Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The homeless are a class apart, out American untouchables. It goes without saying that in America the homeless have no right to shelter. They also have no right to sleep, be seen in public, go to the bathroom or keep their jobs. In short, the gradual deprivation of rights for unhoused people, sped by iniquitous supreme court decisions, is leading inexorably to the homeless lacking the right to exist.

This is awful in itself and more so since even our phony statistics admit that there are more homeless people than ever. That’s because 22 percent of renters pay ALL their income on rent, according to Redfin, which means of the remaining 78 percent, millions and millions pay a humongous percentage of their money on rent. Indeed, 12.1 million Americans spend more than half their income thus, says the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. The report also mentions that 22.4 million tenants spend over 30 percent of their wages on their leases, the amount commonly recommended as the highest decent limit for rent percentage of income.

The cause of this economic catastrophe is greed. Indeed, during the recent Los Angeles fires, the L.A. Tenants Union reported that “landlords are raising rental listings by more than 50 percent to profit from the fires. Penal Code 396 prohibits price-gouging during a state of emergency.” Other sources indicate 120 percent rental listings increases. So we are dealing with a class of people, the landlord class, who are, to put it nicely, amoral. Meanwhile, abetting their amorality is a housing crunch caused largely by the complete financialization of real estate, so that private investors snap up single family homes, not to live in, but to keep empty, as a place to park excess cash. Fifteen million homes sit vacant in America, while likely 3.3 million citizens lack a permanent address. These uninhabited abodes........

© CounterPunch