notes – Page 3 – Jenneral HQ

Challenges facing Violence Against Women Shelters in Ottawa

[Epistemic effort: I’ve had a month for digesting what I heard, but haven’t actually set time aside to think hard about the implications. I have done my best to cross-reference all the claims that I noted down, but there may still be some mistakes remaining, and there’s a chance that I completely misinterpreted something that was said.]

I went to a roundtable discussion on the challenges faced by women’s shelters in the Ottawa region mid-November, and I realized that I was incredibly privileged in that government regime changes generally don’t affect me.

What do I mean by that? Well, I think there’s this general consensus around my social class, that politics are mostly a form of entertainment, and all of the head political figures all kind of channel Zaphod Beeblebrox while some 50 year old white dude with 30 years in the public service and a job title like Assistant Deputy Chief Underminster of Finance actually controls everything. It turns out that I was very, very wrong, and it’s just that the “middle” class is kind of untouchable politically. The Ford administration has actually meant that some urgently needed social services are now underfunded or defunded entirely, with severe implications for the subaltern classes. There are changes, and people’s lives have objectively gotten shittier. I just didn’t see it.

This realization has made me change from ambivalence to disapproval of my fellow leftists who are/identify as accelerationists, who think that we should just burn the entire current structure down and start anew, because according to them the system in place has a net negative impact on the world. Now that I know that this is not the case, my reaction is “hey buddy if you’re going to burn down this system that millions of people depend upon for some reason or another, you better have a dang good reason, because the people whose lives will be upended the most, and for the worse, will be your poor, your disabled, and your oppressed, not the well-off relatives that you resent for being xenophobic.“

In the specific case of the roundtable, I learned that women’s shelters in Ontario lost funding, meaning they either didn’t get enough to keep up with wages and inflation, or actually had to cut the number of beds that they had, which was already pathetically few to begin with. Whatever number you had in mind, it’s lower than that. There are 121 in Ottawa as of 2016. Women who flee often flee because they want to protect their children, so each woman that you take in will generally require 2-3 beds. Women stay for 3-6 months while they get their lives in order to move on. So. Ottawa, a city with a population of almost a million, can support approximately 50-60 abused women at a time, and zero men. I am willing to bet money that that is not close to enough. Ottawa is not a uniquely bad city when it comes to supporting battered women; in fact it may be better than average. Society just flat sucks, in general. (If this information made you update your mental model on the services your city provides for women, I regretfully inform you that you should make approximately the same update w/r/t homeless shelters, resources for refugees, subsidized/community housing, support for queer youth, CPS, and so on and so forth.)

The other incredibly shitty thing is that when it comes to supporting the subaltern classes, funding models are exceedingly zero sum at times. Three years ago, women’s’ shelters here were able to ring up 311 (the municipal help line) when they had a woman on the line who needed to get out, but no room in their shelter or in any other shelter in the city. The city would hook them up with a room for, not 3-6 months, but a decent chunk of time. Now, because of rising housing costs and an influx of refugees, the motels, city shelters, and overflow rooms are all full, all the time, and that is no longer an option for the shelters. This, by the way, is the case even though the mayor, who honestly seems like a pretty cool guy, spent $6.4m over budget last year on shelters.

And, the week after I went to this roundtable, Ford started cutting watchdogs for the province left and right, because according to the party they were ineffectual and therefore a waste of taxpayer dollars. Watchdogs were brought up as a topic during the roundtable discussion as well. According to the panelists, in general they weren’t the most efficient form of advocacy, because it’s hard to bite the hand that feeds you. But it was still useful, and it was provided at no cost to the shelters. Now, the shelters are preparing to scrape at the splintered bottoms of their barrels to pay for advocacy themselves. I don’t like that, but I am generally not a fan of anything that our current government is doing, so that’s not a big surprise.

Misc notes:

Cities don’t have enough money to do anything in the “best” way that we are taught at City Planning School. The way “housing first” is supposed to work: “step one when a person becomes homeless is to give them a stable source of housing, so that they can keep their stuff, have an address which is very important for applying to jobs, and not fall apart mentally.” The way “housing first” works because there are approximately like, negative four affordable units in the city: the city will give you a subsidy of $250 a month for housing. But. Only after you’ve spent more than a cumulative total of 2 years in a homeless shelter, and are not addicted to any substances (“clean”). It is very hard to be clean, if you’ve spent 2 years homeless. Also, homeless shelters are not safe for women generally, so only men stay for long periods of time. This means that men got 80% of the “housing first” subsidies. By the time you get a house because of the “housing first” policy, you already lost most things that a house was supposed to give you.
Another fun thing is that, landlords that are familiar with the housing first policy will deliberately push their rents above the affordable housing threshold, because they don’t want “troubled” tenants. I won’t say that landlords are scum because of this, because I can see where they’re coming from. But this goes back to how severely problematic rent-seeking, and the idea of housing as a form of investment/passive income, is.
This should go without saying, but battered women will make bad decisions sometimes, like going back to their abuser after their shelter stay. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t help them, because a) you don’t know their circumstances and b) you would likely do the same in their shoes. These women [a/n: I feel really uncomfortable with how the shelters speak of their clientele exclusively using female pronouns, but I mean, they’re women’s shelters.] are doing incredibly draining crisis management on a day-to-day basis. They’re trying to keep food on the table and their kids quiet so they don’t get beat up. Recovery is non-linear. Don’t hold this against them.
Lots of women will “hold out” until the shelters have a bed available for them.
A common misconception is that a women’s shelter is like, a large hall with 60 beds in one room. In general they’re like motels, with individual suites – some with connecting rooms too or a dividing wall that can be brought in if there are older kids who need their own space, etc. Lots of times, the kids don’t even know that they’re staying at a shelter of some kind, their mothers tell them that they’re just going on a mini staycation or something.
We know the solution for solving all these problems – for raising women out of poverty, for effectively transitioning them away from abusive relationships. Things like having beds immediately available, providing childcare, and ensuring that they can keep their pets with them (because they are beloved members of the family, and also something that the abuser can threaten/injure/kill if it is left behind) all help women stay away. The only problem is that we don’t have money, and in fact we are losing funding. Ain’t that a bitch.
This year has been especially bad for women. In general, one woman is killed every six days. In 2018, the figure has shot up to 2.5-3.
On the bright side, #metoo has had a visible impact, and more women are seeking out shelters – older women, wealthier women, immigrant women.

De-Commodifying Housing for Fun (and Zero Profit)

I recently discovered this youtube channel that uses cities:skylines to explore the politics of planning. It’s pretty great. This one video in particular I think says a lot of important things about housing and gentrification, so I took notes. The notes are on the second half of the video, not because the first half isn’t good but because it goes over concepts I’m already familiar with. Everything below should be taken as basically a transcription of the ideas outlined in the video, i.e. I don’t own anything and if you find this useful you should consider kicking a few bucks his way.

so here we go:

Conventional methods of fighting gentrification:

More housing (YIMBY)
-YIMBYists are ragtag groups, varies wildly in quality (internet urbanists, development shills, actual anti-poverty activists), east coast groups generally more friendly to tenant rights

-Some nuances on luxury vs affordable housing:

-“luxury” is an advertising term, it basically means granite countertops, hardwood flooring, in house laundry, maybe a doorman. But the only real difference between luxury and affordable units is the rent.

-The floor area is generally the same, because of minimum requirements, and the fact that shoebox apartments are generally illegal.

-Luxury housing costing more (DESPITE BEING BASICALLY THE SAME) means higher ROI and less risk.

-“filtering” – some argue that luxury housing of today becomes affordable stock of tomorrow. This is basically trickle down economics, and even if by some miracle it works that way, at best it will take 20 years and buildings generally don’t last much longer than that (citation needed).

-older, worse buildings for poor people also means higher risk of displacement due to construction.

-land value tends to be higher where higher density is. We can argue cause and effect, but NYC and Hong Kong are both extremely built up and dense, but you don’t see units decreasing in price.

Downzoning

-Usually done through downzoning broad swathes of a neighbourhood (medium/high density to low density, meaning that new apartments won’t get approved) – but illegal conversions will still remain a thing as well as conversions made before downzoning

-Downzoning only serves to stave off problem of rising rents, it doesn’t change the fact that richer people want to move into the neighbourhood and are willing to pay a premium to do so. In addition, it means new units are limited in number. The community may have more control over the rate at which rent rises, but the problem still persists.

-zoning also obviously doesn’t cover renovations, so landlords can still renovate cheap units into expensive ones, which means that displacement of current residents will still happen.

Opposition of Neighbourhood Improvements

-opposing bike lanes, transit improvements, sidewalk improvements, etc.

-the idea is that even if the neighbourhood lands a good employer, it’s not likely that current residents would get the jobs there. Therefore improvements that might improve mobility/attract employers are generally opposed.

-following this line of logic, there will never be housing that is both good and cheap.

In general…

Yimbys and anti-gentrification activists are answering two different questions. Yimbys are asking “how do we fit everyone in?” Anti-gentrification activists are asking “how can we keep everyone already there in their houses?”

The truth isn’t in the middle (this isn’t south park). There is a pressing and urgent need for more housing in lots of cities, but those same cities are also going through eviction crises and mass displacement owing to the development of those desperately needed housing units.

The Actual Real Solution: The De-commodification of Housing

Housing needs to become just housing, and not also the default investment vehicle for large swathes of the population. Socialists talk a lot about this and tend to get patronizing responses like “haha, wow, everything’s possible after the revolution, right comrade?” but there are genuine actionable strategies to make this happen piecemeal in the current capitalistic political environment.

We can’t just pass a law that says “housing is de-commodified now, guys,” but anything that reduces the ability for landlords to extract rents from their tenants, or otherwise reduces their power over them, is de-commodification. Anything that provides housing at below market-prices, competing with the current profit-seeking model, is de-commodification. Policies that help homeowners afford foreclosure insurance, or otherwise support them when they are underwater on their mortgage, is de-commodification. Policy examples:

Co-operative ownership of apartment buildings.
-A board elected by the tenants oversees the building(s) and makes decisions about maintenance and finances.
-Plenty of these exist already, but mostly for the well off (baugruppe with private mini units and collective unschooling for the kids!!!!!)
-Encouraging co-op housing would go a long way towards reducing the power of landlords.

Rent control.
-limits rent increases per year to reasonable levels, or stops them entirely sometimes.

Guaranteed legal counsel in tenant-landlord court.

Improved and expanded tenant rights.

Community land trusts.
-civic organizations that own and manage land and the buildings on them in a community.
-they are organized by members of that community
-they keep rents just high enough for maintenance purposes but lower than a for-profit entity would.

Increased availability of quality public housing.
-you want make public housing cheaper than the market rate, and you want to open it to everyone and not just poor people. You have to build a lot of it and you have to make it accessible to jobs and services. Be as appealing, if not more appealing, than private sector alternatives.

Right of first refusal laws.
-Already a thing in Washington DC (TOPA)
-If an owner sells an apartment building, the tenants of that apartment building have the right to form a tenant association and purchase the building from the landlord, rather than the person the landlord is trying to sell it to.
-In DC this generally requires the association to partner w another development firm to finance the purchase, but it still means that the tenants have more leverage to stay in the apartments, or to receive hefty buy-outs to leave.
-Can also be applied to factories and manufacturers – workers get the option to buy the equipment and the factory and continue as a worker co-op

Vacancy taxes.
-if an apartment or condo is vacant you have to pay an extra tax. Same goes for if you’re airbnbing it out.

Tenancy unions.

“Good-cause” eviction laws.
-laws that impose major restrictions on what can result in a tenant’s eviction.

Stricter licensing requirements for landlords and stiffer penalties for failure to keep apartments in good condition.
-Landlords sometimes let the building they own rot so tenants are forced to move out, and then turn around and sell it to a developer – who was going to demolish it and build new housing on top anyways.
-Better monitoring and implementing actual consequences for illegal conversions, slumlords

So all of this would work towards making it much harder to make money off of housing. It curbs speculation and decreases profit possible from rent-seeking. Effectively, the idea is to make housing useless as an investment, and therefore only to put people in. Now obviously this makes it less financially viable for the private sector to build housing, since the profits from speculation and rent-seeking would disappear, or be significantly reduced. But it wouldn’t be impossible. The value of housing would simply be based on its usefulness as a house, rather than as an investment vehicle.

All the policies mentioned above have been implemented in at least one or two cities, but having these policies work together and full de-commodification would have to go further. We also don’t really know what that might look like. People’s retirement savings are tied to their houses and huge parts of our economy are based on appreciation of real estate holdings. Policies that de-commodify housing will hurt the economy as we know it, pretty significantly. But if we want to live in a world without rent or landlords or homelessness or gentrification, it’s a risk we’ll have to be willing to take.

Review: Time Will Run Back

Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Capitalism

[epistemic status: I haven’t actually stopped worrying, but I am ever so slightly more receptive to the idea of capitalism]

I’ve been reading some stuff from the 50s lately, and I think it’s the first time that I’ve seriously engaged with works from the era. And the first thing that I want to say about them is that I’m frankly flummoxed by the lack of hypervisible left- or right-coded ideology in these texts. Take Barthes as an example: Barthes uses Marxist language very liberally in his text (terms like bourgeois, proletarian, etc), but does not write like how you would expect a Marxist to write. He doesn’t bash capitalism every second sentence, and how much he buys into Marxist ideology is actually left very ambiguous in the text. He simply saw some terms from Marxist theory that were useful, and used them.

To be honest, I’m kind of jealous that he can get away with that. There’s a subtle but profound difference between “rich” and “bourgeoisie” (for example, famous actors and athletes are rich, but they are not members of the bourgeoisie), and similarly between “working class” and “proletariat”, and sometimes I feel like I have to basically write around these Marxist terms lest people disregard my writing as Marxist propaganda.

But I guess this lack of political ideology makes sense, because postmodern theory (bringing with it things like intersectional feminism, post-structuralism, post-colonial theory, respect for indigenous knowledge, and all the rest of the foundations of Good Discourse) was still in gestation and everyone still thought that you can find “the universal truth” using these things called “facts” and “logic”. Speaking from the post-truth (ugh) world of 2018, this is adorably/horrifically naive, but I have to admit that the resulting straightforwardness of the arguments render them much more digestible. It’s so digestible, I finally understand capitalism. And I know that that’s a pretty bold claim, so let me explain where I’m coming from.

Some Ramblings to Establish Context

All the modern-ish books that I’ve read about economic systems can be sorted roughly into one of two categories.

Category 1: “It’s bad that society focuses so much on productivity, when we produce more than enough already and unfair distribution (e.g. along ethnic, class, gendered, or border lines) is the actual problem. Everyone who says anything different is an evil selfish capitalist who is exploiting other people, or an unenlightened drone who needs to awaken from false consciousness.”

Category 2: “Under communism we all share one toothbrush, and no one is incentivized to become a doctor because you can get the same amount of rich by being a janitor. These are bad things. Capitalism is the opposite of communism. QED capitalism is a good thing. Something about reducing market inefficiencies by getting rid of minimum wage and going back on the gold standard. Something about why it’s good when there’s no environmental regulation and we plunder the global south.”

Okay, so admittedly I’ve not engaged with too many things in that second category. But what I want to point out is this: these categories confront each other on an abstract, ideological playing field, with absolutely nothing said on the topic of implementation. And I didn’t realize that anything was wrong with that, until I read Henry Hazlitt’s Time Will Run Back. In it, Hazlitt posits a theory that is very applied: If capitalism did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

So let’s talk about Time Will Run Back: a fictional account of how capitalism was invented piecemeal in a nation called Wonworld (think Oceania in 1984). Hazlitt does a really good job of making the mechanism of capitalism sound intrinsically good, and convincing you that the usage of it is inevitable if the state wants to know anything about its economy.

(If you’re intrigued but don’t have the time/energy/interest needed to read the whole thing, I highly suggest that you read Chapter 25, which is when things really start ramping up. It starts on page 203 in this PDF version online. It’s relatively self-contained, and very, very delightful.)

A selective summary

So consider even a rudimentary thing, like “how many chairs is this chair factory producing per month?” States in general don’t have enough manpower to actually check every factory every month forever, and especially when you’re a corrupt totalitarian state, factories have incentives to overstate their productivity.

As a state, if you want to actually have your finger on the pulse of your economy, you must use a system that incentivizes truth-telling and punishes lying – and preferably in a way that doesn’t require too much of your own manpower.

Now consider, “how many chairs does a family need per year, taking into account things like wear and tear?” This turns out to be very hard to figure out when there’s no market in place to indicate demand for any given product, making the state blind to if they’re producing too little or too much of any commodity.

Or, “how can we get this factory to make their chairs better quality, so they’re not breaking every 6 months?” All factories will of course pay lip service to quality, but how can a state actually make their factories turn out good quality chairs, given the lack of unlimited manpower and the corruption of basically all your civil servants?

The answer to all these questions, according to Hazlitt, is a system with markets. And once you have a market, other things will inevitably follow: the need for competition, brokers who take care of arbitrage and bring prices down to parity, currency inflation, speculation, and so on and so forth. But it’s distinct from modern-day capitalism in a very important way: the system described optimizes for human quality of life, not profit. Under Wonworld’s new economic policy, people work the same amount, it’s just that things are allocated much better. I was tempted at first to say that this is a lobotomized form of capitalism, but upon further consideration, I don’t think that’s true.

Also included in the book, but honestly just distracting from the fun: some murder plots, a sexy spy, treason, and some angst about Disappointing Your Father. Honestly when those things start to happen I recommend skipping forward to when people start talking about markets again. [author’s note: please read that last sentence in a wry enough tone that I come off sounding cool and self aware instead of like the utter dweeb I am, thanks]

Past, Present, Future

Time Will Run Back is a product of its time – a time when capitalism was kinder, and profit optimization had not yet overtaken things like family wages (to clarify, this is not the same thing as a living wage – living wages support solely the earner, family wages enables earners to support a family), rewarding employee loyalty, and strong unions enforcing 8-hour days for their members. (Obligatory all of these were really only in place for privileged white/male folk etc etc.)

But the capitalism of the 50s wasn’t lobotomized, it was just in its infancy. As it matured over the decades, it stripped away worker’s rights, environmental protections, and trade barriers, until we got to where we are now. And there’s nothing guaranteeing that the capitalism of Wonworld wouldn’t eventually do the same.

Another thing of note is that the book only really deals with the “demand” side of the marketplace, and not the “supply”, and all the ugly things that happens on the supply side. Work hours were not extended and wages were not cut in Wonworld, and Wonworld’s poorer neighbours remain unplundered. Instead, Hazlitt assumes that the increased effectiveness in gauging demand and the increased efficiency of distribution just makes everything substantially better, full stop no further questions.

Still, I think this book is a great read, and asks a question that is sorely neglected on the modern political left: how exactly would central planning work efficiently without markets?

My joking answer has always been “benevolent AI overlord,” but Hazlitt has got me thinking that that might not actually be enough, or that there might be an even better, more efficient way that would not require every citizen to hand over oodles of personal information to the state (or the megacorp running it). And that’s a pretty important thing to think about, especially considering that I’m, uh, studying to be a central planner.

Final score: 9/10, the content is mostly just okay, but it’s content that you can engage with without getting your hackles up no matter what your ideological background is, and that’s worth quite a lot in my books. Also, it’s less hamfisted than 1984, which isn’t saying much in my opinion, but everyone seems to think that Orwell was a brilliant novelist, so.