Abstract
The progressive disjuncture, as captured in two signs in front of a home in Santa Cruz, California in September 2018. On the left: a sign opposing Measure M, a local rent control initiative. On the right: a sign proudly declaring support for a wide range of other progressive causes.
Miriam Greenberg
In 2008, venerable scholar of the power elite and professor emeritus in sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), G. William Domhoff, turned his attention, in collaboration with his former graduate student Richard Gendron, to the nature of power in his iconic town on the California coast. Their book Leftmost City: Power and Progressive Politics in Santa Cruz began with a puzzle: How was it that starting in the late 1960s, Santa Cruz became “the most politically progressive medium-sized or large city in the United States,” uniquely resisting the rampant commercial development of what sociologists John Logan and Harvey Molotch dubbed the “urban growth machine.” 1 They attributed this to “an unlikely confederation” that formed in the 1970s, including two groups whom Domhoff dubbed “the Xs and the Ys of progressive Santa Cruz.” The Xs were a combination of social welfare liberals and “NIMBY” (not in my back yard) neighborhood groups, whereas the Ys were UCSC campus radicals and community organizers oriented in a socialist direction. The Xs, who were mostly homeowners, focused on “quality of life” concerns; the Ys, mostly renters, focused on labor and housing issues. Yet they were drawn together through California’s burgeoning environmental movement, with its slow- to no-growth orientation, and by their fundamental antipathy to “big development” and its coziness with local government.
In 1981, the Xs and Ys formed the Santa Cruz Progressive Alliance (PA), voted as a bloc, and took control of the city council from the business establishment for the first time in the town’s history. For the next twenty years, and together with the anti-growth forces at the county level, they proceeded to use a combination of lawsuits and zoning changes to block most large development in and around Santa Cruz, from highway expansion to hotels to housing complexes. Meanwhile, they joined forces with local progressive groups on a range of initiatives—from environmental measures, such as coastal restoration and greenbelt protection, to social causes, such as passing a resolution against immigration raids, establishing a state-of-the-art women’s health clinic, building a thriving LGBTQ community center, and becoming one of the first cities in the United States to legalize marijuana for medicinal use. Together these moves helped seal the town’s reputation as an idiosyncratic and idealistic lefty bastion.
Yet from the beginning the PA was beset by a contradiction: a growing affordable housing crisis. As in most of coastal California and the United States, Santa Cruz was seeing a growing disparity between area median incomes (AMI), which were stagnating, and rents, which were rising rapidly. The crisis was primarily rooted at the state and federal scale, as from the 1970s on, subsidies for public and multifamily housing were rolled back, while privatization, homeowner tax breaks, and deregulation of rental housing were rolled out—for example, California’s Proposition 13 and Ellis Act. 2 Furthermore, this was an era, as French philosopher Henri Lefebvre foresaw, in which global capital became concentrated in urbanization and in which state planning capacities were reoriented around the demands of the real estate industry—what geographer and planning scholar Samuel Stein calls the “real estate state.” 3
Yet, local actors, connected and adjacent to the real estate state, were also deeply implicated in the crisis—and this included members of the PA. Indeed in Santa Cruz, as elsewhere, “progressive” policy positions were particularly detrimental, especially for tenants. This includes policies that the real estate industry often opposed—like mandatory large-lot single family home (SFH) zoning, which prevents the building of more economical multi-family units. It also included policies that real estate very much supported—like opposition to rent control and eviction protections by many neighborhood groups. These positions landed atop decades of de jure segregation and predatory inclusion in the housing sector—from restrictive covenants and redlining to steering and abusive lending practices—endorsed at the state and federal level but carried out locally. 4 Thus PA policies both disadvantaged tenants and exacerbated race-based divisions and exclusion.
This speaks to the fact that cities and counties do have some latitude to fill in gaps produced by state and federal retrenchment and the predation of real estate finance, and to support low-income tenants via local and regional scale measures. On the funding side, and via local taxes, fees, and inclusionary set-asides, this includes measures to support housing trust funds and non-profit, decommodified housing production. On the regulatory side, and via local zoning, this includes enabling the preservation and production of ample multifamily housing in the first place, as well as rent and eviction regulation to ensure the protection of tenants once housing is built (to the degree local rent regulations are not preempted by state or federal law). For there to be any teeth to local interventions, however, all these types of policy—referred to by activists and planners as the “3Ps” of production, preservation, and protection—are needed, ideally with protection and preservation in place while long-terms processes of production play out. 5
At the time of the PA, a few neighboring jurisdictions with strong tenant movements like Berkeley and East Palo Alto managed to pursue a multipronged approach that included both new funding mechanisms and rent regulation. But in leftmost Santa Cruz—as in the vast majority of California—they did not. The PA did pass a model Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) ordinance in 1981, mandating 15 percent of new units be affordable to those making 80 percent AMI or below, and laying the foundation for the city’s housing trust fund. However, given the small amount of building overall, due in large part to the SFH downzoning, IZ was—and is—a low impact policy. Local tenant organizers (the “Ys”) fought to get rent control on the ballot three times in the 1980s, which could have had far greater impact. Yet each time, their neighborhood allies (the “Xs”) staunchly opposed, aligning with their erstwhile adversaries in business and real estate to defeat each measure.
Learning from the Leftmost City
As an urban sociologist who moved from New York City to Santa Cruz just as Leftmost City was published in 2009 and at a time when still escalating housing costs made Santa Cruz among the least affordable cities in the world, I became fascinated with how it was possible such a progressive place could face such an intractable affordability crisis. 6 I found it striking that this was much like other overwhelmingly Democratic cities nationally, including New York City, where affordability crises continued to mount despite otherwise “blue” bona fides. In 2016, I began, together with sociology colleague Steve McKay and our students and community partners, to study this question in Santa Cruz historically and in the present day. 7 Events on the ground gave us much to analyze, as the grassroots tenant effort to pass rent control reemerged for the first time in thirty years. Once again, after a coalition of student and non-student renters labored for months to gather the signatures necessary to get rent control on the ballot—known as “Measure M”—otherwise progressive local homeowners, neighborhood organizations, and “mom and pop” landlords aligned in opposition. This time, however, they were joined by some of the most powerful real estate and development interests in California and the United States, who together spent over $1 million to block the effort in this small city. This was comparable to what similar coalitions spent to block rent control in cities across California, as well as to prevent passage of Proposition 10, which sought to overturn Costa Hawkins, a powerful pro-landlord law that limited rent regulation statewide. Ultimately Prop 10, Measure M, and most rent regulation efforts failed to pass, leaving behind a contentious political landscape for this leftmost city, and leftmost state, that continues to this day.
A number of lessons emerge from this experience. The first is how easily housing and land-use policy can split and subvert progressive alliances. This is due most immediately to the material reality that the tenant wing of the alliance can quite simply be disappeared by escalating rents. Twenty years following where Leftmost City left off, the 60 percent of Santa Cruzans who are renters face an untenable situation—similar to tenants nationally, and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. With 70 percent of them rent-burdened, rents increasing 15 percent annually, and 50 percent forced to move in a five-year period, few are able to stay in town, let alone join and build local political confederations. 8 Thus, we see how “progressive” movements that do not center on housing affordability can subvert their own ideals, as priced-out students and workers commute hours on traffic-choked, carbon-spewing roads; communities become more segregated and unequal; and the creators of vaunted “quality of life”—iconic surfers, beloved teachers, local families, and dedicated activists—are displaced, fraying culture, community, and coalitions themselves.
But I would point to a second lesson in this history: the demise of these alliances is as much a consequence of progressives who benefit from rising housing costs as those displaced by them. For those fortunate to own homes without major debt and/or to invest in this sector, what some call the housing crisis has actually been a boon, a source of unprecedented increase in property values and asset-based wealth. Political economists Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper, and Martijn Konings refer to this ascendant group as the asset class. 9 Since the neoliberalization of the 1970s, with its increasing precarity, austerity, wage erosion, and rent increases, housing assets have become a main source of capital accumulation—not just a life-raft to survive in these stormy seas, but a yacht to rise above them. The dual value of the home as use and exchange value—a source of cultural, emotional, and physical well-being and shelter, on the one hand, and a means of building and passing down wealth, on the other—has never been more rewarding, nor more tilted in the direction of exchange. Renting, or holding heavy mortgage debt, on the contrary, has never been more perilous. It is thus impossible to explain growing race and class inequality in Santa Cruz or across the United States without taking housing tenure and asset-based wealth into consideration, including on the left of the political spectrum.
The Progressive Disjuncture
Recognizing the growing power of the asset class, and their strategic alliances with the real estate state, helps us understand how and why housing and land-use policy has not just fractured progressive alliances, but become a virtual third rail for progressivism overall. In a time of growing precarity, large swaths of the left-leaning asset class, who might be progressive on every other major social, environmental, and economic issue, domestic and international, find it hard to support, and will often oppose, policies that they perceive to threaten the value of their homes—including its emotional, cultural, and physical use value and its exchange value as an asset. This is true even when such opposition undermines their progressive ideals and alliances by contributing to greater inequality and exclusion. 10
In some ways, this is not new. As Stein notes, in both its historical Progressive Era roots and its contemporary manifestations, U.S. urban progressivism has evinced a contradictory tendency toward promoting the interests of capital and property while ostensibly protecting labor and tenants, thus producing policies that undermine its central claims.
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In each era, so-called progressive leaders in the U.S.—whether elite social reformers or contemporary political officials—have abandoned the housing needs of the poor and working class (e.g., for public housing and rent control) in seeking to appease capital. This is unlike municipalist movements in more socialist economies in Europe and Latin America, in which real estate interests are less dominant and social housing less controversial. 12
Yet cities like Santa Cruz teach us that it is not just progressive leaders for whom housing policy poses a dilemma. Grassroots, middle-class progressives who own homes advance their own “central aims” by promoting the interests of real estate capital. It makes sense when these groups advocate lower impact, market-oriented policies like IZ, expanding vouchers, or increasing low income tax credits while avoiding or outright opposing higher impact, socialist policies like rent control, social housing, and the decommodification of land and housing. We can also understand how this contingent might downplay or ignore housing policy writ large—as we have seen among most Democrats for decades.
I refer to this avoidance and opposition as the progressive disjuncture on land use and housing, that is, the lack of support within progressive movements for policy that is explicitly pro-tenant and supports the decommodification and regulation of land and housing. This disjuncture is particularly acute among a significant segment of the middle class who have enjoyed and come to depend upon rising asset values due to property tax breaks, deregulated rental markets, and the real estate–oriented institutional environment built up over the past half century. The inequitable rewards of homeownership versus renting have long fractured local civic engagement in the United States along lines of race, class, and tenure. 13 Now, with stagnant wages and a declining middle class, the growing political influence of real estate, and the multigenerational erasure of social housing alternatives, the defense of property values and homeowner advantages plays a major role in redefining “progressivism” itself.
I center this disjuncture to highlight a political dilemma we face in addressing the housing crisis, nationally and locally. As with the thorniest of social issues, broad-based coalitions are vital if we are to take on the multidimensionality of the affordable housing crisis. Yet how can coalitions form in the midst of this disjuncture, in which fundamental understandings of progressivism are at odds? We feel this most acutely at the local scale, when landlords and homeowners band together against their tenants’ and neighbors’ efforts to stay in their homes—and are subsidized by the National Association of Realtors for their troubles. But this plays out at multiple scales, as local homeowners and landlords support state and federal policymakers—including most Democrats—who push for financialization versus socialization of the housing sector writ large.
Overcoming Coalitional Dilemmas and Bringing Housing Back In
Now is an exciting and urgent time to transcend the progressive disjuncture and bring high-impact housing interventions—from rent control, to social housing, to community land trusts—back into the heart of the progressive movement. There is hope in a new Democratic administration in Washington, D.C., which also needs to take meaningful steps to fend off revanchist Republicans. And, as the pandemic accelerates displacement and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognizes eviction as a national health risk, as housing stock is increasingly abandoned or foreclosed while homelessness skyrockets, intersecting crises can focus our energies in historic and powerful ways. Harnessing these energies will require both federal and state interventions and a broad, trans-local coalitional approach.
Federal and State Scale Interventions
To overcome local opposition and disjuncture on the housing issue and effectively support the “3 Ps,” we need to jump scale. Clearly cities and regions cannot solve the housing crisis, just as they alone cannot solve climate change, despite progressive city boosterism to the contrary. 14 Nor can we imagine that the private sector can fix cash-strapped cities’ affordability problems for them. We know from those in real estate themselves that “it will never be profitable to build affordable housing”—and we should stop imagining it will or should be. 15 Rather, now is the time for the federal and state governments to become major players in housing policy once again.
This means a bold new approach to social housing in the United States. One of the major issues with public housing has long been the lack of sufficient funds for maintenance, with bipartisan legislators gutting housing funds for decades, including significant cuts under the former real estate–aligned president. 16 While short-term measures are needed to prevent a wave of displacements, the federal government can simultaneously move to restore funding for permanent housing and to fund long-overdue repairs of existing public housing stock so that more is not lost, as called for in the Green New Deal for Housing. In addition, Congress can repeal the Clinton-era addition to the 1937 Housing Act, the Faircloth Amendment, which prohibits any net increase in public housing units. In so doing, they will set the stage for expansion of our direly needed public housing stock for the first time since the 1970s. 17
Building on this is the visionary Homes Guarantee, which calls for twelve million new homes built within a decade. 18 This will mean shifting from the U.S. approach of “public housing,” which serves the extremely low income population and is often geographically and socially marginalized, to European-style “social housing,” which serves a mix of classes; is integrally tied to services, cultural amenities, and transit; and balances affordability with green design and maintenance. In the process, we would need to redress the top-down and segregationist practices of past federal housing programs, from urban renewal to redlining, as well as cultural bias against subsidized and collective housing. Such reinvestment would change the political playing field dramatically. Much of the problem with the asset class/real estate state alliance is that they have so much control over the housing sector in the first place. Social housing constitutes less than 1 percent of all U.S. rental housing stock, among the lowest of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations. 19 Massive reinvestment could shift this balance—with some activists aiming for 10-15 percent within a decade—and in the process transform progressive politics.
An additional way to shift the political influence of real estate, and with it the calculus of the asset class, is by decommodifying the housing sector more broadly. This entails taking land and housing off the speculative market and enabling organized tenants and communities to collectively own and control their homes through models such as community land trusts (CLTs) and limited equity coops (LECs). 20 The major challenge here, however, is in acquisition and access to capital. New local policies such as “tenant or community opportunity to purchase acts” (TOPAs and COPAs) provide right of first refusal to community groups and tenants in buildings that go on the market. Yet CLTs face exorbitant costs and 5-6 percent interest rates from non-profit lenders— while also competing with corporate investors who are currently buying up tens of thousands of units with the aim of evicting tenants and raising rents when the market improves. 21 A new proposal by the Urban Democracy Lab at New York University to create a federal-scale, Treasury-backed Social Housing Development Authority would acquire distressed properties and turn them over to the social housing sector, lending at 1-2 percent and providing technical assistance—thus leveling the playing field. 22
On the rent regulation front, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez proposed the ambitious Right to Prosper Act, which would go further than any legislation since World War II in advancing tenant protections at the federal scale and be stronger than recent state-wide rent caps passed in California and Oregon. 23 The bill would establish national rent control, limiting annual rent increases to 3 percent of the average rent or the percentage increase of the Consumer Price Index, whichever is larger, for landlords with five or more units; strengthen anti-eviction protections; offer a right to counsel in tenant eviction proceedings; and bar landlords from discriminating against potential tenants based on the use of housing vouchers, federal assistance, or any lawful source of income.
Finally, while the above may be controversial among centrist Democrats and economists, less so would be a reduction in the federal mortgage interest deduction. This tax break constitutes some two-thirds of all federal housing expenditures, with most benefits going to those making more than $200,000 annually, thus exacerbating divides between homeowners and tenants. (A similar reduction or repeal of California’s Proposition 13 would go a long way toward balancing power between tenants and homeowners in the state.)
Trans-Local, Trans-Issue Coalitions
All of these federal programs could be advanced by the Biden administration, but will no doubt meet opposition across the political spectrum—including on the left due to the progressive disjuncture I have outlined. Hence the importance of broad-based, multipronged coalitions taking on the 3 Ps. These include trans-local alliances—such as Tenants and Workers in D.C. and Virginia, New York’s Upstate/Downstate Housing Alliance (now Housing Justice for All), and the California-wide Tenants Together. It includes coalitions across issues, such as those linking the universal right to housing and health care to the Movement for Black Lives, or those building solidarity between tenant unions, immigrant rights, community labor alliances, and environmentalists. 24 And in crucial instances, such coalitions will also bridge the asset class divide, with progressive homeowners and landlords aligning with tenants and the precariously housed.
Ultimately, solidarity within large-scale, multi-issue formations, as well as funding and regulation from new state and federal programs, can buttress efforts in deeply divided city-regions, from Santa Cruz to New York City. Meanwhile, locals will be ready with ideas of their own. As we have seen in the three years since the demise of rent control in Santa Cruz—despite and because of wildfires, evacuation, and pandemic—housing struggles remain at the vanguard of organizing. A new community land trust movement has formed, forging connections of the tenant rights movement (the old “Ys”) with old rent control opponents (the old “Xs”), many of whom are in a position to help advise on land acquisition, donation, and property management. Neighborhood-based organizers are drafting empty home tax policies that may be more impactful than IZ in extracting funds for our local housing trust fund. And rent-burdened UCSC graduate student employees, represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW), launched a wildcat strike to demand a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) from their employer. The COLA strike spread across University of California campuses, garnered national attention, led to a housing stipend and extra year of guaranteed funding from the UCSC administration, and may well help center COLA in upcoming bargaining and organizing across the University of California.
In highlighting the rise of a progressive disjuncture on land use and housing, and the political dilemma it poses, I have also raised the possibility that new, creatively minded coalitions can work to repair or even transcend this disjuncture. This might entail forming alliances across localities, issues, and scales. It might include engagement with the new Biden administration and the left-wing of the Democratic Party, where a historic emphasis on housing justice over asset and real estate value is emerging. As with other urgent issues of our time, the affordability crisis is multidimensional. We need powerful interventions—and dynamic, engaged distinct coalitions—centering tenant protections; the preservation of housing, land, and community space; and the production of new, green social housing on a massive scale. In the process, the United States may begin to envision a more unified “progressivism,” with the housing question at its core.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
