Letters
LETTERS to the Editor People Problem Articles on oil spills, alternative energy, the greenhouse effect, traffic jams, etc., excellent though they may be, can all be summed up in one word:...
...There seems to be a large number of vacant lots and boarded-up houses...
...L. Carol Shaw Raleigh, North Carolina The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...
...They are still going to create one hell of a mess...
...Although I share your concern about the homeless, I think you should take a much more careful look at rent control before accepting the premise that it can be of any help in solving the problem...
...Yet I demonstrated at great length in my National Review article that even a cursory look at the recent history of these cities reveals ' that rent control preceded low vacancy rates, rather than the other way around...
...While I despise the views of racists, Nazis, and other nihilist groups, I defend their right to present those views...
...Marshals Service...
...I chose, as my topic, "Prisoners of Conscience," intending to deal with foreign cases...
...No city with rent control has a vacancy rate over 3 per cent and no city without rent control, except Worcester, has a vacancy rate under 4 per cent...
...As more prisons are built by the states and the Federal Government, each sharing the new technologies in mass-warehousing of people, abuse becomes institutionalized and accepted...
...Somehow, these people have forgotten—or have never acquired—the basic living skills...
...Currently, fewer than one-third of America's poor families receive any kind of housing assistance—the lowest level of housing assistance in any major industrial country...
...Tucker failed to respond to this challenge and generally has little to say about how to solve our nation's deepening housing crisis...
...However, in all fairness you should mention another side: We have a small but highly active group of people who insist on shitting where they eat...
...Is this just a coincidence...
...What I have been trying to show in my work is that rent control has visibly aggravated homelessness and can only be expected to do worse in the future...
...Only regular exposure in the media can begin to chip away at this system...
...Peter Dreier John Atlas Boston, Massachusetts Rent control does, indeed, make decent housing affordable by stopping landlord rent-gouging...
...I am not arguing that rent control is the only cause of homelessness...
...Ronald Davidson Dannemora, New York Thank you for Bonnie Ur-fer's article about her great witness and action for nuclear disarmament and its various repercussions...
...William Tucker Brooklyn, New York The authors reply: William Tucker's letter simply repeats the basic argument of his study, which allegedly found that rent control causes homelessness...
...Needless to say, neither did my classmates...
...Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institute, perhaps this country's leading liberal expert on housing, has long argued that rent controls are producing housing shortages and wants Congress to outlaw them...
...Amnesty International may not be able to find political prisoners in the United States, but I contend that most people in American jails and prisons are in some way political prisoners—whether directly, as in Bonnie Urfer's case, or by reason of race, economic condition, etc...
...the very concept of prison is abusive...
...Our article described the many methodological flaws and leaps of logic Tucker made to reach his preconceived conclusion...
...There could be no clearer confirmation of this theory than the low vacancy rates that have been created in rent-controlled cities...
...As a member of the 1984 Silo Pruning Hooks action and witness, I could well identify with her experiences in 1988...
...A letter in The Progressive's June issue mentioned "behavioral" problems...
...The New York City experience has proven that the greatest benefits of rent control accrue to the affluent...
...After laboring in obscurity for years here in New York, it is nice to have someone besides the usual conservative policymakers in Washington paying attention...
...Prisons should exist for one purpose only: to keep truly dangerous people away from the rest of society...
...Suppression or censorship is not the way to fight the "racist assholes" of this world...
...If we cut our waste and consumption in half, which of course we won't do, but continue our rate of population growth, we will continue to lose ground...
...Rent control is fine, but those who choose to live in such housing should understand that they have an obligation to take care of the property and not burden the landlord with unjust expenses...
...These people will face prices that are above market (in exempted or uncontrolled units) or may not be able to find anything at all...
...Cutbacks in Federal aid to housing, building and zoning restrictions, the ubiquitous effort to control growth and block new housing, the recession of the early 1980s, the release of mental patients—all have played a part...
...Matthew Rothschild's article on "The Crime of Politics" spelled out the nuances of political punishment...
...It is true that "persons convicted of politically related offenses are often more severely punished than nonpolitical prisoners...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...The housing shortage came afterwards...
...The most startling discovery in my survey of fifty cities was that the nine rent-controlled cities have the nine lowest vacancy rates in the country...
...The argument against rent control is not "conservative versus liberal...
...Eventually, I lost everything...
...Prisons should not be used for revenge or punishment or "justice...
...A trip through any large low-rent area will bear this out...
...Suppressing their speech is more dangerous than ensuring that they have their say...
...The fact that I was a Catholic priest and had a large support community outside the judicial and prison systems made my own situation a little less difficult as time went on, but I sincerely believe, with Bonnie Urfer, that "no one deserves the kind of treatment dealt out in our prisons, just as no one deserves to live with the threat of nuclear war...
...The resulting housing shortage, on the other hand, is experienced most acutely by people on the margins—growing families and the poor...
...Until I read the articles by Bonnie Urfer, Linda Rocawich, and Matthew Rothschild in the May issue of The Progressive, I had no idea such prisoners existed in our glorious democracy...
...Atlas and Dreier argue the latter...
...They are the ones who become homeless...
...They move from one dwelling to the next, leaving graffiti, garbage, and grief in their wake...
...The housing shortage created by rent controls is by no means distributed equally: Overwhelmingly, the benefits of low rents tend to accrue to middle-class people who are able to stay in their apartments a long time, while the adverse effects are visited upon people who are forced to move because they have growing families or have been burned out or have otherwise lost their apartments...
...Mike Rivers Springfield, Massachusetts Free Speech on the Campus Nat Hentoff speaks the truth that no one wants to hear in "Free Speech on the Campus" (May issue...
...I also have many friends who have experienced abuses by the U.S...
...Bureau of Prisons and the U.S...
...John W. Slayton Roanoke, Virginia Cruel Confinement As a state prisoner who has spent "detainee" time in Federal prisons, I can confirm the mistreatment of prisoners described in various articles in your May issue...
...All the great bargains in New York are concentrated in posh areas of Manhattan, on the Upper East and Upper West Sides and in Greenwich Village...
...we must fight them with words...
...There are already more people than this planet can support...
...Ideas that are suppressed become more powerful...
...To my mind, it just isn't fair...
...Until Washington renews its responsibility to help house poor and working-class people, rent control will be needed as the one tool available to local governments to help such people keep a roof over their heads...
...Well, I don't care how ten billion people behave...
...We also suggested that those who attack rent control because it assists the wealthy might join us in calling for reform of the regressive homeowner tax deduction, which primarily rewards rich people who own two expensive homes...
...Or is it because rent control has been imposed in response to low vacancies...
...The First Amendment guarantees that anyone can speak, write, or publish his or her opinions and beliefs, regardless of how offensive those views may be to the majority...
...As a former "slumlord," I found it impossible to meet the demands of the tenants who were very hard on the property and of the housing-court people who were asking me to bring the property up to code...
...Close on their heels comes the government housing specialist whose only mission is condemnation, demolition, and redevelopment...
...In our article, we challenged those who believe that rent control is an inequitable approach to the housing problems of the poor and working class to endorse a Federal housing entitlement for low-income tenants and a beefed-up Federally subsidized housing production program...
...The laws of supply and demand state simply that any long-range effort to hold prices above their market-clearing level will create an economic surplus, while any effort to hold prices below their market value will produce a shortage...
...What is obviously needed is a Government housing program that helps fill the gap between what housing costs to build and manage and what poor and working-class consumers can afford to pay...
...Bravo to The Progressive...
...Your articles and my speech resulted in a rather lengthy discussion, and I encouraged my classmates to express their views to state and national officials...
...It pits the understanding of economics against ignorance and wishful thinking...
...If this is a system you are willing to suppoprt, you are welcome to it...
...Readers are invited to request our more detailed statistical critique and reanalysis of Tucker's data, which show that the opposite is true: Rent control helps reduce the incidence of homelessness...
...Otherwise, I fear, our homeless problem will grow worse...
...LETTERS to the Editor People Problem Articles on oil spills, alternative energy, the greenhouse effect, traffic jams, etc., excellent though they may be, can all be summed up in one word: overpopulation...
...There is no need to repeat our criticism here...
...Nationally, vacancy rates are now about 8 per cent, the highest in many years, yet rent-controlled cities average only about 2.5 percent...
...No money or thanks can ever repay the service you are rendering to the people of this country...
...Krista L. Finstad Sparta, Wisconsin Rent Control Thank you for the attention paid to my work against rent control ("The Phony Case Against Rent Control," by John Atlas and Peter Dreier, April issue...
...American oppression goes on as strongly as it did during the twenty-eight months I spent in Federal custody...
...Rent control was imposed in the 1970s as a response to inflation, not low vacancies...
...Stuart Hernandez Ocean City, New Jersey I am an eighteen-year-old high school student who was given a speech-class assignment to prepare a persuasive talk, with follow-up questions by the audience...
...Father Paul Kabat Nashville, Illinois Of course there is abuse in prison...
Vol. 53 • July 1989 • No. 7
