The Rent’s Too Damned High

A human right, commodified and rendered zero-sum.

Cory Doctorow
GEN
Published in
8 min readJun 6, 2021

--

“Slums. Washington, D.C.” Carl Mydans, 1935, Farm Security Administration — Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress) https://www.loc.gov/item/2017758811/

The pandemic housing bubble has multiple, complex causes. Among them:

Generations of Americans have dreamed of owning a home, both to insulate themselves from the whims of their landlords and to create intergenerational wealth. Home ownership was a key driver of social mobility, allowing working class people to enter the middle class. A horrible “natural experiment” shows just how important property acquisition is to economic stability: redlining and

--

--