Life In the Underclass

Only days after my multimillionaire developer of a landlord slapped me with another rent increase demand (bringing the three year total to a more than 50 percent hike), my apartment flooded.  Repair work on a blocked sewer line had forced wastewater up to a corroded kitchen pipe in my own unit, bursting it and turning half my apartment into a little lake. Fortunately, the crew had a wet-dry vacuum on site and were able to suck up most of the water. Unfortunately, they were running late for their other gigs and second or third jobs, so it took another day to get another crew on site to finish repairing the line and giving me permission to turn on my kitchen faucet. It took still another day (today) for management to finally send over a cleanup crew to remove the rest of the water and shampoo the carpeting, which is more than 20 years old. Actual carpet replacement in these tough times is not an option.

True, I am luckier than many of America's renters, untold millions of whom are so underwater that will be evicted when the national moratorium expires in just a few days. I can still inhabit my apartment for at least another few months, because my state's rent laws require adequate notice on increases. I still have the luxury of writing this post in my dry little office alcove in the rear of the unit. I have managed to keep up with my already-exorbitant rent payments throughout the pandemic, thanks mainly to the three "stimulus" checks which, pundits like Paul Krugman would have us believe, are being saved rather than spent.

Meanwhile, along with more than 100,000 other New Yorkers, I am still awaiting word on my application, for a few months' worth of future rent, to the state's Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP). Although these federal funds for "vulnerable" tenants who pay most of their income on rent were approved in April, it took New York until June 1st to finally open its glitch-ridden internet portal. Jumping through hoops does not even begin to describe the hell of this process, which is just one more way to tax the time of the poor and working class.

 Did I mention that our still-governing Governor Andrew Cuomo awarded the multimillion-dollar, no-bid contract for running ERAP to one of his former advisers, who coincidentally left government to start his own private consulting firm right before he won the contract?

As of last week, only a tiny fraction of "test" awards out of the multibillion-dollar fund had been sent to landlords. Senator Chuck Schumer was so incensed about the delays and incompetence that he wrote a sternly worded letter to Cuomo, warning him that unless the money is disbursed, it will revert back to the US Treasury. Cuomo then promised to "streamline" the program by bringing in an army of "volunteers" to do the work his crony could not, and get the money out by August 31: the expiration of New York's own eviction moratorium. 

That's yet another cruel way of stressing out desperate people. First, you dangle a sliver of relief in front of them and praise yourself to the skies while doing so. Then, you not only make them beg for it, you make it impossible for them even to beg for it. Finally, you make them wait in suspense until the very last minute for it. To prove how much you care, you advise them to practice mindfulness if they can't sleep at night.

As for me, I am throwing all caution to the wind even as I am throwing out my entire stock of the soaked contaminated old towels I'd used as ineffectual mops to clean up my interior lake. I've mindfully made up my mind not to pay one penny more in rent for my decaying living space.  Ergo, I  may end up in eviction court myself sooner rather than later. For the first time in my long-ish life, I am facing the very real possibility of homelessness. I can't even move, because the apartment vacancy rate in my area is effectively Zero.  I can't even live in my car, mainly because I don't have a car.

Much of the local housing stock had been converted to short-term Airbnb-type rentals. And then there's gentrification, which itself has been intensified by the influx of wealthy New York City residents who began arriving up here even before the pandemic. The gentry have not only artificially inflated the rents, they've also balked at more low-income housing getting built in their own new back yards. (NIMBYism on steroids.)

It's gotten so bad up here that even the New York Times is noticing the local housing crisis... mostly from the point of view of employers who, poor things, are having so much trouble these days finding enough minimum-wage help to serve the burgeoning plutocratic refugee class clientele. "What Happens When Your Waiter Can't Afford Rent?" the Paper of Record plaintively asks in its headline.

The article showcases Tom Smiley, the hereditary owner of the Mohonk Mountain House, a palatial resort in New Paltz whose most recent claim to fame was its use as luxurious retreat by Hillary Clinton in the aftermath of her crushing 2016 loss to Donald Trump. It's a very sad story of Smiley being forced to cut his workforce from 760 to 630 since the pandemic began. His quest for federal subsidies to house his workers has, thus far, been tragically unsuccessful. 

For the first time since his family started the business in 1869, Mr. Smiley asked his marketing director to focus on staff recruitment, and not on guest promotions. He spent extra money to advertise available jobs on the radio and billboard space on Route 299 in New Paltz.

Some employees were able to secure cheap lodging at the hotel’s worker dorms, but the number of rooms was cut to 45 from about 180, since the pandemic made it necessary to provide private bathrooms instead of shared facilities.

Heaven forbid that wealthy paying guests be forced from their rooms or have to enter a waiting list simply to get on a reservation waiting list, just as poor and working class people seeking affordable housing in America have been forced to do for decades. Tellingly, the lord of this particular manor apparently hasn't lobbied local, state and federal officials to enact rent control laws for the prevention of unconscionable evictions, let alone offered to pay a living wage of at least $25 an hour to his seasonal cleaning and wait-staff to supplement a signing bonus that doesn't even cover a week's rent in this area.

Not for nothing does local legend have it that horror writer Stephen King modeled the gruesome haunted hotel in "The Shining" directly on Mohonk Mountain House, which he is said to use as a regular writing retreat (complete with one of those scarce private bathrooms, I reckon.)

What with both the local and national crisis of unsustainable neo-feudal serfdom, I just can't get the picture out of my head of millions of worker-corpses floating in private bathtubs all across this plague-ridden American landscape.

The tubs are overflowing so badly that the privacy and comfort of their wealthy clientele should be the least of these overlords' worries. The dam is already bursting, all over this plague-ridden, flood-ravaged, world of ours. The victims of extreme capitalism can no longer be hidden away or even cynically used as props in their spectacles.

The Elite Response to Catastrophe: Beat, Prey, Shove

With piles of furniture on curb-sides becoming a common sight all over the country as evictions ramp up because tens of millions of people have no jobs and no money to pay the rent, former First Lady Michelle Obama went on Instagram over the weekend to show her empathy with the exploding American underclass.

She posted a picture of herself lounging barefoot on an overstuffed sofa she'd transported all the way up to the rooftop terrace of her Washington, DC mansion. It was a way not only of demonstrating solidarity with all those losing the very roofs over their own heads, but of reassuring her millions of concerned fans not to worry about her and the self-diagnosed "low level depression" brought on by the pandemic lockdown. She is doing just fine compared to the "folks" out there working for "the rest of us."

Her self-righteous motto "When they go low, we go high," has been duly augmented by "When I feel low, I go high. And so can you!"

So, proles, stop feeling so down and out just because you're down, and literally out on the street. You, too, can live the elite al fresco lifestyle and perhaps even take up Michelle Obama's therapeutic bullet-journaling hobby on your very own outdoor sofa as you wait for the movers to take your earthly possessions to the auction block or the junkyard.

 If you're especially feeling low, and a rooftop terrace or Martha's Vineyard escape is not available at the moment, then you could opt to do what record numbers of your fellow Down and Outs awaiting their "deaths of despair" started doing long before Covid-19 ever hit the scene. You can go high on drugs and alcohol.

Of course, the Down and Out population is not really the intended audience to whom Michelle Obama has so magnanimously written:

There’s no reason to worry about me. Like I said in that conversation with @Michele__Norris, I’m thinking about the folks out there risking themselves for the rest of us—the doctors and nurses and essential workers of all kinds, I’m thinking about the teachers and students and parents who are just trying to figure out school for the fall. I’m thinking about the people out there protesting and organizing for a little more justice in our country."

If her idea of "a little more justice in our country" does not explicitly include a rent freeze, an eviction/foreclosure moratorium and legislation for the construction of tens of millions of new affordable housing units, it is likely because Michelle's husband had deliberately chosen not to include such relief on his own agenda during his eight years as president. The Obama administration's conscious choice to allow banks to throw millions of people out of their homes after the 2008 financial meltdown actually helped set the stage for the current catastrophe. "Folks" have never recovered from the first eviction/foreclosure crisis of more than a decade ago. Fully 94 percent of all the wealth "lost" as a result of Wall Street's greed-fueled housing bubble and subsequent bursting geysered up to the richest one percent of Americans - Michelle Obama's class, or what she seems to mean by "the rest of us."

As Binyamin Applebaum writes in a New York Times editorial:

The government dismissed the woes of homeowners and renters as personal tragedies that did not require the attention of the Treasury Department. The government was wrong. The millions of individual tragedies required action. A nation is a collection of people; the first job of government is to keep people from harm.

 Even on its own terms, the government’s indifference was a mistake. The massive dislocations shredded communities, as families were replaced by abandoned homes. Schools struggled to help displaced children, whose test scores declined and behavioral problems increased. Businesses lost their customers. Cities starved for property tax revenue slashed spending: Colorado Springs turned off one-third of its street lights.

 The accumulation of individual tragedies left lasting scars on the economy and on society.

Applebaum is being unnecessarily kind when he calls the manufactured cruelty of the Obama years - itself a manufactured prelude to the Trump years  - a "mistake." Crime against humanity, or at least depraved indifference to human life, would be a more apt description.

There is plenty of tone-deafness afflicting the elite circles basking at the level of Michelle Obama's rooftop terrace, of course. 

Donald Trump's own executive order halting evictions is no such thing. The language merely promises to "consider" some sort of eviction relief.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's idea of "a little justice" in the deliberate absence of any congressional relief for regular people was to do Michelle Obama's Instagram post one better, and post a prayer for "responsive justice." The gist of the sanctimonious plea to her Democratic caucus is to pray "even harder" for the GOP sadists than they pray for their unseen and forgotten constituents.

If prayers by Democratic politicians do not miraculously provide food, clothing and shelter for millions of hungry and evicted Americans, then their oligarchic task-masters have offered to vaguely think about helping the exploding Down and Out population themselves, sometime within the next 10 years or so.  

"A new non-profit, the New York Jobs CEO Council, will work with universities, the city and other groups to create new curriculums (sic) and apprenticeships over the next decade," announces the New York Times.

The pledge to prepare 100,000 Down and Outs for the jobs of the future was signed by more than two dozen of the wealthiest tax-averse corporations and oligarchs:

Details are scant, but the initiative has attracted the support of many of the most powerful chief executives in the country, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Laurence D. Fink of BlackRock, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of Google.

 “We started with the C.E.O.s for a very specific reason,” said Gail O. Mellow, who will run the new council and most recently served as president of LaGuardia Community College. “We wanted that buy in.”

Of course, some of the same Wall Street and corporate predators who evicted millions of people after the first financial crisis and bought up the foreclosed properties with a vengeance, only to begin evicting millions of people anew during the pandemic, now again try to present themselves as their victims' saviors.

There is seemingly no limit to how low they'll go for their endless high profits.

As we brace ourselves for next week's Democratic Convention, and speeches by the Obamas and Clintons and Nancy Pelosi, the Times assures us that while the hearts (sic) of Wall Streeters aren't necessarily with Joe Biden, their wallets most assuredly are.

It helps, the article states,  that he's been historically viewed as a "distressed asset" which can be bought low.

They also think that marginalized, jobless, evicted, perennially exploited people can be bought low and brought even lower. 

Is there no pain that these prayerful predators will not try to commodify and consume?

One consolation, as more and more commodified humans protest on the streets (for a whole lot more than "a little justice") is that the ruling elites are displaying their arrogance and ignorance and cluelessness in ever more entertaining and inspiring ways with every passing day. 

Their very existence is a clarion call to action for us to get off our curbside sofas. Our furniture and worldly possessions might disappear, but we cannot and we must not. We must refuse to be part of their planned development, their commodified human refuse dump.