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public housing
Whose City? Our City!
Zohran Mamdani’s people-first plan challenges state militarization and corporate power in New York City
Nov 11, 2025
When a state turns its military inwards, it raises all sorts of questions about what that state is for, and who is considered a threat. President Donald Trump has been answering those questions one way. New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani is answering differently.
The US has a long history of using troops to put down the poor. It’s worth remembering that less than a decade after the American Revolutionary War, the very richest parts of Massachusetts society activated the state militia and funded their own private army to crush the poorest parts, mostly farmers and war veterans like Daniel Shays who were rebelling against foreclosures, and being heavily taxed to pay off the war debts owed to the wealthy.
Fast forward to West Virginia in the 1920s, and you see miners bombed from the sky. When miners—Black, white, and immigrant—fought for their rights not to die on the job, wealthy coal companies used private militia, machine guns, and US Army bombers to pound them into submission. Federal troops eventually intervened on September 2, 1921, leading to the miners’ surrender.
In the 1970s, National Guard soldiers killed students at Kent State and Jackson State for protesting a greedy war machine that was gobbling up their brothers and sisters.
It’s not just Donald Trump who’s watching Zohran Mamdani’s New York. We all are.
What is the state for: people or property? In the last three and half decades, the richest 1% of households in the US have accumulated almost 1,000 times more wealth than the poorest 20% of us. We’re always told the federal forces are being used to keep the public safe, but more often than not, they’re being used to dodge answering demands for change. Answering questions is not what troops are trained to do. They’re much better at suppressing dissent. But none of it is good for our democracy, and in the world’s richest and ever-more unequal nation, those questions will have to be answered some day.
On November 4, Zohran Mamdani answered this way:
To every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, know this: This city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.
Evoking a historical period in the city that was marked by ambitious and transformative public policies, Mamdani referenced Fiorello La Guardia—whose time in office (1934-1945) is remembered for major reforms and public infrastructure investment.
Pushed by the city’s massive immigrant, left, and labor movements, La Guardia created the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and built the nation’s first low-rent public housing projects. To keep costs low for New Yorkers during the Great Depression and World War II, he worked to control rents, food prices, and supported organized labor and unionization, aiming to make New York a "100% union city.”
Central to the media coverage of Mamdani’s victory is the mayor elect’s charisma and his grinning defiance of the demagogue, Donald. But in his victory speech, he was very clear: It’s not just Trump the person he seeks to displace, but also the policy choices that created him. As he said:
After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one.
New York is well placed to be the “shining city” of Mamdani’s dreams. Public housing was born here. People’s movements fought for what was once a free, public university here—the City University of New York (CUNY).
Federal funds may be cut, but New York is a “donor state.” It sends more money to the federal government in taxes than it receives back in federal spending. Some of that flow could be redirected. And New York City is rich. If the city’s multibillion dollar healthcare budget was spent on local service providers and vendors instead of on remote private contractors, it could revitalize entire neighborhoods. Buy local. Hire local. And how about sending more city contracts to more democratically run businesses, like Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx—the country’s largest worker-owned cooperative?
Mamdani knows how to follow the money. In 2023, he introduced the “Not On Our Dime” bill, which proposed amending the state’s nonprofit law to prohibit not-for-profit corporations from funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal under international law. The legislation would have stopped the flow of around $60 million annually from New York-based charities to settlements,and violators could have been sued and fined by the state attorney general. Foreign aid to far-off criminals is part of our economy too, says Mamdani, and we have a right to make new choices about it.
Now is the time to invest in publicly owned green energy—wind and solar power, and community broadband. Alongside Mamdani’s food-for-people, not-for-profit plan, there’s no reason City Hall couldn’t put the next generation of public utilities in democratically run public hands—and absolutely no reason to keep rate payers in hock to the price-gouging investors who own Con Edison.
To those seeking new answers to old questions about what the state is for, choosing Mamdani was easy. The work ahead will not be. Still, New York is a creative, courageous place, with a rich history and plenty of resources to conduct a grand experiment. And as Mamdani told his tired, exuberant followers on November 4:
While we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us.
Now it’s not just Donald Trump who’s watching Zohran Mamdani’s New York. We all are.
"Turn the volume up.”
I talked with Zohran Mamdani about the “Not on our Dime Bill” in 2023. Readers can find that episode and years of reporting on building economic democracy in our archives at "Laura Flanders & Friends." Subscribe to my Substack newsletter and never miss an episode. Find out more at lauraflanders.orgKeep ReadingShow Less
The Grassroots Fight For Affordable Housing
From Tacoma, Washington to Kansas City, Missouri, people power is key to creating communities where working people can live.
Jul 23, 2025
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.
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Trump’s HUD Secretary and Our Reverse Robin Hood Housing System
A Trump-Turner housing agenda appears destined to continue the worst aspects of our nation’s approach to affordable housing: a relentless diversion to the already-wealthy of resources supposedly designated for the housing needs of the poor.
Jan 14, 2025
Donald Trump has nominated former Texas state representative Scott Turner as his secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the $70 billion federal agency that administers rental assistance and public housing programs, enforces fair housing laws, and provides community development grants to local communities.
Other Trump cabinet nominees, like potential Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have attracted attention for the ways they may shift the traditional priorities of the agencies they would lead. Turner has flown under the radar.
Perhaps that is because dramatic changes to HUD would need congressional approval, which was denied when Trump tried to slash the department during his first administration. Or maybe it is because, in many respects, Turner does not seem inclined to significantly alter U.S. housing policies.
As for likely HUD Secretary Turner, he is most associated with yet another housing giveaway to the rich.
That is not a good thing.
A Trump-Turner housing agenda appears destined to continue the worst aspects of our nation’s approach to affordable housing: a relentless diversion to the already-wealthy of resources supposedly designated for the housing needs of the poor.
This reverse Robin Hood approach to U.S. housing began in the 1970’s, when the Nixon administration and Congress began switching our affordable housing investment away from public housing to subsidizing for-profit landlords. Now, we fund wealthy landlords, often corporate landlords, via direct payments such as the Housing Choice Voucher program and Project-Based Section 8 program, in return for the for-profit landlords temporarily housing low-income tenants. 558F Low-Income Housing Tax Credits are designed to provide a tax shelter for wealthy investors.
This profit-soaked combination costs taxpayers six times more each year than public housing does. But public housing is far more efficient, for the simple reason that it bypasses private profits. Public housing is also hugely successful in providing high-quality, low-cost housing when there is adequate investment in maintenance and upkeep.
That is why other nations, who have far less homelessness, evictions, and housing-insecure people than we do, prioritize public housing. They divert little if any government support to for-profit landlords. And it is why U.S. for-profit landlords have been pushing for generations to block U.S. public housing from the funds it needs to ensure safety and keep up maintenance. The resulting deterioration of U.S. public housing undercuts competition for private landlords and creates a narrative justifying the delivery of housing dollars to the private sector.
A Subsidy for Gentrification
But those privatized programs are deeply flawed. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit often leads to rents higher than poor families can afford. The program known as LIHTC has been characterized by housing researchers as “a better-than-nothing gimmick that helps the poor by rewarding the rich.” Even that characterization is too generous for some legislators, who call LIHTC “legalized theft of government assets.”
Similarly, project-based Section 8 housing directs government dollars to for-profit landlords as payment for low-income tenants’ rent. But, like LIHTC, the program allows those landlords to convert their buildings to market-rate rentals after they use the government subsidies to pay off their debt on the properties. By contrast, public housing provides affordable housing in perpetuity.
There is even less lasting impact coming from the largest low-income housing program in the country, Housing Choice Vouchers. We provide a full $30 billion per year in voucher payments to landlords, often large corporate landlords, but those landlords can end their involvement at the end of each tenant’s lease, leaving the low-income renter without housing. It is another low-risk high-yield arrangement for the wealthy and raw deal for the poor: little wonder that the Project 2025 blueprint drafted by Trump supporters champions vouchers even as it slams other HUD programs.
As for likely HUD Secretary Turner, he is most associated with yet another housing giveaway to the rich. During Trump’s first administration, Turner served as executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, which focused on promoting opportunity zones, a program created by Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
The program rewards the wealthy’s investment in economically distressed areas—opportunity zones—with huge tax breaks. But investigations by ProPublica and Congress show that the definition of what areas count as opportunity zones is far too broad, and the guidelines for who benefits from the investments are far too loose. As a result, money invested in expensive hotels, high-rent apartment buildings, and even luxury condominiums as a superyacht marina escapes taxation. Politically connected billionaires lobby for the land where they develop to be designated an opportunity zone, then rake in the benefits.
The Brookings Institution says opportunity zones operate as a subsidy for gentrification. “The direct tax benefits of opportunity zones will flow overwhelmingly to wealthy investors,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says. “But the tax break might not do much to help low-income communities, and it could even harm some current residents of such communities.”
So, despite the relative quiet around Scott Turner’s nomination, we know some important things about him. We know that he champions opportunity zones as an addition to the already abundant tax benefits the U.S. showers on landlords and real estate investors. And we know that he is a fierce critic of anti-poverty programs, as he has made multiple public statements about government assistance being harmful and even disastrous.
But we also know that the likely next HUD secretary is concerned about that alleged harm only when assistance is provided to the poor. The wealthy can count on Trump and Turner to keep the pipeline of government housing money wide open and flowing their way.
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