Homeownership has always been the American Dream. It was the mature and sensible way of putting a roof over your head. No landlord to pay rent to. No lease to tell you what you could or couldn’t do. No restrictions on pets. If little Johnny marked up the living room wall with his magic-marker version of DaVinci’s “Last Supper,” no one was going to take it out of your security deposit.

Homeownership was Ozzie and Harriet quietly raising their two-point-eight kids in a lily white suburban neighborhood with all the adorable little problems that middle-class families are supposed to experience in their daily lives. Fortunately, Ozzie and Harriet never had to worry about eviction from subprime mortgages.

Sub prime interest rates have turned owning a home into the American nightmare. A form of adjustable rate mortgage, subprime is usually given to someone who is lower income or has a shaky credit history with the expectation that he or she will be able to get a better deal through refinancing later on.

When the housing market bubble dropped two years ago, subprimers found that their properties were worth less. Reset mortgages brought higher instead of lower interest rates. In 2007, 1.3 million American households faced foreclosure.

It hasn’t gotten any better. A recent front-page story in the SF Chronicle reports that in Contra Costa County just north of San Francisco, evictions of homeowners who have failed to meet their mortgage payments have increased by 30% since last year. The Sheriff’s Department in that area is doing 45 evictions a week now.

Contra Costa has the most foreclosures in the Bay Area.

Housing in America is as broken as healthcare. At least with the latter, people are advocating for universal coverage. Even the presidential wind-up dolls are being forced to address it, though certainly not adequately. No one talks about universal housing. We can’t even imagine what that looks like, because Americans are brainwashed into thinking that the free market will provide.

These days, all it provides is big profits for landlords and speculators. It couldn’t be a better time for those folks.

It couldn’t be a worst time to need a home. Rents in the major cities in this country are skyrocketing. Here in San Francisco, it may as well be the dot-com boom, part two. Rents are beyond outrageous. Check Craig’s List. If it weren’t for rent control, working-class people wouldn’t be living in the famed City by the Bay at all.

With rent control repeal on the California state ballot in June (Prop. 98 deceptively promoted as “eminent domain” reform), things could go from worse to catastrophic. Imagine millions of renters in the state suddenly at the mercy of Snidley Whiplash-like landlords desperate to get them out so they can raise the rents up to market value. It can happen here.

Death and taxes used to be life’s only certainties. Now it’s evictions and foreclosures.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical southern Italian queer atheist writer and performer whose website is www.avicollimecca.com