HOUSING, RENTS AND THE SYSTEM

To the Editors of The Crimson:

The appearance of Sam Pillsbury's article on rent control two days before a city-wide rent-hike strike is unfortunate. Pillsbury's "balanced" analysis is written from the perspective of the traditional urban planner ignoring the political realities which would scuttle even his most well-intentioned reforms and force tenants to resist rent increase--even though some landlords may be hurt and building maintenance may suffer.

Pillsbury worries over the plight of the small landlord, who is the lowest-level beneficiary of the profit system. He accepts as given the contention that some people have a right to make a profit on others' having a place to live, and hopes that we can still provide decent housing at prices tenants can afford, without understanding the investment system which keeps the housing market going.

The point, of course, in that the system has not kept the housing market going. Maximization of profit has not proven compatible with decent rents. Yes. Controls on rent do make things worse within the investment system, by inhibiting maintenance and construction. But should we remove them? Even the current increase has forced elderly people on fixed incomes and families without employment to switch to diets of starch and pet food in order to pay their rents, or to move out of their homes-and hometown. We have to dig deeper, beneath the tug-of-war between protected profits and decent living standards if, to use Pillsbury's phrase, "the reality of the issue is to shine through."

Housing is a basic human necessity. One might hazard that it is a basic right. The current systemic tug-of-war cannot guarantee it. Why Pillsbury thinks that urban planners, bankers, politicians, and landlords will provide reasonable rents without being forced to do so by the organized power of large, militant tenant groups is a mystery to me. His "balanced analysis" fails to show that the current economic crisis comes down hardest of all on the minimum living standards of poor and working people and only secondarily upon landlords and hapless local governments--while the profits of large banks and corporations are safeguarded at all (social) costs. Such a failure to target corporate profit leads only to a good deal of handwringing about "complexities" and to shallow, ideological hopes for improvement. Each of us grasps the deeper reality when she will, usually after further study and some kind of political involvement on behalf of economic justice. Housing--and feeding and clothing-- for profit makes no sense.

On the page opposite Pillsbury's balanced complexity in the April 29 Crimson. Robert Kennedy Jr. spoke of "clean anger" and struggle as concommitants of any caring and lucid analysis of our social condition. Most of the tenants going on strike have already intuited the deeper reality--perhaps because they are on the butt end of it--and have come up with necessary virtues to boot. Pillsbury will now have to decide, "on balance." Whether to side with them or evict them. James A. Sleeper School of Education