Rampant Magazine

You are here: Home

Chicago Has Plenty of Room for Refugees

by

Outgoing mayor Lori Lightfoot made headlines Sunday when she penned an open letter to Texas governor Greg Abbott, asking him to stop sending refugees on buses to Chicago. In the letter, Lightfoot appeals to Abbot to “stop this inhumane and dangerous action.” She goes on to say that “we simply have no more shelters, spaces, or resources to accommodate an increase of individuals at this level.”

Of course, Abbott simply doesn’t care about the well-being of the human beings he’s been sending to Chicago. As alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez correctly points out, “This is a political fight, and [Abbott] is using migrants, these refugees, as pawns, and it shouldn’t be like that.” 

Echoing Trump, Abbott’s racist argument is that refugees and immigrants from Latin America are a scourge and that they should be forcibly prevented from entering the United States. He is therefore treating thousands of people—including, as Lightfoot points out, pregnant women and sick children—as if they were freight, shipping them to so-called sanctuary cities like Chicago as a political stunt. Abbott’s wager is that his stunt will anger Democratic officials in those cities and confirm his view that immigration from Latin America is a bad thing that ought to be stopped. 

By responding as she has, Lightfoot has played right into Abbott’s hands. 

There is plenty of physical space, plenty of housing stock, and plenty of material resources to meet all of the needs of those seeking refuge.

To her claim that sending refugees to Chicago is “inhumane and dangerous,” Abbott can respond “yes, that’s right—and that’s why we need to stop people from crossing the border in the first place.” To her complaint that “we simply have no more shelters, spaces, or resources to accommodate an increase of individuals at this level,” he can reply in the exact same fashion and try to say that the state of Texas also lacks the shelter spaces and resources. 

No matter whether it’s Abbott or Lightfoot, this appeal to scarcity is illegitimate. There is plenty of physical space, plenty of housing stock, and plenty of material resources to meet all of the needs of those seeking refuge. Lest we forget: the United States is the richest country in the history of the world, and Chicago, in particular, is the richest city in the fifth-richest state in that country. 

There remains a large glut of empty properties on the market.

In the case of housing stock, there is more than enough to go around. As is typical under capitalism, there remains a large glut of empty properties on the market. The owners of those properties, who themselves already have a place to live, find it more profitable to wait and speculate than to permit homes to be used by those who need one. On top of this, office vacancy rates in the loop hit all-time highs in January. Lightfoot is simply wrong: there’s more than enough space to house people in need of shelter. 

There are news reports circulating that refugees are being kept in police stations in miserable conditions. According to the Sun-Times, people are being forced to sleep on cold floors and are being fed food “rations,” which, in at least some cases, expired in 2020. 

An enormous amount of food goes to waste in big cities like Chicago every single day.

That is outrageous. Why is the city warehousing refugees in police stations, as if they were criminals? Why aren’t more resources being dedicated to ensuring that all people—refugees as well as longtime Chicagoans—have wholesome, fresh, nutritious food to eat? As with housing stock, there is never too little to go around—physical scarcity is a non-issue. Indeed, an enormous amount of food goes to waste in big cities like Chicago every single day. (To this we could add that US capitalism regards it as “normal” to destroy millions of pounds of fresh food whenever prices drop low enough to threaten corporate profits.) 

Of course, Lightfoot has a point that it’s unfair to expect the municipal government of Chicago all by itself to be on the hook for solving what is, in fact, a national or even international problem. She’d be correct to say that the federal government should be doing a lot more to make sure refugees are cared for and have safe, secure housing. Here it would’ve been good to directly criticize the Biden Administration, which has been taking an increasingly right-wing, Trump-esque stance on immigration. 

But the fact remains that Chicago is nowhere near physical carrying capacity. There’s plenty of room here—indeed, let’s not forget that this is a city where “population loss” is regularly cited as a cause for concern! We could use more people. And there’s more than enough in terms of material resources. To say that it’s better to keep housing empty than permit it to be used by those who lack shelter is to say that profits for speculators are more valuable than human lives. That is, in effect, what Lightfoot implies when she appeals to scarcity and pleads with Abbott to stop busing refugees to Chicago. 

Will Musk Make Twitter More Free?

by

It’s absurd that oligarchs can simply purchase—as one might buy a T-shirt—entire social media platforms and do with them whatever they want. I have no love for the other ruling class owners who controlled Twitter before Musk. But it’s a big problem that things like social media platforms, which ought to be democratically controlled as public utilities, are even up for sale to the highest bidder in the first place.

The same is true of newspapers and other large media institutions—and let’s not forget that Jeff Bezos recently purchased The Washington Post. It’s a deep problem for democracy that key parts of the public square are the private possessions of the rich.  

But if you ask some of the milquetoast liberals at The New York Times, the main problem here seems to be that Musk might loosen the regime of corporate censorship at Twitter. (Though I may prove mistaken, I doubt he will actually do this.)

I’ll come back to the point about corporate censorship in a moment. For now, let’s sit with the fact that the bulk of liberal commentary about Musk’s takeover doesn’t object in any way to corporate domination of social media platforms, streaming services, and other digital infrastructure.

In fact, this is taken for granted. So, the consensus view seems to be that it’s fine for social media to be ruled by corporations so long as the companies in question brand themselves in the appropriate way and virtue signal regularly. The politics of media thus gets reduced to a conflict over how the ruling class owners of certain companies comport themselves in public and whether they tend to publicly agree or disagree with people like Trump. 

Is it a good thing for democratically unaccountable capitalist firms to control so much of our culture and social life in the first place?

But this only makes sense if you view politics as having nothing whatsoever to do with challenging the entrenched power and privilege of corporations and the rich. It only makes sense if you believe corporations who occasionally make empty symbolic gestures actually care about ending structural oppressions like racism and sexism. In effect, it only makes sense if you think the central question is who our particular corporate overlords ought to be, rather than the more important question of whether it’s a good thing for democratically unaccountable capitalist firms to control so much of our culture and social life in the first place. 

This brings me to the question of censorship. To call for, say, Twitter or Facebook to heavily moderate speech is to imply that profit-driven corporations should generally have the authority to decide what should be censored and what shouldn’t be. But this gives them a kind of power they don’t deserve, which we know they will routinely abuse in pursuit of their own private interests. In a healthy society, public speech, especially calls to harm people and abuse campaigns, would meet with some form of accountability. But it simply shouldn’t be up to billionaires like Musk or Zuckerberg to make calls about what kind of speech is acceptable and what isn’t. This is the kind of thing we must settle democratically. 

Now, it’s true that there are legions of far-right activists—including outright fascists, Nazis, and Klan members—who want to use platforms like Twitter to recruit, to propagate racism and misinformation, incite violence, and so on. 

But the grave problem of how to stop the growth of the far right—here in the U.S. as well as abroad—isn’t going to be solved by appealing to capitalists to more heavily police and control what we can say on the internet. First of all, we know those same capitalists use this power to police oppressed groups and censor radical left activists. Second, the capitalist class (generally speaking) has neither the desire nor the ability to address the social problems that create an opening for the far-right in the first place, like escalating inequality, alienation, economic powerlessness, poverty and insecurity. Finally, corporations are invested in the status quo and are deeply skeptical toward any measure that proposes to seriously shift wealth and power away from them toward oppressed groups. So, it’s a grave mistake to see them as reliable, sincere allies in the struggle to smash oppressive systems like white supremacy, heterosexism, and misogyny. (To see what I mean, just think about how Amazon and Starbucks are currently responding to efforts by workers to organize themselves into unions. Or consider whether J.P. Morgan Chase—which has historic ties to profits derived from chattel slavery—has any interest in relinquishing its  stolen wealth and returning it to the descendents of those who were enslaved.) 

Where does this leave us? Perhaps instead of worrying about whether trolls like Elon Musk will less intensely police what’s said on Twitter, we should recall what happened in the Spring and Summer of 2020. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, defied politicians and economic elites, and demanded radical changes to this society. They loudly and unapologetically criticized the deep connections between white supremacy and U.S. capitalism. The reverberations of this movement are still being felt today. This is how we will ultimately defeat social pathologies like racism, xenophobia, and sexism.

To think there’s a corporate solution to these problems involving censorship is to miss the point entirely.

Chicago’s Houselessness Is Entirely Avoidable

by

The warmth of summer has left Chicago—and temperatures are steadily dropping as winter intensifies. In a matter of days, the weather will be freezing. 

That is a matter of life and death for the tens of thousands of people currently experiencing houslessness in the city.  

According to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, there were 58,273 unhoused Chicagoans in 2019, and the economic turbulence caused by the ongoing pandemic has probably caused that number to rise. A significant percentage of those without homes are minors. This year, for example, the Chicago Public School system reported serving 10,836 homeless students. And the majority of Chicagoans without housing are people of color; CCH reports that roughly 60 percent of those affected are Black, and 25 percent are Latinx. 

Of course, the majority of news articles about housing in Chicago have nothing to do with these perilous conditions or their effect on scores of people in the city. Indeed, a cursory glance at headlines would make you think things are—at least from the point of view of investors, sellers, and landlords—looking better every day. The percentage of commercial spaces in the Loop that sit vacant is recovering after hitting record lows in 2020, residential rents are back to pre-pandemic levels and trending upward, and home values increased by about 9 percent over the course of last year. 

So, viewed as an object of speculation, “housing” is heating up in late 2021, even as dangerously frigid winter weather fast approaches. 

From the point of view of human need, however, the housing situation in Chicago is dire: tens of thousands of human beings are currently forced to go without stable housing in conditions that will soon become deadly.

There are more homes and apartments currently empty than there are people who need a place to live.

This isn’t an accident or simply the result of bad public policy, though there’s plenty of that to go around. Nor is the primary problem, at its root, that there are too few shelters or resources for nonprofit organizations that provide services for the unhoused. There are more homes and apartments currently empty than there are people who need a place to live. 

So what is the problem? The commodification of housing. 

Instead of using all existing housing stock to meet housing needs, our current system would rather use the coercive power of the state to forcibly remove people from otherwise vacant dwellings or bar them from entering them in the first place. 

Why? Because this is essential for housing to be a profitable investment. If speculators didn’t have the right to sit on vacant properties in the hopes of selling at a higher price in the future, then they’d often have to settle for less profit. 

The key problem, then, is the fact that our society often treats a place to live as the mere plaything of speculators. 

And it’s a rather lucrative plaything. Indeed, this is true not just in Chicago but all over the world. As Samuel Stein points out in Capital City, global real estate, which now makes up 60 percent of the world’s assets, is valued somewhere on the order of $250 trillion—more than thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. 

The reasons why real estate has become such a popular place for ruling-class investors to park their capital are complex, but suffice it to say that this speculative regime isn’t about efficiently allocating dwellings to those who need them. That’s clear once we remember that this very regime regularly uses state power to punish and exclude those who lack housing but need it—all for the sake of profit. 

Who benefits from this regime? The official story is that everyone benefits, that the rising tide of property values lifts all boats. Those who already own real estate can and should buy more, and those who don’t should save and aspire to acquire property of their own. In short: the justification is that there is a ton of money to be made in real estate right now, and everyone has access to the spoils so long as they gather enough money to buy into the game. 

This is a strange justification of a housing policy. It makes no reference whatsoever to the importance for human beings of having stable, safe, quality housing, and it makes no claims at all about how many people will be forced to go without any kind of housing. In short, it says nothing per se about houses or dwellings—it only tells us that we’re locked inside a casino where some people can make money if they have money to play the right game. That game just happens to involve acquiring housing, but it might just as well involve acquiring futures in natural gas.

There’s no technical reason why we couldn’t have luxurious and spacious public housing for everyone.

A better approach would be to first ask what housing needs human beings have, and then determine which housing arrangements best meet those needs. Let’s think things through in this way and see where this line of inquiry leads us. 

Chicago is one of the wealthiest cities in one of the wealthiest states in the wealthiest country in the world. Scarcity of material resources is not an issue. So, if we begin from the fact that everyone needs a stable, safe, warm place to live, and we add that Chicago possesses more than adequate resources to ensure that this is so, then we seem already forced to conclude that there’s no good reason to deny anyone housing. 

But someone might say that commodified housing, though not perfect, is better than any alternative system. Though it produces problems of affordability and houselessness, these problems are outweighed by higher quality housing (in greater supply) than would be available if speculators were prevented from profiting from building and selling and renting real estate.

I find this unpersuasive. 

In many large European cities, a significant portion of the housing stock is already publicly owned and de-commodified. And the housing in question is not dingy or dirty—these units are highly coveted. In Vienna, for instance, about a quarter of the city’s housing stock is publicly owned, and another quarter is heavily subsidized. In Berlin, before a wave of neoliberal privatizations sold off huge quantities of housing to speculators in the 2000s, a substantial portion of the city’s apartment buildings were public property. Disillusionment with this change is likely part of what drove the people of Berlin to recently vote in favor of a referendum that proposes to expropriate large, corporate landlords (who own several thousand units) and begin to bring housing back under public control. 

It stands to reason that a country like the United States, which has even more resources at its disposal than Austria or Germany, could (if it wanted to), do an even better job of de-commodifying housing and ensuring high-quality and adequate supply. Indeed, there’s no technical reason why we couldn’t have luxurious, spacious, architecturally astounding public housing for everyone.

The only real obstacle is political. This alternative way forward poses an existential threat to those profiting from the existing order: it would mean closing the real estate casino and running the housing system in a different, more democratic way. So, when advocating for a rational housing system we should expect nothing but hostility from real estate speculators and the legions of politicians they’ve purchased. 

The example of Berlin is useful for us here in Chicago. Rather than trying to get establishment politicians to “see the light,” housing activists built up organized networks of resistance among those most directly harmed by the status quo. Eventually, legitimate anger at the elevation of profit over people was channeled into decisive political action that landlords couldn’t stop, even though they very much wanted to stop it.