Municipal Socialism’s “YIMBY” Problem

The Housing Crisis and Zohran—which way forward?

Ben Rosenfield and Holden Taylor

February 10, 2026

doi.org/10.63478/SHTMZMYB

Introduction

It’s Tuesday, November 4: Soon-to-be mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announces—after weeks of ducked questions—that he is voting yes on housing ballot Propositions 2 through 4. Props 2, 3 and 4 generated significant disagreement (in often illegible ways) with bizarre medleys across the spectrum of politics on both sides of the debate; neither the socialist nor the tenant movements offered sanctuary from this confusion.¹ In the months since their passage, and with Zohran’s administration having made its first moves, it has become increasingly clear that Props 2 through 4 served as a microcosm for larger and more longstanding political and strategic divergences within the socialist and tenant movements. These ballot propositions are the tip. In this article, our aim is to explore the iceberg.

On the housing question, most socialists agree on the end goal: decommodified, publicly-owned, democratically-controlled housing for all—that is, dignity, safety, comfort. However, there is significant disagreement on the means and actualization of those ends. What tactics, strategies, and organizations—what politics, in both theory and practice—are necessary to build the requisite power to reach our end goals? On these questions, for us, the means are the ends. What we do now and how we do it inform what will be possible for us to accomplish in the future.² There are no shortcuts.

The stakes are high. This is in part because of the scope and severity of the crisis facing tenants and the unhoused in New York City. It is also because Zohran’s election was made possible by—and has further inspired—working class self activity. New opportunities are now available. Tenancy has a more widely recognized political character. It is understood as a political constituency (whatever this might mean). And the connections between tenants, state and landlord are both clarified and shown to be fungible. Yet the relationship between building power in the socialist and tenant movements and the Zohran administration is far from straightforward, much less agreed upon. The fates of the former are not that of the latter. Lurking alongside these novel opportunities are pitfalls, false starts, and false promises—continuity’s wolf dressed in the sheepskin of rupture.

Previous mayors Bill De Blasio and Eric Adams both set out to address the housing crisis through increased production, rezonings, and emphases on affordability. None of these measures made the city more affordable for working-class and poor New Yorkers, nor did they bolster the capacities of working class organization. Rather, both further entrenched the logic that the market represents the only solution to the crisis. But such is expected from a ‘progressive’ and a pro real estate mayor; should we expect it from a democratic socialist like Mamdani?

In this essay, we argue that a certain proletarian sobriety is required, either in contrast to or alongside the celebration of the novelty of a socialist municipal executive. Both the politics that produced Zohran, as well as the institutional requirements and gravity of the office signal overwhelming continuity with the bourgeois city governance we are used to. Yes, new openings and even gleeful moments of landlord paroxysm are to come; but so too looms the risk of obscuring and further retrenching the foundational causes of the so-called “housing crisis”—namely, the market and the class power of capital and real estate.

In order to develop our arguments, the article proceeds as follows: first, we discuss Propositions 2 through 4, and the debates they prompted. Next, we disentangle the broader political-discursive landscape—defined by questions of housing shortages and affordability—that the propositions emerged from. Of particular interest for us is teasing out both the limits and the underlying political foundations of the ‘housing crisis’ discourse and the use of affordability as a metric or political prescription. From there, we explore the phenomenon of YIMBYism—short for yes-in-my-backyard, an urban development spin on classical supply side economics, which argues that the broad-sweeping ‘housing crisis’ can be solved primarily through building (and, crucially, eliminating anything that might get in the way of building). YIMBYism matters doubly: it characterizes recent municipal governance, and has become both a positive political initiative and rhetorical bludgeon within parts of the progressive and socialist movements. YIMBYism’s adoption by parts of the socialist movement is downstream from a particular theory of change—gradual, compromising, flexible, and directed from the state by professional reformers. With this analysis in mind, we turn to the housing programs of the De Blasio and Adams administrations, paying particular focus to their shared YIBMYist development policies, both delivered with rhetorics of affordability. As is necessary, we address here the specter of rezonings. Through this, a levelheaded examination of Zohran’s housing politics can emerge, in which we can trace clear lines of continuity between him and past mayors, their personnel, policy, and rhetoric.

We conclude the essay by turning to tenant organization and tenant unionism. Here, we criticize the socialist and tenant movements for failing to develop a credible alternative to the increasingly dominant left YIMBY vision. We then stake out, in tentative terms, what organizational means might be capable of reversing that failure–with an emphasis on democratic bodies, rooted in the particular and local but scaling up in abstraction–and what that alternative vision might just look like.

Ballot Proposals 2, 3 and 4

Ballot Proposals 2, 3 and 4 each addressed an element of the ‘affordable’ housing question in New York City and the bureaucratic and technical processes through which they play out. Proposal 2—Fast Track Affordable Housing to Build More Affordable Housing Across the Cit— allows publicly financed affordable housing projects to bypass the typical seven month Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) review process, reducing a given Community Board’s window of intervention to sixty days; it also allows affordable housing projects in the twelve community districts with the lowest rates of affordable housing to be reviewed simultaneously by the relevant Borough President and Community Board, as well as relocating final approval from the City Council to the Mayor appointed City Planning Commission (CPC). Proposal 3—Simplify Review of Modest Housing and Infrastructure Projects—bypasses ULURP for “small projects” requiring land use changes as well as for climate related infrastructure developments and, for these projects, reduces the window of Community Board input, and relocates final approval from City Council to the CPC.³ Finally, Proposal 4—Establish an Affordable Housing Appeals Board with Council, Borough, and Citywide Representation—would create a so-named new board (composed of the Mayor, the relevant Borough President, and the Speaker of the City Council) vested with the power to override City Council rejections of affordable housing projects. These initiatives were crafted by a charter revision commission appointed by then Mayor Eric Adams. They will, supporters argue, fast track the construction of desperately needed “affordable housing.”

Both the camps in support of and against Props 2, 3 and 4 were composed of heterogeneous groups. The ‘yes’ camp included progressives, socialists, tenant advocate organizations, Democratic party strategists (spearheading the campaign through a Political Action Committee, “Yes on Affordable Housing,” with a $3 million war chest), private developers and real estate, and political figures including Andrew Cuomo, Kathy Hochul, and eventually Zohran. The ‘no’ camp was composed of equally strange bedfellows: from major labor unions (such as SEIU 32BJ, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, and the District Council of Carpenters) and the overwhelming majority of City Councilmembers to conservative politicians like Vicky Paladino and Curtis Sliwa, as well as socialists, other tenant organizations, and independent tenant unions.

There are several important points regarding Props 2, 3 and 4 that help explain these contradictory camps. First, as with most ballot proposals, they necessarily narrow and reduce complex political questions into binaries, strip these questions of their context, and present them to voters in the abstract. It makes sense that so many New Yorkers were desperately seeking out analyses of these specific proposals. This confusion was exacerbated by the fact that two of the main socialist and tenant organizations were either unable or unwilling to provide their constituents with any answers. Both Housing Justice 4 All (the statewide coalition of protenant nonprofits in New York) and the NYC chapter of DSA were noticeably silent on these questions. Despite this, socialists and tenants nevertheless made arguments both in favor and against these proposals.

This diversity of views [surrounding Propositions 2,3, and 4] is indicative of a clear cleavage within the socialist movement with regards to both housing and broader political theory. The schism regarding the proposals shows not only political difference, but an inability within the movements to democratically negotiate these differences. Instead these differences are funneled into abstract disputes and disarticulated from organization or party.

The Crown Heights Tenant Union (CHTU)—an independent tenant union situated on the left of the NYC tenant movement—came out strongly against the proposals. While acknowledging that “the current system is broken and doesn’t serve tenants,” CHTU argued that “ballot measures 2-4 will do more harm than the status quo.” As the union put it:

…if passed, [they] will make it harder for tenants to fight back against the luxury development that continues to gentrify our neighborhood. That’s because these ballot measures take away power from our council member, who we have the power to elect and vote out, while increasing the power of citywide officials, who are not accountable to our neighborhood…Don’t be fooled by the misleading ballot language. These ballot measures don’t guarantee that the truly affordable housing we need will be built…These ballot measures take away our leverage and dilute our power. If the ballot measures pass and a bad development deal is proposed (which usually happens in gentrifying neighborhoods like ours), our community is only a tiny part of the giant pool of votes the city-wide electeds want; if we don’t live in the speaker’s district (50/51 chance), our tiny leverage goes down to almost ZERO.⁴

A central thrust of CHTU’s argument is that change is not necessarily good change; a broken system does not mean that we should chase easy fixes that move us further from our goals.

The urban planning professor Tom Angotti offered another angle of criticism, writing:

These ballot initiatives are a continuation of housing and land use policies that have for over a century been based on the myth that building more housing units is the key to “solving” the shortage of affordable housing…. [They] completely evade the need to preserve and expand existing affordable housing units—in public housing, Mitchell-Lama and low and middle income cooperatives, and low and middle income working class homeowners who face predatory investors, deed theft and speculators anxious to clear out more space for more profitable new development (albeit with some token “affordable” housing).⁵

In contrast, Michael Kinnucan (a member of NYC DSA and Socialist Majority Caucus) wrote in favor of the proposals on the basis that you can’t have social housing without building housing.⁶ While Kinnucan contextualizes that affordable “generally means middle income rent stabilized, not low rent,” he argued that the zoning and bureaucratic restrictions addressed in the ballot propositions haven’t protected tenants in the past, and their change won’t hurt them any more going forward; and to him, most importantly:

If we want the social housing tenants deserve, we need to build it—and we need to change the rules to make that possible.… If the city’s social housing program is subject to the unappealable veto of every individual city council member, every development will require months of negotiation over building heights and parking minimums, and much of the city’s land area will be quite simply off limits to social housing. Socialists who want to see Mamdani’s program given a fair chance to succeed should certainly vote yes on these proposals.⁷

Moreover, on Facebook, Kinnucan, in a peculiar echo of Angotti’s argument, wrote that the propositions—and zoning discussions more broadly—are altogether “irrelevant” to the question of truly low income housing and to housing the homeless.⁸

This diversity of views is indicative of a clear cleavage within the socialist movement with regards to both housing and broader political theory. The schism regarding the proposals shows not only political difference, but an inability within the movements to democratically negotiate these differences. Instead these differences are funneled into abstract disputes and disarticulated from organization or party.

In the end, Proposals 2, 3 and 4 all passed comfortably with 58.5 percent to 41.5 percent, 56.9 percent to 43.1 percent, and 58.5 percent to 41.5 percent, respectively. Thus, our socialist mayor elect (and those nonsocialist mayors who might follow) begins his tenure in office with markedly increased powers to fast track the construction of “affordable housing.”

On the Shortage of Housing and Affordable Housing in Particular

Two interrelated claims that fit into a broader “housing crisis” discourse structure the discussion around these proposals.⁹ The frame of “housing crisis” is classically fetishistic: it naturalizes and obscures contingent class and power relations, orients us away from the actors—tenants, landlord, the state—to focus on the atmospheric, and reduces questions of distribution, access, and control to simple supply statistics.

The first claim within this wider frame is that New York City (and the country as a whole) suffers from an abject lack of housing units, full stop.¹⁰ An explanatory article on the “3 controversial housing ballot proposals,” by the worker owned progressive news outlet Hellgate provides an instructive example of this. It begins: New York City’s housing affordability crisis is an existential threat to the self-professed greatest city in the world. And while tenant organizers and mayoral candidates fight to protect the existing affordable housing we have, the need to build more is also acute. The city currently has a shortage of roughly 500,000 apartments, and the current pace of construction—25,000 units per year—isn’t enough to meet the demand.¹¹

Interestingly, the figure of five hundred thousand [link preserved] is attributed to a report produced by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company for the Regional Plan Association (RPA), a storied liberal think tank. RPA is funded by the likes of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Uber, Google, and the very same McKinsey & Co; investment banker Raymond Maguire chairs its board, and its CEO and president is known for his role in the campaign to redevelop Hudson Yards.¹² This year, RPA cohosted what they describe as “the country’s flagship pro-housing conference,” YIMBYtown.¹³ Moreover, RPA was a sponsoring member of the aforementioned “Yes on Affordable Housing” PAC.¹⁴

Despite being used as an “objective” basis for much of the housing conversation, the McKinsey report nowhere mentions any such 500,000 unit deficit in New York City. Rather, the report refers to a 540,000-unit deficit across the entire Tri-state region.¹⁵ This number is derived from what the report labels “a potential methodology to calculate the region’s housing gap” that synthesizes the “overcrowding,” and “vacancy” methods which, respectively, calculate the required housing to overcome situations of more than one person per room and determine the number of housing units required to reach 2012 vacancy rates, along with homelessness statistics. Consideration of, say, the rampant vacancies in luxury apartments hoarded as speculative assets and used to launder money by the world’s financial elite or the nearly 23 percent of New York City offices that, as of last year, sit empty are notably absent from the methodology.¹⁶ Social relations beyond quantitative housing stock that inform conditions in which overcrowding occurs or vacancy rates drop are similarly neglected. The report does mention that the “potential impacts of maintaining the current projection of housing production until 2035 include…[that the] region could miss out on $400-900B in cumulative GDP growth.”

While there may certainly be a dearth of new construction in cities across the country (and there certainly is when it comes to public housing), it is worth noting that digging into these statistics often leads one into the incestuous world of well funded policy wonk advocates and their big firm consultants cooking up narrow positivist assessments of complex and class antagonistic realities that invariably lead to arguments for massively revved up paces of development. These policy discussions ignore questions of commodification or dispossession, historical assessments of the decline to public housing in this country, and the class power of real estate.

The second claim (a component of the first) is that the city is starved of “affordable housing” in particular. This claim calls for an exploration of what exactly affordable housing is in New York City and the political and ideological role that it plays more generally.

Area Median Income (AMI) is the metric used to determine affordability and income eligibility in New York City. AMI is set by a federal body and affordability is subsequently pegged to it. A household that makes half of the AMI is eligible for affordable housing that is priced at the 50 percent rate. As ANHD demonstrated in a 2022 report, AMI is “a convoluted and increasingly disconnected metric that contributes to equally disconnected—and inequitable—housing policies.”¹⁷ For example, in 2022, AMI for a 3 bedroom apartment in the city was roughly $120,000. But that same year, the actual median income of these households was just under $94,000—a full $26,000 or 28 percent difference. This means that substantially more units are allotted the label of “affordable” despite being genuinely unaffordable for most, particularly those in the lowest income brackets. Unsurprisingly, nearly 8 out of 10 rent burdened households make less than 50 percent AMI. The less you make, the more you struggle to pay the rent because there are not actually affordable apartments, despite the proliferation of “affordability.” In New York City, the following are considered low income: $90,720 for a 1 person household, $116,640 for a 3 person household, and $157,500 for a 5 person household. Based on NYC AMI, then, all of the following count as housing for low income tenants: $2,268 for a studio, $2,430, for a 1 bedroom, $2,916 for a 2 bedroom, and $3,370 for a 3 bedroom.¹⁸ Anyone who lives in New York understands how absurd this standard of affordability is.

Under Bill de Blasio’s Housing New York plan, only 15.4 percent of new housing was for “extremely low income” New Yorkers (those making at or under 30 percent AMI). The most updated data is almost exactly the same. According to a 2025 report from the city government, only sixteen percent of all housing completions were for extremely low income households, consistent with the data from 2024.¹⁹ Generally, when there is new construction in New York City, only a portion of it needs to be “affordable” and developers and landlords can set the majority of rents. Only a relatively small portion of the “affordable” housing is designated for “extremely low income households.” This highlights two problems. First, a woefully inadequate number of actually affordable housing units are being created for the lowest income New Yorkers; and, second (and more importantly) focusing on “affordability” often orients our tactics, strategies, and politics to an agenda of affordability that does not challenge the market’s role in housing creation or allocation or in social reproduction more broadly.

YIMBYism…establish[es] a constricted, moralistic, and binaristic framework of political discourse concerning the complex matrix of housing, tenancy, real estate, landlordism, and social reproduction…The equation is painfully simple: more housing=more consumer choice=lower rents. What lurks at its boundaries—beyond the fragility of its central premise—is the capacity of the framework to recklessly identify “bad actors” to blame for the current state of things. By generalizing all opponents of any instance of construction as “NIMBYs,” the YIMBY can conveniently group tenant organizers with the actual political architects of neoliberal retrenchment in order to blame the former for the latter.

In response to this obvious shortcoming, some (namely the YIMBY side of the socialist-tenant-progressive movements) claim that affordability and housing supply—that is, the market itself more broadly—produces a natural filtering effect. According to this logic, building market rate or units that are affordable only to some attracts those who can afford them. These tenants would, in turn, move out of their cheaper apartments, thus opening the former for the needy who would, in turn, move out of their even cheaper apartments. A rising tide of buildings, so they say, lifts all boats. Unfortunately, this is not remotely the case.²⁰ More often, the opposite occurs: landlords, seeing new developments sprout up, seize any opportunity to dispossess long-term tenants and install newer, higher-paying, less-rooted, more-transient, and whiter tenants. The city as a whole becomes increasingly unaffordable and working-class tenants (predominantly of color) are displaced not only from neighborhoods, but from the city itself.

Moreover, as tenant unionists have saliently argued, “affordable housing” is often an outright scam: affordability is “the term by which city officials promise housing for the poor and working people and, by those very same housing schemes, take it away.”²¹ The Crown Heights Tenant Union, arguing against the recent ballot proposals, points out that “the vast majority of what is labeled ‘affordable housing’ is not affordable for working-class families.”²² “Affordability” serves to obscure the fundamental class conflict that determines both housing production and its distribution, and becomes grease for developers, a bludgeon for YIMBYs, and a magnanimous veneer for a technocratic status quo characterized by cycles of real estate accumulation by means of community dispossession.

And yet, socialists on the “pro” side of the debate acknowledge the gap between questions of affordability and housing the city’s wide swath of low income and homeless residents. Kinnucan, for example, clarifies his support for the propositions by writing: “If we want to house really low income people, those people can’t pay the rent it takes to construct and maintain housing in NYC in 2025 [sic]… Sustainably housing them requires the city or state to subsidize their rents using money. That’s the ONLY way to produce ‘deeply affordable’ housing (for households earning, say, $30k or $40k a year).”²³ For Kinnucan, the question of affordability is about the multitudinous middle class New Yorkers frustrated with the percentage of their income going monthly to their landlord, but not quite experiencing the gristle of displacement and dispossession that characterize the city’s most marginalized.

The YIMBY Spectre Haunts the Socialist Movement

YIMBYism as an ideological and rhetorical phenomenon has become functionally hegemonic among consequential parts of the progressive and socialist movements, including the brunt of Zohran’s housing administration. YIMBYism is a simple concept that sprang up—flush with developer and tech cash—amid the hellscape of the Silicon Valley transplant-cum-policy wonk discursive universe and in contraposition to NIMBYism (not-in-my-backyard).²⁴ NIMBYism—though first coined to denote activists fighting against the disposal of nuclear waste in their communities—is now most often used to denote and denigrate community members who block the construction of high density housing in their neighborhoods through community input. These NIMBYs continue a tradition of racist and reactionary white homeowners virulently protesting change. YIMBYism presents itself as the opposite of and—through simple juxtaposition—the solution to the former. Rather than not build, we should build (and build, and build, and build). To YIMBYs, obstacles to construction are problems to be solved, removed, or overcome. Most often, the target is “red tape”—a catchall term for any policy or state mediation that prevents construction.

As annoying as it might be, YIMBYISM is a remarkably effective rhetorical tool. Though YIMBYism—either self-pronounced or through the use of ‘NIMBY’ as a pejorative—is neither a coherent political bloc or ideology, it does serve to establish a constricted, moralistic, and binaristic framework of political discourse concerning the complex matrix of housing, tenancy, real estate, landlordism, and social reproduction.²⁵ In contrast to a Marxian grappling with these subjects rooted in questions of class power and processes of accumulation, dispossession, exploitation, and social reproduction situated within an irreducible social totality, this binary framework abridges complexity and obscures class relations with the brute brush of supply side economics. The equation is painfully simple: more housing=more consumer choice=lower rents. What lurks at its boundaries—beyond the fragility of its central premise—is the capacity of the framework to recklessly identify “bad actors” to blame for the current state of things.²⁶ By generalizing all opponents of any instance of construction as “NIMBYs,” the YIMBY can conveniently group tenant organizers with the actual political architects of neoliberal retrenchment in order to blame the former for the latter.²⁷ Tenant organizers, the left, and communists—so YIMBYs would lead us to believe—are to blame for our dire lack of public housing.²⁸

While the YIMBY-NIMBY discursive tussle has flared up over the years (moreso online than anywhere else), the dynamic growth of the DSA in the past two years (most pointedly through the ascension of Zohran Mamdani and the mushrooming of the NYC chapter) has injected what has often been a predominantly online phenomenon with genuine political consequence.

YIMBYism’s encroachment within parts of the socialist left is evident in two registers. First is the positive vision championed by the socialist movement’s right flank, articulated in the “build, baby, build” approach to the contemporary housing crisis, and the cross class coalitions so necessitated. On this, Kinnucan’s refrain from above is worth repeating: “building apartments is generally good, building social housing is even better.” Then there is the derisive attitude this bloc holds toward those to their left, particularly toward tenant organizers and tenant unionists who reject YIMBYism and its constrictive collaborationist program. Because YIMBYism flattens complexities, here it serves to loop tenant unionists into a camp alongside the Vicky Paladinos of the political world. This serves to essentialize and deepen cleavages in the socialist and tenant movements

A few different tendencies and developments are responsible for this proliferation of YIMBYism. For one, the socialist right’s adoption of YIMBYism is downstream of its theory of change: that is, its belief that effectively administering the bourgeois state at various levels via governing coalitions and pressure campaigns will gradually improve material conditions for a broad sector of working people. According to this theory, such effective administration will win the working class’s favor, making more significant reforms of a similar character (conducted from the same scene of government) possible. Socialism will, just as gradually, become hegemonic if not ambiently realized.

That such efforts at (premature) governance necessitate multitudes of contradictions, compromises, and coalitions is not only understood by this bloc, but is embraced head on, and brandished as a slogan.²⁹ As such, the requirements of governance entail addressing a full scope of political issues for which the socialist movement has nowhere near the capacity to adequately champion. Strategic compromise is not only the name of the game. It’s the game’s whole universe of possibility. A socialist project with the primary aim of immediate competent governance calls for innumerable particular fixes to the panoply of general structural rot. There is a reason, for example, that the Zohran administration is avoiding the actual question of the NYPD at all costs. YIMBYism provides an (albeit insufficient) answer to a different, distinct problematic: the housing question.

As this reformist tendency in DSA, and NYC-DSA in particular, develops and becomes refined, YIMBYis—which, through its ample developer and tech funded war chests, has financed legions of propagandists—sends forth these practitioners on to proselytize across the active political spectrum. In NYC-DSA, about five years ago, we started seeing an influx of Open New York activists in the now defunct Housing Working Group (HWG).³⁰ The HWG’s dissolution is only understandable in light of this development, as what now exists are two distinct working groups: one dedicated to the YIMBY lite and nonprofit adjacent House the Future campaign, and the other to tenant organizing. The two working groups have not coordinated or collaborated, despite some middling attempts by members across both. Each working group is understood to be the fiefdom of a particular tendency and the unfortunate reality is that the chapter’s project of building block and neighborhood tenant organization has been effectively divorced from its legislative counterpart. YIMBYism—rejected by the tenant organizing working group and welcomed in the House the Future working group—both expresses and exacerbates the split within the chapter and socialist movement.

A fundamental characteristic of the [socialist] right flank’s theory of change is revealed here: for them, socialist organization…is qualitatively identical to the legion of other issue-based organizations and, in that sense, holds no particular responsibilities aside from equitable participation. We could even say that this faction tends to understand DSA as an issue-based organization…

If the ideological framework of the right flank of the socialist movement has acted as an open invitation for YIMBYism’s entry, then New York City’s dense progressive ecosystem of issue-based nonprofits, bureaucratized labor unions, and career activists has functioned as a capable courier. The leadership of these tendencies in NYC-DSA is deeply integrated—often overlapping in single persons—with various sectors of this world. The organizations in this system—on their own, rarely scenes of democratic participation, much less decision-making—interact through coalitional arrangements. Rather than forging ideological or political leadership, clarifying political programs of these coalitions, or facilitating their democratization, NYC-DSA often functions in these spaces as a mere tailist actor, funnelling volunteer labor toward goals determined by a coquetry of nonprofit directors and career activists. Sometimes these goals are entirely just. At other times, they fail to meet the moment. Many of these actors are admirable activists, committed to causes of social justice and deeply rooted in their communities. But in the aggregate, these coalitions produce and reproduce a stolid, undemocratic, and unchanging reformism.

NYC-DSA tails within these coalitions. We could label it, to parrot the words of one of these activists, a “secret girlfriend” complex, due to a strange and deferent identity politics (the archetypal white transplant socialist wishing to follow the lead of those ‘most impacted’), an internalized red scare, or, a peculiar synthesis of the two wherein a democratic socialist politic becomes a ticket with which to participate in this progressive ecosystem.³¹ These coalitions are defined by narrow issue-based compromises that result in continual struggle toward incremental reforms with no coherent broader political program or vision of transformation. This lack of a unified vision is due to the discretionary equity among participating nonprofit directors and their respective undemocratic and constrained organizations (a description that includes much of the labor left as well). A fundamental characteristic of the right flank’s theory of change is revealed here: for them, socialist organization (what many hope is our Party-in-becoming) is qualitatively identical to the legion of other issue-based organizations and, in that sense, holds no particular responsibilities aside from equitable participation. We could even say that this faction tends to understand DSA as an issue-based organization, representing democratic socialist issues, rather than a particular ethnic or otherwise marginalized community. A continuity rather than a break with the progressive ecosystem delineates the main factional disputes within NYC-DSA.

One of the defining characteristics of so-called left-YIMBYism is this claim of cultivating conditions that will open possibilities for grassroots tenant organization. Whether, when, and how this is true is difficult to determine, particularly because the figure of “organization” is often left undefined and made to roughly mean “marginally better living conditions.” When YIMBYism attempts a socialist politic, the means and the ends become fully disarticulated.

The foil to left-YIBMYism is not, as the left-YIMBY might claim, left-NIMBYism, but class independence. This is true for both the tenant and the socialist movement. Class independence doesn’t mean eschewing high politics or the complexities of governance, nor is it about abandoning coalitions or trudging along alone, much less in a sectarian fashion. Class independence is forged through mass democratic engagement, proletarian self activity, and a transformative program. It takes the form (in fact merges the fates) of both the party and the council (the assembly, the union).

Housing New York + City of Yes: de Blasio, Adams, and the YIMBY Project

Before examining Zohran’s platform, we want to briefly and schematically review a couple of major developments from the last ten plus years of the de Blasio and Adams’s administrations as they relate to housing. By fleshing out an understanding of the means that Adams and de Blasio each implemented to address their respective “housing crises”—namely rezonings, increased production, and a focus on “affordability”—we can see how these policies actually fueled the processes they were purportedly implemented to curtail. Perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this article, an examination of the actions of the previous administrations helps us to clearly see the lines of continuity between the three administrations.

Sworn in on January 1, 2014, Mayor de Blasio’s housing plan, ‘Housing New York,’ set out to create and preserve three hundred thousand high quality, affordable homes by 2026.³² The plan focused on deep affordability for working and middle class New Yorkers, seniors, and the unhoused. One of the major policy tools created by de Blasio to help achieve these goals was Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH).³³ MIH requires that a percentage of new housing built by developers taking advantage of upzonings must meet certain affordability criteria.

De Blasio achieved record levels of affordable housing investment and production during his tenure.³⁴ Despite that fact, the extremely high percentage of rent-burdened low income tenants remained essentially unchanged during his tenure, from 72.3 percent in 2014 to 71.5 percent in 2019.³⁵ While de Blasio oversaw high levels of the production of new housing, it was largely unaffordable to most neighborhood residents and homeless New Yorkers.³⁶ De Blasio’s focus and prioritization on quantity (high levels of production) rather than need (real affordability for the lowest income New Yorkers) led to a reproduction and deepening of the problems. The Housing New York plan overproduced for moderate and middle income New Yorkers, while meeting less than 15 percent of the need for the most vulnerable.³⁷

Because the metrics and frameworks of affordability are so fundamentally flawed, an agenda of affordability actually leads to unaffordability in practice, as evidenced by de Blasio’s policies. The statistics, particularly as it relates to MIH rezonings, clearly illustrate this point. De Blasio primarily targeted working class neighborhoods of color for city sponsored MIH-based rezonings, ostensibly with the aim of creating more affordable housing where it was most needed. As Sam Stein notes:

Not a single one of the 9,902 apartments built in 21 MIH projects in neighborhoods with average incomes under 40% of AMI would be affordable to the typical local resident–let alone anyone making less than the neighborhood average…In only 23 percent of projects were a majority of ‘affordable’ units affordable to average local residents. In total, 89 percent of apartments approved through project-specific MIH rezonings would be unaffordable to the average neighborhood.³⁸

It is clear that MIH, as both a policy tool and framework, was not effective at delivering housing to the New Yorkers who needed it most. It simply added fuel to the already raging fires of displacement and gentrification.³⁹ These dynamics were only intensified during the Adams administration—we can see this through the massive neighborhood rezonings that have recently been approved by the City Council. The Jamaica Neighborhood Plan, one of these, demonstrates clearly the ways in which upzonings, production, and MIH/affordability have been exponentially scaled up since de Blasio first experimented with them.

Eric Adams, himself a landlord supported by legions of real estate barons, was, unsurprisingly, more antitenant than his predecessor. Whereas de Blasio froze the rent three times for rent-stabilized tenants, Adams implemented a cumulative total of 12 percent increases for rent-stabilized tenants. He also tried (unsuccessfully) to stack the Rent Guidelines Board with anti-tenant members just before his term ended in an attempt to block Mamdani from implementing a rent freeze.⁴⁰ Upon taking office, Adams set out to create 500,0000 units of housing by 2032. As of December 2025, the administration had either created, preserved, or planned the construction of over 433,000 homes. To achieve these goals, Adams “cut red tape” to fast track new developments. He also invested $26 billion towards affordable housing through the city’s ten year Capital Plan in Fiscal Year 2025. The administration has produced nearly 86,000 affordable homes, with the last three fiscal years representing the most new affordable homes ever created in a three year fiscal stretch.⁴¹

In December 2024, Adams and the City Council passed the “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity,” which the administration described as “the most pro-housing legislation in city history.”⁴²

In addition to the goal of creating over eighty thousand new homes, City of Yes brings about significant changes to the city’s zoning code in order to create new housing. The specific zoning changes include: new state legislation allowing much higher density in residential districts, legalizing accessory dwelling units (ADUs), expanding the range of office buildings that can be converted to residential use, and more. In response to the passage of City of Yes, Governor Hochul remarked that “our only shot at solving New York’s affordability crisis is by building more housing.” Council Speaker Adrienne Adams echoed those sentiments, stating that the legislation represents a “historic stride to create more homes and make our city more affordable…[and a] major step to address the housing shortage.”

Two additional points bear mentioning. First, Adams convened the Charter Revision Commission, the body that ultimately authored Propositions 2, 3 and 4.⁴³ Leila Bozorg (the executive director of housing in the Mayor’s office under Eric Adams) was appointed as the Secretary of the Commission. In December 2025, Zohran announced that Bozorg would serve as his deputy mayor for housing and planning.⁴⁴ Second, Adams’s administration initiated five neighborhood rezoning plans: the Bronx Metro-North Station Area Plan in the East Bronx, Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan in Crown Heights/Bed Stuy in Central Brooklyn, Midtown South Mixed-Use Plan, OneLIC Neighborhood plan in Long Island City, and the Jamaica Neighborhood Plan. These rezonings alone will create fifty thousand new homes over the next fifteen years.

The Jamaica rezoning will see the private development of 11,829 new units in a 230-block area. 3,778 of these new units will be covered by MIH, making it the largest MIH zone in the city.⁴⁵ The rezoning utilizes a combination of options 1, 2, and 3 of the four available MIH options.⁴⁶ This means that of the nearly 12,000 units, only about 3,800 will fall into the already-murky umbrella of affordability; and those themselves vary quite a bit in terms of actual affordability. Developers and landlords can set the prices for the remaining units–more than 8,000–at whatever price they see fit, thus raising the rent rates of the neighborhood as a whole.⁴⁷

Despite the praise from electeds regarding this rezoning, it is exceedingly clear that it will have a similar—if not significantly magnified—impact as the de Blasio rezonings. Namely, gentrification, displacement, and new housing that caters to the needs of middle class, rather than working class New Yorkers. In a City Limits article published right before City Council voted to approve the rezoning, Natalie Bump Vena cuts to the core of what was at stake: “[T]rading wholly uncertain community benefits for the authorization of large-scale displacement is a raw deal for Jamaica residents…the [plan] might line the pockets of developers, but it would do little to address the city’s affordable housing crisis.”⁴⁸ She cites urban planner Tom Agnotti, who writes that “MIH will be used as a Trojan Horse to convince communities to accept rezoning schemes that will result in substantial new market rate housing and significant displacement.”⁴⁹

We question the extent to which the municipal state, beholden to predatory bond markets and rarely steered by democratic socialists, is in fact operating outside of the profit motive. Does stabilization of volatile markets make an admirable socialist goal when those markets are premised on continual dispossession?

De Blasio, a self-styled progressive and vocal Zohran fan, attempted to address the housing crisis through increased production, rezonings, and mandating affordability through MIH. Adams, a proud friend of developers and landlords, continued where de Blasio left off and oversaw increased production and bigger and more ambitious rezonings. The MIH/affordability framework has allowed Adams to implement this program with perhaps more support than he might have otherwise. Who would dare come out against the construction of affordable housing in neighborhoods that desperately need it? During his campaign, Mamdani stated that “while we cannot address the housing crisis through zoning actions alone, [Adams’] ‘City of Yes’ is a good start.”⁵⁰

Enter Zohran

As Zohran enters office it has become clear that his vote on the housing propositions was not an aberration, but a signal of things to come. His chosen Deputy Mayor of Housing served as Eric Adam’s executive director of the same and was one of the designers of the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program ( which invites private market management of public housing and supercharges evictions).⁵¹ His ‘housing’ transition team was a creative mix of tenant advocates, nonprofit directors, policy wonks, notable YIMBY propagators, real estate executives, landlords, developers, and two pastors.⁵² On the one hand, this mix is plainly symptomatic of a conundrum that Sam Stein aptly describes: “Most people with the experience to understand exactly how the housing system works today either outright oppose, or simply cannot fathom, radical changes to it, and most people who support a radical rehauling are too inexperienced to craft a practical path forward.”⁵³ On the other hand, it is clear evidence that a particular strain of left housing politics founded entirely on class compromise is looking out from Gracie Mansion, and that its alternative—socialists and tenants who reject YIMBYism—remains firmly on the outside.

Zohran’s campaign website provides us with some useful (though surely outdated by now) information regarding his vision for housing in New York City: “We need significantly more affordable housing,” it states, and “[W]e can’t afford to wait for the private sector to solve this crisis.”⁵⁴ It then highlights the central aspects of his plan. First, “tripl[ing] the City’s production of publicly subsidized”—which means privately-owned—“permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes, constructing 200,000 new units over the next 10 years,” and second, that “any 100% affordable development gets fast-tracked.” The platform cites three different projects as archetypal examples of the necessary fast tracking: 200 deeply affordable units at West 108th street, 175 affordable units above the new Inwood library, and the 500 affordable units on the site of the long-vacant Greenpoint hospital.⁵⁵ These projects “will no longer take years to get approved,” the campaign website states. What’s notable of these three examples is not the eventual character of the developments themselves. They seem like they will be lovely places to live. But the narrative of their production. As reported in the links advertised on Zohran’s campaign website, they are stories of benevolent developers arduously overcoming conniving and parochial NIMBYs (so named) and their manipulation of both community boards and tenants. One of these goes so far as to emphasize the alliance “between well-connected, well-to-do NIMBYs and tenant advocates in neighborhoods like Inwood, both of whom, for very different reasons, see nearly every change as a threat.” This framing performs a vintage form of liberal condescension wherein the people (tenant advocates, who are often actual tenants waging daily struggles to maintain their communities) are portrayed as hapless fools easily led astray by malicious interests. Such stories about development, though possibly accurate in a narrow sense, serve to further entrench the NIMBY/YIMBY binary.

Zohran’s housing program is inseparable from the right wing of NYC-DSA’s politics. It is premised on a class neutral welfare style of governance, wherein particular reforms, through the language of affordability, are prioritized above all. And, through such prioritization, a teetering harmony of class collaboration becomes the ruling ethos. Things that disturb that fragile balance, such as criticism from the left, are understood as existential threats.⁵⁶ Yet that this right-wing faction’s housing politics are reducible to YIMBYism is a misnomer and a disservice. YIMBYism is an overly narrow, clearly laundered project that cannot constitute a genuine—much less holistic—program for housing.

In the context of ‘municipal socialism,’ YIMBYism might best be understood as a strategic compromise, an olive branch extending from the ultra progressives of the Mamdani administration to the foundation backed progressive NGOs and onto the broader “real estate development community.”⁵⁷ The politics of housing cogovernance that includes such an olive branch are much more interesting than boilerplate Twitter-activist YIMBYism. A recent essay by one of Zohran’s primary housing advisors—who was recently appointed director of the revitalized Office to Protect Tenants and who was also a noted speaker at the aforementioned YimbyTown ‘pro-homes’ conference—puts forth an interesting aspect of this vision:

With its multi billion dollar capital budget, the City has the capacity to act as a non-speculative market actor: purchasing buildings where the landlord is no longer interested in ownership. Thanks to its scale, its lack of a profit motive, and its taxing power, the City can intervene to stabilize volatile markets and act as a counter-cyclical force that puts housing quality first and property values second. It can use this power—to acquire rent stabilized housing as a market actor—to drive down costs for operators and improve housing quality across New York.⁵⁸

While the positive thrust here—bolstering the city’s existing capacity to acquire housing—is remarkable, the analysis’s omissions are just as, if not more so. The city acquiring distressed rent-stabilized buildings is an unqualified good. It provides a necessary complement to any increased stringent code enforcement and regulation, and thus functionally calls the longtime bluff of rent stabilized landlords complaining of state imposed (rights infringing!) unprofitability.⁵⁹ However, such a policy also operates as a buyout for negligent and struggling landlords. The consensual sale of distressed buildings to the city essentially establishes a price floor that other, more profit inclined firms must then outbid. This serves to protect real estate investments and, in that sense, motor further speculation. And, as the Eric Adams-led city initiative offering $50,000 cash to landlords currently warehousing rent stabilized units to go towards repair and eventual return of warehoused units to the market shows, treating real estate in good faith and with kid gloves does not entice better behavior.

We question the extent to which the municipal state, beholden to predatory bond markets and rarely steered by democratic socialists, is in fact operating outside of the profit motive. Does stabilization of volatile markets make an admirable socialist goal when those markets are premised on continual dispossession? Here, again, the spectre of class collaboration (tenants and landlords shaking hands over smooth-water markets) rears its reformist head. Baked into Zohran’s housing politics (or perhaps it is baked into the executive office through which his politics now take shape) is the logic that the market, if guided correctly, can in fact provide adequately for the social good.

Both expropriation or the expansion of rent stabilization to cover more existing building stock remain absent from this collaborationist YIMBY vision. With due respect to the exigencies of strategy, this abject lack of explicit confrontation with the class forces that have caused and profit from the ‘housing crisis’ in this city is a black mark on a socialist housing program. Demanding the expropriation of the expropriators is necessary not because it is likely or even feasible that a socialist mayor can compel the mass repossession of real estate, but rather that socialist leadership’s responsibility is to clarify class lines and to outline the historically necessary course of action –so that the wider working class might prepare to undertake such an effort (as they are the only actor capable). And yet the hesitation reveals a rather correct estimation of class power: the working class is not, in its current composition, strong enough to seize our homes back from the owners. And the slander campaign leveled at this housing advisor by the right wing shows exactly that democratic socialism will be fought tooth and nail by the forces of reaction, from landlords to fascists.⁶⁰

Whether and where Zohran’s mayoralty represents a clear break with Adams and de Blasio is the question of its institutional relationship to mass organization. Both the Office of Mass Engagement and the Office to Protect Tenants present new opportunities, though still taking shape, for working class organization. But whether these offices function to legitimate and bolster independent working class organization or to affect forms of state capture and whether these offices might survive beyond the Zohran administration are all very much open questions.

What of the Tenant Unions

This state of affairs highlights shortcomings of both vision and organization within the socialist tenant movement. The independent tenant movement positions itself in contrast to the bloated and diverse nonprofit housing universe. The independent tenant unions are member led and controlled. Often, they have no staff, and are independent from boards of directors, philanthropists, and NGOs. These unions place rank and file member democracy and autonomy at the heart of their projects. And yet (and perhaps for some of these very reasons), outside of a few notable exceptions, they have struggled to expand into the mass organizations from which their more visionary political demands can be made. No citywide tenant union currently exists in New York City, nor a formation to unite the non YIMBY tenant organizers and organizations into an effective counterweight to the coalitionist compromises currently being put forward. Because of the lack of a viable alternative, we see runaway reformism and an embrace of YIMBYism.

The [Centro de Defensa Communitaria]’s ongoing horizon is…the dissolution of the boundary between defender and defended. In other words, the instantiation of militant mass protagonism through the tenant union and against the real estate-qua-deportation state. Political vision, organizational infrastructure, and militant self activity can be separated only to the socialist movement’s detriment.

As a symptom of this dilemma, the radical tenant unionist bloc here in NYC has failed to present a compelling, coherent countervision to the YIMBYs and reformists. The nationwide tenant union movement does not have think tanks to produce its policy or refine its theory. There are no careers in anti-YIMBY tenant unionist punditry. Even still, the lack of vision remains glaring. In no surprise, an instructive exception comes from the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU)’s demand this year for an eviction moratorium in response to the brutal increase of federal immigration raids.⁶¹ Whereas the YIMBY tinged policy vision serves to narrowly stabilize volatile markets through class compromise, the demand for the eviction moratorium proceeds from active mass organization, attends to the political polycrisis, identifies clear class antagonisms, and situates them in relation to one another. In contrast to the olive branch of consensual expropriation, the demand for an eviction moratorium in the context of ICE raids addresses the singular centrifuge of dispossession that is real estate and extraborder fascism. Such a pointed, relevant, and multisided indictment of the system as it exists is the stuff of coherent socialist housing politics.

LATU’s timely political demand was not cooked up in a policy institute, nor is it a floating articulation disconnected from historical activity. Los Angeles had the longest eviction moratorium of anywhere in the country during the COVID era and, amid the recent catastrophic wildfires, another eviction moratorium was demanded and won. That is to say, the political recognition of crisis, rent, and real estate dispossession is continuous with the bearing down of structuring calamity. Simultaneous to their latest moratorium demand, the tenant union, first via their Koreatown Local, began a project of Centro de Defensa Communitaria.⁶² This project merged ICE watch and mutual aid and remained rooted in the union’s communal infrastructure. Centro organizers set up at hotspots, like nearby Home Depots where day laborers often congregate, identifying ICE vehicles, providing food and Know Your Rights information, and—when the time comes—defending their neighbors in confrontations with fascist federal officials.⁶³ They are actively training other union members to do this work. The project’s ongoing horizon is, as one of its organizers says, the dissolution of the boundary between defender and defended. In other words, the instantiation of militant mass protagonism through the tenant union and against the real estate-qua-deportation state. Political vision, organizational infrastructure, and militant self activity can be separated only to the socialist movement’s detriment. The expansion of our capacity, in terms of both raw power and means of self governance, comes not merely through the influencing or orchestration of conditions but by the development of the varied and diverse working class as and into a conscious historical actor.⁶⁴ Our organizational design must flow from this fact, not hope to address it at some later date.

The contrast of such programmatic reciprocity can be seen in the left YIMBYs of New York’s active on-the-ground tether, the NYS Tenant Bloc (the voter mobilization infrastructure of the Housing Justice 4 All coalition). The actual character of this organization is to be seen, but we reserve hesitations about its democratic capacity due to a history of issues of this sort with its parent coalition.⁶⁵ This formation’s general focus is the cultivation of a formidable tenant electoral constituency. And this has been undertaken, in lockstep with the Zohran campaign, to incredible success. Though it often presents itself as an organization, it is ultimately a mobilization apparatus that lacks any of Centro’s protagonism. It is neither a vehicle of self activity, nor democratic participation and therefore is unsuited to promulgate novel politics rooted in the urgent conflicts that define daily life in this conjuncture that might move beyond the reformist ecosystem’s ingrained incrementalism. YIMBYism bears down upon the tenant base. In spite of these limitations, Tenant Bloc is recently making efforts toward instantiating mass organization through a portfolio organization project patterned after independent tenant union efforts.⁶⁶ Though we maintain our concerns about the extent to which regular, rank and file tenants will be empowered to lead and make consequential decisions over this project (due to the circumscription of the eventual body’s decision making by full time staff and directors), it represents a possible opening toward tenant power and self activity.⁶⁷

But there are developments in the independent tenant union movement that point to generative and genuine alternatives. Two tendencies in particular are emerging within this left sphere of the tenant movement. The first tendency is one of deep rooted, localist autonomy and is articulated best in the Crown Heights Tenant Union and the Union of Pinnacle Tenants (UPT, a portfolio organizing project that inspired the Tenant Bloc project just mentioned).⁶⁸ UPT, now an independent union itself, grew out of the CHTU’s Palestine Solidarity Working Group, as Pinnacle is a financialized real estate firm deeply invested in the Tel Aviv Stock Market with a long history of evicting (particularly Caribbean) tenants in Crown Heights and motoring the neighborhood’s gentrification machine. In this tendency, we see a feminist praxis of decentralized autonomy, localism, and a deliberate spadework approach to organizing that centers community building and confronting the racial trauma of gentrification. This is an ethos that emphasizes “a slow, relationship-centered approach to organizing” whose “goal is to foster connections between tenants and build trust as the foundation of taking collective action.”⁶⁹ Structure is understood here as something organic, arising within and from the differentiated conditions of tenants in their particular struggles in and responsive to equally particular needs. Notably, in the last year, as hundreds of Pinnacle buildings across the city have faced foreclosure or sale, the pace and scale of UPT’s organizing increased dramatically. Relatedly, one of Zohran’s first acts related to housing as Mayor was to lobby the courts against the sale of five thousand Pinnacle units, an effort that proved futile, though important concessions regarding building improvements and investments.⁷⁰ This is to say, a practice of dedicated localism and autonomy, because of the structural relations of dispossession, gave way to a higher abstraction of organizing; and yet the former has not been obscured but reified in its importance.

The second tendency emphasizes deep democratic deliberation, more centralized infrastructure, and the imperative of developing higher level politics, particularly in a historical moment when our struggles are often invoked and yet not adequately represented, much less in control of, political currents shaping our conditions. This current is represented in NYC-DSA’s Tenant Organizing Working Group (TOWG) and the two citywide tenant assemblies held last year. The former has been hard at work over the last few years supporting tenant unions in neighborhoods where they exist, helping seed them where they don’t, and connecting each of them to one another across the city. Its work, such as building out the Upper Manhattan Tenant Union and resuscitating the Astoria Tenant Union, rests on principles of independence (from nonprofits and the Democratic Party), democracy (in practice and decision making), geographic boundedness, solidarity (not service!), and cadre development.⁷¹ These principles lend themselves to a relatively replicable structure that can be adopted in any neighborhood.⁷² A practical example of this work is the tenant circle, modeled after the rank and file labor unionist practice of workers’ circles.⁷³ These are relatively unstructured sessions where tenants in a particular geography meet and discuss their organizing, troubleshoot obstacles, and share strategies. These are designed so as to democratize expertise and allow for connections across buildings to be made. TOWG began holding these a few years ago, in various neighborhoods and at the city-level. In 2024, TOWG members began a practice of tenant circles in the Crown Heights Tenant Union, and they have since become pillars of the union’s activity.

At each of the citywide assemblies a wide swath of the independent tenant unionists of the city convened to share strategies and cohere toward a collective analysis if not organization. Skillsharing, storytelling, and deliberation were on the menu for both. Though the assemblies represent an expression of the second tendency, the first tendency was present at both, participating and even leading in turn. The first assembly was organized expressly through TOWG; but, as determined by the assembled, an independent coordinating committee was constituted outside of the scope of NYC-DSA. At the second assembly hosted at the Church of the Village this past December, after UPT led an extensive workshop on their organizing practice, a debate opened up between the two tendencies on the nature and composition of the assembly and its future. The second tendency argued for the development of a citywide union, or a union of unions, that could produce a political program and articulate genuine alternatives to the “build, build, build” ethos; the first tendency insisted on resource sharing, the increase of coordination, and mutual support, and argued against the imposition of undue structure. No binding decisions were made, but the debate itself represented a development of trust between the tendencies, and perhaps even a recognition of their mutual necessity.

Zohran’s election represents a brilliant rupture from the established order; and yet, due to the very same politics that wrenched open that rupture, and due to the responsibilities of the office, his administration constitutes a clear continuity with the forms of governance that have midwifed the crises in which we live and struggle. The answers, of course, lie not in his politics nor his office.

The necessary antidote to the political program that we’ve described as “consensual expropriation” is the continued, careful symbiosis of these tendencies—that is, in grounded, independent working class organization that confronts the contradictions of racial capitalism as manifested in our city and in our movements through the long haul work of building class struggle communities of resistance. These organizations and this movement must coalesce through democratic and participatory bodies so as to produce a high level politics controlled not by careerists nor cordoned off activists, but by the rank and file of a heterogeneous movement always in motion.

In discussions with fellow tenants and tenant unionists at these citywide tenant assemblies and at tenant union meetings, in lobbies with tenant associations, at bars after these types of things, and in the multitude of moments in between, four planks of a prospective program for such a movement crystallize (though this is merely a sketch intended to open up conversation):

An immediate eviction moratorium: the tenant movement—progressive and socialist, YIMBY and not—can and should coalesce around an eviction moratorium until ICE completely halts its activity on NYC soil. This is the widely accepted common sense for those in the movement. Zohran’s administration should be pushing for this.
The expansion of rent stabilization: the seizing of market rate buildings and bringing them into the folds of rent stabilization; more than just building more buildings (some of which will be rent stabilized, others not). This demand recognizes rent stabilization as a tool that the tenant movement can and does effectively wield, not an end itself. We want and need more tools.
Tenant-led, democratic expropriation: the development of legal infrastructure such that organized tenants can expropriate their buildings into tenant controlled, municipally owned social housing; such a program should account not just for the contemporary processes of expropriation but also, retroactively, the years and decades of disinvestment that tenants of this city have endured. Reparations regarding the displacement that the city has facilitated is a necessary adjunct to this program. Expropriation that is based not merely on outstanding deprivation but also founded in tenant organization and proactivity!
The preservation and expansion of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)⁷⁴: the combating and retraction of its privatization, its full funding, and the development of new public housing. The championing of NYCHA as a historical project and of NYCHA tenants as historical actors is an absolute prerequisite for the movement. That the left YIMBY hegemony has abandoned NYCHA full stop, only bolsters this necessity.

These four constitute a wide ranging, expansive, and politically coherent program that flows from the needs and activity of the militant tenancy of this city. And, yet, they matter little as standalone proclamations. Their content and salience are fundamentally transformed by the organizational means from which they emerge. That is to say, a program here is only meaningful insofar as it responds to and is expressive of the actual activity of tenants in their class struggle against real estate and capital. It is the active mass of tenants that grant the expressions of a politic real meaning. As Marx famously says, “material force [like real estate] must be overthrown by material force…theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.”⁷⁵ Yet, the organized masses must retain control and autonomy over those ideas, maintaining their essence and changing them as real conditions make necessary, for them not to wither into technocratic slush. Backroom deals between real estate, politicians, and nonprofit directors where tenants are excluded are where these ideas are severed from the people who give them their gravity. Such a dialectical tether exists only through the form of mass democratic organization extending from the building, the block, and the neighborhood to the borough and the city. More than a tether, such organization serves as the laboratory wherein struggles are transmogrified into political programs and working class tenants, in their collective fights for dignity in their homes, become the political intellectuals, experts, and arbiters of the future that they have always been.

Often in the tenant movement, policy writers and tenants are bifurcated. On one side are the wise (career) devisers of city plans, and on the other the tenants in their homes struggling toward survival and better conditions. The current split composition of the NYC-DSA housing working groups is emblematic of this. The abolition of this distinction is a primary objective to be undertaken through the development of increasingly democratic and grounded independent working class institutions—or, in other words, the instantiation of self governance.⁷⁶ Rather than free of contradictions, these mass organizations must be where those contradictions are fully and collectively engaged.

Conclusion

Immediately after being sworn into office by his political idol, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Zohran attends a boisterous rally held by the Union of Pinnacle Tenants in a Brooklyn building—one of ninety three across the city that this bankrupt slumlord has since auctioned off despite Zohran’s protestations.⁷⁷ Here, at a makeshift desk in the building’s lobby and surrounded by raucous, righteous tenant unionists, Zohran signs three executive orders which pertain to the questions of this essay: one is the reconstitution of the Office to Protect Tenants, to be led by the former Housing Justice 4 All director Cea Weaver.⁷⁸ The next, in recognition that “the housing shortage must be addressed through the production of additional housing at all levels of affordability,” establishes the Land Inventory Fast Track Task Force to review city owned properties with the aim to produce “at least 25,000 new housing units over the next ten years.” What sort of housing? and affordable for whom? is curiously left unspecified. The last, to ‘improve the process to accelerate affordable housing,’ repeats the need for “production of additional housing at all levels” and empowers a new task force called SPEED (Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development) “to facilitate the most efficient production of affordable housing.”⁷⁹ Herein lies the full gamut of contradictions. Zohran’s election represents a brilliant rupture from the established order; and yet, due to the very same politics that wrenched open that rupture, and due to the responsibilities of the office, his administration constitutes a clear continuity with the forms of governance that have midwifed the crises in which we live and struggle. The answers, of course, lie not in his politics nor his office.

At the same rally, Josie Wells, a leader of the Union of Pinnacle Tenants, raised in the building that played host, spoke brilliantly: “The Union of Pinnacle Tenants learned a thing or two about how to make a ruckus, lessons passed down by the Crown Heights Tenant Union. The grassroots organizing CHTU began 13 years ago has grown into something far larger than anyone could have imagined. That swelling sound became a symphony, and from it emerged a Union of Pinnacle Tenants. And in this orchestra I found my voice.”

It is important to recognize the metaphor here as more than symbolic or sentimental. The voice, the orchestra, the symphony—these are the actual components of socialism, and self governance. When Josie Wells describes finding her voice, we should not register it in a feel good Hallmark sense (though it certainly feels good to hear), but instead, as it is, as a profound declaration of political and organizational prowess, of transformative, democratic infrastructure rooted into the grounds of daily life and branching out into the edifices of higher politics. The task at hand for the socialist tenant movement in New York City becomes, despite the obfuscations of our time, quite clear: to embed our communities of resistance into the organic fabric of where we are and to do the diligent infrastructural work to allow these communities to blossom as veritable political actors. Through this reciprocal practice, the crisis of reproduction can be attended to and the effrontery of “socialist YIMBYism” will naturally be rooted out (though its trappings do call for regular criticism). This all requires us to continue building the stuff—the mass assemblies but also the block parties, the tenant circles and the stoopside barbecues, the ever stronger organs of working class militancy but also the rich relationships of trust and love forged in building lobbies and each other’s apartments that allows the symphony to sing, the orchestra to hum, and the every cook to govern.

Notes & References

In New York City, there is a tenant movement and a socialist movement and there is a socialist tenant movement. Each of these groups is broadly defined and of heterogeneous composition. There are cleavages within and between all of these three. In this article, we speak as one of the many voices from the perspective of the socialist tenant movement.
For an extended argument for this point, see Taylor “The Protagonism of Tenants” and “Is Rent the Crisis.” Holden Taylor, “The Protagonism of Tenants,” Cosmonaut, May 19, 2023, https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/05/the-protagonism-of-tenants/#; Holden Taylor, “Is Rent the Crisis? On the Tenants Movement Old and New,” Spectre, September 24, 2024, https://doi.org/10.63478/645UK70K.
Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, a review process invoked when a proposed development will affect legal protections afforded to either an area or its inhabitants.
“Vote NO on ballet measures #2, 3, and 4,” Crown Heights Tenants Union, accessed January 28, 2026, https://www.crownheightstenantunion.org/press/vote-no-on-ballot-measures-2-3-and-4.
Tom Angotti, “The Latest Developer Scam: City Charter Revisions That Claim to ‘Fast-Track’ Housing,” Indypendent, November 3, 2025, https://indypendent.org/2025/11/the-latest-developer-scam-city-charter-revisions-that-claim-to-fast-track-affordable-housing/.
Michael Kinnucan, “You Can’t Have Social Housing Without Building Housing,” Jacobin, October 30, 2025, https://jacobin.com/2025/10/new-york-housing-ballot-measures. Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) is a DSA caucus, and probably the most influential and powerful of the New York City Chapter; SMC is on the right-wing of the DSA ideologically, with a commitment to ‘mass politics’ over dogmas or purity. Read NYC-DSA-beat reporter Peter Sterne’s caucus breakdown for more. Peter Sterne, “Get to know DSA’s internal caucuses,” City and State New York, January 26, 2026, https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/01/get-know-dsas-internal-caucuses/410951/.
Kinnucan, “You Can’t Have Social Housing.”
Post by Michael Kinnucan (michael.kinnucan), Facebook, October 30, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/michael.kinnucan/posts/pfbid02uioxge6bR39dUcFAxiqWzEjFQXxf6rmtsGyCVcrtjMkxncogbD4KpLc7gTttWcuMl?rdid=xzyOEZrFFeEMLw20#.
That the overriding framework of ‘housing crisis’ is insufficient if not purposefully misleading has been effectively argued at length elsewhere. For example: See the introduction of Ricardo Tranjan’s The Tenant Class, which traces a century of continuous claims of a ‘housing crisis’ to show a “permanent state of affairs.” Ricardo Tranjan, introduction to The Tenant Class (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2023). Or refer to Tracy Rosenthal’s 101 Notes on the LA Tenants Union: “When we call this crisis a housing crisis, it benefits the people who design housing, who build housing, who profit from housing, not the people who live in it. It encourages us to think in abstractions, in numbers, in interchangeable “units,” and not about people, or about power.” Tracy Rosenthal, “101 Notes on the LA Tenants Union,” Commune, July 19, 2019, https://communemag.com/101-notes-on-the-la-tenants-union/.
Mihir Zaveri, “N.Y.C Housing Isn’t Being Built Fast Enough, Report Says,” New York Times, December 30, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/nyregion/nyc-housing-development.html; Greg Ip, “New Yorkers Vote to Make Their Housing Shortage Worse,” Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/nyc-mayor-election-housing-costs-c1f88bcb?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqcRF4IYH9RFmOdiqlG3_ld90P7gWhfoEXj2oED6-dUWd44boUIVQL18wz8JlzU%3D&gaa_ts=6951a3af&gaa_sig=4iCwcFQ_CAaPv65ujQFrcjDErwbcN-8eOxXXPHrIbgyoZsv8z01dkefxbyRQJ0aqMg5XQ3Zp9rkAQW34Dxyrpg%3D%3D; Richard McGahey, “‘City of Yes’: Promising But Won’t Solve New York’s Housing Crisis,” Forbes, November 30, 2024, updated December 2, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardmcgahey/2024/11/30/city-of-yes-promising-but-wont-solve-new-york–housing-crisis/; Emily Davis, “New apartment construction in NYC is falling far short of solving the housing crisis claims bombshell report,” New York Post, December 23, 2025, https://nypost.com/2025/12/23/real-estate/rebny-report-claims-nyc-housing-construction-falling-short/.
Christopher Robbins, “A Crash Course in the 3 Controversial Housing Ballot Proposals,” Hellgate, October 16, 2025, https://hellgatenyc.com/nyc-housing-ballot-proposals-guide-2025-election/.
“Our Staff: Tom Wright,” RPA, accessed January 28, 2026, https://rpa.org/about/staff/tom-wright.
RPA, Annual Report FY2025 (New York: RPA, 2025), available at https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/rpa-org/pdfs/RPA-Annual-Report-FY2025.pdf; “About YIMBYTown,” YIMBYtown, accessed January 28, 2026, https://yimby.town/yimbytown-2025/about/.
“RPA Supports YES on Affordable Housing Coalition’s Push to Pass Charter Revision Proposals 2 – 4,” RPA, accessed January 28, 2026, https://rpa.org/news/news-release/rpa-supports-yes-on-affordable-housing-coalitions-push-to-pass-charter-revision-proposals-2-4.
RPA, Impact Analysis of Housing Undersupply on the Tri-State Region (New York: RPA), available at https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/rpa-org/pdfs/20240502_Impact-analysis-of-housing-undersupply-on-RPA-region_Main-report_vS_III.pdf.
Chelsea Li, “Empty Mansions and Millionaire Filled Streets in New York City,” Science Survey, July 21, 2023, https://thesciencesurvey.com/editorial/2023/07/21/empty-mansions-and-millionaire-filled-streets-in-new-york-city/; Rosalind Tsang, “Op-ed: Reimagining NYC’s Empty Office Buildings through Creative Design,” Oculus 86, no. 4 (Fall 2024): https://www.aiany.org/membership/oculus-magazine/article/fall-2024/op-ed-reimagining-nycs-empty-office-buildings-through-creative-design/.
Sarah Internicola and Lucy Block, “New York City’s AMI Problem and the Housing We Actually Need,” ANHD, September 19, 2022, https://anhd.org/report/new-york-citys-ami-problem-and-housing-we-actually-need/.
“Area Median Income,” nyc.gov, accessed January 28, 2026, https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/area-median-income.page.
Mayor’s Management Report (New York City: Office of Mayor Eric L. Adams, 2025), 413–18, available at https://www.nyc.gov/assets/operations/downloads/pdf/mmr2025/hpd.pdf.
George Galster and Jerome Rothenberg, “Filtering in Urban Housing: A Graphical Analysis of Quality Segmented Market,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 11, no. 1 (1991): https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X9101100106.
LA Tenants Union, “‘Affordable Housing’ is a Scam!” Medium, January 20, 2020, https://latenantsunion.medium.com/affordable-housing-is-a-scam-9a4c43ba8149.
Crown Heights Tenants Union, “Vote NO on ballet measures #2, 3, and 4.”
Post by Michael Kinnucan (michael.kinnucan), Facebook, October 30, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/michael.kinnucan/posts/pfbid02uioxge6bR39dUcFAxiqWzEjFQXxf6rmtsGyCVcrtjMkxncogbD4KpLc7gTttWcuMl?rdid=4HMtzpRyAP5pNQKO#.
Staff, “‘Selling Off California’ Exposes Corporate YIMBYs’ Ties to Big Tech and Big Real Estate,” Housing is a Human Right, March 22, 2022, https://www.housingisahumanright.org/selling-off-california-exposes-corporate-yimbys-ties-to-big-tech-and-big-real-estate/#.
Profile Page for YIMBYLAND (@YIMBYLAND), X, accessed January 28, 2026, https://x.com/YIMBYLAND; Tweet by Organizermemes (@OrganizerMemes), X, October 30, 2025, 9:12 a.m., https://x.com/OrganizerMemes/status/1983884690390982901?s=20.
Harlo Pippenger, “AUSTIN and the Limits of YIMBY,” Trainposting (Substack), May 26, 2025, https://substack.com/@harlo/p-164453880.
Tweet by Cassie Pritchard (@hecubian_devil), X, November 27, 2025, 8:55 p.m., https://x.com/hecubian_devil/status/1994223628565795071.
Tweet by Cassie Pritchard (@hecubian_devil), X, November 25, 2025, 2:24 p.m., https://x.com/hecubian_devil/status/1993400299705581845.
Genevieve R., “No One is ‘Politically Independent,’” Socialist Majority, April 5, 2025, https://www.socialistmajority.com/theagitator/no-one-is-politically-independent.
“About Open New York,” Open New York, accessed January 28, 2026, https://opennewyork.org/about.
On a recent coalition Zoom meeting that one of us happened to be on, an elected chapter leader offered NYC-DSA to be a forefront sponsor of the nascent coalition’s campaign, but acknowledged that the group might not want a ‘socialist’ organization in the spotlight. This leader then, jokingly but revealingly, remarked that NYC-DSA would be happy to be the campaign’s ‘secret girlfriend.’
“Housing New York,” nyc.gov, accessed January 28, 2026, https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/about/the-housing-plan.page.
“Mandatory Inclusionary Housing,” New York City Council, accessed January 28, 2026, https://council.nyc.gov/land-use/plans/mih-zqa/mih/.
Sam Stein, “De Blasio’s Housing Legacy in 9 Graphics,” Community Service Society, February 3, 2021, https://cssny.org/news/entry/de-blasio-housing-legacy.
Stein, “De Blasio’s Housing Legacy.”
Sam Stein, Assessing De Blasio’s Housing Legacy (New York: Community Service Society, 2021), available at https://smhttp-ssl-58547.nexcesscdn.net/nycss/images/uploads/pubs/Deblasio_Housing_V41.pdf.
Stein, “De Blasio’s Housing Legacy.”
Stein, “De Blasio’s Housing Legacy.”
Ava Farkas, “MIH: Progressive Gentrification,” https://thetenant.org/mih-progressive-gentrification/. Farkas writes that “building new housing that is 70 to 75 percent market-rate housing in low-income communities of color will only fuel gentrification, as it gives landlords an incentive to raise rents. Because they can exploit major capital improvements, individual apartment improvements, vacancy bonuses, and vacancy decontrol to raise rents, neighborhoods will likely lose more affordable units than can be built under the mayor’s plan.” The article also quotes Marina Ortiz of East Harlem Preservation; “‘You know what we call MIH uptown? Missing In Harlem, cause that’s what we’ll be if this plan goes through[.]’”
“Most Pro-Housing Administration in City History: Mayor Adams, City Planning Release “Manhattan Plan,” Ambitious Proposal to Build 100, 000 New Homes in the Borough Over Next Decade,” nyc.gov, December 22, 2025, https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/12/most-pro-housing-administration-in-city-history–mayor-adams–ci0.
“Most Pro-Housing Administration in City History.”
“Mayor Adams Announces New Charter Revision Commision to Continue Important Work Tackling Generational Housing Crisis Impacting Working-Class New Yorkers,” nyc.gov, December 12, 2024, https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2024/12/mayor-adams-new-charter-revision-commission-continue-important-work-tackling.
David Brand, “Mamdani taps Mayor Adams’ housing czar for key deputy role,” Gothamist (blog), December 19, 2025, https://gothamist.com/news/mamdani-taps-mayor-adams-housing-czar-for-key-deputy-role.
Through the land use process, local politicians and community members were able to secure an additional 200 affordable units, as well as ‘targeted commitments’ to ‘address additional concerns around local green space, sewer infrastructure, flooding, and overall community impact.’ Ryan Schwach, “Jamaica rezoning clears Council committees with less housing but a lot more money,” Queens Daily Eagle, October 10, 2025, https://queenseagle.com/all/2025/10/10/jamaica-rezoning-clears-council-committees-with-less-housing-but-a-lot-more-money. City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams remarked that “this level of neighborhood investment, housing affordability, and targeted commitments would not have been possible without the City Council’s direct role in the land use process to negotiate and secure community needs.” These remarks came less than a month before the election and directly speak to props 2-4- she was a strong proponent of a ‘no’ vote on 2-4, in large because ‘yes’ on 2-4 takes power away from the City Council and community members.
Naeisha Rose, “Council committees approve Jamaica plan,” Queens Chronicle, October 10, 2025, https://www.qchron.com/editions/eastern/council-committees-approve-jamaica-plan/article_21f12156-2e69-49b7-b106-1458a6f99c3d.html. For areas of the rezoning covered by MIH option 1, 25 percent of the units must average $1,701 for a studio, $1,822 for a one bedroom, $2,187 for a two bedroom, and $2,527 for a three bedroom. For MIH option 2, 30 percent of units must be average $2,268 for a studio, $2,430 for a one bedroom, $2,916 for a 2 bedroom, and $3,370 for a three bedroom. Finally, for MIH option 3, 20 percent of units must average $1,134 for studio, $1,215 for one bedroom, $1,458 for two bedrooms, and $1,685 for three bedrooms.
And this effectively introduces what the geographer Neil Smith termed a “rent gap”–wherien potential rents (what a possible new tenant could pay) of the surrounding areas outpace actual rents, paving the way for future development and gentrification.
Natalie Bump Vena, “Opinion: Jamaica Rezoning is a Gift to Real Estates, Not Residents,” City Limits, October 8, 2025, https://citylimits.org/opinion-jamaica-rezoning-is-a-gift-to-real-estate-not-residents/.
Tom Agnotti and Sylvia Morse (eds.), Zoned Out!: Race, Displacement, and City Planning in New York City (New York: New Village Press, 2023).
Sahalie Donaldson, “Mayoral Candidates each support ‘City of Yes’ the most,” City and State New York, November 20, 2024, https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2024/11/mayoral-candidates-each-support-city-yes-most/401200/.
Mihir Zaveri, “Mamdani Names Deputy Mayors for Housing and Economic Justice,” New York Times, December 19, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/nyregion/zohran-mamdani-leila-bozorg-julie-su.html; Policy with a Purpose: CHPC’s 60th Annual Luncheon (New York: Citizens Housing Planning Council, 2019), 16–17, available at https://chpcny.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Leila-Bozorg-Award-Bio-2019.pdf; Greg B. Smith, “Eviction Filings Highest Among Private Managers of NYCHA Buildings,” The City, March 14, 2024, https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/03/14/eviction-private-nycha-managers-rad/.
“Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani Announces Transition Committee Appointments to Advance his Affordability Agenda,” BRIC, November 11, 2025, https://bricartsmedia.org/about/news/press-release/mayor-elect-zohran-mamdani-announces-transition-committee-appointments-to-advance-his-affordability-agenda/.
Samuel Stein, “Zohran Mamdani Vs. the Real Estate State,” Jewish Currents, December 17, 2025, https://jewishcurrents.org/zohran-mamdani-vs-the-real-estate-state.
“Housing By and For New York,” Zohran for New York City, February 3, 2025, https://www.zohranfornyc.com/policies/housing-by-and-for-new-york.
Mihir Zaveri, “An Affordable Housing Project Faced a Huge Backlash. It Won Anyway,” New York Times, November 19, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/nyregion/housing-crunch-affordable-upper-west-side.html; Michael Kimmelman, “Neighbors Fight Affordable Housing but Need Libraries. Can’t We Make a Deal?” New York Times, June 28, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/arts/design/inwood-library-affordable-housing.html; Emma Davey, “Hospital Space Turning Into Mixed-Use Affordable Housing Campus,” Greenpointers, January 5, 2025, https://greenpointers.com/2023/01/05/former-greenpoint-hospital-space-turning-into-mixed-use-affordable-housing-campus/.
Sid CW, “NYC-DSA ‘Orients’ to a Zohran Administration,” Socialist Tribune (Substack), October 13, 2025, https://socialisttribune.substack.com/p/nyc-dsa-orients-to-a-zohran-administration.
Tweet by Shabazz Stuart (@ShabazzStuart), X, November 25, 2025, 12:22 p.m., https://x.com/ShabazzStuart/status/1993369731563503846.
Cea Weaver, “Stabilization and Speculation,” Phenomenal World, October 30, 2025, https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/stabilization-and-speculation/. See also, Rocco Vertuccio, “One-on-one with new Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants director,” Spectrum News, January 3, 2026, https://spectrumlocalnews.com/product-pages/nyc/CTV/2026/01/03/one-on-one-with-new-mayor-s-office-to-protect-tenants-director; Tweet by “holdenn” (@comradejumpshot), X, August 17, 2025, 2:05 p.m., https://x.com/comradejumpshot/status/1957141806405300344.
John Kruzel, “US Supreme Court rebuffs challenge to New York rent stabilization,” Reuters, November 12, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-wont-hear-clash-over-new-york-rent-stabilization-laws-2024-11-12/.
Dana Rubinstein, Sally Goldenberg, and Mihir Zaveri, “This Activist Has Long Been Polarizing. Mamdani Is Standing by Her,” New York Times, January 6, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/nyregion/cea-weaver-mamdani-tweets.html.
“About” Evict ICE, Not Us! accessed January 28, 2026, https://www.evicticenotus.org/about.
Tracy Rosenthal, “Immigration Raids at this Home Depot Got More Aggressive but Less Effective. The LA Tenants Union Knows Why,” Hammer and Hope, no. 8 (Fall 2025): https://hammerandhope.org/article/los-angeles-tenants-ice.
The article by the comrade and LATU co-ounder Tracy Rosenthal is required reading. Rosenthal, “Immigration Raids at this Home Depot Got More Aggressive but Less Effective.”
Taylor, “The Protagonism of Tenants,”; Taylor, “Is Rent the Crisis? On the Tenants Movement Old and New.”
See Holden Taylor, “Who is for the Tenants?: Toward a City-Wide Tenant Union,” Brooklyn Rail, July/Aug 2022, https://brooklynrail.org/2022/07/field-notes/Who-is-for-Tenants/.
“Our Events,” ourtime.nyc, accessed January 28, 2026, https://ourtime.nyc/events?campaign=housing.
Jai Gohain and Holden Taylor, “For a Rank-and-File Tenant Unionism,” Marxist Unity Group, April 21, 2025, https://www.marxistunity.com/light-and-air/for-a-rank-and-file-tenant-unionism.
Sam Russek, “Zohran Mamdani’s First Big Housing Test is Already Here,” New Republic, December 11, 2025, https://newrepublic.com/article/204287/mamdani-tenants-rights-rent-stabilized.
Palestine Solidarity Working Group of the Crown Heights Tenant Union, Reflections 2024–2025 (New York: CHTU, 2025), available at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6591cc62b3aee81cda7e14f4/t/695ff5b5dda58b4cf36f766e/1767896501762/Pinnacle+Project+History+%281%29.pdf.
David Brand, “Judge Approves Controversial Sale of NYC Rent-Stabilized Apartments over Mamdani’s Objections,” Gothamist (blog), https://gothamist.com/news/judge-approves-controversial-sale-of-rent-stabilized-apartments-over-mamdani-objections.
New York City Democratic Socialists, “Tenant Organizing 101: Training,” Google Docs, accessed January 28, 2026, https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fsIlsUa3BLC1YuKhx2a3jSjX8mex7Ra4MhBn_Uc-Rzc/edit?slide=id.p#slide=id.p
Interestingly, both tendencies are responses of sorts to the nonprofit housing world. The first rectifies the continual tokenization and exploitation of organic ‘tenant leaders’ for director-decided campaigns whose end product are often backroom compromises distinct from their initial promise. The second tendency, this more-centralized approach, is a response to the left-YIMBY monopoly on left-of-center housing politics—that is, to its exploitation not of individuals, but of the whole movement.
A pressing example and ongoing struggle to preserve existing NYCHA housing is the Fulton, Elliott, Chelsea houses in West Chelsea, Manhattan. In the name of ‘modernization’ and repairs, public housing (NYCHA) will be demolished and privatized. The socialist tenant unions support struggles like these and the tenants waging those struggles for their homes and community–but to what effect is unclear. For an overview of the situation, see Brambhatt, “Right to the City.” Viren Brahmbhatt, “Right to the City,” Architect’s Newspaper, September 25, 2025, https://www.archpaper.com/2025/09/nycha-fulton-elliott-chelsea-houses/. The YIMBY socialists perspective, in contrast, as argued by Kinnucan (in a comment in this Facebook thread), is that “It’s really exciting that the city has found a way to finance completely rebuilt public housing at Fulton-Elliott.” Comment by Michael Kinnucan (michael.kinnucan), Facebook, November 25, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/jnmedina8989/posts/pfbid06o6KZSX8EzpQWgbeyfdF1xCnq6naChMnhz1r4BgjkhNrv6V94iizW1jBuAfQce7il?comment_id=1891262341747177.
Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction,” in Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Penguin, 1992), available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm.
This particular thinking is inspired by something the late Asad Heider wrote: “Optimism of the intellect, because we have to start by recognizing that all people are capable of thought, that they are able to not only form conceptions of the world but also to experiment with new possibilities. There is no emancipatory politics without recognizing this universal capacity for thought. Gramsci never failed to emphasize two essential points: that all people are philosophers, and that this mass intelligence is the basis for a future society; and that despite the political division between leaders and led, rulers and ruled, it is possible to engage in forms of political action which abolish this distinction rather than preserving it. This is quite distinct from an optimism about the future, regarding which we must pass over in silence. Our optimism of the intellect is the one which says that it is possible for people to govern themselves, and in every act of collective resistance this capacity is confirmed.” Asad Haider, “Pessimism of the Will,” Viewpoint, May 28, 2020, https://viewpointmag.com/2020/05/28/pessimism-of-the-will/.
The auctioning off of Pinnacle buildings increases the urgency for the development of a citywide tenant union or union of unions, as the rooted militancy of the Union of Pinnacle Tenants clearly requires an organizational architecture that extends beyond the portfolio. Brand, “Judge approves controversial sale of NYC rent-stabilized apartments.”
“Executive Order 03,” nyc.gov, January 1, 2026, https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/executive-order-03.
Executive Order 04,” nyc.gov, January 1, 2026, https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/executive-order-04.

Anti-capitalism, Class struggle, New York City, Social Movements, socialism, Tenants Unions, Zohran Mamdani

Ben Rosenfield and Holden Taylor

Ben Rosenfield works in the legal services sector in New York City and is a member of UAW Local 2325. He is also a member of the Tempest Collective and the Crown Heights Tenant Union.

Holden Taylor is a tenant unionist and an academic. They are a member of both the Brooklyn Eviction Defense Tenant Union and the Crown Heights Tenant Union. They are an adjunct professor at CUNY’s Baruch College and a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, where their work focuses on tenancy and political economy.

Reading Third Camp Socialism in the Time of Trump and Xi

David Camfield

David Camfield reviews Paul Heidemann and Kent Worcester’s newly edited Phyllis and Julius Jacobson reader.

Behind Alma Mater as police dismantle the first encampment and students begin to occupy the opposite lawn. Photo Credit: Wm3214 via Wikimedia Commons

Reckoning with the Alma Mater

Olive Demar and Eli Meyerhoff

Olive Demar and Eli Meyerhoff look at the university’s role as a colonial and capitalist apparatus, arguing that we need to free education from the institutions that betray and abandon it.

Municipal Socialism’s “YIMBY” Problem

The Housing Crisis and Zohran—which way forward?

Ben Rosenfield and Holden Taylor

Introduction

Ballot Proposals 2, 3 and 4

On the Shortage of Housing and Affordable Housing in Particular

The YIMBY Spectre Haunts the Socialist Movement

Housing New York + City of Yes: de Blasio, Adams, and the YIMBY Project

Enter Zohran

What of the Tenant Unions

Conclusion

Notes & References

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Reading Third Camp Socialism in the Time of Trump and Xi

Reckoning with the Alma Mater

HELLO, COMRADE

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Municipal Socialism’s “YIMBY” Problem

The Housing Crisis and Zohran—which way forward?

Ben Rosenfield and Holden Taylor

Introduction

Ballot Proposals 2, 3 and 4

On the Shortage of Housing and Affordable Housing in Particular

The YIMBY Spectre Haunts the Socialist Movement

Housing New York + City of Yes: de Blasio, Adams, and the YIMBY Project

Enter Zohran

What of the Tenant Unions

Conclusion

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Reading Third Camp Socialism in the Time of Trump and Xi

Varieties of White Nationalism

Reckoning with the Alma Mater

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