At DNC, Farmworker President Emerita Dolores Huerta indicts capitalism for homelessness

Dolores Huerta | U.S. Dept. of Labor (Creative Commons)

CHICAGO—At a DNC panel on Kamala Harris’s plan to back a cap on rents, veteran union leader Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, indicted the corrupt capitalist system for the problems of homelessness and poverty. Huerta, now 94, remembers seeing homeless people sleeping on the streets when she was aged 17—in Mexico City.

“I never thought I’d see that in the United States of America,” Huerta said. “This is a blatant example of how our model of capitalism is not working. “People wring their hands and say ‘What can we do?’ But these corporations” that buy rental properties and jack up the prices “are going the other way,” forcing everyone to rent, at higher and higher monthly costs. “They’re trying to get a monopoly so nobody can buy a home again.”

If elected, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris says she will propose a national cap on annual rent increases as one key way to combat rampant poverty in the U.S.

Susie Shannon, moderator of a panel during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago which discussed how to eliminate poverty among an estimated 100 million people in the U.S.—and especially 753,000 homeless, announced Harris’s endorsement during the panel’s August 20 session in Chicago.

Quoting a Harris tweet, Los Angeles pro-rent activist Shannon read: “When I am president, it’ll be a day one priority to bring down prices. I’ll take on predatory landlords who gouge low-income folks.”

“I’d like to say a lot of low-income folks say a lot don’t have a union, they have the Democratic Party,” Shannon added. The catch is that, right now, they don’t. Harris, Shannon told the lightly attended session, may well change that—despite the party’s big givers and corporate backers who generally, like many neo-liberal Democrats, ignore the poor.

That, to some extent, includes current President Joe Biden, who keeps emphasizing aiding the middle class and promoting people into it. The president has often said he doesn’t mind if people get rich, but he wants to lift everyone else. The common-sense idea that if you lift the bottom of the barrel the entire thing goes up is often ignored by corporations and lawmakers beholden to them.

Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, have more working-class roots than many of the typical Washington lawmakers: He in rural Nebraska and she in Oakland, the poorer of the two cities flanking San Francisco Bay.

The poor can never take for granted, however, that politicians will respond to their needs unless they apply pressure. The Rev. William Barber II, co-executive director of the Poor People’s Campaign, has demanded a meeting between Biden and citizen complainers for more than three years. They’ve had to settle for talking to aides.

Now, during this election, they are out registering millions of poor voters who live in swing districts, in hopes of increasing their influence on all the politicians.

The poverty panel itself is part of the process of applying pressure to people who are expected to listen. The idea was to have a panel that would raise with Harris the need to continue to help lift people out of poverty. Conveners know that someone like Trump and the GOP will never be moved on these issues so they are applying pressure on Harris and the Democrats where they believe they have the better chance of getting results.

“We know what happens when rents are increased and people can’t pay any more,” said Shannon. “They become homeless, their lives are unstable, their children are pulled down in school or out of schools” as they transfer from school to school when their parents move.

But now the [party] platform includes a rent cap. We capped rent hikes in two million apartments” in publically financed housing “and will take on corporate greed by banning “junk fees” and holding companies accountable for price gouging.” Shannon said.

“We know the root cause of poverty. The housing crisis means 73% of low-income people pay more than half their income in rent,” said Christian Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women. The homeless rate has sharply risen in the last five years, Nunes said.

Other ideas included:

Subsidies for low-income renters. Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., said “Giving them a little help now will save millions of dollars later on” in federal long-term subsidies and in spending to counter the harmful effects of poverty, including homeless and sometimes crime.

“Most of our housing programs” for the poor “are too small, too slow, and too inefficient,” Gomez said. He proposed that any renter forced to pay more than 30% of their income on rent should be reimbursed for the difference between what they pay and that figure.

Restoring the child care tax credit. Nunes, who is also a Harris-Walz surrogate speaker, pointed out the expanded childcare tax credit, instituted to help families which lost income due to the coronavirus-caused Great Recession, cut child poverty by more than half, to 5.2%.

But when the Republican-run House let that tax break expire, using the excuse the virus was receding, the child poverty rate more than doubled, to one of every eight. The adult rate rose to more than 12%.

Harris, Biden, and the party platform want to restore the larger credit and make it permanent. She’d also make it payable monthly, rather than having taxpayers file for it every April and then wait and wait for the checks.

Emphasizing more workforce training, along with temporary salaries to every homeless person aged 16-21. Hilda Solis, now a member of the all-woman L.A. County Board of Supervisors “is doing a lot of work on that.” It’s needed. “We’re the national epicenter of homelessness. We have 77,000 homeless out of 753,000 total” nationwide. “Many are Latino, Black, and homeless widows, but now we’re seeing more families.”

“We have workers living in a tent, in a car, and out on the street,” but the children can be grounded in school through vocational education. Meanwhile, another possibility is job training to help homeless colleagues. “We can’t find enough trained people” especially in mental health. “We used American Recovery Protection Act funding during Covid” to house people in vacant hotels, some of them for months, and stabilize their lives.

Now the city is undertaking a multimillion-dollar program to build housing, including prefab housing, for the homeless, added Solis.

Banning discrimination against federal housing aid recipients. “If you have a Section 8 housing voucher, it shouldn’t be held against you,” Rep. Gomez says.

Money for people to buy starter homes. Harris proposed a $25,000 per purchaser subsidy. One panelist proposed double that. But there’s still a problem they didn’t address: Many borrowers cannot qualify for home loans due to overwhelming student debt. The Biden-Harris administration is trying to solve that too, but the Trump-named U.S. Supreme Court majority has thrown a monkey wrench into their efforts, and Biden is working his way around that.

Build more low-income housing. This may be tougher because developers don’t see the profit in it, Gomez admitted. Still, the U.S. has a housing shortage of half a million units for low- and moderate-income people per year, Biden’s original Build Back Better plan, a massive improvement in the social safety net, would have added 800,000 units per year over a decade.

“That’s too small and that’s too slow,” Gomez says. “If we can’t do that, we’ll be running in place.”

And Congress didn’t approve it anyway. A Republican filibuster threat, aided by renegade Sens. Joe Manchin, Ind-W. Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, Ind-Ariz., both captive to special interests—fossil fuels for Manchin, the financial lobby for Sinema—blocked it.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.