I started the Facebook page Housing Justice Headlines in early 2019 as a way to aggregate and share all of the articles I was reading related to the housing crisis. As a public page, anyone can see what I post, so I expected to eventually get some angry comments about Sharia Law or building walls. I was not surprised then, when I got into a heated discussion with a commenter over a rather boring Newsweek article about AOC’s connecting student debt and low wages to young people’s inability to buy homes. The exchange was silly because most people accept that low wages and lots of debt are in fact barriers to buying a home. But one thing this person wrote really struck me – “It’s not a crisis, it’s an opportunity.” I couldn’t grasp it at first. “How could anyone regard displacement, eviction, and skyrocketing rents as anything other than a crisis with devastating effects on actual humans, families, and communities?” Corporations certainly make those kind of emotion-free calculations all the time, but how could some regular working guy with a cowboy hat celebrate his neighbor’s loss as his own gain? I eventually came across two items that helped me make sense of that comment. Continue reading ““It’s Not a Crisis, It’s an Opportunity”” →