Michael Shainblum / Creative Commons
Downtown Los Angeles at sunrise. The city and state own numerous vacant properties that unhoused families could use for protection from the COVID-19 outbreak.
First Response
The coronavirus is likely to bear down most mercilessly on the unhoused. You cannot shelter in place without shelter. And this crisis matched with the existing crisis in affordable housing will serve as a force multiplier, creating more homeless families at the worst possible moment.
Solutions to this mess exist, and some aren’t waiting for government to get around to them. This morning, unhoused families in the Los Angeles neighborhood of El Sereno occupied six vacant, state-owned homes, in a development with over 200 vacant properties. The group is calling themselves “Reclaiming Our Homes,” and they want the city and the state of California to immediately make all government-owned homes available to those who need them, as an urgent matter of safety.
Marta Escudero, a part-time caregiver with two daughters, told me that the group takes inspiration from Moms 4 Housing, a successful coalition in Oakland who occupied investor-owned properties earlier this year and won the right to stay in them. “I paid $1,200 a month for a two-bedroom a few years ago, and now it’s $2,000,” Escudero says. “I think it’s ludicrous when there are hundreds of homes vacant, that government is not providing houses for the most vulnerable.”
The 500-lot development fell into the hands of government 55 years ago. The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) acquired the properties with the expectation of demolishing them, to make room for an extension of the 710 Freeway. The project never got off the ground amid legal action from the community. They became state-owned surplus housing, much of which was rented out. State law mandates some of the homes to be offered at affordable rates to qualified tenants, but only 40 have been sold in this fashion.
Roberto Flores, the co-founder of Eastside Café, a local community space, was a former tenant of the Caltrans housing. He claims that the agency has been pursuing a policy of depopulating the corridor. He explains that in 2013, Caltrans started raising rents by 10 percent every six months, to comply with an audit that found the rents fell below market rate. “The houses are not well taken care of, people were begging Caltrans to fix the houses if they were going to charge market rent,” Flores says. “My rent went from $1,480 to $2,200 in two and a half years. It forced my wife and me out of the house.”
According to Flores, vacancies have doubled in the development since the 2013 rent hike. Escudero, along with the other Reclaiming Our Homes families, see these homes as part of a necessary solution amid the coronavirus outbreak. “There’s nowhere to go for people to quarantine and be safe,” she says. “It makes the crisis even worse. The housing system is not working for ordinary folks, just rich people and the banks.”
The families moved in Saturday morning. They say that governments have a responsibility to use their resources to account for the unhoused. Escudero expects a sympathetic ear from California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has made homelessness a top priority.
“We’re not criminals,” she says. “We’re families, we’re seniors. The government is not doing enough, that’s why our community is taking things into its own hands. We believe that all publicly-owned houses should be made available to those who need housing. I would want him to take action.”
Vital Stats
According to the CDC, there are 1,629 total U.S. cases of COVID-19 and 41 deaths as of Friday, March 13. Due to the lack of early testing, this is almost definitely an undercount.
The COVID-19 Tracker of testing for the coronavirus estimates about 17,892 completed tests within the country as of March 13, up from 11,515 the day before. They’re ahead of the CDC count, showing 2,182 positive cases.
Congressional Wrangling
House Democrats and the White House reached agreement on a second coronavirus response bill last night, and the House passed it overwhelmingly, 363-40, with the Senate expected to follow suit next week. Here’s a fact sheet on the “Families First Coronavirus Response Act,” and here’s the bill text. It includes free testing for everyone, including the uninsured; $1 billion toward food assistance for low-income pregnant women, seniors, and children, including waivers so kids who get most of their meals at schools can continue to get fed even if their school is shut down; some increased public health system funding; a temporary cancellation of food stamp work requirements; expanded unemployment insurance and expanded Medicaid payments to states; and temporary paid sick and emergency leave, for up to 14 sick days for workers, and three months of emergency leave during forced quarantines or family care.
The last piece required round-the-clock negotiations between Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Businesses will receive a tax credit to offset at least some of the sick and emergency leave plans, and businesses under 50 workers will be exempt. Most important, these provisions sunset at the end of 2020, meaning that the United States will continue to be one of the world’s only countries that does not guarantee that workers can stay home if they’re sick and get paid. That’s one of the holes in this plan, which will particularly magnify if COVID-19 dissipates and then returns down the road. Free testing without free treatment is another self-defeating feature; people with no insurance or high deductibles will still be reluctant to get tested, because they can’t afford care if they test positive.
There’s likely to be a third bill, as the president is holding out for his cherished payroll tax cut, and broader economic measures will likely need to be taken. Democrats simply must hold out for permanent paid sick leave and free COVID-19 treatment in that bill.
Your Chance to Take Part
Our web event with the American Economic Liberties Project is filling up, and we have a new guest: Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Mark Pocan (D-WI). Join Rep. Pocan, AELP Senior Fellow Lucas Kunce, the Brookings Institution’s Rush Doshi, and me on Tuesday, March 17 at 3pm ET for “Concentrated Power & Coronavirus,” a look at how consolidation of global supply chains has magnified the economic crisis. Get your questions ready! Register for the event at this link.
I’m also doing something new: live-streaming the Democratic presidential debate on Sunday night. Through a new app called HotMic, you can “watch” the debate along with me and get my live commentary. All you have to do is download the free HotMic app, and on debate night (8pm ET Sunday) use this invite code: DAVID122.
Finally, if you have stories about how you’re dealing with COVID-19, email me at ddayen-at-prospect-dot-org. I’ll run some more of your emails tomorrow.
That Press Conference
Yesterday we were all treated to an infomercial in the Rose Garden, with a parade of CEO self-aggrandizement, and presidential actions that seemed more about goosing the stock price of multinationals. (Buying cheap oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which helps approximately nobody except for fossil fuel companies, was a giveaway.)
Put the constant handshaking and touching, and the outright lie about a Google website, aside. It’s nice and all that Walmart and Target will carve out space in their parking lots, and Quest Diagnostics will help with lab work for testing, but it’s really a by-product of a dead government that has outsourced its power to private monopolies. Government testing is easily done in a functioning society; no innovation is needed for a test as simple as a grad student-level project. We put corporations in charge of these efforts as a policy decision.
And when you outsource government to the monopolists, you get outcomes that align with the monopolists’ bottom lines. Corporate labs have apparently withheld their supply stockpiles of critical ingredients in testing kits to force deregulation of the kind the Trump administration announced yesterday. The biggest oil trade group is lobbying against financial relief for the industry, because its largest members are hedged against collapses in oil prices, but the smaller drillers aren’t. Big Oil sees the crisis as an opportunity to pull more market share, in other words. None of this is being done out of generosity, to pull together in a crisis, but to dominate in the future. It’s revolting that we’ve hollowed out government so much that we allow this.
Today I Learned
- We are now all reliant on Jared Kushner’s brother’s wife’s dad’s Facebook group. (The Daily Beast)
- Online learning may not be ready for prime time. (New York Times)
- Single-digit new cases in Wuhan for two straight days. Hopeful news. (Reuters)
- Bill McBride on the sudden economic stop. (Calculated Risk)
- Britain’s strategy on COVID-19 response sounds absolutely insane. (Eudamonia)
- A petition to get prisoners making hand sanitizer in New York more than $1 a day in pay. (Color of Change)
- Some coronavirus greeting cards. (Boing Boing)
