“We want a home near the really good schools . . . ” That simple statement, expressed by parents and parents-to-be every day, reveals many things about what we face today.
Education and real estate may seem like separate topics, but are instead inextricably linked for many reasons. Today, we’re told that problems of education and housing are either simply a natural product of growth and change to be meekly accepted, or that they are the fault of teachers, parents, immigrants, drug addicts, progressive politicians and the criminal element they supposedly “coddle”, or poor people in general. These are lies.
People of the community didn’t raise the rents, cut the wages and jobs, jack up healthcare, food, energy, and all other prices, and cut taxes on the billionaires and the corporations that made them billionaires – investment companies, banks, and corporate backed politicians did. The people didn’t put every city, county, and state government into deep debt, investment banks did. Most of the unhoused people in Oakland, where I live, are from Oakland; they had homes here, and were evicted from them.
For most people, schools are the center of a community; they represent the growth, the health, and the continuity of any community, because education is how a society shares and inherits its knowledge and prepares its young to create and share new knowledge. Having a great local school, within walking distance, means children and families can develop deep relationships throughout the community – kids walk to school, make friends at school who they play with after school, either at the campus or in the neighborhood; parents walk to school & community meetings at their local school. It’s how people learn to be the best possible version of themselves. At least, that’s what it means to you and me.
To Business, public education has been central to their need for skilled, educated workers. In fact, public education was created to guarantee a large, productive workforce for the new industrial economy of the 19th Century, and continually developed up through the 1960s in the United States; the California Master Plan of 1960 is a prime example, representing the corporate and government need for millions of highly skilled management and production workers. In an economy that needed millions of skilled workers of many kinds, that also required real estate, food, and other prices in line with workers’ incomes, to reproduce that labor; i.e., keep them coming to work and prepare their children to come to work.
Well, that’s how it used to be. The needs of the community and those of business aligned to a certain extent in the old economy, where millions of workers were needed to produce goods and services. School was regimented to teach obedience, but it also performed its community functions. The old “Trickle Down Theory” , “a rising tide lifts all boats”, means it’s okay if rich people get richer because they will create jobs that let workers live decent lives.
Not anymore; this is the New Economy. Now, a tsunami of wealth sinks the rest of us.
In the new economy, the workplaces that once were full of people are now highly automated and in low-wage locations; the workers who made livable wages in the local factories and offices, wages that paid for home, food, water, college, healthcare, have never again achieved those income levels. Those who replaced them in the “new” digital working class are far fewer, and mostly come from higher income bracket families with access to high-end education leading into tech- and tech-related management or engineering jobs.
In the new economy, investment is mostly speculative – gambling – and much less about producing things people need. Real estate speculators are at the core of the tsunami, because they don’t need to provide housing for workers; high prices are great for real estate speculators. For them, housing is an investment opportunity whose value is increased every time it’s bought and sold. Its price can be raised throughout an entire community by holding housing off the market unoccupied, creating an artificial shortage of housing. Its price can be raised by selling it back and forth between investors and their LLCs (Limited Liability Corporations, legal bodies created to hide behind and shield investors from losses, lawsuits and public scrutiny), increasing its paper value as an asset. As well, converting existing housing into market rate or luxury housing creates a social demand for new construction of affordable or low-income housing (more assets!) because low-cost housing availability has been reduced. And you wondered why there’s a 9-year wait for subsidized housing in Oakland?
Therefore, with a lower need for skilled labor and a motive driven by profit, corporate interests lead the push to defund, close, or privatize our public schools, driving low-income folks out and turning schools into profit centers. So how do these corporate interests get away with this? If well-funded, functioning, beautiful schools create a reason to live in a neighborhood, non-functioning schools can help empty it. Defund the schools; change principals every year. Underpay the teachers and support staff so they get demoralized and quit. Cut the budget for nurses, librarians, and student mental health supports. Cut the maintenance budget so everything is broken and dirty. Use the district administration as a cash cow for consultants and extra administrators, all paid well over $150K; outsource functions like food preparation and construction to for-profit companies that take a hunk out of food funds for profits.
Give a gift to the Tech billionaires by buying their Chromebooks whose software dies after a few years, and/or let them insert their marketing messages into your curriculum via “donated” classroom software. Make it difficult to enroll in schools where investment wants to move in. Then, put the word through the reliable corporate news media out that these schools are too small, too run down, and need to be closed or consolidated so kids have to get across town to go to schools out of their own neighborhood. It all comes out of the children’s lives, the community’s life.
As if we need a more stark illustration, homelessness among OUSD (Oakland Unified School District) students increased by 70% since 2020 to 1,780, equal to between 3.5%-5% of OUSD students, and that figure relies on voluntary reporting; it is likely much higher, considering that a documented 15% of community college students nationwide suffer from homelessness. The new OUSD/OEA (Oakland Education Association – teachers’ union) contract features the needs of unhoused students as one of the main concerns addressed in its Common Good agreements, which the community forced into contract negotiations.
So… underfunding and closing schools is essential to making East and West Oakland available for real estate investment. Even the closed schools themselves are investment opportunities, whether reopened as charters or private schools to become profit centers in their own right, or sold for development as “classic public school styling in a new, luxury apartment complex” or to be torn down for a luxury high-rise. That, along with healthcare-induced bankruptcies, militarized policing and criminalization of entire low-income neighborhoods, increased evictions, and general neglect, are all basic tools in the Make Oakland Safe for Profitable Real Estate Investment Toolkit.
How can the community take back the vitality and viability of public schools? The 2020 and 2022 elections give some recognition that things are changing. Significant breaks in continuity, starting with the Oscar Grant murder and protests and then Occupy, and culminating in the 2019 Moms 4 Housing takeover, led to a progressive electoral victory that broke the working unity between the investment corporations and the city government.
The Moms 4 Housing outed the true nature of the investment vultures when their research showed that the sweetly-named Wedgewood Homes company is actually five companies-in-one, with a company dedicated to finding and foreclosing distressed mortgage properties in Oakland, then passing them on to their eviction company, and then to their auction-dominating company.
This is why we see the rapid rise of attacks on these new, progressive, politicians-for-the-people. The Right Wing isn’t just the rabid trolls and racist ideologues. They are funded and constantly propagandized by behind-the-scenes groups working for the big-money interests, or they would not be able to exist. The polite-seeming media articles and reports hinting that these new, progressive city and county officials just don’t seem capable of understanding the realities of how to run an effective government, are part of the same machinery of attack. Assertions that progressives are allowing crime to run amok in our city are also part of this integrated attack.
We need to develop a unified strategy, based on solidarity, that fights back against the attacks on the poor, working class, and the progressive elected officials that represent them. We’ve begun that process – that’s how the Progressive Slates won the last elections. Now the giant corporations are striking back, and we can’t delude ourselves that the battle for Oakland ended with our votes. That was only the beginning. Our strategy must expose and defeat their strategy, and the lies that hold up their strategy. A comprehensive strategy will include the economic forces at play and how we can see them operating within the community to achieve their aims. There is certainly racism afoot, but this is far beyond simple racism, so our solutions must recognize the development of a now multi-racial, multi-gendered oligarchic ruling class and its flunkeys.
We can win this – but we have to out-think the big money.
