Globalization, Privatization and Their Effects on Our Community: A Case Study of Forestvale

By City Life / Vida Urbana
Jamaica Plain, MA

All over the world public services are being taken over by private, for-profit companies that are generally more concerned with making money than providing equal and high-level services to society. When services are public we as a society have some control over how they function and whom they serve. Once services are privatized or deregulated, private and for-profit companies take over the services and they are no longer responsible to the public and society, they become responsible only to their shareholders and boards of directors. In Bolivia this past year, a private corporation from California tried to gain control of the drinking water in the country. Bolivians took to the streets in protest and surrounded the capital of La Paz to protest the privatization of and the price increase on their water. Welfare in the US has now been placed largely in the hands of the military plane producer Lockheed-Martin. The health-care system is ruled by money and not by our health needs. Likewise, housing is being moved from the hands of the public and society into the hands of private landlords who are looking to make profit off of our homes.

To us, housing is a human right and a human need. Our homes are hugely important to our families, our communities and the stability of our lives. Yet there are many landlords that see our homes as an investment, as a way to make profit for themselves.

Many of us have been working hard to better our communities over the past ten, twenty and even thirty years. When we clean up our streets, beautify our neighborhoods and work to decrease crime, we are investing in our community. This is not a monetary investment, rather it is an investment of our time and our care. As we know, when we work to better our community it becomes a more desirable place to live and that's when large landlords come and buy up property in our communities and raise the rents. Gentrification is the process of upper-income, mainly white people moving into lower-income, mainly communities of color and forcing rents up due to their economic privilege.

All of the time and effort we invest in our communities makes our neighborhoods more "valuable". They are more valuable to us due to increased safety and beauty, but they are more valuable to landlords because they can charge higher rents and make more profit. Our investments in our neighborhoods become privatized when landlords buy property in our community, using all of our work and investment in them in order to raise rents and force us out. Our hard work goes into their wallets. That is privatization of a public resource and a human need, housing, much like with the water situation in Bolivia.

In the case of Forestvale, the owner, Francis Colannino, has received federal tax money to subsidize his mortgage over the past 36 years. That means that our public tax dollars have allowed him to purchase the building and have low mortgage payments. With these subsidies and with the rents that the tenants pay each month we have bought the Forestvale property for Mr. Colannino. We have been subsidizing him, he hasn't been subsidizing us! Now he wants to take our time, our money and our subsidies and put them in his pocket, raise rents to the market level and force out all of the tenants. If the property is so valuable because of the good work we have done in the community, and our tax dollars and the rents of the tenants have bought the property for him, why won't he listen to the needs of the tenants and the needs of the community for affordable housing? We demand that we be heard, as this is our community, these are our homes and we are the ones who make these things valuable, not the landlords.