On NYC-DSA’s Green Social Housing Campaign: A Constructive Analysis
As socialists, we understand what is happening in New York City (and across the US!) not as a housing crisis but as a crisis of worker-tenant power. It is not a lack of housing or wealth in this city that is the cause of dilapidated buildings and exorbitant rents, of eviction and transience. Rather, it is a lack of organized working-class power.
Similarly, we understand socialism as the positive project of democratic working-class control, through organization, over the conditions of our lives, not just reducing capitalism’s many harms. This means that our project of building socialism requires, in all endeavors, the cultivation of democratic, independent working-class organization.
This city’s history is littered with examples of well-thought and well-intentioned plans to alleviate the ills of capitalism. And this city’s history is marked by the destruction and perversion, the inefficacy and decay, of these attempts at the hands of capital precisely because there lacked the working-class organization to protect, enforce, and sustain them. This story is not specific to NYC: it has been happening across the world, since the dawn of capitalism. But one particularly relevant contemporary example is Right to Counsel: in NYC, by law, all working-class tenants facing eviction have a right to a free lawyer in housing court; in practice, less than half of these tenants end up represented!
The Green Social Housing Priority Campaign emerges out of a peculiar context. NYC-DSA’s Housing Working Group (HWG), previously the home of the chapter’s housing and tenant organizing, has recently dissolved. In its place a Citywide Housing Leadership Council (CHLC) is being formed, made up of representatives from the Green Social Housing Campaign and the Independent Working Class Organization (IWCO) initiative. We share this context to emphasize the organizationally confusing manner in which this campaign emerged. Not only that, but it has been presented to DSA fully formed, and with the extensive backing of housing nonprofits already in tow. In contrast, this campaign has been put forward without any conversation with the vibrant independent tenant union movement in NYC, of which the IWCO is an active element.
This last aspect concerns us. We are not hoping to derail the social housing campaign, as we understand its important functions, but we are concerned that the campaign was developed without consideration of:
(1) the democratic and protagonistic rank-and-file will of the chapter; we believe in open and transparent political deliberation, and that campaigns like this can only be made stronger if developed through deliberation and collective decision-making.
(2) how it relates to the IWCO initiative and independent working-class organization more broadly; our broad legislative project and our project of building working-class organization must be in conscious harmony!
We celebrate the campaign and the bill it is pushing. The formation of a Social Housing Development Authority (SHDA) with a mandate to acquire and preserve “social housing” is a worthy and meaningful project. We are particularly excited and enthusiastic about the possibilities for tenant expropriation. This is an incredibly important potential tool in the socialist arsenal!
That said, we do have some concerns:
The SHDA is to be run by a board, with a majority appointed by the Governor, the Senate Majority, and the Assembly Speaker (and a minority elected by tenants); we do not have the organized political power (either as tenants or as the DSA) to hold these figures accountable.
The bill and campaign tout union labor as integral; while we certainly support this, the campaign/bill framing is insufficient for two reasons: (1) it has no reference to rank-and-file power, leaving the door wide-open to be coopted by conservative labor leadership; (2) it ignores the long history of construction unions in NYC behaving parochially, chasing development projects that displace their own working-class membership (CSS’s Sam Stein wrote a whole dissertation on this!).
It positively cites failed/deteriorating social housing projects like the Mitchell Lama Coops without assessing the fundamental reasons for their failure: not merely policy or administrative decisions, but the absence of a mass, organized working-class movement to ensure commitment to the program’s goals.
Recent social housing policy in the US is in large part inspired by Red Vienna. The lessons learned seem to be we need what they have. But Red Vienna was built, protected, and enforced by a mass and militant Social Democratic Party that was infused into the very lifeblood of the city.
As such, we suggest:
Reframing the campaign not in terms of a housing crisis but as a positive project of building working-class tenant power.
Amending the campaign’s language to explicitly outline collaboration with the IWCO initiative and to emphasize the role of working-class organization beyond the currently stated plans of “pressuring Hochul” -- social housing must be won from the ground up!
Strengthening the emphasis on expropriation and tying it specifically to taxing the rich (e.g. a pied a terre tax!)
Opening up this specific campaign (and the broader Priority Campaign process) to more substantial democratic deliberation and decision-making.