The Capitalist Crisis is Forcing Workers Onto the Streets in Connecticut

As Marxists warned last year and the year before that, the crisis in the housing market, so long suppressed by the last-ditch stabilizing measures  of the U.S. government, has finally broken out into the open. The contradiction was unsustainable: the working classes have been deprived of their income by death, disease, and economic manipulation, and are now being forced to pay back rent that the government suspended — rent that they can’t afford. Now that this larcenous manipulation — the issuing of what are essentially interest-free loans to banks and investors, billed in the presses as “relief” — has increased the cost of staple goods and threatens hyper-inflation, the political lackeys of the U.S. real estate capitalists are preparing to give the economy a strong dose of “shock therapy.” The real costs of the so-called “relief” are becoming more and more apparent.

In Connecticut alone, hundreds of working class families have been thrown onto the streets. A smoldering fire of evictions threatens to explode into a full-blown conflagration of houselessness far beyond the capacity of the meager resources allotted by the capitalist state to combat it.

This particular housing crisis was created by the COVID pandemic and the bungled half-measures taken by the government in response. Even as investors line their pockets, the working people sink deeper into misery. This stop-and-start “protection” has merely given the illusion of safety while allowing the capitalists to plunder the public coffers and leave growing numbers unhoused, food-insecure, and unemployed.

“I haven’t seen this in my 20 years working in Connecticut,” said David Rich of the Housing Collective in Fairfield County. Housing advocates are calling it the “perfect storm” for the working classes. The state reports a shortfall of more than 85,000 units of rental housing. As of late August 2022, only about 2% of the state’s rental units were available, which gives Connecticut the lowest vacancy rate in the U.S. Empire.

“The people who are coming into the shelter now were housed and [lost housing] either through evictions or being priced out of their housing,” said Michele Conderino of the Open Doors Community.

ACT CT, a bourgeois NGO operating in Connecticut to “address the root causes of poverty, addiction, and health,” released a report on the state of houselessness in Connecticut from data gathered on Tuesday, January 25, 2022. They identified 2,930 people who were unhoused in Connecticut on that date. Last year the same report identified 2,594 houseless persons. The very first wave of the crisis has seen an increase in houselessness by 13%, which is a reversal of a decade of decreases.

And it’s not only that there is insufficient shelter for rent — the protections for tenants introduced at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic have since been lifted and evictions are now being processed at an increasing pace. Those protections were still in place in January of this year, when the study was conducted, but in March there was a 70% increase in eviction filings — from an average of 1,469 each March to 2,490 in March of this year. The effects of this dramatic increase have not yet been seen.

What’s more, landlords have taken this crisis as an opportunity to drive rents up. Average rents across Connecticut are up 12% over the last 18 months and are projected  to continue rising.

Inflation caused by the capitalist printing of “free money” to the banks throughout 2020, 2021, and early 2022 has pushed many working class families already on the brink of poverty over the edge. Compounded with the lifting of eviction protection and the predatory housing purchases by huge investment firms like BlackRock, Mandy Properties, and Farnam Realty, the capitalists appear to be conspiring to drive working class people out of their homes.

There’s no sign this crisis will let up any time soon. In fact, every law of capitalist development points firmly to its intensification as the investment markets suffer contractions and the U.S. Federal Reserve withdraws its offerings of what was essentially, until now, free credit to the banks and investors. All this adds up to a worsening crisis for working class families in Connecticut and across the U.S. Empire. 

Houses and apartments are “withdrawn” from the market for a “more profitable” resale or investment. There are 700,000 unoccupied units of housing in Connecticut. The owners of these properties refuse to rent them, for the selfish reason that they can make more money by waiting and using their real estate holding sas passive investments to sell as they “appreciate” in value than they can by renting them. In other words, under capitalism, housing is often more profitable when it isn’t actually used for housing. These landlords buy up all the property, wait for desperation and misery to increase, and then sell them at huge profits.

But why is all this happening? The greed of a few is the dispossession of many.

Let’s step back to the beginning of the COVID pandemic: To save the lives of millions, measures were implemented to keep many from going to work. Clumsy half-measures at alleviating pandemic-induced poverty were adopted by the government. But the government’s policies weren’t stringent enough to burn out the disease (unlike the zero-COVID plan in China) and weren’t liberal enough to keep the markets functioning.

While “essential” industries (from food processing to restaurants) were kept open and the workers there were subject to sickness and death, other workers, especially the labor aristocrats and petit-bourgeoisie, were protected under stay-at-home orders. COVID-19 was permitted to rage among the poorest strata of the laboring classes, resulting in government-sanctioned social mass murder.

But, for the capitalist economy to function, for money to circulate, for stocks to stay high, for banks to remain solvent, eventually even those labor aristocrats and petit-bourgeoisie had to go back to work. To support capital during the initial period, the Federal Reserve began issuing what were essentially interest-free loans to banks and investors. Then, under immense pressure from their capitalist masters, the government declared the pandemic was “over” and forced everyone back to work by removing all the protections it had extended: rent and eviction protection, mandatory or free COVID tests, free vaccinations and boosters, school closures, work closures.

The capitalists and their lackeys in government have the tools to alleviate the misery they’re creating. The unhoused merely have to seize this property or have it ordered available by the government; that this is unthinkable speaks to the power of the bourgeoisie to command not only the police force, but the very halls of government.

The pandemic has not ended. The capitalist government did not provide long-term solutions for anything. Neither the disease, which continues to ravage and kill, nor the economic problems, which were shifted from the ruling class onto the working classes, have been addressed. We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this.

The government has worked tirelessly to do what is best for the capitalists. When the capitalists were afraid they might be infected, a limited amount of protections were put in place. After they’d had enough time to develop suitable defenses, like monoclonal antibodies or increased security and temperature screening in their walled gardens, they told everyone “Hey! Get back to work! And by the way, you still owe me a year’s rent.”

This is a stark example of the contradictions at the heart of the capitalist system. The government, composed of the representatives not of the renters, but the landowning classes, can’t order the forgiveness of the overdue rents (doing so is actually constitutionally forbidden, because that would be considered a “taking”), nor can it afford to pay those overdue rents itself.

Where are public funds being spent? Not on the unhoused, those with marginal housing, or those working people being forced out of their longtime homes. Rather, the State of Connecticut just held a lavish state funeral for two Bristol police officers, costing tens of thousands of dollars, diverting millions in state resources, and drawing tens of thousands of fascist fellow-officers and fascist cop supporters from across the country. Indeed, every city in Connecticut is increasing funding for the police across the board.

Thousands of evictions are expected each month going forward. The dreaded “cliff” is still ahead of us: the sharp and sudden explosion of litigation and summary process that will drive thousands of working-poor people onto the streets across the U.S. Empire.

With this crisis now coming to a long-anticipated head, the subterranean contradictions of capitalism, its sometimes-hidden brutality, stands revealed and unveiled for all to see. In response, tenants unions are springing up across the state, but this will not alone stem the tide. Only a united coalition  of unhoused councils, unemployed committees, and housing justice activists, led by a strong Communist movement, can bring the capitalists to heel and force them to concede ground.