Author: Evan Rose

Putin’s War Shows Autocracies And Fossil Fuels Go Hand In Hand

Posted on April 11, 2022

Democracies are making more progress than autocracies when it comes to climate action. But divestment campaigns can put pressure on the most recalcitrant of political leaders

At first glance, last autumn’s Glasgow climate summit looked a lot like its 25 predecessors. It had:

  • A conference hall the size of an aircraft carrier stuffed with displays from problematic parties (the Saudis, for example, with a giant pavilion saluting their efforts at promoting a “circular carbon economy agenda”).
  • Squadrons of delegates rushing constantly to mysterious sessions (“Showcasing achievements of TBTTP and Protected Areas Initiative of GoP”) while actual negotiations took place in a few back rooms.
  • Earnest protesters with excellent signs (“The wrong Amazon is burning”).

But as I wandered the halls and the streets outside, it struck me again and again that a good deal had changed since the last big climate confab in Paris in 2015 – and not just because carbon levels and the temperature had risen ever higher.

The biggest shift was in the political climate. Over those few years the world seemed to have swerved sharply away from democracy and toward autocracy – and in the process dramatically limited our ability to fight the climate crisis. Oligarchs of many kinds had grabbed power and were using it to uphold the status quo; there was a Potemkin quality to the whole gathering, as if everyone was reciting a script that no longer reflected the actual politics of the planet.

Now that we’ve watched Russia launch an oil-fired invasion of Ukraine, it’s a little easier to see this trend in high relief – but Putin is far from the only case. Consider the examples.

Brazil, in 2015 at Paris, had been led by Dilma Rousseff, of the Workers’ party, which had for the most part worked to limit deforestation in the Amazon. In some ways the country could claim to have done more than any other on climate damage, simply by slowing the cutting. But in 2021 Jair Bolsonaro was in charge, at the head of a government that empowered every big-time cattle rancher and mahogany poacher in the country. If people cared about the climate, he said, they could eat less and “poop every other day”. And if they cared about democracy, they could … go to jail. “Only God can take me from the presidency,” he explained ahead of this year’s elections.

Or India, which may turn out to be the most pivotal nation given the projected increases in its energy use – and which had refused its equivalent of Greta Thunberg even a visa to attend the meeting. (At least Disha Ravi was no longer in jail).

Or Russia (about which more in a minute) or China – a decade ago we could still, albeit with some hazard and some care, hold climate protests and demonstrations in Beijing. Don’t try that now.

Or, of course, the US, whose deep democratic deficits have long haunted climate negotiations. The reason we have a system of voluntary pledges, not a binding global agreement, is that the world finally figured out there would never be 66 votes in the US Senate for a real treaty.

Joe Biden had expected to arrive at the talks with the Build Back Better bill in his back pocket, slap it down on the table, and start a bidding war with the Chinese – but the other Joe, Manchin of West Virginia, the biggest single recipient of fossil fuel cash in DC, made sure that didn’t happen. Instead Biden showed up empty-handed and the talks fizzled.

And so we were left contemplating a world whose people badly want action on climate change, but whose systems aren’t delivering it. In 2021 the UN Development Programme conducted a remarkable poll, across the planet – they questioned people through video-game networks to reach humans less likely to answer traditional surveys. Even amid the Covid pandemic, 64% of them described climate change as a “global emergency”, and that by decisive margins they wanted “broad climate policies beyond the current state of play”. As the UNDP director, Achim Steiner, summarized, “the results of the survey clearly illustrate that urgent climate action has broad support amongst people around the globe, across nationalities, age, gender and education level”.

The irony is that some environmentalists have occasionally yearned for less democracy, not more. Surely if we just had strongmen in power everywhere they could just make the hard decisions and put us on the right path – we wouldn’t have to mess with the constant vagaries of elections and lobbying and influence.

But this is wrong for at least one moral reason – strongmen capable of acting instantly on the climate crisis are also capable of acting instantly on any number of other things, as the people of Xinjiang and Tibet would testify were they allowed to talk. It’s also wrong for a number of practical ones.

Those practical problems begin with the fact that autocrats have their own vested interests to please – Modi campaigned for his role atop the world’s largest democracy on the corporate jet of Adani, the largest coal company in the subcontinent. Don’t assume for a minute that there’s not a fossil fuel lobby in China; right now it’s busy telling Xi that economic growth depends on more coal.

And beyond that, autocrats are often directly the result of fossil fuel. The crucial thing about oil and gas is that it is concentrated in a few spots around the world, and hence the people who live on top of or otherwise control those spots end up with huge amounts of unwarranted and unaccountable power.

Boris Johnson was just off in Saudi Arabia trying to round up some hydrocarbons – the day after the king beheaded 81 folks he didn’t like. Would anyone pay the slightest attention to the Saudi royal family if they did not possess oil? No. Nor would the Koch brothers have been able to dominate American politics on the basis of their ideas –when David Koch ran for the White House on the Libertarian ticket in 1980 he got almost no votes. So he and his brother Charles decided to use their winnings as America’s largest oil and gas barons to buy the GOP, and the rest is (dysfunctional) political history.

The most striking example of this phenomenon, it hardly need be said, is Vladimir Putin, a man whose power rests almost entirely on the production of stuff that you can burn. If I wandered through my house, it would be no problem to find electronics from China, textiles from India, all manner of goods from the EU – but there’s nothing anywhere that would say “made in Russia”. Sixty per cent of the export earnings that equipped his army came from oil and gas, and all the political clout that has cowed western Europe for decades came from his fingers on the gas spigot. He and his hideous war are the product of fossil fuel, and his fossil fuel interests have done much to corrupt the rest of the world.

It’s worth remembering that Donald Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, wears the Order of Friendship, personally pinned on his lapel by Putin in thanks for the vast investments Tillerson’s firm (that would be Exxon) had made in the Arctic – a region opened to their exploitation by the fact that it had, um, melted. And these guys stick together: it’s entirely unsurprising that when Coke, Pepsi, Starbucks and Amazon quit Russia last month, Koch Industries announced that it was staying put. The family business began, after all, by building refineries for Stalin.

Another way of saying this is that hydrocarbons by their nature tend towards the support of despotism – they’re highly dense in energy and hence very valuable; geography and geology means they can be controlled with relative ease. There’s one pipeline, one oil terminal.

Whereas sun and wind are, in these terms, much closer to democratic: they’re available everywhere, diffuse instead of concentrated. I can’t have an oilwell in my backyard because, as with almost all backyards, there is no oil there. Even if there was an oilwell, I would have to sell what I pumped to some refiner, and since I’m American, that would likely be a Koch enterprise. But I can (and do) have a solar panel on my roof; my wife and I rule our own tiny oligarchy, insulated from the market forces the Putins and the Kochs can unleash and exploit. The cost of energy delivered by the sun has not risen this year, and it will not rise next year.

As a general rule of thumb, those territories with the healthiest, least-captive-to-vested-interest democracies are making the most progress on climate change. Look around the world at Iceland or Costa Rica, around Europe at Finland or Spain, around the US at California or New York. So part of the job for climate campaigners is to work for functioning democratic states, where people’s demands for a working future will be prioritized over vested interest, ideology and personal fiefdoms.

But given the time constraints that physics impose – the need for rapid action everywhere – that can’t be the whole strategy. In fact, activists have arguably been a little too focused on politics as a source of change, and paid not quite enough attention to the other power center in our civilization: money.

If we could somehow persuade or force the world’s financial giants to change, that would yield quick progress as well. Maybe quicker, since speed is more a hallmark of stock exchanges than parliaments.

And here the news is a little better. Take my country as an example. Political power has come to rest in the reddest, most corrupt parts of America. The senators representing a relative handful of people in sparsely populated western states are able to tie up our political life, and those senators are almost all on the payroll of big oil. But money has collected in the blue parts of the country – Biden-voting counties account for 70% of the country’s economy.

That’s one reason some of us have worked so hard on campaigns like fossil fuel divestment – we won big victories with New York’s pension funds and with California’s vast university system, and so were able to put real pressure on big oil. Now we’re doing the same with the huge banks that are the industry’s financial lifeline. We’re well aware that we may never win over Montana or Mississippi, so we better have some solutions that don’t depend on doing so.

The same thing’s true globally. We may not be able to advocate in Beijing or Moscow or, increasingly, in Delhi. So, at least for these purposes, it’s useful that the biggest pots of money remain in Manhattan, in London, in Frankfurt, in Tokyo. These are places we still can make some noise.

And they are places where there’s some real chance of that noise being heard. Governments tend to favor people who’ve already made their fortune, industries that are already ascendant: that’s who comes with blocs of employees who vote, and that’s who can afford the bribes. But investors are all about who’s going to make money next. That’s why Tesla is worth far more than General Motors in the stock market, if not in the halls of Congress.

Moreover, if we can persuade the world of money to act, it’s capable of doing so quickly. Should, say, Chase Bank, currently the biggest lender on earth to fossil fuel, announce this year that it was quickly phasing out that support, the news would ripple out across stock markets in the matter of hours. That’s why some of us have felt it worthwhile to mount increasingly larger campaigns against these financial institutions, and to head off to jail from their lobbies.

The world of money is at least as unbalanced and unfair as the world of political power – but in ways that may make it a little easier for climate advocates to make progress.

Putin’s grotesque war might be where some of these strands come together. It highlights the ways that fossil fuel builds autocracy, and the power that control of scarce supplies gives to autocrats. It’s also shown us the power of financial systems to put pressure on the most recalcitrant political leaders: Russia is being systematically and effectively punished by bankers and corporations, though as my Ukrainian colleague Svitlana Romanko and I pointed out recently, they could be doing far more. The shock of the war may also be strengthening the resolve and unity of the world’s remaining democracies and perhaps – one can hope – diminishing the attraction of would-be despots like Donald Trump.

But we’ve got years, not decades, to get the climate crisis under some kind of control. We won’t get more moments like this. The brave people of Ukraine may be fighting for more than they can know.

Putin’s War Gives America A Chance To Get Serious About Refugees

Posted on April 5, 2022

These past brutal weeks have become only more unbearable as pictures emerge of the devastation that Russia has left behind in the towns around Kyiv. Still, shock events on this scale do present an opportunity to unstick locked-in attitudes and policies, which is something we badly need, particularly because we face an even larger and more existential challenge than the rise of Putin-style despotism: the climate crisis, and, with it, the almost unimaginable refugee challenge that is coming our way as the planet warms. There’s a chance that the war in Ukraine could be instrumental in helping to renew our resolve to take on both.

So far, the most widely noted area of overlap between the Ukrainian tragedy and global warming has had to do with energy. The fact that Russia’s war machine is funded by fossil fuel, and that Putin uses control of gas supplies to intimidate Western Europe, has begun to shake up energy policy: Germany has moved up its target date for a conversion to clean energy, for instance. And, if the Biden Administration has caved to Big Oil’s insistence on increasing the supply of hydrocarbons, at least that stance is being more urgently and broadly questioned. Last week, in the Times, Thomas Friedman insisted that, instead of doubling down on fossil fuels, we should “double the pace of our transition” off them, because “nothing would threaten Putin more than that,” and because the temperature in the Antarctic last month was seventy degrees above normal. “Our civilization simply cannot afford this anymore,” he wrote, a point underlined by today’s release of a dire and comprehensive report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But, even if we seize this moment to dramatically accelerate the transition to solar and wind power—even if we somehow manage to meet the scientific mandate to cut emissions in half by 2030—we’ll still face the huge and unavoidable consequences of the warming that we’ve already unleashed. And chief among these is the fact that we’re steadily shrinking the area of the planet that humans can inhabit, and, in the process, creating refugees and migrants in what will almost certainly turn out to be unprecedented numbers: the United Nations estimates that we could see two billion climate migrants before the century is out. So the fact that Putin has created four million refugees in a matter of weeks is a test of our systems.

Those systems are straining. Volunteers have been showing up at European train stations offering spare rooms to fleeing Ukrainians, but there’s probably a limit to that kind of generosity. A resident of Vienna named Tanja Maier provides a daily account on Twitter of her efforts to help people arriving in that city, and recently she wrote that some of them are heading back home, “as the disenchantment sets in and the reality of the refugee experience in Europe without funds takes its toll. So much is luck and money. You need both.” The sheer scale of the exodus is overwhelming: Moldova, for instance, has seen four hundred thousand people come across its border; most have moved on to other countries, such as Romania, but a hundred thousand have been absorbed there—in a country of 2.6 million people.

The United States is a country of three hundred and thirty million people, with a per-capita income more than four times that of Moldova, which makes the Biden Administration’s offer, issued last month, to take in a hundred thousand Ukrainians, seem slightly less generous. Nevertheless, Biden’s move is a politically brave one, considering how, in recent elections, Republicans have demagogued anything to do with immigration. He’s got away with it so far, though—partly because the daily pictures from Ukraine make it clear just how necessary it is, and partly because, as refugees from other war-torn territories have pointed out, Ukrainians are white. As an Afghan refugee in an Italian camp told a reporter, “People who used to give spare clothes and food to us are now giving them to Ukrainians.”

Even Biden’s offer, however, demonstrates how broken our immigration and refugee systems are: a group of Ukrainian refugees told the Washington Post that visits to U.S. embassies in European capitals had proved useless. “They told us, ‘Sorry, we don’t have any options for you yet,’ ” one man said. So they flew to Mexico City and on to Tijuana, where some fifteen hundred are now camped a few yards from the U.S. border. The closest thing to a register of the refugees is a numbered list that volunteers keep on a yellow legal pad, the Post reported. “No. 612 was Gleb Prochukhan, 15, the No. 3-ranked junior table tennis player in Kharkiv, whose English was good enough to translate for some of the foreign volunteers who had descended on Tijuana with blankets and protein bars and tacos.”

Of course, the number of Ukrainian refugees on the border is nothing compared with the number of refugees from South and Central America, who have been stuck at the border for years, ever since the Trump Administration, under the guise of covid protection, stopped taking their applications. The Biden Administration may lift that policy next month, but it hasn’t said how many people it will admit, or under what circumstances. On Friday, the Post reported, “A family of Honduran asylum seekers, turned away at the border, passed by the Ukrainian encampment to ask for small change.”

Hondurans and their Central American neighbors, in fact, have as strong a claim to shelter here as Ukrainians do. By 2019, Honduras was in the fifth year of a devastating drought, linked to climate change, that, in some parts of the country, cut corn yields by more than seventy per cent. An internal report from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, obtained by NBC News, found that a crop shortage was the “overwhelming factor driving record-setting migration” from Guatemala. The report describes that shortage as leaving citizens “in extreme poverty and starving.” Then, in 2020—at the end of the most active hurricane season ever recorded in the Atlantic—within two weeks, two huge storms crashed into the region, doing damage estimated at forty per cent of Honduras’s G.D.P. By contrast, the costliest U.S. natural disaster ever, Hurricane Katrina, which displaced a million or more Americans, dented the nation’s economy by only one per cent of its G.D.P. (And Hondurans did next to nothing to cause the climate crisis that drove that drought and those storms—the average Honduran emits one-fifteenth as much carbon dioxide as the average American.)

We should obviously care about Ukrainian suffering, but we should also care about the suffering of Central Americans, and of others—such as Somalians, who have been enduring an escalating drought. As Reuters reported last month, “It has not rained on Habiba Maow Iman’s farm in southern Somalia for two years. Her animals are dead; her crops failed. . . . The 61-year-old is one of tens of thousands seeking aid on the outskirts” of a refugee camp that is now in the midst of a measles epidemic. Somalia’s per-capita carbon emissions are about 0.3 per cent of America’s.

Which brings us back to the present moment, and the opportunity that President Biden now has to dramatically shift the tenor of this debate in favor of making immigration and asylum easier. To do so, he’ll need to argue on practicalities as well as on principles. Most Americans agree that immigrants are hardworking and improve the country. Meanwhile, unemployment is approaching record lows, and many people sense that we need more bodies in the workforce. To look at the health-care industry, for example, if you’re a rural American, you know that we’re running desperately short of doctors; if you’re an aging American, you know that there’s already a dire shortage of home health-care workers, which is going to get worse in the years ahead. And so on. America’s population is barely growing now; as Derek Thompson pointed out in The Atlantic last month, 2021 saw the slowest growth in the nation’s history, in part because so many people died of covid, in part because fewer people had babies, and—in the largest part—because immigration has collapsed, from more than a million people annually, before Donald Trump entered office, to less than a quarter of a million last year.

Shifting to a more welcoming set of immigration policies will require figuring out systems to take migrants in and resettle them, but lots of people are ready to assist. Krish Vignarajah, the president of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (I serve on the advisory board), told NPR that, during the past year, a hundred thousand Americans have volunteered to help, as they watched first Afghans and then Ukrainians be forced from their homes. Refugees, she said, “need everything from organizations like ours picking them up at the airport, you know, helping them find affordable housing—obviously not an easy thing to do at this moment given the housing crisis. It’s about helping them find new jobs, integrate into their communities, navigate public transportation… taking them to doctor’s appointments, helping them enroll kids in public school.”

This task won’t be easy, not logistically and not politically, but every tenth-of-a-degree rise in temperature shrinks the habitable world by some fraction, forcing more people from their homes. Just as Putin’s war gives Biden a new opportunity to make the case for renewable energy, so it gives him an opening to address this intractable problem. In both cases, it may be a last chance before climate change overtakes us.

Amazon Workers’ Historic Win And Corporate America’s Ongoing Greed

Posted on April 4, 2022

If it can’t fight off unions directly, it will do so indirectly by blaming inflation on wage increases, and then cheer on the Fed as it slows the economy just enough to eliminate American workers’ new bargaining clout.

On Friday, Amazon—America’s wealthiest, most powerful, and fiercest anti-union corporation, with the second-largest workforce in the nation (union-busting Walmart being the largest), lost out to a group of warehouse workers in New York who voted to form a union.

If anyone had any doubts about Amazon’s determination to prevent this from ever happening, its scorched-earth anti-union campaign last fall in its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse should have put those doubts to rest.

In New York, Amazon used every tool it had used in Alabama. Many of them are illegal under the National Labor Relations Act but Amazon couldn’t care less. It’s rich enough to pay any fine or bear any public relations hit.

The company has repeatedly fired workers who speak out about unsafe working conditions or who even suggest that workers need a voice.

As its corporate coffers bulge with profits—and its founder and executive chairman practices conspicuous consumption on the scale not seen since the robber barons of the late 19th century—Amazon has become the poster child for 21st-century corporate capitalism run amok.

Much of the credit for Friday’s victory over Amazon goes to Christian Smalls, whom Amazon fired in the spring of 2020 for speaking out about the firm’s failure to protect its warehouse workers from COVID. Smalls refused to back down. He went back and organized a union, with extraordinary skill and tenacity.

Smalls had something else working in his favor, which brings me to Friday’s superb jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The report showed that the economy continues to roar back to life from the COVID recession.

With consumer demand soaring, employers are desperate to hire. This has given American workers more bargaining clout than they’ve had in decades. Wages have climbed 5.6 percent over the past year.

The acute demand for workers has bolstered the courage of workers to demand better pay and working conditions from even the most virulently anti-union corporations in America, such as Amazon and Starbucks.

Is this something to worry about? Not at all. American workers haven’t had much of a raise in over four decades. Most of the economy’s gains have gone to the top.

Besides, inflation is running so high that even the 5.6 percent wage gain over the past year is minimal in terms of real purchasing power.

But corporate America believes these wage gains are contributing to inflation. As the New York Times solemnly reported, the wage gains “could heat up price increases.“

This is pure rubbish. But unfortunately, the chair of the Federal Reserve Board, Jerome Powell, believes it. He worries that “the labor market is extremely tight,”and to “an unhealthy level.”

As a result, the Fed is on the way to raising interest rates repeatedly in order to slow the economy and reduce the bargaining leverage of American workers.

Pause here to consider this: The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that corporate profits are at a 70-year high. You read that right. Not since 1952 have corporations done as well as they are now doing.

Across the board, American corporations are flush with cash. Although they are paying higher costs (including higher wages), they’ve still managed to increase their profits. How? They have enough pricing power to pass on those higher costs to consumers, and even add some more for themselves.

When American corporations are overflowing with money like this, why should anyone think that wage gains will heat up price increases, as the Times reports? In a healthy economy, corporations would not be passing on higher costs—including higher wages—to their consumers. They’d be paying the higher wages out of their profits.

But that’s not happening. Corporations are using their record profits to buy back enormous amounts of their own stock to keep their share prices high, instead.

The labor market isn’t “unhealthily” tight, as Jerome Powell asserts; corporations are unhealthily fat. Workers don’t have too much power; corporations do.

The extraordinary win of the workers of Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse is cause for celebration. Let’s hope it marks the beginning of a renewal of worker power in America.

Yet the reality is that corporate America doesn’t want to give up any of its record profits to its workers. If it can’t fight off unions directly, it will do so indirectly by blaming inflation on wage increases, and then cheer on the Fed as it slows the economy just enough to eliminate American workers’ new bargaining clout.

Anti-Arab Bias And Ignorance Of European History

Posted on April 4, 2022

The double standards in political commentary regarding the war in Ukraine have been widely discussed, from the welcoming of Ukrainian refugees (while Arab refugees face closed doors), to the support of Ukrainians’ right to self-determination and resistance to invasion (while these are denied to Palestinians), to the US and Europeans decrying the illegality of invading a sovereign nation (while ignoring our own histories).

One additional form of bigotry in some comparisons of Ukraine and the Arab World is particularly galling and requires a response.

An example: A prominent New York Times columnist, comparing the world’s response to Russia’s preparation to invade Ukraine with its response to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, wrote:

“Kuwait is a small authoritarian emirate, representing few grand political ideals, in a war-torn region. Ukraine is a democracy of more than 40 million people, on what was a largely peaceful continent home to major democracies.”

So much is objectionable in these two sentences; most egregious is the writer’s underlying thinking, i.e., Ukrainians are more deserving of defence than Kuwaitis. Looking more closely reveals the bias (and ignorance of history) that led to this observation.

We can dismiss the comparative size of the two countries. I feel certain the writer wouldn’t claim that Egypt, because of its size, is more worthy of defence than Israel.

As for their forms of government, the writer clearly doesn’t understand that Kuwait, while a traditional society, has a vibrant political culture, with highly competitive parliamentary elections. The parliament has a long history of challenging government ministers, frequently clashing on matters of policy and accountability. While Ukraine does have a democratically elected executive, its governance has not been without turbulence, unsavory characters, and charges of corruption. The form of government can’t determine a nation’s worthiness to exist or a people’s right to self-determination.

The Times’ columnist appears to view Ukraine as more deserving of support than Kuwait because Ukraine comes from “largely peaceful Europe” while Kuwait is located in the “war-torn” Arab World, in other words, invasions and violence are expected from Arabs, but not Europeans. These few words demonstrate a willful ignorance of history and a healthy dose of bigotry.

“Largely peaceful?” In the last century, Europeans fought two bloody World Wars in which more than 60,000,000 people were killed. First, millions of young men were sacrificed as pawns in a competition between European powers. Then, the birth of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain gave way to an even more deadly war including an effort to exterminate the Jewish people, mass murders of Poles, Russians, Gypsies and others, and cruel and indiscriminate mass bombings of cities (by both sides). At war’s end, Europe was divided with the establishment and expansion of the Soviet Union which repressed and murdered millions as it consolidated control and brutally suppressed rebellion. The end of communist rule brought more violence in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine, and the rise of far-right movements across Europe.

Beyond these murderous conflicts, European powers were fighting to expand colonial holdings or, by mid-century, repressing colonies that had independence movements. Millions of Arabs, Africans, and Asians died seeking to throw off European colonisers who had conquered their lands, exploited their treasures, and denied them their rights.

But the legacy of “largely peaceful” Europe did not end there. European colonial powers then drew artificial lines dividing peoples and creating new states to serve their own interests. They pitted religious, tribal, or ethnic groups against one another, or gave lucrative concessions to compliant partners, who prospered at the expense of their compatriots. In these regions European powers left a legacy of division and seeds of future conflict.

Europe has not been “largely peaceful”, and deserves significant blame for the Arab World being “war torn”.

My intention is not to dump on Europe nor totally absolve Arabs from responsibility for their current situation, nor pick on one NYT writer. Rather, my point is that the invasion of Ukraine isn’t a solitary blot on an otherwise pure European landscape. Russia should be condemned for its invasion and Ukrainians deserve their freedom, not because they are Europeans from a “largely peaceful” continent, but because invasion and occupation by bullies are wrong wherever they occur and whoever they are.

The Housing Crisis – The Adaptive Re-Use Model

Posted on January 27, 2022

Video (above): The Sanders Institute Founder and Fellow, Dr. Jane Sanders, recently visited California to see the homelessness problem in Los Angeles firsthand. Jane walked Skid Row and the surrounding neighborhood and witnessed the excellent work that The Healthy Housing Foundation is doing in LA to convert old hotels to affordable single room occupancy units. She met with tenants who until recently were living on the street and heard repeatedly how much of a difference having a place to call home has made in their lives. HHF has demonstrated that the model not only works, but that adaptive re-use can be one of the fastest and most cost effective ways to provide housing to those in need.


What is Affordable Housing Preservation?

Affordable housing preservation refers to the acquisition and rehabilitation of existing properties as an alternative to new construction while ensuring long-term affordability for residents. Affordable housing preservation along with more recent adaptive reuse strategies are key to tackling our nation’s affordability housing crisis. The strategy can take many forms and be applied across building types — from single family homes and apartment buildings to commercial buildings and hotels. While preservation can look many different ways, there are three general categories:

  1. stabilizing housing, both subsidized or unsubsidized, as long-term affordable housing for current residents
  2. converting market-rate housing to affordable housing for new residents
  3. converting a building from a non-housing use, such as a hotel, office or industrial space, to affordable housing for new residents

The following is a brief history of and case for preservation, as well as an overview of four critical strategies taking place across the country. This includes the stabilization of communities at risk of speculator-displacement to strategies designed to house our growing un-housed population.

 

A Brief History of Affordable Housing Preservation

In the 1960s, the preservation of affordable homes through acquisition and rehabilitation took off as a focus for localized community development efforts. Community development corporations (CDCs) leveraged grant and loan programs to convert existing housing stock into long-term affordable housing.  From that period through 2010, most preservation efforts remained focused on extending affordability terms of subsidized or income-restricted housing and funding capital improvements for these projects. Between 1999 to 2009, the U.S. lost one-third of the affordable rental units affordable to a person making minimum wage.  Some were converted from subsidized to market-rate units and some were converted from rentals to ownership.  In response to the rapid loss of affordable rentals nationwide, practitioners focused on both keeping the original pool of subsidized homes affordable and mounting a defense to displacement by taking homes off the private market to grow the stock of permanent (or semi-permanent) affordable housing.  The trend is nationwide, with standout models in New York, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, and San Francisco.

 

Why Housing Preservation?

While preservation and new housing production are hardly an “either or” tradeoff, situations of scarce funding availability create the question, “Why fund existing housing when you could build new units instead?” Preservation has a unique value proposition, and is a critical complement to new construction in our comprehensive affordable housing strategy.

Affordable housing preservation is uniquely:

Effective at preventing displacement in areas where residents face the risk of gentrification and displacement. Preservation provides a targeted intervention to keep low and middle-income individuals housed in their existing communities. Especially in low-income communities of color, the impact of preservation extends far beyond units and residents directly housed. By keeping long-term community members housed in place, preservation stabilizes relationships, businesses, and other organizations upheld by long-term community members.

Fast and cost-effective – Preservation relies on existing housing stock.  One study found that it cost 25 to 40% more to build new affordable housing than acquire and rehabilitate an existing unit.  In order to convert market-rate housing to affordable housing, the building often needs to be refinanced and changes ownership structure.  In addition, buildings require small to medium scale rehabilitation to ensure safe conditions for current and future residents.  Still, the approach is significantly faster and more cost-effective than building new units from the ground up, especially in urban markets experiencing a scarcity of available land for development and escalating construction costs.

Environmentally Sustainable – Preservation is significantly less material intensive than building new housing from the ground up.  When paired with energy-efficient upgrades, rehabilitation can reduce building emissions while saving residents and government long-term utility costs.

Resources:

Brennan M, Deora A, Heegaard A, Lee A, Lubell J, Wilkins C. Washington D.C. Center for Housing Policy. Comparing the Costs of New Construction and Acquisition-Rehab In Affordable Multifamily Rental Housing: Applying a New Methodology for Estimating Lifecycle Costs. 2013.

Enterprise Community Partners. “Preserving Affordability, Preventing Displacement: Acquisition- Rehabilitation of Unsubsidized Affordable Housing in the Bay Area.” 2020.

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Preserving Affordable Rental Housing: A Snapshot of Growing Need, Current Threats, and Innovative Solutions. 2013.

ChangeLab Solutions, “Preserving, Protecting, and Expanding Affordable Housing: A Policy Toolkit for Public Health,” April 2015.

Graham, Darwin Bond. “Is the Only Way to Make Housing Affordable by De-Commodifying It?” East Bay Express, September 19, 2018.

 

Four Models of Preservation

 

1. Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH) 

Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH), refers to aging residential units that can be renovated and dedicated as permanently affordable housing through a process that is both quicker and cheaper than constructing new housing units.  NOAH developments rely less on government subsidies which can lengthen the development process and tend to only prioritize housing for very low-income individuals.. Once NOAH building stock is acquired and rehabilitated by the owner, the building owner is able to maintain affordable rents.

Resources:

US Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Models for Affordable Housing Preservation.”

Williams, Stockton. The Urban Land Institute and Neighborworks, Preserving, Multifamily Workforce and Affordable Housing.

Alvarez, Thyria and Steffen, Barry. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy Development and Research. “Worst Case Housing Needs: 2021 Report to Congress.” July 2021.

Arechiga De Leon, Hector and Bates, Jonathan. USC Price Case Study: Normandie Lofts and the Los Angeles County Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH) Impact Investment Fund

 

2. Affordable Housing Conversion of Market-Rate Housing

There is also an effort to acquire and remove market-rate housing from the speculative market and convert these homes to permanently affordable homes through deed restrictions particularly in low-income and working class communities experiencing rapid gentrification. Unlike NOAH projects, these projects usually have city and or state financing which subsidize the acquisition, rehabilitation, and ongoing affordability of the site.

Unlike traditional multi-family acquisitions, the conversion of market rate buildings to affordable housing projects requires a high level of tenant participation and the buildings are legally required to maintain affordable rents due to receipt of public financing.  Tenants are required to verify their income in order to remain or move into building to meet public subsidy requirements.

Conversion is one of the few anti-displacement strategies which combats neighborhood gentrification directly by stabilizing residents in their homes in sensitive communities and securing the long-term affordability of these homes.

 

3. Models of Adaptive Re-Use

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the tourism and hotel industry faced severe economic ramifications. Owners of hotels, motels and other forms of short-term rental housing had to evaluate whether staying in business during a global pandemic made economic sense, with the alternative being to sell their building. Cities and developers encountered a unique opportunity to acquire buildings that could be repurposed to rental housing at a discount given a lack of demand for hotel rooms.

An example of a statewide response to this economic phenomenon is California’s Project Homekey.  Project Homekey is a state program that provides funding for the acquisition and occupancy of hotels, motels, and other properties to house people experiencing homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic.

From July to December 2020, Homekey facilitated the acquisition of more than 6,000 housing units amongst 94 properties, 5,000 of which will become permanently affordable housing.  Homekey is the fastest, largest, most cost-effective effort to grow permanently affordable housing in California history.  The average cost per unit was $129,254 compared to California’s average new construction cost of $380,000 – $570,000.

Similar efforts are taking place across the country.  In Vermont, nonprofit housing developers purchased hotels and motels, converted commercial buildings, and placed manufactured homes on empty lots to create 247 new permanent homes, most with supportive services.  Every project is subject to a housing subsidy covenant ensuring the homes remain permanently affordable.

In Oregon, the state established a preservation initiative to acquire 800 to 1,000 units.  Initially, the goal was to create non-congregate shelter during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Approximately two thirds of local entities applying for the state funds are aiming to convert these properties to transitional or permanent supportive housing over the next five years. As of  July 2021, 19 properties were approved, representing 867 units and $71.7M in state funds.

In Minnesota, Hennepin County acquired 165 units to shelter unhoused seniors and adults with pre-existing medical conditions during the pandemic. The county plans to convert all units to permanently affordable single room occupancy housing by 2022.

For additional hotel conversion case studies visit The National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Resources:

Tingerthal, Mary. The National Alliance to End Homelessness, “HOMEKEY: CA Statewide Hotels-to-Housing Initiative” , “Vermont Housing & Conservation Board Coronavirus Relief Fund: Vermont’s Statewide Initiative” , “PROJECT TURNKEY: Oregon’s Statewide Hotels-to-Housing Initiative”, HENNEPIN COUNTY Hotel/Motel Acquisition Initiative”

CA Department of Housing and Community Development, Project Homekey.  Homekey: A Journey Home 2021 Legislative Report

 

4. Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD)

Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) is an affordable housing preservation initiative developed in consultation with residents, public housing authorities (PHAs), property owners, lenders, investors, and other stakeholders. During a RAD conversion, a property managed by the public housing authority is converted to a project-based Section 8 project.  The Section 8 platform provides predictable and stable rental assistance which is well understood by lenders and investors and ensures long-term affordability of housing units.

Public housing faces a massive capital needs backlog, plus significant modernization challenges. Under RAD, the property has access to the new financing tools used by the rest of the affordable housing industry. Public housing properties converted through RAD must address 100% of their current capital needs and remain affordable through long-term HAP contracts and use agreements which preserve HUD’s interest in the property.  The property must be owned or controlled by a public or non-profit owner. Residents preserve the rights they had as public housing residents and the right to request a tenant-based voucher after living at the property for a period of time.

America’s Struggle At Home

Posted on December 15, 2021

In the first year since the end of the Trump administration, the United States is still in the throes of a struggle to overcome decades of political corruption and social neglect.

Almost a year after Joe Biden’s narrow election victory over Donald Trump, the United States remains on a knife-edge. Many political outcomes are possible. These range from the gradual economic and political reform that Biden is seeking to the subversion of elections and constitutional rule that Trump attempted last January—and that he and the Republican Party are still intent on pursuing.

It’s not easy to diagnose exactly what ails America at its core so deeply that it incited the Trump movement. Is it the ceaseless culture wars that divide America by race, religion, and ideology? Is it the increase in inequality of wealth and power to unprecedented levels? Is it America’s diminishing global power, with the rise of China and the repeated disasters of U.S.-led wars of choice leading to national agony, frustration, and confusion?

All of these factors are at play in America’s tumultuous politics. Yet in my view, the deepest crisis is political—the failure of America’s political institutions to “promote the general Welfare,” as the U.S. Constitution promises. Over the past four decades, America’s politics have become an insider’s game to favor the super-rich and corporate lobbies at the expense of the overwhelming majority of citizens.

The 1% Above The Rest

Warren Buffett homed in on the essence of the crisis in 2006. “There’s class warfare, all right,” he said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The main battlefield is in Washington, D.C. The shock troops are the corporate lobbyists who swarm the U.S. Congress, federal departments, and administrative agencies. The ammunition is the billions of dollars spent annually on federal lobbying (an estimated $3.5 billion in 2020) and campaign contributions (an estimated $14.4 billion in the 2020 federal elections). The pro-class-war propagandists are the corporate media, led by mega-billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

Nearly 2,500 years ago, Aristotle famously observed that good government can turn into bad government through a flawed constitutional order. Republics, governed by the rule of law, can descend into populist mob rule, or oligarchic rule by a small and corrupt class, or a tyranny of personal, one-man rule. America faces such possible disasters unless the political system can detach itself from the massive corruption of corporate lobbying and campaign financing by the rich.

America’s class war on the poor is not new but was launched in earnest in the early 1970s and implemented with brutal efficiency over the past 40 years. For roughly three decades, from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression to the Kennedy-Johnson period of 1961-68, America was generally on the same development path as postwar Western Europe, becoming a social democracy. Income inequality was declining, and more social groups, most notably African-Americans and women, were joining the mainstream of economic and political life.

Then came the revenge of the rich. In 1971, a corporate lawyer, Lewis Powell, laid out a strategy to reverse the social democratic trends toward stronger environmental regulation, worker rights, and fair taxation. Big business would fight back. President Richard Nixon nominated Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971, and he was sworn in early the next year, enabling him to put his plan into operation.

Under Powell’s prodding, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to corporate money in politics. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the court struck down federal limits on campaign spending by candidates and independent groups as violations of free speech. In First National Bank of Boston v. Belotti (1978), Powell wrote the majority opinion declaring that corporate spending for political advocacy was free speech that could not be subjected to spending limits. The Court’s onslaught on campaign finance limits culminated in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010), which essentially ended all limits on corporate spending in federal politics.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he reinforced the Supreme Court’s assault on the general welfare by cutting taxes for the rich, waging an assault on organized labor, and rolling back environmental protections. That trajectory has still not been reversed.

As a result, the U.S. has diverged from Europe in basic economic decency, well-being, and environmental control. Whereas Europe generally continued on the path of social democracy and sustainable development, the U.S. charged ahead on a path marked by political corruption, oligarchy, an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, disdain for the environment, and a refusal to limit human-induced climate change.

A few numbers spell out the differences. Governments in the European Union raise revenues averaging roughly 45% of GDP, while U.S. government revenues amount to only around 31% of GDP. European governments thus are able to pay for universal access to health care, higher education, family support, and job training, while the U.S. does not ensure provision of these services. Europe tops the World Happiness Report rankings of life satisfaction, while the U.S. ranks only 19th. In 2019, life expectancy in the EU was 81.1 years, compared to 78.8 years in the U.S. (which had a higher life expectancy than the EU in 1980). As of 2019, the share of the richest 1% of households in national income was around 11% in Western Europe, compared with 18.8% in the U.S. In 2019, the U.S. emitted 16.1 tons of carbon dioxide per person, compared with 8.3 tons of CO2 per person in the EU.

In short, the U.S. has become a country of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich, with no political responsibility for the climate damage it is imposing on the rest of the world. The resulting social cleavages have led to an epidemic of deaths of despair (including drug overdoses and suicides), declining life expectancy (even before COVID-19), and rising rates of depression, especially among young people. Politically, these derangements have led in varied directions—most ominously, to Trump, who offered faux populism and a cult of personality. Serving the rich while distracting the poor with xenophobia, culture wars, and a strongman’s pose may be the oldest trick in the demagogue’s playbook, but it still plays surprisingly well.

Powerful Headwinds

This is the situation that Biden is trying to address, but his successes so far have been limited and fragile. The simple fact is that all congressional Republicans and a small but decisive group of Democrats (most notoriously Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona) are intent on blocking any meaningful increase in taxes on the rich and U.S. corporations, thereby preventing the growth in federal revenues urgently needed to create a fairer and greener society. They are also blocking decisive action on climate change. Thus, we are arriving at the end of Biden’s first year with the rich still entrenched in power, and with obstacles in every direction regarding fair taxation, increased social spending, protection of voting rights, and urgently needed environmental safeguards. Biden could still eke out some modest wins, and then build on them in the coming years. The public wants this. Roughly two-thirds of Americans favor higher taxes on the rich and corporations. Yet there is a real possibility that Biden’s setbacks in 2021 will help the Republicans win control of one or both chambers of Congress in 2022. That would put an end to legislative reforms until at least 2025, and could even presage the return of Trump to power in the 2024 presidential election amid social disarray, violence, media propaganda, and voter suppression in Republican-controlled states.

America’s turmoil has disturbing international implications. The U.S. cannot lead global reforms when it cannot even govern itself coherently. Perhaps the only thing that unites Americans nowadays is an overwrought sense of threats from abroad, mainly from China. With America in domestic disarray, politicians of both parties have escalated their anti-China rhetoric, as if a new Cold War could somehow soothe America’s homegrown angst. The only thing that Washington’s bipartisan belligerence will produce, alas, is more global tension and new dangers of conflict (over Taiwan, for example), not security or real solutions to any of our urgent global problems.

The U.S. is not back, at least not yet. It is still in the throes of a struggle to overcome decades of political corruption and social neglect. The outcome remains highly uncertain, and the outlook for the coming years is fraught with peril for both the U.S. and the world.

The Need For Public Housing

Posted on November 12, 2021

Origins of Public Housing in the United States

Amidst widespread poverty and unemployment of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt embarked on a mission to integrate publicly built affordable housing into his economic recovery plan, the New Deal. One of the most impactful elements of the New Deal was the Public Works Administration, an unprecedented mobilization of public resources to provide jobs and critical infrastructure to the American people and pull the nation out of a crippling depression. One of the longest lasting legacies of the PWA still stands today— public housing.

Throughout the course of the New Deal, the PWA provided over $6 billion, roughly $126.6 billion today, in funding for infrastructure projects including public housing, allowing public housing developments to expand across the country. The federal government aided municipal and state governments to form housing authorities tasked with building, administering, and maintaining the nation’s public housing stock, with nearly one million units still in existence today.  A third of our nation’s public housing stock is in just ten of the country’s major cities including New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Miami. Though wildly successful at building affordable units for over a million Americans, the legacy of public housing lives under the long shadow of America’s racial segregation with many developments housing separated and segregated communities.

In 1937, legislation was enacted placing price caps on government expenditures per unit, leading to the decline in quality of public housing as well as middle class residents in public housing.

 

A Promise Betrayed

Following World War II, Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry Truman changed course, re-orienting the government’s housing policy from mass subsidization of public housing to the controversial urban renewal program, a public-private partnership in which the government cleared blighted neighborhoods to pave the way for private developers to build homes and start businesses. Throughout the course of urban renewal, only one home was built for every four that were razed, marking an era of mass displacement and privatization. Moreover, the growing stigmatization of public housing as concentrated pockets of poverty led to a backlash, with states such as California enacting legislation to block further public housing development.

 

 

In 1965, the Housing and Urban Development Act was passed, creating the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which administers the country’s public housing and funding for affordable housing. The HUD Act introduced the first rental subsidy program funded by the federal government, marking a major policy shift with the government shifting the responsibility of affordable housing production and maintenance on private developers and landlords.

The rental subsidy program was enshrined as the central policy to boost housing affordability with the creation of the Section 8 housing choice vouchers in 1974, with Section 8 recipients paying 30% of their income toward rent and HUD vouchers paying for the difference between the market rate and tenants’ income-capped rent. Yet the market-based solution has allowed patterns of segregation as landlords discriminatorily refuse Section 8 vouchers to prevent lower-income residents, particularly people of color, to move into historically exclusionary neighborhoods.

Three years later, the Housing Act of 1968 banned high rise public housing development and accelerated white flight by reallocating funding to subsidize the purchase of single family homes outside the urban core, placing a larger share of maintenance on cities and states rather than the federal government. In doing so, America’s public housing system entered a constant cycle of disinvestment— rents collected from tenants were insufficient to properly fund the maintenance of our public housing buildings and most of our public housing stock fell into disrepair.

In 1973, Nixon ordered a moratorium on federal [1][2]aid for housing and community development. The subsequent three administrations, Reagan, Bush and Clinton, slashed HUD’s public housing funding by over 50%.

 

Successful Public Housing Models

Meanwhile, there are successful public housing models in cities and countries around the world, most notably Vienna, Austria and Singapore.

 

 

The city of Vienna is home to 220,000 units of publicly owned housing, roughly 25% of the city’s overall market.  In addition, the city has permitted private developers to build 200,000 units on publicly owned land, negotiating terms to ensure price controls and affordability requirements.1  Close to 60% of its residents live in public housing and units are capped at 20-25% of a resident’s income.  For over a century, Vienna has led and expanded its public housing portfolio with strong public support. In contrast to the United States where there is rigid means testing for subsidized housing, Viennese public housing units permit residents to stay in their units even if their income grows above the unit’s intended threshold allowing families to establish roots in a mixed income community with a stable and affordable home.

 

 

Singapore is another well cited example of public housing. Though different from the American and Austrian models, Singapore houses 82% of its population in public housing built by the Housing Development Board (HDB). In addition, approximately 90% of HDB residents own their apartments, allowing virtually all Singaporean residents an accessible and affordable path to homeownership.

 

Where Do We Go Now?

America is facing a devastating affordable housing crisis, with record rates of homelessness. The importance of maintaining existing and constructing new public housing units is re-entering the public policy discourse again.

There are over two million Americans living in public housing– 70% are people of color, 16% are seniors and 36% are disabled people. There are millions more who qualify for public housing units but are unable to secure a home due to shortage of units and lack of resources and support to navigate the system.  Housing experts agree that a deep investment in maintenance and construction of public housing units will not only make a significant impact on addressing our national homelessness crisis but spur economic growth by providing financial stability and security to millions of American households.

 

 

First, we must adequately fund local and state housing authorities to adequately maintain and retrofit our existing public housing stock.  Cities are at risk of continuing to lose precious units of our affordable housing to disrepair, mismanagement and neglect. In 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal for Public Housing bill, which would provide a historic $180 billion to both repair and sustainably retrofit our 950,000 public housing units nationwide over the next ten years.  This bill would create up to 240,000 union jobs per year while reducing our annual carbon emissions by roughly 5.6 million metric tons, the equivalent of taking over 1.2 million cars off the road.

Second, we must invest in public housing neighborhoods to improve conditions surrounding public housing and improve services on-site to improve safety, wellness and resiliency of residents.

Third, we can fund the replacement of public housing units lost in the past, under the Faircloth Act limit, growing the existing supply of affordable homes in our nation.

As the shortage of affordable housing units continues to worsen every year, reaching a deficit of 5.2 million units this year, it’s clear that market-based solutions alone have not built the housing needed by millions of Americans.  Reinvesting in public housing is a part of the solution and should be a part of our strategy in housing every American.

 

To learn more about public housing in America and abroad, visit these resources:

https://berniesanders.com/issues/housing-all/

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/21/bernie-aoc-public-housing-plan-484013

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/10/schumer-billions-new-york-public-housing-520519

 

American Public Housing:

Goetz, Edward. “Gentrification in Black and White: The Racial Impact of Public Housing Demolition in American Cities.” Urban Studies 48, no. 8 (2011): 1581–1604. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43081801.

Ruechel, Frank. “New Deal Public Housing, Urban Poverty, and Jim Crow: Techwood and University Homes in Atlanta.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (1997): 915–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40550189.

Bloom, Nicholas Dagen. “Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century.” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/section-8-is-failing/396650/

https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america

https://time.com/5826392/coronavirus-housing-history/

 

Vienna Public Housing:

“Housing as a basic human right:” The Vienna Model of Social Housing

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_article_011314.html

https://charterforcompassion.org/shareable-community-ideas/public-housing-works-lessons-from-vienna-and-singapore

 

Singaporean Public Housing:

https://www.economist.com/asia/2017/07/06/why-80-of-singaporeans-live-in-government-built-flats

Eng, Teo Siew, and Lily Kong. “Public Housing in Singapore: Interpreting ‘Quality’ in the 1990s.” Urban Studies 34, no. 3 (1997): 441–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43083375.

Yuen, Belinda. “Reinventing Highrise Housing in Singapore.” Cityscape 11, no. 1 (2009): 3–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20868687

Wealth Inequality Eating This Country Alive

Posted on November 6, 2021

Elon Musk’s wealth has surpassed $200 billion. It would take the median U.S. worker over 4 million years to make that much.

Wealth inequality is eating this country alive. We’re now in America’s second Gilded Age, just like the late 19th century when a handful of robber barons monopolized the economy, kept wages down, and bribed lawmakers.

While today’s robber barons take joy rides into space, the distance between their gargantuan wealth and the financial struggles of working Americans has never been clearer. During the first 19 months of the pandemic, U.S. billionaires added $2.1 trillion dollars to their collective wealth and that number continues to rise.

And the rich have enough political power to cut their taxes to almost nothing — sometimes literally nothing. In fact, Jeff Bezos paid no federal income taxes in 2007 or in 2011. By 2018, the 400 richest Americans paid a lower overall tax rate than almost anyone else.

But we can not solve this problem unless we know how it was created in the first place.

The Basics

Wealth inequality in America is far larger than income inequality.

Income is what you earn each week or month or year. Wealth refers to the sum total of your assets — your car, your stocks and bonds, your home, art — anything else you own that’s valuable.Valuable not only because there’s a market for it — a price other people are willing to pay to buy it — but because wealth itself grows.

As the population expands and the nation becomes more productive, the overall economy continues to expand. This expansion pushes up the values of stocks, bonds, rental property, homes, and most other assets. Of course recessions and occasional depressions can reduce the value of such assets. But over the long haul, the value of almost all wealth increases.

Lesson: Wealth compounds over time.

Next: personal wealth comes from two sources.The first source is the income you earn but don’t spend. That’s your savings. When you invest those savings in stocks, bonds, or real property or other assets, you create your personal wealth —  which, as we’ve seen, grows over time.

The second source of personal wealth is whatever is handed down to you from your parents, grandparents, and maybe even generations before them — in other words, what you inherit.

Lesson: Personal wealth comes from your savings and/or your inheritance.

Why the wealth gap is exploding

The wealth gap between the richest Americans and everyone else is staggering.

In the 1970s, the wealthiest 1 percent owned about 20 percent of the nation’s total household wealth. Now, they own over 35 percent.

Much of their gains over the last 40 years have come from a dramatic increase in the value of shares of stock.

For example, if someone invested $1,000 in 1978 in a broad index of stocks — say, the S&P 500 — they would have $31,823 today, adjusted for inflation.

Who has benefited from this surge? The richest 1 percent, who now own half of the entire stock market. But the typical worker’s wages have barely grown.

Most Americans haven’t earned enough to save anything. Before the pandemic, when the economy appeared to be doing well, almost 80 percent were living paycheck to paycheck.

Lesson: Most Americans don’t make enough to save money and build wealth.

So as income inequality has widened, the amount that the few high-earning households save — their wealth — has continued to grow. Their growing wealth has allowed them to pass on more and more wealth to their heirs.

Take, for example, the Waltons — the family behind the Walmart empire — which has seven heirs on the Forbes billionaires list. Their children, and other rich millennials, will soon consolidate even more of the nation’s wealth. America is now on the cusp of the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history. As wealthy boomers pass on, somewhere between $30 to $70 trillion will go to their children over the next three decades.

These children will be able to live off of this wealth, and then leave the bulk of it — which will continue growing — to their own children … tax-free. After a few generations of this, almost all of America’s wealth could be in the hands of a few thousand families.

Lesson: Dynastic wealth continues to grow.

Why wealth concentration is a problem

Concentrated wealth is already endangering our democracy. Wealth doesn’t just beget more wealth — it begets more power.

Dynastic wealth concentrates power into the hands of fewer and fewer people, who can choose what nonprofits and charities to support and which politicians to bankroll. This gives an unelected elite enormous sway over both our economy and our democracy.

If this keeps up, we’ll come to resemble the kind of dynasties common to European aristocracies in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

Dynastic wealth makes a mockery of the idea that America is a meritocracy, where anyone can make it on the basis of their own efforts. It also runs counter to the basic economic ideas that people earn what they’re worth in the market, and that economic gains should go to those who deserve them.

Finally, wealth concentration magnifies gender and race disparities because women and people of color tend to make  less, save less, and inherit less.

The typical single woman owns only 32 cents of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by a man. The pandemic likely increased this gap.

The racial wealth gap is even starker. The typical Black household owns just 13 cents of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by the typical white household. The pandemic likely increased this gap, too.

In all these ways, dynastic wealth creates a self-perpetuating aristocracy that runs counter to the ideals we claim to live by.

Lesson: Dynastic wealth creates a self-perpetuating aristocracy.

 

 

How America dealt with wealth inequality during the First Gilded Age

The last time America faced anything comparable to the concentration of wealth we face today was at the turn of the 20th century. That was when President Teddy Roosevelt warned that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power” could destroy American democracy.

Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. Congress enacted two kinds of wealth taxes. The first, in 1916, was the estate tax — a tax on the wealth someone has accumulated during their lifetime, paid by the heirs who inherit that wealth.

The second tax on wealth, enacted in 1922, was a capital gains tax — a tax on the increased value of assets, paid when those assets are sold.

Lesson: The estate tax and the capital gains tax were created to curb wealth concentration.

But both of these wealth taxes have shrunk since then, or become so riddled with loopholes that they haven’t been able to prevent a new American aristocracy from emerging.

The Trump Republican tax cut enabled individuals to exclude $11.18 million from their estate taxes. That means one couple can pass on more than $22 million to their kids tax-free. Not to mention the very rich often find ways around this tax entirely. As Trump’s former White House National Economic Council director Gary Cohn put it, “only morons pay the estate tax.”

What about capital gains on the soaring values of wealthy people’s stocks, bonds, mansions, and works of art? Here, the biggest loophole is something called the “stepped-up basis.” If the wealthy hold on to these assets until they die, their heirs inherit them without paying any capital gains taxes whatsoever. All the increased value of those assets is simply erased, for tax purposes. This loophole saves heirs an estimated $40 billion a year.

This means that huge accumulations of wealth in the hands of a relatively few households can be passed from generation to generation untaxed — growing along the way — generating comfortable incomes for rich descendants who will never have to work a day of their lives. That’s the dynastic class we’re creating right now.

Lesson: The estate tax and the capital gains tax have been gutted.

Why have these two wealth taxes eroded? Because, as America’s wealth has concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the wealthy have more capacity to donate to political campaigns and public relations — and they’ve used that political power to reduce their taxes. It’s exactly what Teddy Roosevelt feared so many years ago.

How to reduce the wealth gap

So what do we do? Follow the wisdom of Teddy Roosevelt and tax great accumulations of wealth.

The ultra-rich have benefited from the American system — from laws that protect their wealth, and our economy that enabled them to build their fortunes in the first place. They should pay their fair share.

The majority of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, believe the ultra rich should pay higher taxes. There are many ways to make them do so: closing the stepped up basis loophole, raising the capital gains tax, and fully funding the Internal Revenue Service so it can properly audit the wealthiest taxpayers, for starters.

Beyond those fixes, we need a new wealth tax: a tax of just 2 percent a year on wealth in excess of $1 million. That’s hardly a drop in the bucket for centi-billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, but would generate plenty of revenue to invest in healthcare and education so that millions of Americans have a fair shot at making it.

One of the most important things you as an individual can do is take the time to understand the realities of wealth inequality in America and how the system has become rigged in favor of those at the top — and demand your political representatives take action to unrig it.

Community Land Trusts, Then And Now

Posted on November 2, 2021

A community land trust (CLT) is a dynamic model of affordable housing and community development that has taken many different forms over the years. What is typical of nearly every CLT, however, is a nonprofit corporation that does community-led development on community-owned land. Importantly, whatever is built on that land, especially housing produced with the assistance of private donations or public subsidies, is kept permanently affordable for people of modest means.

 

Origins and Growth of the Community Land Trust

Fifty years ago, African-Americans fighting for political and economic equality in the South established New Communities Inc., now viewed as having been the first CLT in the United States. Among its founders were Freedom Riders, voting rights activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, leaders of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and members of the Albany Movement who had led the struggle to overturn racial apartheid in southwest Georgia.

These Civil Rights activists regarded the protests they were organizing against Jim Crow and voter suppression as being the first step in a larger campaign. As Gandhi had described his own campaign against British rule in India, it was important for a “protest movement” to be complemented by a “constructive movement” if the gains of political struggle were to be consolidated. New Communities represented a collective, “constructive” effort to extend the struggle for political rights into the realm of economic rights and residential security.

Founded in 1969, New Communities Inc. acquired nearly 6,000 acres of farmland and forests near Albany, Georgia the following year – at the time, the largest landholding by African-Americans in the United States. They conceived of a new way of owning and developing this rural acreage. Drawing upon examples of planned settlements on community-owned land in other countries – including the Garden Cities in England, Gramdan villages in India, ejidos in Mexico, moshavim in Israel, and Ujamaa Vijijini in Tanzania – the founders of New Communities proposed a new model of land tenure for America. They called their experiment a “community land trust.” It had three components:

  • The land was to be collectively owned by a nonprofit corporation – and never resold.
  • The nonprofit landowner (i.e., the CLT) was to be democratically governed by a membership living on and around the land.
  • Houses and other buildings were to be individually owned by families, cooperatives, or small businesses, each owner holding a deed for the structure and a long-term ground lease for the underlying land.

Inspired by New Communities, CLTs began springing up across the country. By the start of the  Millennium, their number had reached one hundred. Significantly, most of them were in urban areas – including the one started by the administration of Mayor Bernie Sanders in Burlington, Vermont. A model seeded in a rural area of southwest Georgia found ready acceptance among residents of urban neighborhoods, cities, and towns. In hot real estate markets, CLTs were organized as a bulwark against the displacement of low-income households. In cold real estate markets, CLTs were organized to assemble vacant land, to rehabilitate dilapidated buildings, and to construct new housing.

This rising generation of urban CLTs applied the model in novel ways. Like their rural counterparts, many focused on developing single-family, owner-occupied housing on community-owned land. But urban CLTs were soon branching out to include limited-equity condominiums, limited-equity cooperatives, and multi-family rentals. They also sponsored nonresidential land uses like community gardens, day care centers, community centers, and office space for other nonprofit organizations.

The spread of CLTs into more urban settings, where housing costs tended to increase much faster than household incomes, led CLT advocates in the 1980s to emphasize stewardship as a defining operational feature of the model pioneered at New Communities. A CLT would not only be the owner and lessor of lands scattered throughout a neighborhood, city, or town; it would also be the watchful steward of affordable housing and other buildings erected on its land.

What this meant in practice, then and now, is that a CLT stands behind the housing (and other buildings) it has delivered into the hands of people of modest means. It is committed to preserving the affordability of that housing; promoting the sound upkeep of that housing; and preventing foreclosures, evictions, and other threats to a homeowner’s or renter’s security of tenure. This three-fold commitment to affordability, quality, and security is long-lasting. As the former director of a CLT in Albuquerque once put it: “We are the developer that doesn’t go away.”

 

A Community Land Trust for Burlington, Vermont

The Burlington Community Land Trust, today named the Champlain Housing Trust (CHT), was started in 1984 with a substantial grant and technical assistance from the City of Burlington. It was the first CLT in the United States to be initiated by a municipality. It was also the first to be deeply embedded in municipal policy as a priority recipient of public funding for the production and preservation of affordable housing.

Bernie Sanders was in his second term as the mayor of Vermont’s largest city when members of his administration pitched a new idea for tackling the city’s chronic shortage of affordable housing. Progressives in city government had already moved aggressively to revitalize Burlington’s public housing. They had enacted ordinances protecting tenants against racial discrimination, excessive security deposits, and condominium conversions. They had begun organizing to save the largest subsidized rental project in the state, Northgate Apartments. What Burlington lacked, however, was a nonprofit organization that could partner with the municipality to expand homeownership for working people who were being priced out of the city’s overheated real estate market.

The CLT’s potential for bringing homeownership within the reach of low-income and moderate-income families appealed to Mayor Sanders. He also liked the idea that a CLT’s land would be forever removed from the marketplace, owned and managed as a community asset. And he liked the organizational structure adopted by most CLTs, one that featured a broad-based membership and a three-part board, representing a diversity of community interests.

He initially worried, however, that preserving affordability might come at the expense of the opportunity for low-income homeowners to build a financial nest egg for the future. But he was persuaded by his allies on the City Council and by his own staff in City Hall that the proposed CLT would truly benefit “the little guy.” Homeowners would, in fact, be able to earn a fair return on their investment when reselling CLT homes, even as the price of those homes was kept affordable for the next round of low-income homebuyers. He became a vocal champion of CLTs and a forceful advocate for the fiscally responsible policy of retaining the affordability of housing assisted with public dollars. When later elected to Congress, he inserted a definition of the “community land trust” into federal law that made CLTs eligible for funding from a variety of federal programs.

Today, the Champlain Housing Trust has grown to become the largest CLT in the United States with over 3000 units of housing. This portfolio includes houses, condominiums, cooperatives, multi-family rentals, supportive housing for persons with special needs, and short-term housing for the homeless. CHT also owns and operates over 160,000 square feet of nonresidential space, including a pocket park, a food shelf, a multi-generational center, and a former elementary school, now converted into a neighborhood center for sports, cultural activities, and social services. All of this housing, as well as all of CHT’s nonresidential buildings, will remain accessible to people of modest means – forever.

Burlington’s community land trust has received a number of national and international awards for its trailblazing work. One of the most prestigious was the United Nations World Habitat Award, received by the Champlain Housing Trust in 2008 for “exemplary local efforts to improve housing and services for low-income people in the community.” The following year, because of winning that Award, CHT hosted an “international study visit” for participants from thirteen countries. This peer-to-peer exchange helped to hasten the global dissemination of the CLT model, when several participants returned home after seeing what CHT had accomplished and started CLTs of their own.

 

The City-CLT Partnership

Many cities today where the most productive CLTs are to be found have followed the Burlington blueprint. City officials have made permanent affordability a priority condition for investing public dollars or using public powers to subsidize housing for low-income or moderate-income households. Then, recognizing a CLT’s particular ability to lock those subsidies in place, thereby ensuring that publicly assisted homes will remain affordable year after year, those cities have made CLTs a priority recipient of municipal largess.

As in Burlington, cities have supported CLT development in a variety of ways. They have provided project funding to expand the CLT’s holdings, as well as operational funding to support the CLT’s stewardship of land and housing. They have transferred publicly owned lands to a CLT, as is currently happening in Houston, Texas where a municipal land bank is partnering with a CLT to rebuild an African-American neighborhood devastated by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Other cities have used municipal mandates like inclusionary zoning or municipal incentives like density bonuses, parking waivers, tax abatements, and targeted disbursements from municipal (or state) housing trust funds to move affordably priced housing produced by private developers into the hands of a local CLT for safekeeping.

What all of these places have in common are farsighted policymakers who have come to realize that the best way to make progress in solving the many housing problems that are theirs is to invest in homes that last. By partnering with a CLT, a city commits itself to protecting forever the affordability, quality, and security of whatever housing the municipality itself has helped to create. This is a policy both fiscally conservative and politically progressive, a hallmark of many of the policies, programs, and partnerships brought into being when Bernie Sanders was Burlington’s mayor.

 

Community Land Trusts Go Global

CLTs have continued to proliferate and to spread across the United States, currently numbering close to 300. There are sometimes multiple CLTs operating within the same city, as is the case in Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, and Philadelphia, where separate CLTs serve different neighborhoods. By contrast, there are cities like Atlanta, Denver, Durham, Houston, Minneapolis, and Oakland that have one or two CLTs serving a large metropolitan area. CLTs are also found in smaller cities, college towns, coastal islands, and inner-ring suburbs.

Over the last decade, the number of CLTs taking root outside the USA has also grown. There are now robust community land trust movements in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom. Interest has also been rising in Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scotland, and Spain.

Most CLT development to date has occurred in the Global North, but seeds for new CLTs are now being scattered across the Global South as well. The Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust in Puerto Rico has led the way, demonstrating how a CLT can be used to secure the homes of hundreds of families residing in seven informal settlements in San Juan. This has attracted the attention of communities struggling with similar issues of land and housing insecurity throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, ranging from urban residents of Brazil’s favelas to indigenous peoples in remote, rural regions. Activists in Asia and Africa have taken note, as well, weighing whether a CLT might be used to promote equitable and sustainable development in their own communities.

The United Nations has estimated that, throughout the world, over a billion people are currently living in informal settlements or using lands for homesteading, grazing, or farming without holding formal title to them. They are at constant risk of being uprooted from lands they have occupied for many years. Within such areas, some urban and some rural, the CLT may find fertile ground for future growth.

 

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT COMMUNITY LAND TRUSTS

 

Community Land Trusts: Features and Rationale

Can this innovative housing model help solve California’s affordable housing crisis?

Axel-Lute, Miriam. 2021.  Understanding community land trusts. Shelterforce (July 12).

Davis, John Emmeus. 2020. In land we trust: key features and common variations of community land trusts in the United States. Chapter 1 in J.E. Davis, Line Algoed, and Maria E. Hernandez-Torrales (eds.). On common ground: international perspectives on the community land trust. Madison, WI: Terra Nostra Press.

Common ground: Community-owned land as a platform for equitable and sustainable development. University of San Francisco Law Journal 51 (issue 1).

Grounded Solutions Network. 2019. Community Land Trusts Explained.

King, Steve. 2020. Making the case for CLTs in all markets, even cold ones. Chapter 4 in J.E. Davis, Line Algoed, and Maria E. Hernandez-Torrales (eds.). On common ground: international perspectives on the community land trust. Madison, WI: Terra Nostra Press.

 

Origins of the Modern Community Land Trust

Arc of Justice: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of a Beloved Community. Documentary film co-produced by Helen Cohen, Mark Lipman, and John Davis.

Davis, John Emmeus. 2010. Origins and evolution of the community land trust in the United States. The community land trust reader. John Emmeus Davis (ed.). Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lim, Audrea. 2020. We shall not be moved. Collective ownership gives power back to poor farmers. Harper’s Magazine(July).

Roots & Branches: A Gardener’s Guide to the Origins and Evolution of the Community Land Trust.

 

Burlington Community Land Trust/Champlain Housing Trust

Axel-Lute, Miriam and Jake Blumgart. 2021. Champlain Housing Trust: breadth and depth, how the largest community land trust in the U.S. scaled up. Shelterforce (July 19).

Blumgart, Jake. 2016. How Bernie Sanders made Burlington affordable. Slate (January 19).

Davis, John Emmeus and Alice Stokes. 2009. Lands in trust, homes that last: a performance evaluation of the Champlain Housing Trust. Burlington, VT: Champlain Housing Trust.

Building the progressive city: third sector housing in Burlington. The affordable city: Toward a third sector housing policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Sanders, Bernie. 2012. Acceptance speech on receiving the Swann-Matthei Award at the National Community Land Trust Conference, hosted by the National CLT Network and the Champlain Housing Trust.

Torpy, Brenda. 2020. The best things in life are perpetually affordable: the story of the Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont. Chapter 18 in J.E. Davis, Line Algoed, and Maria E. Hernandez-Torrales (eds.). On common ground: international perspectives on the community land trust. Madison, WI: Terra Nostra Press.

 

Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust

Algoed, Line, María E. Hernández-Torrales, Lyvia Rodriguez Del Valle, and Karla Torres Sueiro. 2020. Seeding the CLT in Latin America and the Caribbean: origins, achievements, and the proof-of-concept example of the Caño Martin Pena CLT. Chapter 11 in J.E. Davis, Line Algoed, and Maria E. Hernandez-Torrales (eds.). On common ground: international perspectives on the community land trust. Madison, WI: Terra Nostra Press.

Leon, Hortense. 2019. Community land trusts in the age of climate change. Shelterforce.

World Habitat. 2015. Press release and 7-minute video announcing the Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust as winner of the 2015 World Habitat Award.

Beyond Burlington: Community Land Trusts in Other U.S. Cities

Abello, Oscar Perry. 2021. An unusual community land trust in Colorado is making its mark. Next City (August 10).

Axel-Lute, Miriam. 2017.  New York City becomes a hotbed of community land trust innovation. Shelterforce Weekly, November 7.

Binkovitz, Leah. 2018. In Houston, a radical approach to affordable housing. Kinder Institute for Urban Research, Rice University.

Childers, Linda. 2021. First a park, then a citywide land trust in D.C. Shelterforce. (July 13).

Durham’s community land trust allows generations of families to continue living in their hometown. Shelterforce. (July 27).

Davis, John Emmeus and Rick Jacobus. 2008. The city-CLT partnership: municipal support for community land trusts.Policy Focus Report. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Pickett, Tony and Emily Thaden. 2020. Combining scale and community control to advance mixed-income neighborhoods. Chapter one in Impactful development and community empowerment: balancing the dual goals of a global CLT movement. J.E. Davis, L. Algoed, and M. E. Hernandez-Torrales (eds.). [A Common Ground Monograph] Madison, WI: Terra Nostra Press.

Smith, Harry and Tony Hernandez. 2020. Take a stand, own the land: profile of Dudley Neighbors Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts. Chapter 16 in J.E. Davis, Line Algoed, and Maria E. Hernandez-Torrales (eds.). On common ground: international perspectives on the community land trust. Madison, WI: Terra Nostra Press.

 

Growth of the International CLT Movement

Bettini, Fabiana. 2017. The rise of community land trusts in Europe. The Urban Media Lab (September 6).

Bunce, Susannah and Joshua Brandt. 2020. Origins and evolution of community land trusts in Canada. Chapter 7 in J.E. Davis, Line Algoed, and Maria E. Hernandez-Torrales (eds.). On common ground: international perspectives on the community land trust. Madison, WI: Terra Nostra Press.

Davis, John Emmeus, Line Algoed, and Maria E. Hernandez-Torrales (eds.). 2020. On common ground: international perspectives on the community land trust. Madison, WI: Terra Nostra Press.

De Pauw, Geert and Joaquin de Santos. 2020. Beyond England: origins and evolution of the CLT movement in Europe. Chapter 9 in J.E. Davis, Line Algoed, and Maria E. Hernandez-Torrales (eds.). On common ground: international perspectives on the community land trust. Madison, WI: Terra Nostra Press.

Hill, Steven, Catherine Harrington, and Tom Archer. 2020. Messy is good: origins and evolution of the CLT movement in England. Chapter 8 in J.E. Davis, Line Algoed, and Maria E. Hernandez-Torrales (eds.). On common ground: international perspectives on the community land trust. Madison, WI: Terra Nostra Press.

Smith, David. 2020. The London Community Land Trust: a story of people, power and perseverance. Chapter 20 in J.E. Davis, Line Algoed, and Maria E. Hernandez-Torrales (eds.). On common ground: international perspectives on the community land trust. Madison, WI: Terra Nostra Press.

Williamson, Theresa D. 2019. The favela community land trust: A sustainable housing model for the global south. Critical care: architecture and urbanism for a broken planet. Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny (eds.). Cambridge: MIT Press.

 

WEBSITES OFFERING FREE CLT RESOURCES

Center for Community Land Trust Innovation (RESOURCES)

Equity Trust

Grounded Solutions Network (RESOURCE LIBERARY)

Schumacher Center for a New Economics

Terra Nostra Press

The Movement To Take Money Away From Fossil Fuels Is Working

Posted on October 27, 2021

I remember the night in the autumn of 2012 when the first institution in the U.S. publicly committed to divest from fossil fuel. I was with a group of other climate activists in a big theater in Portland, Maine, halfway through a monthlong road show with rallies in cities across the country, and the president of tiny Unity College in the state’s rural interior announced to the crowd that his trustees had just voted to rid their endowment of coal, gas and oil stocks. We cheered like crazy.

On Tuesday, a little less than a week before the start of the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, activists announced that the fossil fuel divestment campaign has reached new heights. Endowments, portfolios and pension funds worth just shy of $40 trillion have now committed to full or partial abstinence from coal, gas and oil stocks. For comparison’s sake, that’s larger than the gross domestic product of the United States and China combined.

It’s gone far beyond Unity College. Institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge (and more than half the public universities in the United Kingdom) have committed to divest; so have the University of California and the University of Michigan. Most of the Ivies are on board now, as are Catholic powerhouses like Georgetown; in the last couple of months, places as diverse as Harvard, Loyola University Chicago and Oregon’s Reed College have joined in.

My own employer, Middlebury College, agreed to divest in 2019, following a six-year campaign by students and faculty. But many schools have yet to act. The very first college to face divestment demands — Swarthmore, in Pennsylvania — has yet to make the commitment, and the same is true of plenty of others who should know better (Yale and Princeton, say).

And by this point, divestment has spread way beyond colleges and universities. Enormous pension funds serving New York City and state employees have announced that they will sell stocks; earlier this year, the Maine legislature ordered the state’s retirement fund to divest; and just last month, Quebec’s big pension fund joined the tide. We’ve seen entire religious groups — the Episcopalians, the Unitarian Universalists, the U.S. Lutherans — join in the call; the pope has become an outspoken proponent (and many high-profile Catholic institutions have announced they will divest). Mayors of big cities have pledged their support, including Los Angeles, New York, Berlin and London. And an entire country, even: Ireland has announced it will divest its public funds.

And some of the most historically important investors in the world have joined in too: A Rockefeller charity, the heirs to the first great oil fortune, divested early. Just last week, the Ford Foundation got in on the action, adding a great automotive fortune to the tally. This month also saw the first big bank — France’s Banque Postale — announce that it would stop lending to fossil fuel companies before the decade was out.

Since most people don’t have oil wells or coal mines in their backyards, divestment is a way to let a lot of people in on the climate fight, because they have a link to a pension fund, mutual fund, endowment or other pot of money. When we began the divestment campaign, our immediate goal was, as we put it, to “take away the social license” of Big Oil: It was a vehicle to let people know the essential truth about the fossil fuel industry, which is that its oil, gas and coal reserves held five times as much carbon as scientists said we could safely burn. Later this week, the heads of the big oil companies will testify before Congress about whether their companies misled the public about global warming and sought to stymie action on the problem.

The movement has grown so large that it’s now also testing the ability of some companies to raise capital. As early as 2017, Peabody was listing divestment as a major concern; by the next year, Shell was warning shareholders that the campaign could have a “material adverse effect on the price of our securities and our ability to access equity capital markets.”

Early divestment adopters have been handsomely rewarded; over the last five years, the market has gone up at an annual rate of 16 percent, but the oil and gas sector has fallen at an annual rate of 3 percent. Now many investors are putting their money into clean energy, where returns have risen by an annual rate of 22 percent over the same period. And one other sweet result: It was largely alumni of college divestment fights who formed the Sunrise Movement, a group of young climate activists, and championed the proposed Green New Deal; this has been a training ground for activists around the world.

This campaign still has a lot of work to do. Huge fights are underway in the teachers’ pension funds for New York and California; for financial giants like T.I.A.A., which maintains retirement accounts for educators and many others; and pretty much anywhere else where money and morality coincide. Yes, other people buy stocks when institutions divest, but, as The Times pointed out recently, it’s private equity funds that have invested at least $1.1 trillion into the energy sector since 2010, overwhelmingly in fossil fuels, trying to make a short-term killing.

The battle to wind down the fossil fuel industry proceeds on two tracks: the political (where this week may or may not see action on big climate legislation from Congress) and the financial. Those tracks cross regularly — the influence of money in politics is clear on energy legislation — and when we can weaken the biggest opponents of climate action, everything gets easier. Divestment has helped rub much of the shine off what was once the planet’s dominant industry. If money talks, $40 trillion makes a lot of noise.