Activity

We need to put class conflict at the center of the housing question, and the housing question at the center of class conflict. Workers have often been the focus of this fight, but tenants (both working and unemployed) have a crucial role to play too. Exploitation through our housing has long ensure…

Neither building nor, for that matter, blocking new private housing will overcome the misery and injustice of rent. We need to transform the power relations that keep this system in place. We need to break the private monopoly on development—its stranglehold over the pace and type of production, de…

Securing housing doesn’t mean competing just with other people who want to use it to live in. It means competing with people and corporations who want to use it to make money. More than 68 percent of the world’s wealth is held in real estate, and 79 percent of that is in residential housing. In 202…

Landlord lobbyists have crusaded to rebrand themselves as “housing providers” and rid themselves of the feudal title that makes their power clear, but landlords do not “provide” housing, they extract rent from housing by hoarding the places where we can live.27 When our rents are leveraged for more…

The supposed cure for renting is owning your own home. But rent is a trap. When tenants try to buy a house, we find that landlords already have the advantage. Tax work-arounds, special interest rates, and all-cash offers make housing effectively cheaper the more money you have, crowding us out of o…