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A Right to Housing?
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A radical blueprint for universal housing meets an unflinching assessment of why we haven’t won—from the best-selling author of Capital City
In the fight for housing, we are caught between the world we know and the world we want. This book is both a road map and a reckoning. Drawing on his own experience of on-the-ground organizing, Samuel Stein presents practical policies for enacting a right to shelter, a right to a home, and a right to the city itself.
With raw honesty, he then explores why these visions founder on the rocks of political reality. He reveals the forces blocking our path—from the power of real estate capital to the inadequacy of our institutions—and captures the complex feelings of a left that has lost faith in the future.
Written in the heady weeks surrounding Zohran Mamdani’s historic election for New York City mayor, Stein frames the book around the stirring possibilities and structural constraints of a socialist administration in the financial center of a sputtering empire. He opens a space for action in the absence of hope. This is an examination of life and politics at the intersection of optimism and pessimism, nihilism and naivety, faith and doubt—an essential book for activists, planners, and anyone who refuses to accept the housing crisis as inevitable or immutable.
Reviews
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Stein has written a book for those tired of merely describing gentrification and displacement, who are looking for explanations as well as new programs for action to do more . . .This is a lively user's guide to the changing landscape of the American city.
Peter Marcuse, co-author of In Defense of Housing -
Explicit in Stein's narrative is the idea that a different, more democratic kind of planning might lead us to more democratic kinds of cities.
, The New Yorker -
What does it really mean to demand a right to housing? What needs to be done to actually build a world that includes such a right? Drawing freely from housing studies, social philosophy, history, literature, Marxism, Judaism and his own experience as a tenant organizer, Sam Stein provides a deeply thoughtful and provocative exploration of housing politics in the current conjuncture. This is a readable and well-informed overview of research and strategy around the right to housing. But it’s also an artifact of the culture of radical housing activism today. The book simultaneously channels the hope for revolutionary transformation, explores the limits of housing reform under capitalism, and meditates on the challenges of being an activist in New York City in our era of multiple intersecting crises
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In his signature electric prose, Stein explicates the complexity of our present moment, when activists teeter on the knife-edge between possibility and despair. With radical honesty, Stein acknowledges difficult truths about progressive victories, while never suggesting a retreat from working to achieve them. Highly recommended for activists of all stripes, but a “must-read” for everyone who has struggled to instantiate a human right to housing.
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In this refreshingly honest look at the fight to secure housing as a human right, Samuel Stein turns his attention inward. What do we mean when we demand a right to housing? And how do we square this demand with a political and economic reality so at odds with its realization? As much a treatise on the undiminished power of the real estate state, Stein asks the reader to acknowledge the relative hopelessness of our aims. In leaning into the despairing aspects of our current conjuncture, Stein provides the socialist movement a rare gift – that of honesty. The hope, of course, is not to encourage complacency or retreat but to ask readers to face, forthrightly, the dissonances (cognitive and otherwise) within the struggle itself. For those engaged in the fight for socialism, A Right to Housing? will remain a powerful little book, precisely because it demands that we start from the truth of our situation – and what a dismal truth that is -- but that we nonetheless keep fighting. As Stein puts it beautifully, “it is entirely sensible to be hopeless, but it is entirely senseless to give up."
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What a pleasure to see inside the doubting mind of Samuel Stein as he grapples with the impossibility of our housing quagmire. If you too have the uncomfortable suspicion that solving housing might be hopeless: read this book.