{"id":16126,"date":"2019-12-11T01:04:35","date_gmt":"2019-12-11T08:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/politicalhat.com\/?p=16126"},"modified":"2019-12-11T01:04:35","modified_gmt":"2019-12-11T08:04:35","slug":"housing-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/impeachreno.org\/politicalhat\/2019\/12\/11\/housing-justice\/","title":{"rendered":"Housing Justice"},"content":{"rendered":"

     Whenever an ardent Leftist Progressive qualifies the word \u201cjustice\u201d, they don\u2019t actually mean justice<\/em> and rarely actually care about the qualifier beyond the excuse to target someone over something.<\/p>\n

     Such as is the case in the call of \u201chousing justice\u201d. The excuse is the \u201chousing crisis\u201d caused by that paragon of progressive preposterousness: California, which is\u2014unsurprisingly\u2014mostly trying to make<\/a> things<\/a> worse<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

     One must remember that to the Progressive Left, \u201crights\u201d only mean the \u201cright\u201d to do or be good, as they define it, and such protections do not apply to the designated villain.<\/p>\n

     But sometimes even that<\/em> isn\u2019t enough, certainly in the case of this little rant<\/a> from the Sightline Institute, and quotes from the \u201ccommunity organizer\u201d sounding \u201cAlliance of Californians for Community Empowerment .\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe report and ACCE\u2019s accompanying campaign emphasize the horrifying fact that Los Angeles in particular has more \u201cnon-market vacant\u201d units than there are Angelenos experiencing homelessness on any given night.<\/p>\n

\u201cACCE is pushing for new taxes on long-term vacant homes, partly inspired by the one in Vancouver, BC. If a city has a high number of mostly-vacant \u2018investment\u2019 properties, it\u2019s a reasonable proposal.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut there\u2019s an even bigger injustice this report overlooked, as do most of the similar exercises about empty apartments that circulate now and then.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s true that for 2013-2017, the Census estimates 691,343 totally empty homes in California, including plenty in condo buildings, that ACCE categorizes as \u2018off-market\u2019 because they\u2019re either \u2018for seasonal, recreational or occasional use\u2019 or otherwise unavailable to rent or buy. This is, disturbingly, more than five times the estimated 129,972 homeless Californians.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is equally true that even if every adult and every child in one of California\u2019s owner-occupied homes required a bedroom of their own, the state would have 2,660,505 bedrooms where no one sleeps\u201420 unoccupied bedrooms for every homeless Californian.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cNot only is California failing to disincentivize this second, larger injustice. In this case, it\u2019s actually subsidizing the injustice with hundreds of millions of dollars every year in the form of California\u2019s cap on property taxes for longtime property owners, which swells the price of housing for anyone not lucky enough to already own.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

     The author is insinuating that because some people have a spare bedroom, it is somehow unjust because a homeless person isn\u2019t using it. Though the author isn\u2019t demanding seizure of empty guestrooms for redistribution (at least not openly), but is demanding the state punish those who a second home, investment property not occupied, and other wise inflict \u201cstructural changes\u201d such as:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIn addition to continuing to raise and spend money for below-income housing, we should do things like re-legalizing shared homes, lifting the apartment bans in low-density, job-rich enclaves of San Jose, subverting speculation with community land trusts and reforming California\u2019s monumentally terrible property tax system that systematically transfers wealth from young to old, migrant to incumbent, brown to white. All these things would lower the costs of finding a stable home in California.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

     This will only make things worse. By driving out, increasingly, the middle class, all California will eventually be left with poor neo-feudal serfs and their super-rich overlords, who can then vote to redistribute property that makes the French Revolution\u2019s stealing of church property seem like amateur hour.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

     Whenever an ardent Leftist Progressive qualifies the word \u201cjustice\u201d, they don\u2019t actually mean justice and rarely actually care about the qualifier beyond the excuse to target someone over something.      Such as is the case in the call of \u201chousing justice\u201d. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16129,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[101,19,77,22,24,37],"class_list":["post-16126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-progressives","tag-ca","tag-communism","tag-derp","tag-fail","tag-leviathan","tag-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/impeachreno.org\/politicalhat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/impeachreno.org\/politicalhat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/impeachreno.org\/politicalhat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/impeachreno.org\/politicalhat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/impeachreno.org\/politicalhat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16126"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/impeachreno.org\/politicalhat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16130,"href":"https:\/\/impeachreno.org\/politicalhat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16126\/revisions\/16130"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/impeachreno.org\/politicalhat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/impeachreno.org\/politicalhat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/impeachreno.org\/politicalhat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/impeachreno.org\/politicalhat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}