This article provided an excellent definition of neo-liberalism as well as a listing of the five characteristics of neo-liberalism. Among the five characteristics of neo-liberalism is the Rule of the Market. One of the goals of the rule of the market is to reduce wages.
THE RULE OF THE MARKET. Liberating "free" enterprise or private enterprise from any bonds imposed by the government (the state) no matter how much social damage this causes. Greater openness to international trade and investment, as in NAFTA. Reduce wages by de-unionizing workers and eliminating workers' rights that had been won over many years of struggle. No more price controls. All in all, total freedom of movement for capital, goods and services. To convince us this is good for us, they say "an unregulated market is the best way to increase economic growth, which will ultimately benefit everyone." It's like Reagan's "supply-side" and "trickle-down" economics -- but somehow the wealth didn't trickle down very much.
Since the mid 1970's wages for the middle class have stagnated and this has caused a crisis in which more and more middle class families are falling into poverty or are near poverty. The wages for the poor are not even mentioned in most reports, but as squeezed as the middle class has become, the poor are simply struggling to survive on minimum wages that do not begin to cover every day necessities. While wages have stagnated, the cost of everything else has risen, including the cost of housing.
Fortunately, income inequality and middle-class living standards are now squarely on the political agenda. But despite their increasing salience, these issues are too often discussed in abstract terms. Ignored is the easy-to-understand root of rising income inequality, slow living-standards growth, and a host of other key economic challenges: the near stagnation of hourly wage growth for the vast majority of American workers over the past generation.
Just this week, the local bi-weekly newspaper in this small town in NC where I spend much of my time had an article on the Community Land Trust trying to create more work force housing. The Community Land Trust identified two main problems in our community: rent affordability and availability. Currently in our county, approximately 40% of the population that rents spends more than 30% of their income on housing. In addition, another 19% of renters are spending 50% or more of their income on rent.
According to a 2016 survey conducted by the local Community Land Trust, nearly half of the respondents were concerned about the stability of their housing situation. For example, in this county, the starting salaries for a first year teacher is $37,975, a sheriff's deputy is $33,528, and a minimum wage worker is $15,084. In the past, most of us would consider a teacher or a sheriff's deputy to be middle income. But in today's economy, not one of these salaries is enough to cover housing costs and living expenses, although the wage gap is significantly less for the teacher than the minimum wage worker. This scenario is being played out across the United States, often with far greater wage gaps.
Recently I have read a number of articles about the cost of minimal housing as it relates to income. While the minimum wage has remained stagnant and the ability for a minimum wage worker to find and keep full time work increasingly difficult, the costs of housing are continuing to rise. These rising costs of housing are impacting not only the minimum wage worker, but workers in nearly all income ranges.
The costs of all types of housing has grown faster than incomes in most of the United States. Landlords will charge as much as they possibly can and with much of the rental market now being held by large investors, rental rates are increasing much faster than wage growth. In recent years large investor have moved into the single family market as well as apartment complexes.
The trend of investors buying up single family homes is largely a new one. It will be interesting to see the impact of the massive amount of investor buying in single family homes unwind over the next decade. Rents may have increased at an even faster rate because some investors bought run down foreclosures and upgraded the property. These upgrades were then used as reason to hike rents up.
In fact, in many locales, the rise in the cost of housing has far outstripped other costs. With wages stagnating and job security becoming more and more precarious, many households cannot afford to a buy a home and must rent instead. Since the great recession, the number homeowners has been dropping while the number households renting has steadily risen. As of 2014,slightly more than 41% of all households are renters.
At the end of the day, housing affordability is made up of two things: the cost of rent and the income and wages people use to pay for it. In the aftermath of the economic crisis, renters have been caught in a devastating bind as rents have risen while incomes decline. Average rents increased by 22.3 percent between 2006 to 2014, while average incomes declined by 5.8 percent.
The impact of housing costs upon minimum and low wage households has been staggering. The general rule of thumb is for a family to spend about 30% of income on housing and a similar amount on child care and food. Many families are spending over 50% of their income to put a roof over their heads. There is not a single county in the United States in which a minimum wage worker with one child can afford to live. This last link provides an interactive map of the gap between wages and the cost of living under three different scenarios. It is very interesting.
I intend to write more on this subject in a future essay.
Comments
Great essay gulfgal
Too many people in my very red state believe this:
They of course vote republican and hate everything that "liberalism stands for. They really believe that if they do all the right things they too will become rich.
The article on What is Neoliberalism shows how our government has adopted and followed the playbook of neoliberalism. And that's why they made sure that Bernie didn't win the primary. If he was able to get his legislation passed then the corporations would lose profits like they did after the New Deal was passed.
What I don't understand is if the elites and the corporations continue to see our wages go down then how are they going to be able to keep their profits high? If this keeps happening then no one can buy their products. Wouldn't that would affect their profits? If they continue with their austerity, how are people going to pay for new cars, houses or even go to sporting events or movies? Those things are already too expensive for many people. The last time I went to a ballgame 15 years ago it only cost me $5 for the BART train to the stadium and $5 for my seat behind right field. I have no idea what tickets cost for those seats now, but I wouldn't go anyway because of the TSA security searches
I look forward to reading more of your essays on neoliberalism.
The saying "you can't get blood from a turnip" would come true, right?
And jobs are harder to find these days.
Many people also believe this:
Or my personal favorite:
If that's true, why is it that many people in their 20s and 30s are still making minimum or just above minimum wage?
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
I read those types of comments
If people aren't making enough money then they should go back to school and learn another career. They truly believe that every single person can get themselves out of poverty. And without help from the government.
These types of people have no problems with corporate welfare because they say that they create jobs and if they have to pay more income taxes they will leave the state or country.
Most times, I believe
that comments like yours and those of others here are better than the essay itself. There is so much that I learn form reading your comments and those of others here.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
It all starts with a great essay
Your neoliberalism essays are full of information and links which I follow to other links. I don't remember reading your first link before and I'm pretty sure that if I had read it I would have remembered because of the way it made me feel. Especially towards Obama and the way he played so many of us. There were people pretty much screaming at us that he wasn't who he said he was and that he wouldn't do even half the things he said he would. I wish that I would have listened to them, but I found out pretty quickly that they were right.
And after reading your comment down thread, I realize even more what he didn't do for us.
I have often written that he watched as people continued to lose their homes while the banks continued to commit fraud, but seeing the possibilities for what he could have done for the HUD program makes my blood boil.
Just the fact that so many houses were deliberately kept vacant when they could have helped the millions of people who lost their homes or could have been used for the HUD program is beyond my comprehension that the people in our government could be that cruel.
Many of the homes that went back on the market were sold below their values, so why couldn't congress have put rules in the bank bailouts that required them to let people refinance their homes at those values? Yes I know that the banks basically wrote the bill and congress just signed it.
Oh look, I went off on another tangent. Or is this a rant?
Anyhoo, we have a lot of great writers here.
@snoopydawg
Oh, boy, you coulda gone for the Clintons - or someone like Rmoney - instead. Too bad that the corporate parties only offer evils as 'voting choices'...
Luckily, I rather doubt that American voters or votes will make much, if any difference, with everything running through Homeland Security, assuming that we all survive to watch President Clinton explode the world with her delayed celebratory nuclear firework special which maybe Trump will save for her to set off?
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
There is an answer to your question
It has to do with a whole slew of businesses being basically Potemkin facades with a stated purpose - make shoes, widgets, whatever- but the real purpose is to simply get financing by going public and then making money on the stock, salaries, bonuses, etc. and then selling out at the right time. The product is not really widgets, the product is a McGuffin, an excuse or cover for internal profiteering and asset stripping before they go bankrupt and then offer up the corpse to external asset strippers. The very bottom of the pyramid, if they are even on the pyramid, are the workers and consumers.
" “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” FDR "
And they'll be able to walk away
when they break that company or government, their ultimate objective. They don't think long term anymore but only live for short term "bumps" which they get bonused from. At my company we use all kinds of "cash flow" inducing measures, buy back our own stock, and do lots of mergers and acquisitions where there is again, that short term "bump" in profits. The ones getting bonuses based on that short term gain have no real fealty even to the Corporation any more, and while I do not worry about the poor company it is just one more instance of short term skim that our entire society is based on. As long as each member "gets theirs" they could not give a shit about long term survival.
I used to ask myself the same thing snoop - can't they SEE this? Can they not see they're killing their own profitability? The sick thing is, as we all know too well, they DO see it and they don't care. So what if they destroy a company or country as long as they individually profit from it.
Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur
Exactly lizzyh
There are two major roads to go down: cut expenses to the bare bones on the backs of the workers and suppliers in order to massage the books to look good for a takeover OR just skip that step and cannibalize the company yourself and try to get out while the getting is good. Vulture capitalism - Greed is Good. I Got Mine.
" “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” FDR "
And I could go on and on about just this
that you mention, but won't as we all get it. One of my co-workers is sometimes forced to listen to me rant away about this crap. The good thing is she really is starting to "get it" about the whole ugly mess. But there are days I really feel for her having to listen to me!
While they give us no raises and talk about buying the stock back that they make bonuses from, they're into providing "free coffee" now, ain't that grand?!
Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur
@lizzyh7
As always, you've nailed it; the big corporations should move over and let more efficient small business take over. We could all actually survive that, too.
Edit: never mind
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Housing in Ithaca, NY is very tight.
Two campuses in town have made many (crappy) rental properties and some newer developed ones that are over $1K/month for a studio. Single-family housing has mostly recovered from the recession. Many employers now find that employees live out-of-county or at least out of the city to have anything remotely affordable, to rent or own. More housing is being built, but with current construction costs, the rental prices will be eye-popping. And, as you stated, wages are stagnant. Even with NY's $15.00 minimum, not including food workers.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
Labor shortage hits hard in Sonoma County
Thanks for the timely essay, it is like being plugged directly in to the zeitgeist around here. Labor shortage hits hard in Sonoma County
There's more if you follow the link. Trump and immigration of course. But unbelievably shitty wages are what employers still expect to pay, and they complain their asses off about training, benefits, over-regulation, blah blah blah. Well if being in business is so fucking hard, get out! That's what I say. 20% of the population on SNAP, thousands of people living on the streets, employers and politicians both keep saying "let's hire a consultant to tell us what to do." Feh.
"That's the system". It is what needs changing here, the whole system. I need to go back and review joe's list of demands, because continuing to plug in to this mess is stupid I think. I don't know.
Thanks
Originally this was to be a single essay
but as I was trying to wrap it up, I realized that the issue of wage stagnation and housing costs was similar, but also quite different for middle income people and those earning a minimum wage. Middle income households are being squeezed by housing costs but generally still are able to make ends meet. Low income and minimum wages earners simply cannot cover their basic costs of living and must rely upon other sources such as welfare and charity simply to exist. This is criminal in the richest country the world has ever seen and more and more people are falling into poverty or near poverty every year.
In my small town in NC, one of the problems is that no multi-family housing has been built here since the 1980's other than tax credit or income subsidized housing, which does not meet the needs of the target group that the local Community Land Trust has been working toward providing housing for. The target group is those middle income earners in the $30,000 to $45,000 range who need what is called work force housing. The ability of a community to provide work force housing adds to the long term stability of that community.
Another problem in this area is that nearly every single family rental unit that comes up for sale is immediately sold to an investor who cutesies it up and turns it into a vacation rental by owner. This has been systematically removing affordable units from the already limited local housing stock in an area where the vacancy rate is less than 1%. Owners of these units can make more money in one week via short term rentals than they could in a month from a stable long term rental. Thus far, the local governments have refused to regulate short term rentals despite calls form the public to do so.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Housing is absolutely the next big crisis
It's an area that has become a vise for the working classes. More and more pay staggering percentages of their income in order to have a roof over their head and for decreasing value in the quality of the rentals themselves.
I have always offered up a few basic rules about real estate and housing, one of the major ones being that the costs of housing needs to be reflective of the average or median incomes of an area. If that is not the case, you get "Aspenization" which is when the working classes have no affordable housing options in a specific city. And when that occurs, you get weird situations like large employers importing workers from other countries in order to house them in dormitory type situations. The concept of migrant labor is being expanded from agriculture into service industries like hotels and restaurants. The other things that happens is that people are forced to share single family housing and convert it into informal multi-family housing where for example in a three bedroom house, 3 couples live there and you will see six cars in the driveway and on the street.
This economic sector needs to be discussed and dissected much much more. As with just about everything else in the Obama administration, any efforts to actually help American homeowners and keep them in their houses was sadly lacking. Funds were allocated but only a fraction used. One of their major programs was designed to help only those already in arrears and facing foreclosure so it offered a perverse incentive for homeowners on the edge to give-up and go into arrears and then a large number of them found themselves foreclosed upon when they thought they were entering a foreclosure avoidance program!
After the foreclosure crisis, there were millions of foreclosed houses on the market - too many to release into the sales inventory at one time, because the banks feared triggering another wave of equity loss by driving home values down even father and triggering even more foreclosures and adding to the "shadow inventory". So a lot of these house were simply off the market and vacant while they continued to decline in value as they were not maintained and/or vandalized while sitting empty.
These houses could have been turned over to entities like Habitat for Humanity, or HUD and Treasury could have come up with some programs to make these houses "workforce housing" with innovative home loans and rehab money. There were no efforts as far as I am aware to expand the 203K rehab program which had the bones of everything required, but which is undermanned in terms of HUD inspectors and loan officers and contract managers who were conversant with the details of that program. From my own experience, I found that a couple of loan officers in a couple of banks and a few contractors and a small subset of real estate agents had the knowledge and experience to pilot consumers through a very bureaucratic and multi-layered process. In addition, there was no 203K equivalent program for investors, which could have placed many of these properties in smaller, local hands.
What happened instead was that these foreclosures were bundled and sold en mass to large, deep-pocket investors who then obtained large inventories of properties that they planned to turn into single family rentals. This is where things in my opinion should get interesting. Single family residences have no economies of scale that make them attractive as investments. If you re-roof an apartment building, you are roofing for multiple housing units in that building. If you re-roof a single family, you have just had a huge outlay of bucks for one single housing unit. Add to that the usual wear and tear, maintenance and upkeep, management fees, eviction costs, vacancy times, taxes and insurances, overhead and salaries of the ownership company, legal fees, etc., IMO you are going to have a very hard time making an actual profit. If you were to make a profit, you would have to jack up the rents to a level where you don't experience negative cash flow which would generate a huge rent increase. Again, this is my opinion, but single family rentals make sense for small, local investors who don't have the same large overhead and who can oversee and repair the properties.
Because of declining and stagnant wages and the desire of the Federal Government to move us away from the American Dream of home ownership, a lot of the Smart Money sees a great future in building large apartment complexes and they are doing so. They are offering these apartments at rates that are dwarfing previous mortgage outlays for a modest single family home. Since they are corporately owned, along with the high rentals are the credit, employment and background checks, which large numbers of Americans cannot pass because they are overextended or in debt bondage or would have to spend a greater percentage of their income than the rental company offering the exorbitant rents, thinks is feasible.
The end result of this is that millions of Americans are locked out of both affordable and unaffordable housing because of their stagnant incomes. If you want proof of this situation, look at your local Craigs List under Housing Wanted where you will find listing after listing of people looking for a "Private Owner" rental because they know they can't pass corporate screening and offering up heart wrenching testimony as to why the "Private Landlord" should take a chance on them. Because the Private Owners are renting their properties swiftly anyway, I doubt that they know or care about these ads. Or, maybe the slumlords do.
What happens next is that motels are turned into substitute long-term housing. If there's a motel near you, notice how the school buses stop in the morning and the afternoon. Many communities do not allow motel residency of longer than 30 days, so the inhabitants have to be moved into another unit or building or leave for a week or do whatever else they have figured out to do to comply with the regulations.
" “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” FDR "
Man dies during fight at motel with Rohnert Park police officer
thanks,
What you all write about I see every day around here, and in places I used to live within proximity to the Bay Area. Owned a house in Rohnert Park for about a decade in the 90s. There is a casino down there now.
Man dies during fight at motel with Rohnert Park police officers
The Rohnert Park casino made the Geyserville casino go in to default on their loans, great planning huh? This is literally right down the street from me yesterday, WARNING it is before the first responders arrive:
Hwy. 101 crash near Cloverdale splits car down middle, injures 2
Ya think? Okay how about going one deeper? Why the fuck are so many people medicating? It's the stupid economy, that's what I think. Needs to get a conscience!
Peace
sry for the bump.
Edited: to fix 'needs' typo, even the tiniest errors are bugging me
There was a motel
here in this town that was partially converted into cheap rental housing for day laborers. The motel was sold and the majority of the site was demolished and turned into strip commercial, while a small portion of the motel was turned into student housing for the local college.
The real problem of housing was not solved by a motel being used for cheap rentals, or by it being demolished and sold off. When the cheap rental tenants were being evicted, there was a huge scramble by local charitable organizations to find them any housing in the area.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Housing has become another asset of the rich
The cost of housing reflects the disparity in income and wealth. As the rich increase their wealth they are looking for more "investment opportunities" for their money to get a return and to grow their capital. There aren't a lot of good investments today, especially ones where the banks will provide significant leverage. The problem with this model is that that asset is what most people need for housing, and it is a non-productive investment, it's a debt based investment, compared to investing in a new company or technology, etc.
Because of this the price of housing is way above historical values, especially in major metropolitan areas, where most people live. I went to school in the Boston area and in 1967 the cost of a nice suburban house in Concord MA was $30,000. I know because a friend of mine bought such a house. I checked the price of that house on Zillow and today it is $729,900, in today's dollars. That's an increase of 24.3 times, when at the same time inflation is 7.16. That's 3.4 times the rate of inflation. Housing prices have recovered since the Great Recession and grew at 6.8% last year, according to Zillow.
So, you say what so I care if I own my home? Wait a second, you don't own your home, the bank does. And that mortgage principle is part of some mortgage backed security. That is, the 1% own your home and you pay them rent. That's called "economic rent". They make money for not doing anything except owning something.
The price of this asset, your house, is in an economic positive feedback loop. As more money goes into mortgage backed securities it drives up the cost of houses in the market. There was so much money in these funds in the naughties (2000s) that a fortune could be made just originating mortgages. Why do you think this all happened? Home owners, it seems, have no control over what they spend to buy a house. All they look at is the monthly payment and if it is "only" 50% of their take home pay then they sign. It's easy, and the banks were not applying any test for qualification.
The free market solution for this is construction of new housing. New cheaper housing drives down the market. Sorry, but this doesn't work, for many reasons. Builders have been building more and more expensive new houses. They use the market price of existing housing to drive up the price of new housing. They are making a fortune, at the same time they were willing to pay tradesmen higher and higher wages, because they were making more money and the building lot itself is a scarce resource. This has ratcheted up the price of construction and it refuses to come down with a slower market. Have you needed an electrician, or plumber lately?
Just for a greater perspective, the cost of a roof over your head should be coming down significantly, in hours worked to pay for that unit, as we have the advantage of modern technology and materials and processes in building housing units. Also projects are cheaper to manage with the advent of the internet and personal computers.
Captalism can't solve this problem. It's driven mainly by income disparity between the 1% and the rest of us. More neoliberal economics equals more income disparity. In the Communist Soviet Union everyone had a roof over their heads, free health care, cheap food, free education and a job. The downside is that they never achieved the economic output of the West. The solution, then, needs to achieve high output with economic justice. Also we need to take another look at using the free market to price housing. It's been a disaster here. As soon as you make housing a trade-able asset subject to speculation you are screwed.
Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.
Wonderful essay, as always. I am bookmarking
because of all the links to your prior essays on this subject as I have only read the most recent.
Yes, housing an issue. I saw a program once that showed how housing people costs a community less money that leaving them homeless, but, as a society, we're too mean to do that, even to save money. Utah, however, has done it, based strictly on economics.
If we can't or are unwilling to provide basic decent housing for people, I wish we would at least provide places where they can launder their clothes and take a shower.
Some homeless people were using the rest room in the local neighborhood health center to take a sponge bath. On noticing that, the center put locks on the doors to the rest rooms. Again, as a society, we're just mean and it's shameful.
I so agree about the laundry and showers
Bathhouses used to be a thing back in the day when there were boarding houses and SRO hotels.
Speaking of, why NOT bring back the concepts of the boarding house and SRO hotels? They always had a place in the housing scheme of things. Even YMCAs and YWCAs used to provide cheap dormitory type housing. Why don't we build modern dorm type housing in cities? A large secure room with a bathroom, a bed, a desk and a couch with a microwave and fridge with access to laundry facilities would suit many people who don't need or want a multi room house or apartment.
I had a one room studio in college - one large room, a small but efficient kitchen and a decent bathroom and I loved it. It was my little nest.
" “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” FDR "
We feel the homeless are not worthy of
toilets or rooms with ceilings, even if it saves us money. We must punish them for the unforgivable sin of having allowed themselves to become homeless. We believe in that so much, we're willing to pay good money to punish them.
Because we're nuts.