I have just finished Matthew Desmond’s Evicted (2016). Though a couple years old, the stories of impoverished people in Milwaukee struggling simply to be is one that is localized neither to the time nor place. This is a omnipresent and ongoing phenomenon, and tenants – particularly low-income tenants – face the looming threat of eviction in Milwaukee, here in Vancouver, and throughout most cities in the developed (and likely undeveloped) world.
This constant displacement is a consequence of a cabal of economic and political interests that rely on the (ab)use of legal and political process to ensure that their elite-driven agenda succeeds. The poor receive the brunt of this assault directly and purposefully. They are first exploited for every last ounce of value they can produce,[1] then they are increasingly marginalized for their inability to meet the economic demands of the ruling class – in other words, to pay rent. So they get evicted.
The effects of eviction are profound. Desmond adroitly documents this:
Eviction even affects the communities that displaced families leave behind. Neighbors who cooperate with and trust one another can make their streets safer and more prosperous. But that takes time. Efforts to establish local cohesion and community investment are thwarted in neighborhoods with high turnover rates. In this way, eviction can unravel the entire fabric of a community, helping to ensure that neighbors remain strangers and that their collective capacity to combat crime and promote civic engagement remains untapped.
[. . . ]
Losing your home and possessions and often your job; being stamped with an eviction record and denied government housing assistance; relocating to degrading housing in poor and dangerous neighborhoods; and suffering from increased material hardship, homelessness, depression, and illness – this is eviction’s fallout. Eviction does not simply drop poor families into a dark valley, a trying yet relatively brief detour on life’s journey. It fundamentally redirects their way, casting them onto a different, and much more difficult, path. Eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.[2]
Displacement and alienation are key mechanisms of capitalist accumulation. It is well-documented in many contexts the course of capitalist domination, which forces occupants away from land, and severs social and political ties in so doing. This serves two functions: first, displacement allows for redevelopment, the replacement of the original function of the land with something that can generate more value. Vancouverites (and others, I’m sure) know well the threat of “renovictions,” wherein landlords evict tenants, perform renovations on the rental unit, and then rent the unit out at a sharply increased price. Thus, evictions serve a specific economic function in generating more value for landowners and landlords.
The second function of displacement and alienation is to undermine resistance. This is the social aspect, the sense of community that Desmond writes about above. This sense of community is important for more than just combating crime and promoting civic engagement – it is important for the very possibility of resisting further exploitation and displacement. It is not as if the capitalist landlord class is going to cease their activities on a whim. It is, rather, necessary that tenants are organized and able to create visions for their own independent futures and how to achieve it. In these ways, we see things like rent strikes and tenants’ unions offering this hope.
How is the capitalist ruling class able to accomplish this mass displacement and alienation so effectively? First, because the elite became that way as a result of generations of dispossession of the poor and Indigenous, and the consequent accumulation of wealth on the part of a select group of people. This same group of people controls the wast majority of wealth, therefore the wast majority of land and living space. There is little opportunity for upward mobility. Further, the history of this displacement is a racist, white supremacist one. The ruling class is therefore largely homogeneous.
Generations of elites have then been able to shape the law to support their ownership interests. This includes a litany of techniques designed to create racialized divisions of housing – segregation – and to exploit the living conditions of the poor and non-White by forcing them into slums or ghettos.[3] Beyond that, it serves to lock the poor in a cycle of poverty, as Desmond outlines above. Landlords, who disproportionately have access to legal counsel, utilize obscure legal provisions to evict tenants, who disproportionately lack access to legal counsel.[4] Access to low-income or subsidized housing is circumscribed to a particular subset of low-income individuals, who fulfill some per-determined and largely arbitrary requirement imposed upon them. Middle-income renters, who are increasingly living in precarious and unaffordable tenancies, receive little to no assistance at all, left to fend for themselves as rents increase and wages stagnate.
In BC, by way of example, despite the fact that 1 in 5 renters are spending over half of their income on housing, and rent has increased nearly 40% in comparison with the median wage, the provincial government announced an allowable rent increase of 4.5%. While it is nice to have any rent control at all, this type of policy is not only irresponsible but completely immoral. And it is only possible because government and legal systems reflect the interests of the most economically well-off, those who are perceived as contributing to the generation of revenue that can be taxed and turned into government services. This is, of course, capitalist mythmaking. But the fact that a government that was supposed to be an ally to renters and low-income people can be co-opted by such mythology is testament to the power this elite class possesses. There are possibilities outside of the framework of owner-renter. Our law and governance does little to reflect this.
At bottom, as always, the problem is one of political will. Resistance in these circumstances is difficult, but necessary. Renters make up the majority of population in most major North American cities – and the ratio is growing. Clearly a legal schema that favours owners while oppressing and abusing renters is not sustainable in this circumstance (along with all other tools of extreme inequality under capitalism). Thus we need to remain in solidarity and fight.
[1] See, eg, Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016), at p 306. Desmond notes that, historically, landlords supported the labour movement’s demands for increased wages, but only because they recognized increased wages meant they could increase rent.
[2] Ibid, at p 298-299.
[3] Richard Rothstein, The Colour of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, (New York: Liveright, 2017).
[4] Desmond, Evicted, at p 303.
A Socialist Perspective for Vancouver 
