One Struggle is an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist organization based out of south FL. We understand that the system of capitalism and imperialism is at the core of the many varied crises that we are facing as a society. We build unity to connect our struggles – individual and societal – to that core conflict/enemy because we see that what is needed is a mass movement, a collection of diverse but coordinated groups operating with the common goal of abolishing this genocidal system. To build that unity and ultimately that movement the work starts now with people struggling to stand up and fight back.
We all live in neighborhoods. They are dynamic, complex arenas of class struggle – becoming, growing, and changing based on interests and conflicts that have developed over time. They are landing places for people who play many different roles in society – students and workers, the young and old, renters and owners, etc. People’s access to neighborhoods is reliant in no small part on the interests of real estate developers and banks. Although we – the people who live and work in a place – make the soul of a neighborhood, the body belongs to said interests and that body can be moved, chopped up or sold without any say on our part. This tendency is not unique to our homes and communities – it is in fact the mode of operating that the global economy relies on. Public services, schools, workplaces, even international relations follow this model (imperialism) of gutting a place/thing, depriving it of resources and then coming with a new shiny alternative, a new source of profit to some section/s of the ruling class. It is to the interest and benefit of capital, which needs constant expansion and contraction of markets to find a way to ground the spoils of its speculative endeavors all over the world. In the inter-capitalist class struggle between financial and industrial capital, this process is happening faster and further all the time.
Back to real estate, it is used to maintain the dominance of the ruling class economically and politically. They make fortunes off rent, speculation, and “ownership” of resources. It is also one of the most common avenues that average people have for “moving up” in life, “the path to generational wealth.”
The issue is that inevitable weakness of capitalism – the need for endless profit from finite resources. For workers and the petit-bourgeois (or middle-class) our solution is to scrape and scramble to buy property (or take advantage of government homebuyer programs that could snap back in our faces in the form of global economic meltdown…and the loss of our homes) and cross our fingers that it doesn’t get in the way of the ambitions of some bigger fish that wants to build a highway through or “enrich” the community we’ve invested ourselves in.
For the capitalist class, gentrification is the solution to this limitation. Neighborhoods, the places where we express and experience reality, are a variable factor in their profit equations. They use tactics like purposeful neglect, systemic racism, “reinvestment,” etc to bend that variable to their favor. Our traumatic eviction is a number on a spreadsheet to them. It isn’t a matter of conspiracy – there is plenty of conflict happening among the people that are profiting from gentrification and varied approaches for how it should be executed. However, despite their disagreements they are unified in maintaining a system that devalues and revalues the land we all live on with destabilizing, violent consequence to the rest of us.
One Struggle is encountering and trying to understand one specific tool the capitalist class uses to gentrify, the community redevelopment agency (CRA). They are entities set up by a city or county to promote private-sector involvement in the “economic development” of certain areas that are deemed to have “blight”. To be clear, “blight” is the policy term for poorly maintained buildings, people hanging outside of corner stores, or houseless people simply existing. The Miami-Dade CRA website blatantly “calls for private sector involvement to the maximum degree possible.” So, it is a way for capitalists to have more control over real estate speculation while also totally skirting their responsibility for poverty and homelessness. It furthers the tendency of public-private mixes or total privatization of things like roads, transportation, housing and development. The federal Housing Act of 1949 established the existence of CRAs where local governments can essentially court and be courted by private interest to fund development programs. In FL, the Redevelopment Trust Fund is supplied by tax increment financing (TIF). Basically, there are special districts where they will use revenue collected from property taxes and a certain portion is allocated to the CRA. They “freeze” the taxable property values that the county or city can get, and any taxes collected above that value as time goes on and property values increase go to the trust fund for the CRA. This is an obvious incentive for property taxes to increase which, among other new fees and bureaucratic nonsense, drives people out of being able to afford their homes. Property taxes are meant to be allocated to things like sewer and water, fire department, roads, education etc. These special districts take that money and give it to the CRA to incentivize private involvement, allow for private profit and make the prices of everything go up. Often, they just provide some version of the same services that money would have gone to in the first place, except it isn’t subject to the same public input or regulation.
CRAs can buy and sell property, charge rent, obtain land through eminent domain, sell bonds, and operate public facilities like waste management and utilities. They are predatory organizations uniting public officials and capitalists to keep churning out crazy profits from a real estate market that should be stagnant because no one that is actually from any given place can afford to be there, whether it is to live or work or play. They have the veneer of “helping” communities and operate with significant influence, largely unwatched. However, they are still public institutions and so they must operate with a level of transparency with open meetings and records. Communities need to recognize the force and interests of these agencies and other capitalist institutions in their neighborhoods and build our power to resist their short-sighted drive for profit. They are organized and gaining power, we need to be too. We accomplish this through coming together to understand our realities in the context of this class struggle to find where we can work together and start to push the power dynamic in our favor.
This flyer was made to pass around a neighborhood being gentrified by a CRA.
If you see the neighborhoods around you changing and want to understand more about our perspective or want to contribute to this struggle in any way, reach out!
