Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.) joined fellow Democrats last week in calling for the passage of the Housing Emergencies Lifeline Program (HELP) Act to “crack down” on some evictions while barring the use of evictions on credit reports. Pressley declared that “evictions are an act of policy violence.”
Promoting the act, Pressley said:
“Eviction is an act of violence, and we have to do everything to prevent it. It is devastating for the families. It degrades the health of communities. There is great stigma associated with it. It affects your credit score. Housing is a human right. It is a predictor of health outcomes. It’s essential for social and economic mobility…”
The HELP Act would prohibit the credit reporting of evictions and utility debt. That is a major indicator for credit companies and would deny access to the information for those reviewing the financial history of people seeking loans and other benefits.
It would also fund legal counsel for people contesting evictions. It is co-sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D., Conn.) and Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D., Cal.)
Critics ripped into Pressley over her family’s reported millions held in rental properties.
The true concern, however, should be in Congress dictating the removal of key financial history from debt reports. It is one thing to provide assistance to renters. However, these companies play a key role in allowing a wide array of businesses to judge the risk of individuals seeking contracts, leases, or loans. Forcing the non-reporting of such records undermines the faith and utility of such reports.
The manipulation of financial reports is a dangerous precedent in politics. Not long ago, some states, like New York, mandated the expungement or sealing of criminal justice records to help people secure jobs.
Yet this is an effort by Democrats to artificially improve credit reports by removing evidence of past evictions or lease defaults.
At the same time, landlords and others are dealing with a squatting crisis where people use existing evictions laws to delay their removal from properties.
In New York, socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s previously called to seize unoccupied luxury condos in New York and give them to the homeless. After this election, he then appointed Cea Weaver as the new director of the Office to Protect Tenants. Weaver previously stated a need to ‘impoverish the white middle-class’ and called homeownership “racist” while demanding the seizure of private property.
The videos Weaver echoed thread-worn socialist mantras:
“I think the reality is, that for centuries we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good…And transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently and it will mean that families – especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well – are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”
Weaver and others in the Mamdani administration view “private property, including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of White supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”
Pressley’s view of evictions as an act of violence adds to this rising rhetoric at a time when more young people are embracing socialism. In my book, “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.” I discuss this trend in Western countries.
Recent polls show sixty-five percent of Democratic voters have a favorable view of socialism. An even greater percentage of young Britons want to live under socialism, and 72 percent favor nationalization of industries.
As my book discusses, the work of Adam Smith was immediately embraced by the founders as the perfect economic theory to advance their political theory. Smith’s idea of the “invisible hand” offered an idea of individual economic freedom where whole economies were driven by the individual tastes and choices of citizens.
The free market was viewed not as “violence” but liberation for individual citizens in achieving true independence.
You guys are nuts. Just think, Michael Jordan’s house, the 56,000-square-foot estate—featuring nine bedrooms, 19 baths, and a basketball gym— listed for $29 million–will be all mine as they divvy up property fairly. It’s only fair. Relax. You’ll get something for free, too.
She is a loon. Who needs white Liberals when you have pro-blackity black-black Caitiffs like her https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/who-needs-white-liberals-when-you
There’s something about a bald head Rep. Ayanna Pressley.
On my 13 birthday my Dad handed me a $20 bill and said get a job your Mother an I will no longer give you anything but the basics.
The communists have been here for a long time. They just changed their name to socialist.
Representatives Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass), Rosa DeLauro (D., Conn.) and Jimmy Gomez (D., Cal.) and others like them weaponize legal due process for their own political gain … what a joke. Doing what they are suggesting would hamstring / tie up the process of ownership of rental and lease property such that it would quickly die…. if the legal process is not allowed to protect owners they will stop investing and it would greatly damage the sector to the point of shutting it down. Stupid is, as stupid does.
You are completely correct. Several years ago, in Seattle, they made it law that landlords must rent to the first applicant, even if they applied online and the owner and tenant never actually met. Further, landlords cannot evict tenants, even if they never paid any rent at all, and were destroying the property. At the passage of that law, landlords (I know some) quickly sold their rental properties to owners who would make the houses their residence. Suddenly, and predictably, there was a massive rental housing shortage, driving rental prices through the roof for the few (and I mean very few) that remained. And homelessness quickly grew. Rental houses are now scarce and tenancy is confined mostly to apartment buildings with constant rent increases.
Then, to make rents more affordable, they raised minimum wage , forcing businesses, unable to afford the wage increases, to lay off employees. And homelessness grew further.
Socialism is a disease that infects healthy communities and turns them into place like… Seattle.
The vile communists are only able to exploit this because, as the guy with the impressive facial hair says, “Rent is too damn high!” This is completely true. From a historical perspective, food and clothing are incredibly cheap. But rent continues to go up and up. At the same time, the blunt force of rent control creates its own problems, and this insanity of “eviction is violence” would amplify those problems to absurd levels. I wish I had a solution.
But as long as this problem persists, communists will use it as a wedge to introduce their vile tyranny into our system. Remember, the most powerful bulwark against communism is prosperity. Back in the 50s and 60s, the communist academics were all baffled that no one was converting to their cause. This was because the people were doing pretty well.
I’d also love to see PSAs dedicated to “this is what communism looks like” with footage from Soviet Eastern Europe. The TikTok generation genuinely does not know this.
Comrade Pressley gives underscored meaning to the term hypocrisy: “pain for thee, but not for me.”
Any policy changes to further restrict the eviction process is reminiscent of the requirements of the early 2000’s that banks make clearly unsound mortgage loans, and will result in the same catastrophe. Once again, leftist policy masquerading as being for “the little guy” will hurt those very people it is purportedly designed to help.
Call it what it is. Socialism/communism . More than 50 percent of the young want it. If they only knew what it really does. Thank you public schools.
‘The free market was viewed not as “violence” but liberation for individual citizens in achieving true independence.’
Precisely, and it is precisely why this largely afflicts the young in a day and age when most of them have never been independent, even in their adult lives. They really do think money is created out of thin air by the government, the state should take over for mom and dad, and that AOC is going to buy them the kinds of dresses she wears to galas.
The reality of socialism as a form of *true* institutional slavery is utterly lost on them. They were not alive in the era of breadlines, wood chips in Soviet government issued toilet paper, or government cheese. That is before we even get to things like persecution and imprisonment for opposing the state.
Their mentality is privilege, sheer ignorance, and entitlement in the extreme, and we are going to have to deal with it and do better, and soon. It’s astonishing how ironically insular people have become in the information age, and the ‘algorithm generations’ will be so, so much worse.
This is not a serious effort to pass legislation. She knows it will never pass. This is plain and simple pandering to her constituents, so she can say she tried to help them. It also gives her a boogie man, the Republican party and any other sane Democrat, that would realize this for what it is.
@rcs
Agreed, and it’s wise to point out publicly, but the voters in question absolutely believe it and vote accordingly. 🤷🏽♂️
Realize that Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley grew up in public housing in Chicago, where the rent was a stated fraction of her mother’s income, and evictions were essentially impossible.
Yef Pressley was able to attend the most prestigious — and expensive — private school in Chicago.