Is Fair Housing Flying the Co-op?
The curiosity of a socialist owning real estate inspires much teasing from my friends. But why shouldn’t I own my own home? As our comrade, Barbara Garson has proven in her book, "Money Makes the World Go Around”
We’re a pretty chill board. We don’t have any stringent financial requirements. We’ve approved buyers who put down as low as five percent (when just about every other building in the neighborhood requires a 20 percent down payment), figuring that even if you default on your loan, we’ll make our money back one way or the other. We also assume pets innocent before being proven guilty of loudness or aggression, and therefore don’t have a blanket “no pets” policy. And I, for one, don’t care who your sleep with as long as you are sleeping in your apartment with him or her, and not illegally subletting your place.
Not all boards are as good as this one. The NY Times real estate section is chock full of horror stories of boards using tenant applications as political footballs in struggles over power and wealth, as well as less-well documented instances of purchase applications being rejected for reasons of racism or heterosexism. With more than 332,000 households in New York belonging to co-ops, the City Council is taking action to ensure that hard-fought protections against housing discrimination are not gutted by our “stakeholder society,” by requiring boards to provide prompt and specific justifications for rejecting purchase applications. Our building’s management company – a necessary evil – is, like most management companies, organizing to defeat the bill and seeking to enlist the help of our co-op board members. The Real Estate Board of New York’s lobbying letter concludes, in relevant part:
Int. No. 119 of 2006 will drastically restrict the rights of co-op board members, shareholders and property managers. It will also significantly delay transactions which will hurt the coop market as a whole. More important, it will substantially increase litigation in the marketplace, and make it difficult for coops to recruit qualified shareholders to volunteer their time to be a part of a co-op board.
Any discrimination by board members is expressly forbidden in City, State and Federal law. Currently, under the City Human Rights Law, the New York State Civil Rights Law, and the Federal Fair Housing Act, cooperative boards are prohibited from discriminating against a potential buyer on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, military status, sexual orientation, age pregnancy, or disability. There are remedies within each of these statues for a party who believes he has been discriminated against. The legislation does not add to these protections that are already in place.
In response, I have two points. Firstly, individual members of co-op boards are, for the most part, shielded from personal liability for board decisions – which is a fact that our management companies frequently stress while they, for instance, encourage us to evict our rent controlled tenants. More than fear of litigation, fear of the management companies with which we enter into contract is a more likely culprit for intimidating shareholders from serving on co-op boards. Secondly, while there are plenty of anti-discrimination laws on the books, it is nearly impossible to prosecute such cases if co-op boards need not disclose the reasons for rejecting an applicant. Boards who reject applicants for legitimate reasons (for instance, poor finances, dangerous pets or speculative investments) need not fear the extra scrutiny and paperwork. Boards who run their buildings like the Jim Crow South deserve the exposure and financial liability that this bill threatens. The extra work that it will require on my board’s part will be well worth it to ensure that New York City remains a free and integrated society.
Goodbye, Socialist Party
Today I resigned from the Socialist Party after eleven years of membership. This decision has been a long time coming. Indeed, it was made some months ago but I had been waiting to sever my remaining fiduciary responsibilities to the party to announce it. I have given the party tremendous amounts of time and energy as an officer, an editor, a speaker, a fundraiser and a campaign manager and it was a formative learning experience for me. Truthfully, I should moved on a long time ago – back when the crippling faction fights first arose about five years ago – but I was biding my time, hoping that all that negative energy would expend itself. I have come to the sorry conclusion that such fruitless bickering will never go away.
I leave a Socialist Party that is irrationally bureaucratic, where misleaders place a premium on formal charges of sedition, investigation committees and e-mails of denunciation over simple and direct phone calls and conversations. I leave a Socialist Party that makes a fetish of running token electoral campaigns, which blinds it to genuine opportunities for a break with the two-party system, like the Nader and Sanders campaigns. I leave a Socialist Party full of snotty little boys who are blind or indifferent to their white, male privilege. And most galling of all, I leave a Socialist Party whose leadership chooses to vomit the kind of anti-union rhetoric one would expect from management consultants and who would rather play at being a union with the IWW than organize strong, militant and democratic unions where the majority of workers are.
My decision to resign will likely disappoint some of the comrades who hope to “take it back.” I say to them and the others, “take it, it’s yours” (apologies to Paul Westerberg). The Socialist Party had a proud history in the early 20th century, but it should have been left in the history books. I dare say that most of the new members “recruited” to the party drifted in on their own because of an attraction to the writings and actions of Eugene Debs, even though the past three quarters of a century have badly dated Debs’ beautiful but simple rhetoric. Why, even now, in the midst of the current split, one of our earnest young National Committee members is pointing to an article from 1911 by Debs to prove that he has the “correct” position on electoral activity. Never mind the fact that Debs lived until 1926 – an era that is politically closer to our own – and that by that time he was advocating building a mass labor party and had endorsed the Trade Union Education League’s policy of boring from within the conservative AFL craft unions (both are policies much closer to what I advocate in this article). The simple fact is that Eugene Debs, and the Socialist Party of America, was from another era and needs to be put in the proper historical context, predating the New Deal, World War II, civil rights struggle, Black Power, feminist movement, environmental movement and globalization among other changes.
When Eugene Debs wrote in 1903 that “the class struggle is colorless,” it was a beautiful rhetorical challenge to the racists in the movement, but 104 years later, to continue, as he did, to say, “we have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races” is to be blind to the special persecution faced by black Americans and all people of color in the United States and avoids the work we must do to challenge white skin privilege. Yet, too many members of the Socialist Party still agree with Debs’ color-blind politics. Indeed, they were attracted to the party because of it. This historicism also results in a party that is cool to reproductive rights and gender politics and downright hostile to feminist process and gender-balanced committees. It’s a vicious cycle, discouraging women to join and be active, resulting in even more male-centric politics and a greater discouragement to women. Probably 90% of the party is male at this point, which is regrettable (and not only because the possibility of a slutty convention hook-up is sometimes the only thing that makes those meetings tolerable).
The example of the Socialist Party garnering six percent of the vote for President, and electing Congressmen, mayors and legislators across the country is clearly an inspiration for many of the Party’s newer members, but the Socialist Party cannot win elections in 2007 or anytime soon. The laws and finances have changed, making running such campaigns impossible in most areas. Voters have become much more loyal to the two-party system, and non-voters are much more likely to be right-wing as left in this day in age. Please do not mistake this as a call to endorse the Democrats or to avoid politicking openly as Socialists. As I have previously written, being “the Socialist Party” makes running “Socialist” candidates its raison d’etre, and results in unnecessary sectarianism and an aversion to coalition work. It is, indeed, essential to seek out independent alternatives to the two-party system, and there is often a real value to putting the “S” word on the ballot, but not at the expense of missing opportunities like the Green Party movement, Nader candidacies and the opportunities for boring from within the Working Families party. Only a socialist organization that is emphatically not a party can be open to all possibilities.
Finally, considering my life’s work is in the labor movement, it is disappointing how few comrades I can truly count on in the Socialist Party. As an organizer, I deal with vicious anti-union campaigns from the Boss and too many workers who would rather race each other to the bottom for loss of pay and benefits than unite to win more for all. Every day I am reminded of the dire need for a sane, organized left to carry out meaningful educational work on how the Bosses rob us and the power of coming together, like the old IWW and SPA used to do. Instead, we have a SPUSA and IWW that focus on badly out-dated AFL and “pie card” bashing. The more challenging, but more valuable work, would be for comrades to get their hands dirty as organizers and activists in the large trade unions in the AFL-CIO and Change to Win (regardless of their militancy or whether they endorse Democrats or not), organize, win and change the policy. Sadly, the labor movement is so small these days that a few dozen dedicated comrades could have a real impact on on the unions.
I hold out no hope for the Socialist Party because young men with infantile “leftist” politics will forever be streaming into membership in larger numbers than the tiny organization can absorb and educate. Suffering from delusions of grandeur of being in “THE” Socialist Party, their ridiculous posturing and aggressive factionalism seems somehow noble to them, but sadly, by the time they burn themselves out enough to stop for a moment and learn, they are replaced by the next wave of political infants. Granted, one could count me in this company. If you were to give me a flux capacitor and send me back to 1996 to meet 17-year-old Shaun Richman, I’d want to punch that kid in the fucking face. C’est la vie.
I choose to start over with an organization that is consciously smaller. I intend to use the American Socialist Foundation, a small non-profit corporation I set up, to hold conversations with comrades I respect and trust about what the hell is the matter with the left and what hope there can possibly be for a small socialist membership organization to do meaningful work. There is, perhaps, enough seed money to start a magazine or hold a conference. If there is enough consensus, perhaps then a new membership organization will result. “American Socialist Federation” has a certain ring to it. As of this writing, I am inclined to favor a soft-cadre structure centered around local clubs, with a weak national committee and a central political document that is ratified every few years in the interest of maintaining consensus and unity, as a model worth exploring. However, political principles are more important than structure, and any organization that I am apart of must speak to issues of race and gender within a class framework, must strive to build a mass party of the people and must be an active part of the mainstream labor movement. These are, after all, the areas in which I have been most disappointed, programatically, in the Socialist Party USA.
Year Three
It is with no small amount of pride that I note today’s second anniversary of this Blarg. When I started writing, I kept it a secret because I was unsure how long I would keep at it, for there are few things sadder than a failed blogger. To a certain extent, I still keep this blarg a secret. I don’t publicize it much. I’ve even stopped pressuring my friends to read it. Perhaps my only readers are the eager salesmen of “herbal Viagra” who post so many comments, and misguided fans of Natalie Portman’s butt.
I recently overhauled this website, with completely new software that requires registration in order to post comments. I used to get an occasional comment from a friend or a colleague or a complete stranger, in the midst of the tens of thousands of spam messages that ultimately crashed the site and necessitated the switch. I don’t know if it’s an aversion to registration that’s keeping people from posting comments, but I’d sure like to hear from you, dear readers. All eight of you.
The Two Barbaras
What kind of readers find Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent books remotely edifying? How far up their own asses are these people? I have to admit that I’ve yet to read the book in which she passes for working poor, although I did read her earlier piece in Harper’s magazine that served as a teaser. The fact that some of the lowest-paid service workers have to live in motels because they can’t afford a full month’s rent on an apartment was the only revelation for me (in New York, even our motels are too expensive, so people cram dozens of bodies in small apartments). Do you want to know how the poor live? Talk to your janitor, waitress or telemarketer. The paucity of actual interviews in Ehrenreich’s books saps the story of emotional resonance and dulls her political points.
This tendency is exacerbated in “Bait and Switch,” in which our supposed heroine poses as a white collar corporate job seeker. That corporate downsizing can cause the lives of the white-collar unemployed to spiral right out of the middle class and out of control is, indeed, a story worth telling. But Barbara Ehrenreich doesn’t tell it here. Instead, by going undercover as a PR executive on the job market seeking to enter the corporate world she was never a part of, Ehrenreich gives us 237 pages of a totally misguided job hunt. Parasitic image consultants and job hunt advisors sap her of thousands of dollars over the course of a fruitless year-long search. That says more about her poor choices and lack of support network as a corporate novice. Throughout, she trips over desperate, embittered job seekers – former corporate success stories who were thrown overboard by their employers in middle age – whose plight and occasionally populist gripes about modern capitalism who would be far more fascinating subject matter, but Ehrenreich’s self-indulgent format does not allow for interviews with them.
For some reason, Barbara Ehrenreich is inextricably linked in my mind with fellow socialist and author Barbara Garson. Like Ehrenreich, Garson is a humorist who attempts to grapple with major economic issues in an accessible manner. I recently re-read one of her earliest books, “All the Livelong Day,” which I am including in the theoretical syllabus of the Labor Studies 101 class I’d like to teach one day. Spurred on by curiosity about Big Concepts like Taylorism and “alienation of labor,” Garson innocently asks, “what about the workers?”
While she, too, poses as a worker in a 9 to 5 job to write about the effects of mind-numbing routine on her psyche, this is merely one short chapter. The rest of the book is full of wonderful interviews with workers (Barbara G. is a playwright first and has a wonderful ear for dialogue and an eye for detail) about how they view themselves and their jobs and how they make the time go by. These details – like the woman who daydreams about sex while pulling red meat from white at the Bumble Bee tuna factory or the office pool secretary who amuses herself by typing in a rhythm with her coworkers – really make the text come alive and provoke the reader to think about his or her own private thoughts at work, all while illuminating fairly dense economic theory. Her books are far more deserving of best-seller status, and worth your attention.