It's time someone said it: Engels was dead wrong in "on the housing question", especially in a US context.
<During the 1870s, a major polemical debate unfolded in Germany’s worker/democratic press on the shortage of housing available to workers in major industrial centres. The influx and increase of the proletariat created a housing crisis. On June 26 1872, Engels contributed the first of a series of articles to the Volksstaat, entitled “The Housing Question.” The last appeared on February 22 1873. Engels’ central point was that the revolutionary class policy of the proletariat cannot be replaced by a policy of reforms, because "it is not that the solution of the housing question simultaneously solves the social question, but that only by the solution of the social question, that is, by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, is the solution of the housing question made possible." The series criticizes Proudhonism (and petty-bourgeois socialism in general, including Lassalleanism). It also discusses things like the nature of the State, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the eradication of the antithesis between town and country, the solution of the agrarian problem, forms of the socialist reconstruction of society and the tasks of the proletarian party.Engels argued against other socialists like Proudhon and Emil Sax who argued that widespread working class home ownership was the solution to the housing crisis. Engels actually classified Sax's scheme as "bourgeois socialism" because it aimed state intervention at ameliorating class consciousness without altering overall class relations that much, by "bourgeois-fying" the proletariat through home ownership.
Engels denies that workers even want land and also thinks that if workers owned houses the bourgeoisie will just lower their wages by the amount of the rent they no longer have to pay.
In his haste to prove these non revolutionary class reconciliation schemes can't work and only socialist revolution can actually resolve the contradictions of housing under capitalism. Perhaps that it true in the long run, but that may be centuries. Engels concedes, essentially, that working class homeowners, while not capitalist, are also non proletarian:
>Capital is the command over the unpaid labor of others. The house of the worker can only become capital therefore if he rents it to a third person anPost too long. Click here to view the full text.