These dire statistics and degrading experiences are often collected under the banner of “the housing crisis.” But the capitalist housing system is working exactly as designed: to enrich landlords, developers, and real estate speculators. In the 2010s, landlords raked in over $4.5 trillion from tenants in rent payments.6 In 2019 alone, those rent payments totaled $512.4 billion. As land-lording has become an irresistible way to make money, landlords have taken over more and more homes, enriching corporations and the already rich. In 2021, landlords bought nearly one in seven homes sold in the forty largest US cities—and nearly one in three homes sold in Black neighborhoods.7 Framing the consequences of our housing system as a “housing crisis” ignores that from the perspective of its winners, the system works just fine. The capitalist housing system isn’t designed to provide the best quality housing to the most tenants. It’s designed to maximize profits and to extract the most rent.

Housing isn’t in crisis, tenants are. Our lives are wrecked and wrung by price gouging, eviction, and displacement. We suffer trauma, loss, precarity, panic, poor health, and premature death. For poor and working-class people, particularly people of color, this crisis is permanent. The capitalist housing system has never provided universal access to safe and stable homes, and the policies enshrined by our federal, state, and municipal governments—both its compromised regulations and its deliberate deregulations—maintain crisis as the norm.

The frame of “housing crisis” trains our attention away from the fundamental power imbalance between landlords and tenants. It suggests that to solve the crisis, we should focus on the people who design housing, who build housing, who profit from housing, not the people who live in it. It encourages us to think about abstract, interchangeable “housing units” and not about power, or about people and the constraints that shape their lives.