Who hasn’t received that special letter from your loving landlord promising to annually increase their monthly rent? Cross-eyed with silent rage we see red for days, white knuckling our avocado toast, sipping on the final Pumpkin Spice Latte for the year, and stewing over the gluttonous greed of the slumlords who continue to take, take, and take some more without ever improving living conditions. This is also what oftentimes feels like retaliation for inconveniencing them to replace that oven handle that fell off for the third time this month because they’re too cheap to buy new appliances.
As the gap explodes with tectonic magnitude between us peasants and the lords of paychecks, the voice of the people lays lifeless on the hospital bed, smothered under a flat pillow while the sharp boot heel of the quartermasters lean their fattened weight onto our throats. The people’s quiet anger disembodies every worker with each diminished paycheck, as bills continue to endlessly pile upon them, never stopping, never decreasing, and always saying “more” while pointing to the center of their landlord’s greasy palms.
Compassionless capitalism rears its ugly head each year like Groundhog Day, and when the soothsayers of corporatocracy interpret the bones and divine that a great drought is coming, and our benevolent government just has to ask for more of the dollars (that they printed) for “the greater good.” Capillary powers become synonymous with “the greater,” and it benefits only the wallets of those with capitol while America’s citizenry gasp for air in the dog cages of the pits of capitalism as the water rapidly rises.
Before capitalists chime in with, “I earned this and worked every day for 20 years to own these 4 homes!” Let me be the first to remind you that, so has everyone else. Check your privilege and status at the door before you can reasonably begin a discussion on equity, equal access, and equal opportunity. With gentrification, racism, classism, and slave wages rampant in the streets of Bend, we receive another devastating blow to our paychecks as Oregon authorizes a 14.6% rent increase starting in January 2023.
Who here is receiving a 15% raise each year? Bend’s last Census reported the individual’s annual income was $34,303. If you were to take the current median rent for the year, $22,032 goes exclusively to rent. Rent Cafe reports the median monthly rent in Bend as $1,836, all of which is funneled out of your paycheck each month just to pay for your quarters. That would then mean that 64.2% of your annual income goes towards the slum lords of Central Oregon and that leaves you with a whopping $1022.58 per month to pay for streaming subscriptions and take-out to get you through your undiagnosed and untreated depression.
So, let’s say that you buy into the bootstrappers’ narrative, and you save up median income for a down payment to buy your very own home at the median home listing price for Bend which is $795,000 according to realtor.com. That would require that you do not eat at all, (literally), or pay any other bills for the next 6.5 years straight, just to satisfy a down payment on your home, which you still wouldn’t qualify to pay for your monthly mortgage.
Well, you got to eat right? And you know Pumpkin Spice Lattes are $5.75 for a Grande, which you can’t treat yourself to anymore because, sacrifices am I right? But at who’s expense? Governmental non-intervention has allowed capitalist conglomerates such as Airbnb to decimate the housing market with over 660,000 American listings in 2022, with 14,000 new listings each month.
The demand for housing is far higher than the supply and the fat cats poising as the ostiary gatekeepers to what should be a human right, simply points to a piece of legislated paper and says, “more” in the highway robbery of the housing industry.
If you saved $500 a month for the next 13.5 years (obviously this is not accounting inflation and other ludicrous metrics) you still wouldn’t be able to afford a house in Bend because the median house listing price doesn’t seem to be going down.
So, what do we do? What can we do? And how can a population survive the dystopian landscape of America’s housing crisis? I’m all ears, leave your comments below.
Ryan Ivy
Photographer
