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.