A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Homes for People, Not Profit: Why Basic Income Won't End Homelessness (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Scoop ran a piece on homelessness and basic income in Aotearoa by Basic 
Income New Zealand, which does something important - it acknowledges 
that poverty and housing insecurity are not marginal issues but central 
political questions. The mere fact that guaranteed income schemes are 
being discussed in relation to homelessness signals how deep the crisis 
has become. But from an anarcho-communist perspective, it is not enough 
to debate how much money the state should distribute. We have to ask 
why, in one of the wealthiest countries per capita in the world, so many 
people do not have a secure place to live in the first place.

Homelessness in Aotearoa is routinely framed as a failure of income 
support, a gap in the safety net, or an unfortunate by-product of 
economic turbulence. That framing is too polite. Homelessness is not a 
glitch in capitalism, it is one of its regular outputs. We live in a 
society where housing is treated first and foremost as a commodity, 
something to be bought, sold, speculated on, leveraged, and accumulated. 
Shelter is not organised around need but around profit. Land is hoarded, 
and rents are pushed as high as the market will bear. Under those 
conditions, it is not surprising that tens of thousands of people 
experience insecure housing, are shunted into motels at public expense, 
or end up sleeping rough. The surprise would be if they did not.

The attraction of a basic income in this context is obvious. If rents 
are extortionate and wages are stagnant, give people more money. If 
benefits are punitive and conditional, replace them with something 
universal and unconditional. Parties such as the Green Party and The 
Opportunity Party have floated versions of guaranteed minimum income 
schemes as a humane response to poverty and precarity. The idea that 
every person should have a material floor below which they cannot fall 
has moral force. It speaks to dignity. It gestures toward the principle 
that survival should not depend on pleasing a case manager or satisfying 
bureaucratic criteria. In a country where benefit sanctions and 
administrative cruelty have pushed people further into crisis, the 
appeal of unconditional income is understandable.

Yet we have to be clear about the limits of this approach. A basic 
income, introduced within the existing framework of capitalist property 
relations, does not de-commodify housing. It does not socialise land. It 
does not remove rental housing from the speculative market. It does not 
end the power of landlords to set prices according to what they can 
extract. Instead, it injects cash into a system that continues to 
operate according to profit. In such a system, there is every reason to 
expect that a significant portion of that cash will be absorbed by 
rising rents and costs. Without structural transformation, income 
supports risk becoming subsidies for property owners.

There is a deeper issue at stake. Capitalism does not simply generate 
poverty by accident, it requires insecurity as a disciplining mechanism. 
The threat of unemployment, debt, and eviction keeps workers compliant. 
When education is financed through loans, graduates begin their working 
lives already indebted. When housing is scarce and expensive, people are 
less likely to resist exploitative work for fear of losing their home. 
Homelessness, at the extreme end, is a warning written in human terms - 
fail to secure your place in the labour market and this is what awaits 
you. A basic income might blunt that threat at the margins, but if it 
leaves intact the wage system and the commodification of essentials, the 
underlying logic persists.

In Aotearoa, we have seen how state policy oscillates between 
paternalistic support and outright punishment. Benefit levels rise 
slightly, then are eroded by inflation or offset by cuts elsewhere. 
Administrative hurdles are lowered in one term of government and raised 
in the next. At the same time, proposals emerge to empower police to 
issue "move-on" orders to rough sleepers, effectively criminalising the 
visibility of poverty. The contradiction is stark, the state claims 
concern about homelessness while expanding its capacity to remove 
homeless people from sight. Under capitalism, social policy and policing 
often work hand in hand, one managing poverty, the other containing it.

Those who experience homelessness are not a random cross-section of the 
population. Women, children, disabled people and Maori are 
disproportionately affected. That fact alone should dispel the myth that 
homelessness is about individual failure. It is about structural 
inequality layered across race, gender and class. The legacy of 
colonisation in Aotearoa, the alienation of Maori land, and the 
concentration of property ownership in settler and corporate hands form 
part of the story. So too does the transformation of housing into an 
asset class that delivers untaxed capital gains to investors while 
locking others out. A cash transfer cannot undo that history.

This does not mean that anarcho-communists should dismiss basic income 
debates as irrelevant. On the contrary, any measure that immediately 
reduces hardship deserves serious consideration. An unconditional income 
could weaken the most degrading aspects of the welfare system and give 
people breathing space. It could reduce the power of employers to coerce 
workers into unsafe or underpaid jobs. It could create room for care 
work, community activity and political organising. These are not trivial 
gains. But we must resist the temptation to treat them as endpoints 
rather than footholds.

The fundamental problem is that capitalism organises life around 
exchange value rather than use value. Housing exists to generate rent, 
not simply to shelter. Land appreciates because it is scarce and 
privately owned, not because its value derives from community life. As 
long as these premises remain intact, homelessness will reappear in new 
forms. The system can tolerate a certain level of misery, but it cannot 
tolerate a challenge to property relations. That is why even the most 
generous reforms are carefully calibrated to avoid undermining the 
sanctity of private ownership.

A genuinely transformative approach to homelessness would start from the 
principle that housing must be de-commodified. That means large-scale 
public and community, controlled housing construction, not as a residual 
safety net but as a dominant form. It means taking land out of 
speculation and placing it under democratic stewardship. It means 
supporting hapu-led and community-led housing initiatives that reflect 
tino rangatiratanga and collective control rather than market 
dependency. It means confronting the political power of developers, 
landlords and banks rather than courting them.

Such a programme cannot be delivered solely through parliamentary 
manoeuvres. The history of social change in this country, from union 
rights to Maori land struggles, shows that gains are won through 
collective action. Tenant organising, occupations of vacant buildings, 
and solidarity networks that redistribute resources outside the market 
are not romantic gestures, they are practical challenges to the logic 
that treats shelter as a commodity. When communities occupy empty houses 
while families sleep in cars, they expose the absurdity of a system that 
protects property over people.

Worker power is central to this picture. Homelessness is tied not only 
to housing costs but to wages and job security. An economy built on 
precarious contracts, gig work and underemployment produces constant 
risk of eviction. Strengthening unions, building worker co-operatives, 
and demanding wages that reflect real living costs are essential 
components of any serious anti-homelessness strategy. Without shifting 
power in the workplace, income supports risk becoming permanent patches 
on a leaking boat.

There is also a cultural battle to be fought. Capitalist ideology frames 
independence as individual self-reliance and dependence as personal 
failure. A basic income can be sold within that framework as a tool to 
help individuals "get back on their feet," but the deeper truth is that 
none of us survive alone. Housing, like healthcare and education, is a 
collective good. It depends on shared labour, shared infrastructure and 
shared land. Reclaiming that understanding is part of dismantling the 
moral narrative that justifies homelessness.

The Scoop article gestures toward compassion, and compassion matters. 
But compassion without structural analysis can slide into technocracy. 
It asks how to administer poverty more efficiently rather than how to 
abolish it. Anarcho-communism insists that homelessness is not 
inevitable, not natural, and not the result of insufficient managerial 
finesse. It is the outcome of deliberate choices about ownership, profit 
and power. Those choices can be reversed, but not without confronting 
entrenched interests.

In the end, the debate over basic income in Aotearoa is a test of 
political imagination. Are we prepared to see housing as a right rooted 
in collective ownership and democratic control? Or will we settle for 
cash transfers that leave the architecture of inequality untouched? The 
answer will determine whether homelessness continues to haunt our cities 
as a managed crisis or recedes as a relic of a system we chose to leave 
behind.

If we are serious about ending homelessness, we must move beyond 
tinkering. We must challenge the commodification of land, the wage 
system that disciplines through scarcity, and the punitive apparatus 
that criminalises poverty. We must build networks of solidarity that 
meet needs directly while organising for deeper transformation. A basic 
income may be part of that struggle, but it cannot be its horizon. The 
horizon must be a society in which no one's right to shelter depends on 
their capacity to pay, and where collective care replaces market logic 
as the organising principle of life.

https://awsm.nz/homes-for-people-not-profit-why-basic-income-wont-end-homelessness/
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