What I wrote today

[ritaxis]

 And I sent it too.

Dear Maya Crelan Ray of David Lyng Real Estate,

I'm having trouble composing this note because I don't want to be unnecessarily hostile to a stranger who apparently just doesn't understand the world all that well. I want to be pleasant and gentle, but I also want to express myself quite clearly.

 

I get that you want to be helpful to the business community at large in Santa Cruz, and you want to do your best to keep your hand in during the pandemic so people will remember your name and want to do business with you "when this is all over." But the thing is, you cast your net really wide--I don't know whether it was "all homeowners" or "all people who ever fleetingly signed up for Next Door" or "all people from Santa Cruz who show up in a drag through social media." Whichever, you included me in your list, and I am as far from a person you want to include in this as possible. I'm unrelentingly hostile to the entire industry of real estate--funny we call it an industry, isn't it? Because it doesn't make anything, it doesn't provide services to the people in the community ("but we do!" you'll object, but believe me, the only services you provide are to that narrow class of rentiers who profit off the misery of the poor). All it does is steal land and homes from the poor and concentrate wealth in the hands of people who need nothing.

 

I really don't want to see you smiling at the prospects of driving up housing costs any further in the county, and I know you really don't want to read my furious hostility on this subject. I don't want perky announcements about how this or that owner of a business is attempting to prosper during a community-wide disaster that is disproportionately devastating to the poor and minorities, which is disproportionately deadly to minorities and the poor. Those are not useful to me.

 

If you want your no doubt considerable organizing skills to be useful in the pandemic, don't barge into strangers' homes promoting businesses. See if you can connect homeless and service workers with home sewers who can make them masks. The cloth masks are much better than nothing, but to be really protective a person needs upwards of six or eight of them so they can keep changing into clean ones. Another thing you could organize is clothes washing facilities for the homeless and poor. The laundromat in my neighborhood, for example, closed a couple months ago and people now have to walk five more blocks to get their clothes washed.

 

Whether you decide to continue chirping to the rentiers, or whether you decide to do something that actually helps, take me off your ridiculous mailing list.