UTC Points of Unity
3 min readJan 2, 2021
- Housing is a human right. Access to housing should be separated from a person or community’s ability to pay for it.
- We seek a world without landlords. The hierarchical relationship between landlords and renters is oppressive and extractive. We seek to abolish it and replace it with more democratic and non-extractive ways of organizing housing.
- We are anticapitalist, though we are a multi-tendency group. Capitalism compels landlords, developers, and lenders to exclusively accumulate and profit from what we believe should be a social good: housing. These capitalists wield the state to legislate in their interests, enforce their law, and protect their power and profits at the expense of the masses of housed and unhoused people. Capitalism must be toppled if housing is ever to be something other than a profit-making commodity for individual capitalists.
- We are antiracist. Housing in Charlotte is structurally white supremacist and anti-black. Since these lands were first seized by settlers, black and Indigenous peoples and communities of color have systematically been denied access to housing on equal terms as white people; property values are tied to how the majority of people living in a part of the city are racialized and are particularly tied to a community’s proximity to what whiteness has rendered as “blackness;” capitalist landlords, developers, and lenders intentionally target devalued property in neighborhoods of color for wealth extraction and super-profits; the city and state have directly supported the degradation of housing in communities racialized as nonwhite; and working class white communities have directly reproduced racialized housing relations in Charlotte through explicit support and/or passive toleration.
- We are anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist. The United States is a settler-colonial state, which means the land that the city of Charlotte is sitting on is stolen land. For the purposes of reproducing and expanding its economic and political dominance, the United States continues to wage a 500 year long war of settler-colonialism and imperialism against Indigenous nations and lands all across the world. If housing is to become a universal human right, U.S. imperialism must be brought to its end and the world decolonized.
- We are for police and prison abolition. CMPD primarily exists to ensure that capitalist power and profits and structural white supremacy persist. Modern day policing is rooted in capitalism and colonialism’s need to control colonized peoples, slaves, and workers. Fast forward to the 1970s, mass incarceration and the militarization of local police forces emerge as means of crushing mass people’s movements and revolutionary organizations. Housing as a human right cannot coexist alongside the targeting of working class, poor, and BIPOC communities by US policing and imprisonment.
- We are feminist. Housing under capitalism and colonialism is gendered by heteropatriarchy, meaning housing in Charlotte is structurally sexist and heteronormative. Landlords, lenders, and developers profit from the super-exploitation of women, trans persons, and gender nonconformists who often work for unequal wages in a gendered job market only to return home to perform all the family’s reproductive labor for free. This process ends up making affordable housing for working class women and LGBTQI+ persons comparatively less accessible, excludes them from housing entirely, or systemically compels them to stay in marital relations that are unsafe and harmful.
- Working class renters and homeowners in Charlotte have more in common with the housing insecure, homeless, and displaced peoples of our city than we do with Charlotte’s business owners, landlords, and financiers. This class solidarity and our collective struggle is fundamental for winning a world where housing is a human right.
- The people have only themselves. Tenants must unite in solidarity with one another and struggle for community control and collective power. No one can do for tenants what tenants must do for themselves. The most powerful weapon organized tenants have is the collective power of withholding their rents — the strike. While the enemy may be strong, we, too, are strong when we unite.
