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social housing
Stop Red-Baiting Zohran Mamdani on Housing
Does Zohran Mamdani represent the second coming of Stalin for New York City? All the red-baiting attacks on him cannot detract from the sensibleness of his call for social housing.
Sep 24, 2025
Since democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary in late June, Fox News has predictably sounded the alarm with heavy doses of red-baiting. For example, politics reporter Alec Schemnel reported on the network’s digital news site in early July the discovery of evidence that claims of Mamdani being a communist “may not be as unfounded as Mamdani claims.” Schemmel wrote that Mamdani was “garnering backlash for previous comments he has made espousing language steeped in radical socialist and communist ideology.”
Schemmel related to readers his titillating discoveries about Mamdani’s communist beliefs: a 2021 video of Mamdani calling for leftists to be uncompromising in pursuit of “seizing the means of production;” a 2020 social media post where Mamdani called for seizing private luxury housing as residences for the homeless during the Covid-19 pandemic; a 2021 speech before The Gravel Institute where Mamdani called for luxury housing to be converted into “communal style living.”
It is on the subject of housing policy where Schemmel concentrated nearly all his effort to prove Mamdani’s commitment to “radical socialist and communist ideology.” He summarized Mamdani’s housing policy as an effort to move “toward the full de-commodification of housing,” a future where housing access is not conditioned by ability to pay but where the government guarantees “high quality housing to all as a human right.”
Mamdani made the above quotations in his capacity as a private left-wing activist; Schemmel was relatively reticent in relating the actual housing policy proposals Mamdani has advanced in his quest to become New York City’s chief executive. Schemmel’s reticence to inform his readers about those proposals is understandable because doing so would complicate his efforts to portray Mamdani as the second coming of Stalin.
There is a very high risk that if Mamdani wins the mayorship, not only will Trump’s thugs try to sabotage his program but business leaders and rich investors will engage in capital flight, withdrawing their money from the city, destroying its credit rating and tax base.
For example, nowhere in his housing policy platform has Mamdani, contrary to Schemmel’s implication, called for “the full de-commodification of housing.” He has called for increased government spending on existing public housing stock, affordable housing, and social housing (a form of public housing) to exist alongside the private housing market. He has called for these policies because rents have skyrocketed in NYC—the Wall Street Journal reported in June that the average monthly rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in the city was $5,280.
Schemmel noted that Mamdani has stated his personal inspiration in the possibilities for social housing—and has specifically cited the model of government-backed social housing in Vienna, Austria as a proper example for a similar program in New York City. The Vienna social housing model has clearly been a success in providing safe, affordable housing with modern amenities for a significant portion of Vienna’s non-wealthy population. Schemmel seemed to subtly admit the success of the Vienna model for he did not try to argue that it had been unsuccessful. Instead, he only briefly referenced it, quoting Mamdani as having “conceded” that residents of such housing in Vienna “still pay part of their earnings in rent to cover operational costs and a sizable chunk of the [Vienna] population lives in private housing.”
In reality, nowhere has Mamdani or his co-thinkers denied that renters in Vienna’s social housing still pay a portion of their income in rent for that housing—or denied that such housing exists alongside a substantial private housing market. The point is that the rent for social housing is significantly lower than in Vienna’s private housing market and provides a significant percentage of the city’s working- and middle-class residents access to high quality housing.
Nearly half of Vienna’s housing is social housing: Half of that total is directly operated by the city government and the rest run by government regulated limited profit corporations. The successful social housing program is perhaps part of the reason why Vienna was named the world’s most livable city for the third consecutive year in 2024 by The Economist. The housing is often constructed in ways allowing residents easy walking access for such amenities as food, healthcare, and education. According to Vienna’s mayor, this massively government-subsidized housing program exists alongside a dynamic capitalist economy: Vienna, with its services and manufacturing industries, represents 25% of Austria’s overall Gross Domestic Product.
For another successful example of social housing—one that has provided affordable and safe housing to a modest but tangible number of working- and middle-class people—one does not have to go outside the United States. Alec Schemmel—like perhaps most Americans and even many New Yorkers—is probably not aware that New York State already has a successful social housing program, created—when American anti-communism was at its highest crest—by the Mitchell-Lama Act of the New York State legislature in 1955. The Mitchell-Lama Act is one of the main subjects of a book—Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons—published earlier this year by Jonathan Tarleton, an urban planner and designer in addition to being a writer.
Tarleton notes how Mitchell-Lama, in the decades after its passage, “funded the construction of 140,000 apartments across 270 developments in New York City (and more across the state). Roughly half of those homes in the city take the form of what’s known as a limited equity co-op.” Limited equity co-ops under Mitchell-Lama receive substantial governmental subsidies. After buying a “share” in a co-op apartment, residents pay a monthly fee that covers the building’s mortgage, maintenance fees, and other costs, paying a monthly rate that is substantially below the average apartment rents in NYC.
Mamdani’s Prospects
There is a very high risk that if Mamdani wins the mayorship, not only will Trump’s thugs try to sabotage his program but business leaders and rich investors will engage in capital flight, withdrawing their money from the city, destroying its credit rating and tax base. This would severely limit Mamdani’s ability to fund his proposed welfare state expansion with regard to housing, transportation, government-run grocery stores, and other areas. New York’s business-friendly Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul is also legally empowered to veto Mamdani’s fiscal proposals. She has publicly endorsed Mamdani for mayor but likely had major reservations in doing so as she has previously vigorously denounced Mamdani’s proposals for tax increases and government borrowing.
There is immense pressure on Mamdani to heavily dilute his program. Social movements rooted in ordinary people will have to keep up constant pressure on him to keep his campaign promises.
Correction: A previous version of this article referred to Jonathan Tarleton as the editor of the radical left NYC newspaper The Indypendent. He is not, and the article has been edited to reflect this.
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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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A Year After Grants Pass, Criminalizing Homelessness Still Doesn’t Work
Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime if our country commits to ensuring that every person has a safe, affordable, dignified, and permanent place to call home.
Jun 09, 2025
In the largest eviction of a homeless encampment in recent history, around 100 unhoused people were recently forced to vacate Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest—or else face a $5,000 fine and up to one year in jail.
The forest was the last hope for the encampment’s residents, many of whom were living in broken down RVs and cars. Shelters in nearby Bend—where the average home price is nearly $800,000—are at capacity, and rent is increasingly unaffordable.
“There’s nowhere for us to go,” Chris Dake, an encampment resident who worked as a cashier and injured his knee, told The New York Times.
Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country.
This sentiment was echoed by unhoused people in Grants Pass, 200 miles south, where a similar fight unfolded. A year ago this June, in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court’s billionaire-backed justices ruled that local governments can criminalize people for sleeping outside, even if there’s no available shelter.
Nearly one year later, homelessness—and its criminalization—has only worsened.
Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country. The federal minimum wage has remained stagnant at $7.25 since 2009, and rent is now unaffordable for half of all tenants.
As a result, there are now over 770,000 people without housing nationwide—a record high. Many more are just one emergency away from joining them.
The Supreme Court’s abhorrent decision opened the door for cities to harass people for the “crime” of not having a place to live. Fines and arrests, in turn, make it more difficult to get out of poverty and into stable housing.
Since Grants Pass, around 150 cities have passed or strengthened “anti-camping” laws that fine, ticket, or jail people for living outdoors—including over two dozen cities and counties in California alone. A Florida law mandates that counties and municipalities ban sleeping or camping on public property. Due to a related crackdown, almost half of arrests in Miami Beach last year were of unhoused people.
Emboldened by Grants Pass, localities have ramped up the forced clearing of encampments—a practice known as “sweeps.”
While officials justify them for safety and sanitation reasons, sweeps harm people by severing their ties to case workers, medical care, and other vital services. In many cases, basic survival items are confiscated by authorities. Alongside being deadly, research confirms that sweeps are also costly and unproductive.
Punitive fines, arrests, and sweeps don’t address the root of the problem: the lack of permanent, affordable, and adequate housing.
President Donald Trump is only doubling down on failed housing policies. He ordered over 30 encampments in D.C. to be cleared based on a March executive order. And his budget request for 2026 would slash federal rental assistance for over 10 million Americans by a devastating 43% (all to fund tax breaks for billionaires and corporations.)
For too long, our government policies have allowed a basic necessity for survival to become commodified and controlled by corporations and billionaire investors. We must challenge this if we ever want to resolve homelessness.
Housing is a fundamental human right under international law that the U.S. must recognize. Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime if our country commits to ensuring that every person has a safe, affordable, dignified, and permanent place to call home.
As housing experts have long noted, governments should invest in proven and humane solutions like Housing First, which provides permanent housing without preconditions, coupled with supportive services.
Despite the obstacles, communities continue to fight back—including in Grants Pass, where disability rights advocates are challenging the city’s public camping restrictions. Others are forming tenant and homeless unions in their cities, organizing rent strikes, and pushing for publicly funded housing (or “social housing”) that’s permanently affordable and protected from the private market.
The Grants Pass decision may have opened the door to new cruelties, but local governments still have a choice to do what’s right. Now, more than ever, we must demand real housing solutions.
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'Inspiring': Seattle Voters Say Yes to Corporate Tax Hike to Fund Social Housing
"This victory is just the latest sign that Americans are fed up with overpaid CEOs—and want to use tax policies to crack down on the problem," one advocate said.
Feb 12, 2025
Seattle housing advocates look to have defeated Amazon, Microsoft, and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce this week with the likely passage of a ballot initiative to fund social housing through an "excess compensation" tax on city businesses paying salaries of over $1 million.
According to early returns for a special election Tuesday, 68.32% of voters backed funding for social housing and 57.55% chose to fund it specifically with the proposed tax. Advocates estimate that the 5% marginal tax on $1-million-plus salaries could raise around $53 million per year for affordable housing, funding 2,000 units in 10 years.
"This victory is just the latest sign that Americans are fed up with overpaid CEOs—and want to use tax policies to crack down on the problem," Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org co-editor and global economy project director at the Institute for Policy Studies, told Common Dreams.
For Seattle housing advocates, the victory was a long time coming. While much of the country struggles with an affordable housing crisis, Seattle's housing costs are around 50% higher than the national average, playing a large role in making it the most expensive U.S. city outside of California, according to a 2024 analysis. Twenty-three percent of Seattle renters spend over half their income on housing, and Washington state has the third-highest homeless population in the U.S., trailing only California and New York. More than half of the state's homeless population—or over 16,000 people—spend their time in Seattle's King County.
There is also a very real sense in the city that Big Tech businesses in particular are directly to blame for the high costs, as rents in the Seattle metro area rose by 17% from 2011 to 2015, as Amazon and other tech giants developed the formerly industrial South Lake Union area into an office park. One local columnist even labeled the phenomenon the "Amazon effect."
House Our Neighbors, a group of housing activists that first came together in 2021 to defeat stricter sweeps of homeless encampments, has been working on a solution for years, according to In These Times. The solution they came up with was a model of social housing pioneered in places like Vienna and Singapore that is "removed from the profit motive, available to all, permanently affordable, and held as a public good in perpetuity."
"Last night's results left no doubt that Seattle voters want our city to act quickly to create permanently affordable social housing for people living on a range of incomes—and we believe that our wealthiest corporations should help pay for it."
First, they succeeded in passing a voter referendum in 2023 creating a new affordable housing agency, the Seattle Social Housing Developer.
To fund the agency, the coalition then gathered more than enough signatures to put the excess compensation tax, first dubbed Initiative 137, on the ballot for the high-turnout November 2024 presidential election. However, the Seattle City Council voted to delay the vote until a lower-turnout February special election. Then, following lobbying from the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and other business interests, the council introduced a competing measure that would fund the social housing agency using an existing JumpStart payroll expense tax that was already earmarked for existing affordable housing and Green New Deal programs.
"The City Council would rather take money from low-income programs than from millionaires and billionaires," House Our Neighbors policy and advocacy director Tiffani McCoy told local publicationThe Stranger at the time.
The competing measures were put on the ballot as Proposition 1A (for the excess compensation tax) and 1B (for the council alternative.) The latter option was promoted heavily by Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell. Since January 1, its campaign received more than twice as much money as the 1A campaign, with tech giants Amazon and Microsoft each contributing $100,000, as local outlet Real Change reported.
"The Proposition 1A campaign had huge odds placed in front of it," Washington State Rep. Shaun Scott (D-43), whose district includes parts of Seattle, told Common Dreams. "It was a… low-turnout February special election in which some of the wealthiest corporations in human history spent gobs of money to defeat it. Many of the political proxies of those corporations… also opposed 1A."
"And yet," he continued, "it won. It won because of working people. It won because it's good for working people."
While many ballots are still to be counted, 1A is currently leading 1B by a 15-point margin, according to The Urbanist.
"Despite a half-million dollars in corporate spending and the unscrupulous tactics of our City Council and mayor, last night Seattle voters delivered an unambiguous message: Now is the time for Seattle to take bold, innovative action to meet our housing and homelessness crises," McCoy said in a statement.
"Last night's results left no doubt that Seattle voters want our city to act quickly to create permanently affordable social housing for people living on a range of incomes—and we believe that our wealthiest corporations should help pay for it," McCoy continued. "This is now the second time that Seattle has told its elected leaders, loud and clear, that we want social housing!"
Shemona Moreno, the executive director of 350 Seattle—which helped with the get-out-the-vote effort—told Common Dreams: "Last night Seattle showed that not only do we want social housing but that we reject the austerity policies of this City Council, mayor, and their corporate backers. A huge thank you to the hundreds of volunteers that made this happen and to House Our Neighbors' leadership. Seattlites deserve safe, affordable places to call home. Social housing is good for our planet and for our communities."
The victory could make a big difference for housing in Seattle itself, though social housing advocates believe the fight is not over.
"Despite this clear mandate, we fully expect a legal challenge from the corporate interests who sought to defeat this measure," McCoy said. "Because let's be clear, their opposition was never about any of the issues they raised—it was about making sure the wealthiest among us don't pay a dollar more in taxes to solve the housing crisis. With two citywide council seats and a mayoral election coming up, we hope our city's elected leaders will listen to their constituents and embrace the work to come."
Beyond the city limits, however, state and national advocates also say it has the potential to inspire change across the country.
"I wouldn't be surprised if we see this spread to 'red' communities as well as officials see such taxes used effectively to raise revenue for social programs—revenue that will be even more needed in the face of federal cutbacks."
Scott has introduced a state bill to increase spending on low-income housing and support for the homeless by closing a corporate tax loophole that favors large banks.
"The city of Seattle has shown us the way," Scott said, adding that he wants Washington state to be able to support Seattle and other cities that may follow its model. The win for Proposition1A may increase support for his bill from other legislators.
"I think it's a clear signal to state lawmakers that this is something that we can win on that's popular," he said.
And the signal doesn't have to stop at the borders of Washington state.
"Seattle can play a very important role for leading the way for what it looks like to address housing unaffordability through progressive revenue," Scott said.
Further south, California Assemblymember Alex Lee (D-24) recently introduced A.B. 11, The Social Housing Act.
"It's inspiring to see the grassroots support for social housing in Seattle," Lee told Common Dreams. "Voters see the value in embracing social housing as a public good, and Proposition 1A is a major step toward bringing this successful housing model to the city. As we've seen in Vienna and Singapore, social housing can actualize housing as a human right. That's why I will continue to push for social housing in California, so that housing can be attainable for everyone."
Anderson agreed the Seattle win could have national implications, especially when it comes to holding corporations who overpay executives to account. She noted that Seattle's excess compensation tax follows measures in San Francisco and Portland, Oregon to penalize companies with large gaps between CEO and worker pay.
And while these efforts may have begun on the progressive West Coast, there is a voting bloc for similar polices to succeed in other parts of the country.
"I wouldn't be surprised if we see this spread to 'red' communities as well as officials see such taxes used effectively to raise revenue for social programs—revenue that will be even more needed in the face of federal cutbacks," Anderson told Common Dreams. "And polling shows that taxing companies that overpay their executives is very popular—across the political spectrum. One 2024 survey, for instance, asked voters their views on a tax hike on corporations that pay their CEO at least 50 times more than they pay their median employee. Large majorities in every political group supported the idea (89% of Democrats, 77% of Independents, and 71% of Republicans)."
On the national level, there are three bills set to be reintroduced this session that seek to address excessive compensation: the Curtailing Executive Overcompensation (CEO) Act, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, and the CEO Accountability and Responsibility Act.
"Once these policies start spreading at the state and local levels, they will give a boost to similar bills that have been introduced at the federal level," Anderson said.
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Defeating Trumpism With a People's Agenda
We should raise walls of resistance as much as we can. More important, though, we should demand from the democratic forces to adopt a socio-economic agenda that puts people’s needs above corporate interests.
Nov 27, 2024
A clear consensus has emerged that the economy was the key factor behind Trump’s stunning victory. However, that may not be a very accurate description about what led a disaffected electorate wanting to see Trump back in the White House as the U.S. economy had been in a rather good shape from the second quarter of 2022 to the third quarter of 2024 and was in fact outperforming all other advanced economies by a wide margin. Indeed, surveys had consistently shown that the majority of voters had negative views on the economy at large, thus revealing a disconnect between economic numbers and public sentiment. Unemployment was the lowest it had been in decades, consumer spending was up, and inflation had cooled off. Yet voters still thought the economy was trash.
The U.S economic system does stink, no matter what the numbers show, and the political system is totally dysfunctional, which explains why so many voters were not fazed by Democrats’ core message that Trump posed a threat to democracy. They were probably wondering where democracy was to be found when economic elites run the show. Forty-five years of neoliberal economics have exacerbated capitalism’s inherent tendencies toward economic inequality, created a permanent state of economic insecurity, and led to the rise of an oligarchy.
It is the disastrous socio-economic and political consequences of neoliberalism that produce feelings of neglect, powerlessness and anger and lead voters in turn to cast their ballots for demagogues like Donald Trump...
The United States is the most unequal society in the developed world. The rich are growing richer with every passing year while the middle class shrinks, and the poor are left to their own fate for survival. Massive social inequalities and economic disparities destroy trust and confidence in government and leave people thinking that the future is unavoidably grim. This is the primary reason for the rise of ethno-nationalism and authoritarian populism in the developed world, including of course Trumpism in the United States. It is the disastrous socio-economic and political consequences of neoliberalism that produce feelings of neglect, powerlessness and anger and lead voters in turn to cast their ballots for demagogues like Donald Trump who promise a return to a golden era.
The irony is that while Trump is an authoritarian bully who wishes to use the iron fist of the state to rollback immigration and crush social agendas and even those who oppose him, his economic views are overall staunchly pro-market and outrageously neoliberal. In that regard, there is nothing fascistic about Trump when it comes to the economy. Statism lies at the heart of fascist ideology. The state is the all-powerful entity for fascists. The question of state-controlled planning of the economy is of paramount importance to fascism. For fascists, the state should not control all the means of production, as is the case with traditional socialism, but should dominate them.
The irony is that while Trump is an authoritarian bully who wishes to use the iron fist of the state to rollback immigration and crush social agendas and even those who oppose him, his economic views are overall staunchly pro-market and outrageously neoliberal.
Trump’s proposals for the economy are seen as a mixed bag. That’s because while he has proclaimed himself a champion for deregulation, he is in favor of protectionist trade policies. But Trump’s trade policy should not fool people that he is not a neoliberal. With protectionist trade policies, Trump, as with the way he runs his own business, only sees the short-term advantages in economic policy. Moreover, protectionist trade policy does not depart from neoliberalism. As has been acutely pointed out by British political economist Tom Wraight, Trump simply uses “the coercive power of the state to force other nations to conform to market-based economic logic.”
Trump has promised an anti-regulation blitz from Day One upon his return to the White House on virtually all aspects of the economy, including environmental and public health regulations. After spending months lying to voters about his knowledge of Project 2025, Trump has picked scores of people who worked on this ultra-reactionary policy manifesto for top posts in his administration. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for the economy, if fully implemented, would create a far more unequal and harsher society as it entails policies that will lead to massive cuts on all social programs, including Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and food assistance, and calls for massive disinvestment in public services and a host of new tax cuts for wealthy households and corporations.
Project 2025 is the ultra-right wing game plan for the full completion of the neoliberal economic vision and political nightmare that started nearly half a century ago. It will produce far greater social dislocation and greater economic anxiety than any other time since the onset of the neoliberal counterrevolution. Most of those who voted for Trump on the basis of their perceptions about the direction of the economy and their belief that the country is on the wrong track will be deeply disturbed by the new economic and social realities that will emerge in the United States during the second Trump reign and will hopefully rethink their support for Trumpism. The problem is that the Democratic Party is either incapable or unwilling to offer citizens a new vision for the United States, one that will end the rule of oligarchy, restore democracy, and put people and the planet above profit.
Here are some policies that should be included in a socio-economic agenda for the specific needs of the people in the twentieth-first century United States of America:
1. Implementing Universal Health Coverage (UHC). That is, a publicly administered system that guarantees that all people have access to the full range of quality health services when and where they need them. Financing of UHC could come entirely from broad-based tax revenues. Coverage would be universal and automatic. Covered services would include inpatient, outpatient, dental, mental health, and long-term health, as well as prescription drugs. All three levels of the U.S. government (federal, state, and local) would be involved in the health care system.
2. Getting rid of all challenges and obstacles of union organizing, which include making illegal threats to close a plant if workers select a union to represent them and threatening workers with loss of jobs or benefits if they join a union. Current U.S. law makes it difficult for workers to join unions and even excludes certain categories of workers.
3. An industry-level approach to collective bargaining with active participation in social dialogue. An industry-level approach to collective bargaining will secure the best economic compensation possible for workers.
4. Undertaking a large-scale federal program of social housing construction. The United States faces a deep and persistent housing affordability crisis that demands active government intervention. It is beyond naïve belief to think that the market can fix the housing crisis. Repairing the house market with market-oriented solutions such as liberalizing zoning rules and other regulations have never worked. They do not lead to a major increase in housing supply or in more affordable housing. A strong housing safety net should also be introduced to address the problem of homelessness and ensure home security for the most vulnerable.
5. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 or even $20 per hour. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has been stagnant since 2009 and maintaining it is a scandal of grand proportions. No decent society, let alone the richest country in the world, should accept having such a thing as the “working poor.”
6.Fighting poverty and inequality. Poverty should not be defined one-dimensionally based on income alone. Poverty should be seen as access to a variety of resources, such as education, health, energy, jobs, rights and personal security. The task of eliminating poverty should include both short-term (cash handouts) and long-term approaches (delivering social services and addressing the structural causes of poverty with initiatives such as the guaranteed-jobs program).
7. Implementing the Green New Deal. Greening the economy is a vital and urgent task to save humanity and the planet from the impacts of global warming but also provides a macro-economic approach to sustainable economic growth. It’s a win-win situation and only vested interests (fossil fuel industry, banks, oil-producing nations) and lack of political stand on the way to transitioning to a green economy.
8. Cutting military spending. The United States spent $820 billion on national defense during the fiscal year 2023. It spends nearly 8.4 times as much on its military as Russia does and more than three times the amount of China. While the U.S. comprises just over 4 percent of the world’s population, it accounts for nearly 40 percent of global military spending. Between 2001 and 2022, the U.S. spent $8 trillion on war. The notion that such enormous defense spending is important for national security questions is utterly absurd. The U.S. homeland has never been invaded and no nation threatens U.S. national security. The obscene amount of money that the U.S. spends on defense, which different methodologies estimated to be above $1.5 trillion for the fiscal year 2022, is for the building and maintenance of the U.S. empire. The U.S has over 750 overseas military bases, which only provoke geopolitical tensions and harm the United States, as David Vine demonstrates in his book Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. Money saved from cuts in the defense budget can go towards supporting social programs and/or for reducing the national debt. Arguing for reforms in Social Security and Medicare when the country spends so much money on the military is morally indefensible and will become politically unacceptable if people realize how wasteful and harmful military sending is.
At the heart of the neoliberal vision is a societal order based on the prioritization of corporate power and free markets and the abandonment of public services. The neoliberal claim is that economies would perform more effectively, producing greater wealth and economic prosperity for all, if markets were allowed to perform their functions without government intervention. This claim is predicated on the idea that free markets are inherently just and can create effective low-cost ways to produce consumer goods and services. It is all rubbish, of course; nothing but an ideological pretext to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Neoliberalism is indeed not simply an economic doctrine but also a socio-political ideology that places individual self-interest before the common good, displays indifference to social inequalities and economic disparities and subsequently justifies plutocracy.
At the heart of the neoliberal vision is a societal order based on the prioritization of corporate power and free markets and the abandonment of public services.
Trump’s approach to government and corporate interests, which he will undertake with an extra heavy authoritarian twist, will magnify all aspects of the neoliberal nightmare that has engulfed the United States under both Republican and Democratic administrations for the past several decades. Unfortunately, a majority of the U.S. electorate refused to see what Trump really stands for and was duped into believing that their great leader is the one to take on the detestable liberal/neoliberal establishment and create in turn a system that works for the average citizens, not just the rich.
The next four years promise to be one of severe cruelty for the most vulnerable people in the United States and a nightmare for the environment. We should raise walls of resistance as much as we can. More important, though, we should demand from the democratic forces to adopt a socio-economic agenda that puts people’s needs above corporate interests and consigns neoliberal capitalism to the dustbin of history.Keep ReadingShow Less
What We Can Learn From Social Housing in Singapore and Vienna
The housing crisis is threatening to make the American dream impossible. What’s needed is the will and investment necessary to bring social housing—publicly developed homes for residents of mixed incomes—to California.
Oct 05, 2024
California is the epicenter of the national housing shortage. Over half of California renters—and four in ten mortgaged homeowners—are cost-burdened, which means they pay more than 30% of their income on housing. And I am one of them.
Yet of the 120 members of the California State Legislature, I’m one of the only five renters.
In the Bay Area district I represent, home prices average roughly $1.5 million and modest apartments rent for over $2,000 per month. It’s impossible for most working people to afford to buy a home in my district. Too many of my friends and family have been priced out of the communities we grew up in.
To address this urgent crisis, I have tirelessly pursued a policy that has successfully ended housing shortages in jurisdictions around the world: social housing.
Social housing is the public development of housing for residents of mixed incomes. I have introduced the California Social Housing Act every year since I took office. I fought to become Chair of the Select Committee on Social Housing, and I’ve participated in delegations to Vienna, Austria, and Singapore to study their social housing systems.
As that dream becomes impossible for so many Americans, there remains one tool that has realized that dream for millions of people around the world.
Vienna and Singapore have important lessons for us on how social housing can actualize housing as a human right.
In both cities, social housing emerged from crisis. After a crushing defeat in World War I, Vienna saw the collapse of its monarchy and extremely overcrowded living conditions. Singapore experienced destruction during World War II and emerged from both Japanese and British colonization with a severe housing shortage. Squatter settlements were devastated by fire in 1961, leaving about 16,000 people homeless. Today, the two governments are identified with opposite ends of the political spectrum—left-leaning Vienna compared to the more right-leaning Singapore—but both housed their populations through social housing.
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In Singapore, the Housing and Development Board builds 99-year leasehold flats that it sells to citizens. It has built so many units that roughly 80% of Singapore’s population live in them. Nine out of ten of these residents own their homes. Homeowners have the right to resell them, rent them out, and pass them to their heirs. These condos appreciate in value over time, enabling them to generate wealth. Only citizens and permanent residents may buy these flats, so no private equity firms, corporations, or speculators can game this system.
Vienna—sometimes referred to as the “Renters’ Utopia”—builds social housing for rent with indefinite leases that tenants never need to renew and can even pass down to their children. Over 60 percent of its residents live in social housing. As in Singapore, most residents qualify for social housing under the high income cap that encompasses 75% of the Viennese population. This income limit only applies when the tenant moves in. Without constant eligibility screenings, tenants may remain even if they make more money in the future, enabling socioeconomic integration of social housing neighborhoods. Residents pay about a third less rent than their counterparts in other major European capitals. Even private sector renters enjoy strong tenant protections.
While Singapore and Vienna offer different social housing models, both governments prioritize creating housing for the public good. The foundation of their policies are the finances, land banking powers, and expertise to build housing as a human right.
The result? Both are consistently ranked as the most livable cities in the world.
California today is well positioned to implement what Vienna and Singapore undertook in the past century. What’s needed here is the political will to bring social housing to our state. We can’t afford to wait.
The harsh reality is that California has roughly 30% of all people experiencing homelessness in the nation. The Golden State must build at least 2.5 million more homes by 2030 to end the current shortage. But California built just 85,000 housing units annually from 2018 to 2022.
California today is well positioned to implement what Vienna and Singapore undertook in the past century. What’s needed here is the political will to bring social housing to our state. We can’t afford to wait.
Today’s social housing proposals avoid the mistakes of the past by creating socioeconomically integrated, financially self-sustaining housing. And momentum is building nationwide. In 2023, my social housing bill was approved with two-thirds majorities in both houses of the California Legislature, but was vetoed. In 2023, Seattle voters approved a ballot measure to create a social housing developer. The state of Hawaii has passed legislation to develop social housing. Montgomery County, Maryland, is at the forefront of creating publicly developed, mixed-income housing through the Housing Opportunities Commission. The Commission serves roughly 17,500 renter households and owns more than 9,000 rental units.
Earlier this year, British Columbia, Canada, announced a CAD $4.95 billion (USD $3.67 billion) social housing initiative. Called BC Builds, the plan is to build 8,000 to 10,000 homes over the next five years, which could be the world’s largest new social housing program in decades.
The American dream has long been centered on having your own home. As that dream becomes impossible for so many Americans, there remains one tool that has realized that dream for millions of people around the world.
Let’s learn from our global peers and embrace social housing as a proven tool to solve our housing crisis.
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Why Wall Street Landlords Love a Housing Shortage
And how a new social housing bill introduced Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Tina Smith aims to address the crisis harming families and communities nationwide.
Sep 24, 2024
In its most recent year-end letter, the private equity firm Blackstone gave its stockholders a seemingly counterintuitive assurance: the lack of new housing stock was reason for optimism.
Why does a stagnant growth in new living spaces benefit Blackstone? Because it is the nation’s largest corporate landlord. For the firm and its investors, chronic housing shortages mean more power to set prices and more leverage to extract wealth from vulnerable working-class tenants.
Blackstone’s letter reveals the malevolent and distortionary role private equity plays in our residential real estate market and underscores the fundamental problem with housing commodification writ large.
Our market-based system simply does not give the private sector incentives to meet the public’s demand for high-quality, permanently affordable housing. Providing it would be against the sector’s economic interests since new supply would bring down prices and negatively impact profitability.
Social housing will make certain that housing is treated as a public good that satisfies a social need, not a financial asset to profit off of.
The negative effects of housing commodification are all around us. For-profit investors are snatching up properties at an alarming rate – 1 in 6 of all residential homes in the second quarter of this year – giving them the power to charge residents junk fees on top of rent increases.
As a result, a record number of renter households – 22.4 million individuals and families, half of all renters – are now paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent and other housing-related expenses. This places a significant strain on household budgets and contributes to a range of problems related to mental health including anxiety and depression.
Tenant unions and working-class institutions across the country have spent years fighting back against the financialization of housing, organizing their communities against speculators in favor of greater tenant protections and fighting for housing to be a human right.
A promising step in this direction was taken last week when Senator Tina Smith (D-MN) and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced new legislation designed to solve our acute affordability crisis.
The Homes Act would invest in the construction of new social housing while dedicating resources to rehabilitate the existing stock. The bill proposes to establish a Housing Development Authority, authorizing $300 billion over the next ten years for the new department to finance and develop permanently affordable housing. It would also repeal the obsolete Faircloth Amendment, a provision that effectively limits the availability of public housing, removing structural barriers to the construction of new public units.
Rents would be capped at 25 percent of a household’s income for tenants, greatly easing the burden of housing for them.
Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the bill is the importance it places on equity and democracy. The new units will be built by union workers; priority will be given to protect underserved communities of color from displacement; a significant share of the affordable housing stock will be earmarked for households with low incomes; and many of the new homes will be placed under democratic and community control when transferred to eligible entities like community land trusts and tenant-owned cooperatives.
The emphasis on permanence in the provision of social housing is critical for understanding housing struggles today. Permanent affordability will not only begin the process of decommodification, but it will also protect buildings from private equity firms who see affordable housing as another sector they can plunder.
Affordable housing already accounts for eight percent of Blackstone’s BREIT portfolio, but there is no genuine commitment to providing reasonably priced homes to working-class households. The firm has opened its coffers more than once to defeat rent control ballot initiatives and it exploits programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) to secure the tax benefits that come with investing in affordable housing. Yet Blackstone still raises rents, evicts tenants, and underinvests in maintenance.
The permanence of affordability is the cornerstone of social housing. Social housing will make certain that housing is treated as a public good that satisfies a social need, not a financial asset to profit off of. Only when speculators and concentrated wealth are reined in will we solve the housing crisis and guarantee safe, healthy, affordable, and dignified homes for all.
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Ocasio-Cortez, Smith Push Bill to Create Social Housing Authority
"Because we believe that housing is a human right, like food or healthcare, we believe that more Americans deserve the option of social housing."
Sep 18, 2024
"It's becoming nearly impossible for working-class people to buy and keep a roof over their heads. Congress must respond with a plan that matches the scale of this crisis."
That's according to U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), who on Wednesday introduced the Homes Act in a New York Times opinion piece and an event with supporters of the proposal on Capitol Hill.
"Because we believe that housing is a human right, like food or healthcare, we believe that more Americans deserve the option of social housing," the pair wrote in the Times. "That's why we're introducing the Homes Act, a plan to establish a new, federally backed development authority to finance and build homes in big cities and small towns across America. These homes would be built to last by union workers and then turned over to entities that agree to manage them for permanent affordability: public and tribal housing authorities, cooperatives, tenant unions, community land trusts, nonprofits, and local governments."
"Our housing development authority wouldn't be focused on maximizing profit or returns to shareholders," the congresswomen continued. "Rent would be capped at 25% of a household's adjusted annual gross income. Homes would be set aside for lower-income families in mixed-income buildings and communities. And every home would be built to modern, efficient standards, which would cut residents' utility costs. Renters wouldn't have to worry about the prospect of a big corporation buying up the building and evicting everyone. Some could even come together to purchase their buildings outright."
In addition to establishing the new authority under the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the bill would repeal the Faircloth Amendment, which prevents the use of federal money for building new public homes. Under the new plan, construction would be funded by congressional spending and Treasury-backed loans.
"In New York, the average worker would need to clock in 104 hours a week to afford a one-bedroom apartment," Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement. "This country is staring down a full-blown housing crisis. A crisis where affordable housing is slipping out of reach."
"This bill would create more than 500,000 jobs and create 1.25 million affordable housing units," she noted, declaring that "everyone deserves a place to call home."
It's not just New York City where lower-wage people are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Smith pointed out that "more than 90% of workers cannot afford a modest one-bedroom apartment. Americans across the country are bidding for homes against the wealthiest financial firms and they're losing."
"We have a severe housing crisis," she stressed. "The private market cannot meet this moment on its own. The Homes Act meets peoples' needs through social housing."
As Jacobin's Samuel Stein wrote Wednesday:
The housing system sketched out in the Homes Act looks nothing like what we are used to in the United States. Though we have an important social housing legacy, we have never normalized decommodification as the cornerstone of our housing system.
Introducing legislation like the Homes Act does not accomplish that goal in and of itself, but it offers us a concrete depiction of what that transition could look like. It also highlights the severe disjuncture between what our housing and urban planning system does right now—promote private profits in real estate while minimizing the public provision of housing—and what we need it to do.
The goal of legislation like this is not to pass it immediately, since no sober person would expect the current U.S. Congress to line up in support. Nor is the goal to supplant the messy work of organizing with the schematic and technical language of legislation. Instead, the point is to inspire organizing: to show that the status quo is not the only way our housing could operate, to give tenant organizations a concrete and affirmative vision to build toward, and to offer socialist candidates for office a platform to run on.
The bill to create a social housing authority—introduced less than two months out from the U.S. general election—is backed by the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and its affiliates from across the country.
"Working families are being forced to make sacrifices in order to pay the skyrocketing cost of keeping a roof over their heads, while corporate landlords and Wall Street executives are getting even richer," said CPD co-executive directors Analilia Mejia and DaMareo Cooper. "This legislation provides a clear alternative to for-profit housing. It creates a framework to make community-owned, permanently affordable green social housing a reality."
Advocates from both sponsors' states also spoke out in favor of the bill.
"In Greater Minnesota, counties and towns don't have staff to build affordable housing projects, financing is another huge issue. We don’t have as many philanthropic organizations or financial institutions as urban areas," explained Noah Hobbs, policy director at One Roof Community Housing in Duluth. "This bill is the first real investment we've had in years. We're incredibly proud to endorse this legislation."
Aisha Hernandez, secretary of the Coalition to Save Affordable Housing at Co-op City in the Bronx, said that "cooperative housing gave me the ability to co-own my home. A few years ago, my neighbors and I came together to ensure our housing stays affordable, that our management is working in the interest of homeowners and prevent any corporate takeover of Co-op City."
"We are co-owners, not at the whims of corporate landlords," Hernandez added. "I want my fellow Americans to have the same access to housing that co-op has afforded me. This bill has the ability to do that. So let's get it done."
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