Rent stabilization is a legal status created by the city government under which landlords can only increase the rent by a certain percentage every year. They may not evict a tenant unless the tenant has violated the lease, and they must sign one or two-year leases with the tenant (as opposed to the landlord’s favorite type of lease, the oral month-to-month, where they can evict or eject tenants for no reason at all at the drop of a hat). New York’s rent stabilization guidelines were created in 1969 as “market-friendly” alternatives to the more stringent controls on rent increases during and immediately following World War 2. These policies had been seen as necessary to keep workers — whose labor was needed in the city’s manufacturing industry — from being displaced by soaring rents. However, by the 1970s, advances in shipping and computation technology allowed capitalists to increasingly export labor costs to the Third World. Hard-fought union struggles increased the wages and working standards of industrial workers in the U.S. Meanwhile, capitalists hired death squads to terrorize laborers in the Third World, and stymy socialist and union organizing. They then took advantage of the non-existence of strong union contracts in the Third World to pay these workers far less than their U.S. counterparts. This left urban working-class communities who had relied on these jobs to support themselves, particularly Black communities, who were also systematically denied mortgages for suburban homes, with no prospects for decent wages.

 As New York City deindustrialized, the city government cut the social services of these neighborhoods with the explicit goal of displacing the residents — what they dubbed “planned shrinkage.” The impacts were immediate and devastating. Just under 1 million people were displaced or killed by the sudden loss of social services. When it was no longer profitable to the capitalists for workers to live in the city, the state began to erode rent stabilization, including the elimination of rent stabilization for any building constructed after 1974. Real estate speculators took advantage of the many buildings in disrepair and in escrow and bought them for pennies on the dollar. Landlords invested in the reconstruction of these buildings because, once reconstructed, they were no longer subject to rent stabilization. They “reconstructed” them for the explicit purpose of evading rent stabilization requirements!

By the 1990s, corporations began to open offices in New York City, bringing their administrative workers with them. Neighborhoods that were depopulated under “planned shrinkage” were filled by office and service workers. This influx of people provided renewed ways for landlords to profit. The New York State government, in order to facilitate their profiteering, continued the attack on rent stabilization. In 1994, it legislated that any unit whose rent was more than $2,000 per month could be destabilized. Landlords began a frenzy of alteration and tweaking to their units in order to justify a $2,000 rent. Once the properties were destabilized, these same landlords left them to decay once more while they collected inflated rents.

Rent stabilization was never designed to end homelessness or housing insecurity. It was an attempt by the city to manage the contradiction between rapidly rising rents that force the poor to leave the city and the need for a working-class to fill jobs in the city, while protecting the class of people who profit from rent collection and exploitation of labor — the landlords and capitalists. 

Rather than force the landlords to rent out these stabilized units, New York City Mayor Eric Adams gave landlords $10 million to renovate stabilized units and list them at market prices. The city government revealed its true nature by protecting and facilitating the profitability of speculative enterprises. The mayor of New York City gave free money to the landlords, not free housing to the people.

According to data gathered by the city of New York, about half of non-owner-occupied New York City apartments are rent-stabilized. This allows many families and individuals to continue to reside in neighborhoods they grew up in, and prevents rent costs from eating their entire paycheck. Rent stabilization is an undeniable good; we can and should defend it. Still, we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking its protection or expansion will make housing really fair or equitable, let alone that it can bring about an equitable world. As long as the landlord class controls the production and distribution of housing, they use housing as a means to enrich themselves while bleeding the working class of the crumbs we receive as wages. One of the chief functions of the U.S. government is to manage the crises caused by this kind of speculation. However, contrary to the commonly held misconception that the government does this to help the people, their role is to ensure the bankers and landlords who gamble with the people’s money can get bailouts, handouts, and a leg up.

It is our responsibility to end this domination and bring about a society in which goods and services are produced according to ability and distributed according to need, not hoarded for the luxury of a few. We who seek to end this domination must form study groups with our friends, coworkers, and loved ones to collectively understand how this system of domination works. From these study groups, we can organize tenants to collectively struggle against our landlords for better living conditions. 

We must organize defense units, and prevent the protection racket known as the NYPD from evicting our neighbors out of their homes and displacing our homeless neighbors from their camps. It’s through these organizations that we, the working class, can exercise our power. As we do, we will take on not just the immediate effects of the housing crisis (the necessary survival programs for the houseless, eviction-defense squads, etc.) but the very institutions of government that permit the landlords to flourish and, ultimately, the landlords themselves. It’s not just New York City, as practically any working-class person can attest. Housing is either unaffordable or unattainable across the entire United States and Canada. Wherever we may be, we must embed ourselves in and establish organizations like these and put an end to the rule of parasitic landlords and bosses!

The capitalist economic system we live under prioritizes the production of profitable goods and services. However, just because something is profitable, does not mean it is beneficial to working people — in fact, our lived experience as the working class in Taos County proves that the opposite is the case! For example, it’s currently profitable for investment companies to buy housing units and convert them to vacation rental properties, which comprise at least 5% of all housing in Taos County. Even worse, a further 20% of the houses in Taos County are second homes! This means at least a quarter of all housing in the county has been hoarded by corporations or the rich, which limits the already slim amount of housing available and causes the price to skyrocket to unattainable levels for the working people of Taos. The tourist and corporate greed that makes the Taos housing market profitable forces locals to relocate further away from town or into homelessness. Clearly, the profitability of housing is not linked to prosperity for working people. 

Those who own businesses such as Taos Valley Inc. also reap the benefits of affluent tourists vacationing in Taos. But it’s not the owners who create the goods and provide the services to tourists at those businesses. It’s the workers who build, clean, and repair the rental units and hotels that we can’t afford to stay in; who serve, prepare, and cook food at the restaurants, and stock the grocery stores’ shelves. The working class produces the profits which the owners collect. The insatiable greed of the owners, and endless quest for profitability ensures the  goods and services we produce are increasingly unaffordable to ourselves, and can only be sold to the demographic that is pricing us out of town.

Worse still, the government of the town of Taos, whose ostensible responsibility should be the wellbeing of the town’s residents, encourages this grift through its partnership with two private agencies, The Center for Responsible Travel and George Washington International Institute for Tourism Studies. Together with these agencies, the local government  created a tourism plan. Though the stated mission of the plan is to ensure the industry benefits the local community, as long as the economy is based on profit, tourism will have disastrous effects on the working people of Taos County. The plan claims to promote collaboration between “residents, local governments, tourism industry stakeholders, enterprise leaders, nonprofit and social services managers” in order to benefit the community. But as we have examined, the needs of working-class residents are directly opposed to the desires of these “stakeholders”who need to displace and exploit us in order to make profits. How can a fundamentally exploitative relationship lead to mutually beneficial “collaboration?”

If the town could simply admit that the working-class economic interests of its residents are opposed to the wealthy’s, it would be a start, but the town doesn’t even bother to maintain a caring façade! Recently, some neighbors at the Taos Men’s Shelter repeatedly sought a meeting with the town commissioners to talk about the state of the shelter and how the town could improve its programs. They were denied every time. When our neighbors from the Shelter were finally able to schedule meetings with local non-profit executives, their ideas and reflections were rudely dismissed. What then, is the point of the survey and the new tourism plan? The town is sloughing off the incalculable suffering the tourism industry is causing the working people who live here. With the help of fancy firms, the town pays lip service to the grievances expressed by the people of Taos, while actually protecting and encouraging the parasitic vultures who profit from the tourism industry, and who are expanding their barrage on poor and working people.

The struggle of working people in Taos, though it has specificities, bears a stark resemblance to processes occurring across the country. The root causes and the response to the fires that wreaked havoc in Maui, especially on native Hawaiians, are connected to tourism in Northern New Mexico. In Maui, intensive construction undertaken by the tourist industry stripped the environment of components critical to fire prevention, such as water, creating the conditions for the deadly fire to take place. In the aftermath of the fire, investment firms, who operate identically to those in New Mexico, and in some cases may be the same companies who own about half of the short-term rental units in Taos, bombarded Hawaiians who had just lost their homes in the fire, seeking to buy their land. These marauding investors are seeking to further displace people in the midst of a crisis so their firms can profit. What’s happening in Maui is also happening in the midst of an economic crisis in Northern New Mexico, with bloodsucking investors coercing Hispanic and Indigenous Tiwa people to sell their land. This cruel pattern will repeat until the working and oppressed classes organize to stop it.

As working people in Taos, we must get organized to protect our communities against those profiting off of our demise. Join us at Kit Carson Park every Wednesday from 11:30–1:30 to learn about how we are organizing against this profiteering. Email us at newmexicosurvivalprograms@gmail.com or find us on Instagram at @newmexicosurvivalprograms.