The Undercurrent of Classism in Anti-Housing Ideology
Keeping housing accessible and in good condition requires absolutely enormous amounts of (working class!) labor. Too many (higher-income) people completely take it for granted.
Fun fact about me: My dad is a contractor. I talk about this a lot. Just because it has shaped my life and perspective a lot.
We are close. He’s always talking about this stuff. I have been around construction all my life.
When I was growing up, he quit his job as a middle-manager at a family-owned construction firm and went to work for himself. He was flipping houses, at the time. This was housing bubble era. And the housing market was generally weird.
When I was in high school we lived in a house he was flipping, and it was all torn up but also super, super awesome (we couldn’t have afforded to live in a house that nice under normal circumstances and when he was done we sold it.)
He spent a year or more fixing it. And the whole time, he was working on it himself but also having skilled tradesmen in and out of the house.
One time, I remember, I came home and he was wearing a maxi pad on his hand. I asked him why and he said he put a nail through it accidentally. And then he just bandaged it up that way and didn’t make a big deal about it.
That’s just the kind of guy he is. This kind of labor is hard work and its honest work and it’s relatively humble work. I think a lot of people take for granted what goes into making the places they live nice and the kind of people who make that possible in a way that is both unfair to them and distorts construction markets a little bit.
When I moved into my house in Cleveland, 15 years ago, my dad, completely selflessly, helped me fix it up. During both these projects, I helped a little. I pulled nails out of the floorboards and woodwork (there were millions) or I painted doors that stood on sawhorses in the living room. But really he did the heavy lifting, and again a number of skilled tradesmen, which he cultivated and genuinely loved.
The plumbers on these jobs, for example, he treated like royalty. For good reason: They were really hard to get, good ones. They were busy all the time and they make a lot of money, relatively speaking. And plumbing is an essential element of a house for obvious reasons. To be able to call a plumber in an emergency and get them to turn out: that’s important and very valuable to a contractor and it’s not easy to do.
We also worked with tile layers and painters and electricians and drywall guys too. And some unskilled just laborer types a little bit as well. And there’s a whole hierarchy in the trades that goes from really, really tenuous (painters and drywall for eg) to high paid and very secure (HVAC and plumbing). To this day, the way people talk about and flatten the building trades annoys me. These aren’t exactly like other jobs. There’s a whole apprenticeship system, which isn’t very inclusive imo. But that’s a topic for another day.
Anyway, in Cleveland, a lot of the professionals I socialize with, even people who work in housing, in more like office roles, have a very negative view of the guys who flip houses. (They don’t properly restore all the historic elements! They cut corners! They encourage gentrification! That sort of thing.)
Flipping houses though, it’s sort of a tough gig. A lot of guys who have construction skills get into doing this. The first flip my dad did was in the suburbs. And that’s mostly where he does them. (Honestly, we could use more of that in the city and it does happen a lot in my neighborhood, to what level is really more of the question, when it comes to affordability.)
Regardless, flipping houses is very risky for these guys personally. To make it work, my dad was financing these projects himself, one at a time (this is common). He was, for example, trying not to work with realtors because he was killing himself to make IDK 20 percent hopefully and risking all this money and some realtor would just waltz in at the last minute and take 5 percent off the top. And without that five percent, it might not be worth his time.
Here’s the thing I think these folks who are a little bit snobby about this miss: This house flipping work that these guys do is providing a really needed service. Houses are just an absolute a fuck ton of work. Especially the way we live now. Bigger spaces, better amenities.
When I’m involved to the extent that I am, which isn’t even as much as I should be probably, it just amazes how much work even little jobs that seem like they’d be simple one-off things are.
There is a need in the market for housing flippers. Because guess what? Every 10 to 15 years or so, houses need damn near everything replaced. Maybe you can drag it out longer than that. It depends on wear and tear and tastes etc. But still.
My house, we fully renovated 15 years ago. And it’s gotten to the point where nearly everything in it needs replacing. We have four people stomping around it, including two kids and that takes a toll. Plus we didn’t start off with high end fixtures that were built to last.
Average people don’t always have the resources and skills (or interest) to take on major renovations themselves. That’s why so many people prefer to move into new houses, and I don’t blame them. Even financing big repairs, dropping $25k on a kitchen or whatever, can be tricky, while you’re trying to hold down a regular job etc.
In Cleveland, I’m not even kidding about this, the MEDIAN construction date of a house is 1920. There is an absolute ton of housing that is very, very old, in very bad shape, in need of major repairs. And at some point, if it doesn’t get some investment, it’s going to have to be a teardown. We could keep a literal army of construction workers in this city busy for decades rebuilding our housing infrastructure, and making it nice and livable. It’s a market failure, and big problem, that it isn’t happening more widely.
There’s a lot of reasons for that. Banks, for one, don’t like to get involved in financing these complicated repair jobs, which they view as risky and more trouble than a conventional mortgage on a move-in ready house. But that is, frankly, bullshit, because there are supposed to be these federal requirements that they invest in low-income and minority neighborhoods, but they’re pretty toothless imo. The banks are all just federally guaranteed and after they do the loans they’re just selling them to federally owned entities like Fanny and Freddie anyway so it’s not even their risk.
In Cleveland, almost all new construction is heavily subsidized for this reason and others. And also because we have a relatively strong labor union presence, and those guys are trying to insist on good wages for the workers, even though housing prices here are some of the lowest in the country.
Why am I ranting about this? The thing that set me off this morning, is this post from Jeff Mauer about Los Angeles, and this absolutely insane resistance they have to allowing housing to be built. Los Angeles has become literally this poster child for homelessness, and not a bit unfairly. Skid Row is a fucking disgrace. There are 60,000 homeless people in LA County.
Their Mayor, Karen Bass, ran on this whole agenda of doing something about homelessness. Then, she went in the media and equivocated about allowing housing to be built in East LA because of concerns about gentrification.
Gentrification is a big deal in LA. However, a big part of the problem is the fierce resistance to allowing any housing to be built. Watching this unfold from afar is just excruciating. Mauer makes a point that I agree with, which is that allowing low-income neighborhoods to be poor and disinvested doesn’t serve the cause of justice either. Why are our leaders defending this immoral and broken system? This is why people lose faith.
Inability to get a handle on this housing crisis in major coastal cities — particularly in the west — torpedoed the whole Democratic agenda, arguably, just a few months ago and we’re still stuck in the same Catch 22 of impotent do-nothing debate-team rhetorical posturing.
These anti-housing people that have amassed all this power in Los Angeles and San Francisco and Orange County or where ever, here is the thing though. They always make it about the developers. GOD FORBID some EVIL developer make a few bucks and take his kid to Disney World.
Meanwhile, these folks, many of them well-off professionals, are just kind of pretending away this whole huge diverse workforce, full of middle and working class guys who would benefit as well from have a normal and functional housing construction and repair market in place.
The interests of these workers are completely skirted. And the value they provide, not just in their jobs but as members of these communities, parents, consumers, is not small. Somehow, they don’t even register on the “justice agenda” and that frankly is the kind of nonsense that is causing the working class to lose interest in this whole project.
Construction is honest work. And important work. I am tried of college-educated people paying lip service to the building trades in a sort of vague and romantic way, and using their enormous economic and political privilege to prevent other people from benefitting form the invaluable services they provide.