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Friday, September 15, 2023

Fact v. fiction

 'The adherents of the "Yes In My Backyard," or YIMBY, movement believe that America's housing crisis comes down to the fundamental tension between supply and demand. The country simply doesn't have enough homes, they argue, so people are forced to fight, scrape, and pay exorbitant prices to secure the housing that is available. Building more homes, or "housing abundance" in YIMBY parlance, is the key to improving access and ensuring an affordable cost of living.'

There are on any given night  between 500,000-600,000 homeless people in the US, with about one-third sleeping on the streets and two-thirds in homeless shelters.   According to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2018., there are 138,539,906 housing units in the United States, of which 17,019,726 homes are vacant.

The YIMBY movement will fail.   This is also true of  the Ending Homelessness Act of 2019.  150+ years ago Frederick Engels explained why: 'As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labour by the working class itself’ (The Housing Question, 1872).


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