Waiting for the Turnaround

by Gary Phillips

In the streets of London, angry chants from thousands of protestors went up as the G-20 summit convened. Such colorful fare as, “Hang the Bankers” and “Tax the Rich, Make Them Pay” echoed outside the Royal Bank of Scotland—where some broke in and spray painted “thieves” on the walls until they were arrested. Groups like the anti-capitalist Four Horsefolk of the Apocalypse and the London Anarchists, who called on the people to, as the Guardian reported, join in “fucking up the summit and other adventures,” were pushing back against the system.

The revolutionaries mixed with union members and everyday people and families suffering under the boot heel of this global economic crush—while not to far away First Lady Michelle Obama made the faux pas of putting her arm around, and hugging up on, the Queen like homegirl was, you know, from around the way. Etiquette be damned, the G-20ers huddled to figure out how to save capitalism as we know it. For as the redoubtable Robert Scheer observed on truthdig.com, the Obama Administration is determined to ensure “No Banker Left Behind.”  As far as Scheer is concerned, the future portends even more money will be thrown down what has to be the world’s record for rat holes.

The rat hole monies have amounted to nearly three trillion dollars. Three trillion, baby. That’s way the hell more than what we’re spending on educating our children, and light years away from what we’re willing to pump into affordable housing. This push back around this crisis in L.A. is embodied in the policy struggle for a mixed-income housing ordinance. The ordinance is backed by many housing groups, particularly L.A. Voice, part of PICO (Pacific Institute for Community Organizing), which organizes congregations, clergy, and neighborhood residents. PICO is an outgrowth of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the seminal organization that Saul Alinsky, the sociology student shaped by the Great Depression who would mold and name this thing our president once practiced, community organizing.

Mixed-income housing policy has several components, but in this context refers to providing incentives such as tax breaks to developers to set aside a certain amount of units in their new developments as affordable housing—though who knows (even before the bubble burst) how you define what’s affordable to low-wage earners and the working poor. As Raphael Bostic, a professor of Policy, Planning and Development at USC wrote, from 2000 to 2006, the cost of ownership properties more than doubled in California due to factors including job growth and aggressive lending in the prime and subprime mortgage markets. At the same time, given the high percentage of renters in the state and L.A. (60% according to a 2003 stat), 213,000 rental units would have to have been produced to keep pace.

Now, in this economic uncertainty we’re in, groups like Housing Los Angeles are pushing for not only mixed-income neighborhoods, but commitment by the city council to enact comprehensive policies like dedicated funding streams for the Housing Trust Fund—a pot of money to spur through matching funds the building of affordable housing. These kinds of housing spurts would also be tied to a percentage of jobs going to local residents and apprenticeships in the building trades. For now, though, the Obama Administration is bailing out Wall Street and, to a much lesser extent, those with the albatross of debt-laden mortgages around their necks. But not, so far, creating Works Projects Administration (WPA)-like or Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) programs.

In the meantime, then, ACORN—you remember them for being the straw man/target of the right last fall during the presidential race for having a few of their signature gathers try to submit fake names (no matter that it was ACORN itself that called attention to this)—isn’t waiting for that train to leave the station and has kicked off what they’re calling Home Defender Trainings as part of a Home Staying Program, reminiscent of the Consolidated Tenants League in the Depression organizing rent strikes and brigades to take furniture back into apartments the landlord kicked tenants out of. February 19 in Watts, on 101st Street near the ironically—or maybe it’s prophetically—named Success Avenue, Roseanne Barr (yep, that Roseanne), Carson Mayor Pro Tem Mike Gipson and United Teachers of Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy joined with ACORN members and organizers to defend the home of Tommy and Debora Beard.

The Beards (the wife is a teacher’s aide and the husband a recently laid off cook in a hospital) had done a refinance a few years ago with a predatory lender—the sort who prey on low wage workers. He convinced them to consolidate their debt but of course didn’t fully explain the terms of the loan. In 2008, their monthly mortgage payment went from $1,700 a month to $3,200. They fell behind and they and their five children got foreclosed on, facing eviction. For now they remain in their home as negotiations continue with the lender.

On another front, his past Thursday, April 3 outside the KB Home offices in Westwood, homeowners, religious leaders, LIUNA (Laborers’ International Union of North America) members, and housing organizers held a tent city protest to call attention to Countywide KB—the entity’s lending arm—hoodwinking homeowners into subprime loans. Adding to their funky press, former KB Home CEO Bruce Karatz has been indicted by a grand jury on various counts including wire and securities fraud, four counts of making false statements in reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and one count of lying to the company's accountants.

Out in Riverside a lone deputy serves eviction notices while glue sniffers and school ditchers and gangbangers squat in empty Cape Cod two-story models in uncompleted housing tracts; mountain lions laze on the walls of near-abandoned outlet malls and distressed mothers and fathers chain themselves to light meters or porch posts as the bills pile up and services are cut; public employees take mandated furloughs, and, in the private sector, willing employees take pay cuts and forgo raises to stem layoffs of themselves and others. Employment offices are seeing more middle class people waiting on their plastic chairs than ever before, and what economic forecasting there is predicts the bottom probably hasn’t been reached yet.

Waiting for the turnaround is a mutha.

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