The Grassroots Fight For Affordable Housing

In the United States, the housing situation is abysmal and getting worse.

A few statewide and local statistics are emblematic of a broader national problem. For example, in Washington state, according to the New York Times, rental housing prices rose by 43% from 2001 to 2023 while, during the same time period, the income of state renters grew by only 26%. Meanwhile in New York City, The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the average price of a two-bedroom apartment was $5,560. The Journal headline of the article in which that statistic was cited nicely embodied a rising feeling among ordinary New York City residents: “New York’s Housing Crisis Is So Bad That a Socialist is Poised to Become Mayor,” referring of course to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who is the frontrunner to win the city’s mayoral election in November. Rates of homelessness, evictions, and foreclosures remain high around the country.

In the face of this ever growing crisis, mainstream politicians—Democrats and Republicans—have virtually nothing useful to say. They’ve doubled down on existing national, state, and local government subsidies for affordable housing—which do not even remotely begin to produce the supply of housing at levels needed—while insisting that the unregulated free market in housing (increasingly controlled by an ever smaller number of corporations) operate as much as possible.

Grassroots Resistance

Tacoma, Washington is a city of about 222,000, 35 miles southwest of Seattle. It is largely a working class town; the Tacoma News Tribune recently reported that 77% of the jobs within it “don’t pay enough for a single worker to be able to comfortably afford housing on their own.” In the whole of Pierce County (of which Tacoma is the county seat), 37% of renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

A group which has attempted to alleviate this situation, with modest but tangible success, is Tacoma For All (T4A), a group founded by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 367 and the Tacoma Democratic Socialists of America. T4A’s most noticeable achievement has been launching and successfully influencing the passage of Initiative 1 by Tacoma voters in November 2023, securing relatively strong eviction protections for the city’s renters and a cap on rent increases.

In order to assist in meeting the crisis of affordable housing, KC Tenants and T4A have both made a strong push for government-funded social housing within their particular locales.

However, the most impressive achievement of T4A has been its building of an organization, democratically run by its dues-paying members, devoted to educating ordinary people about their legal rights as tenants and to acting in solidarity to protect the rights of other tenants against the depredations of corporate landlords. The organization regularly sends teams of organizers to knock on doors of Tacoma apartment buildings, asking tenants about any issues they might be having with landlords, and offering the organization’s assistance and solidarity in addressing those issues. T4A has established Tacoma Tenant Legal Aid to help tenants pursue their rights. The organization has achieved real successes in helping Tacoma residents stay in their homes

Another successful grassroots organization is KC Tenants in Kansas City, Missouri. It is profiled in Jonathan Tarleton’s 2025 book Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons. While the group is anti-capitalist, KC Tenants foremost approach to tenants is not to preach socialism but to help them navigate bread-and-butter housing issues. The presentation of their critique of racial capitalism or lessons on the virtues of social housing comes later in the process of integrating tenants into their organization. As KC Tenants organizer Tara Raghuveer told Tarleton, the group’s initial approach is to simply ask tenants, “How the fuck are you?...We knock [on] doors asking people how they’re living now, which by itself is a very politicizing line of questioning because the people are not living good.”

For tenants suffering from serious psychological trauma and anger because of housing issues, the approach of KC Tenants organizers—the message that people are here to offer assistance to them without judgement and structures for solidarity with other people going through similar issues—can be exhilarating, even liberating. Similar feelings have also been felt by KC Tenants professional organizers. One of them is Magda Werkmeister, who at one point left Kansas City for back East to complete a college degree but eventually returned to continue working with KC Tenants. She told Tarleton that she returned to the group because “I was missing out on something that makes life more joyous, and I think that was just the sense of community… and these people that you are able to care about and [who] care about you.”

Social Housing

In order to assist in meeting the crisis of affordable housing, KC Tenants and T4A have both made a strong push for government-funded social housing within their particular locales. Other municipalities have followed suit: For example, Seattle voters approved funding for a city social housing developer in February, and in May the Chicago City Council passed a Green Social Housing Ordinance.

Social housing is a form of public housing: It is meant to assist persons of a wide range of income levels (not merely low income) and utilize government subsidies to ensure the rents it charges are substantially below market rate. The most successful example of social housing in the world is found in Vienna, Austria. The success of Vienna’s social housing seemingly played a role in Economist Intelligence naming it in 2024 as the world’s most livable city.

The Bottom Line: People Power

It seems likely that Zohran Mamdani—who has cited the Vienna model of housing as a major influence—will have immense difficulties in implementing social housing in New York City, as well as his other proposals like free childcare and free bus service. These programs will require tax increases on the city’s businesses and wealthy as well as increases in New York City’s debt limit; both require the approval of New York’s business-friendly Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and she is unlikely to accommodate Mamdani’s requests to any significant extent. Moreover, there is risk that city business leaders and the wealthy—fearful of the threat to their bottom line should Mamdani win election in November and try to implement his relatively mild democratic socialist program—will engage in capital flight, wrecking the city’s tax base.

Regardless of whether Mamdani is, somehow, able to resist the establishment pressure and implement major parts of his agenda—or whether that pressure forces him to sell out that agenda—it is obviously crucial that ordinary people and grassroots activists stick unflinchingly to core principles and relentlessly pressure politicians to follow them.