“Viewpoints” is a place on Chapelboro where local people are encouraged to share their unique perspectives on issues affecting our community. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work, reporting or approval of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com. If you’d like to contribute a column on an issue you’re concerned about, interesting happenings around town, reflections on local life — or anything else — send a submission to viewpoints@wchl.com.
Shelter Should Not Be a Speculative Asset
A perspective from Dustin Queen
This essay is a case study in liberal delusion — a smokescreen for the capitalist class dressed up in technocratic concern. The author claims to care about housing and working families, but every solution they offer up is rooted in the same failed capitalist logic that created this crisis in the first place.
Let’s be clear: the housing crisis isn’t a zoning issue. It’s not because local governments didn’t “embrace change” fast enough. It’s not even about “restrictive land use” — it’s about a system where shelter, a basic human need, is treated as a speculative asset. Housing is unaffordable because capitalists — banks, developers, landlords — profit when it is. And the state, whether red or blue, exists to protect that profit.
This author talks about voters being tired of the “status quo.” But what is that status quo? It’s capitalism. It’s a system where working people live paycheck to paycheck while developers sit on empty luxury condos as investment vehicles. It’s a system where property values and rents go up because they’re designed to — because the value of land is artificially inflated to extract maximum surplus from the working class. That isn’t an accident. It’s the engine of the system you’re defending.
The proposed solutions? Deregulate zoning, eliminate parking minimums, let developers build in commercial areas. As if loosening rules will somehow make housing affordable when the problem is who owns the land and who controls production. All this does is grease the gears of gentrification, making it easier for developers to displace communities under the banner of “progress.”
And the cherry on top: the writer pats themselves on the back for attending a summit put on by the Progressive Policy Institute — the same centrist think tank that helped gut welfare in the 1990s and sell out labor to corporate interests under Clinton. These aren’t “new directions for Democrats”; they’re old, rotting ideas reheated for another round of failure.
If you actually cared about solving the housing crisis, you’d call for the decommodification of housing. Public housing. Tenants’ unions. Community land trusts. Mass eviction defense. Land back to Indigenous communities. National rent control. Seizure of vacant units and luxury properties for social use. But that would require breaking with capitalism, and this writer is too busy trying to save it.
Democrats won’t win by becoming “the party of change” under capitalism — because the real change people need is the abolition of capitalism itself.
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
