Freezing the rent is just the beginning

We need to own collectively own and control our communities

A strange thing happened the other day, an ad for a mayor’s race went viral. Normally candidates for local office have to fight like hell for even a little attention, but in New York City something very different is happening with Zohran Mamdani. It’s NYC, of course, but millions of views on a mayoral candidate’s ad is still highly unusual. The fact that the ad is a repeated declaration that he plans to freeze the rent might have something to do with it going as viral as it did.

Now, Zohran is proposing a rent freeze for rent-stabilized tenants, as he says in the ad, but that’s still nearly a million apartments and it really would be a big deal. It would also not be new, Bill de Blasio did it multiple times during his recent tenure. But between Zohran’s democratic socialism, the shifting of the Overton window around housing in recent years, and the smart branding that focuses on the phrase “freeze the rent,” quite a few people freaked out.

The primary driver of the freakout is the strange capitalist idea that housing should be a commodity, and that if landlord profits shrink it’s somehow bad for the rest of us. A certain faction has become so convinced (or has financial incentives to believe) that what’s causing the housing crisis is just developers and landlords being constrained, being hampered by regulation, that the idea of freezing rent for rent-stabilized tenants drives them into a fury.

Overcoming this silly belief that the people who make a profit off housing must be allowed to do whatever they want is pretty easy. Tenants don’t need it explained to them that landlords are the problem, not the solution. People looking to buy a home can also see without much explanation that it’s gotten immensely more expensive at a remarkable rate. In 2009 the average house sold for about $214,000. A short sixteen years later the average home now costs nearly twice that, at $417,000. And despite the idea promulgated by the anti-red tape brigade that all we need to do is build more housing, the average new home now sells for about $512,000.

Should new housing be built? Of course. Should we do it in a manner that allows for-profit enterprises to extract more and more money out of one of our most basic necessities? Of course not. Most of us get that inherently. Health care, housing, there are aspects of society where people need little convincing that greed should not be allowed to enter the equation. And there are alternatives to a profit-driven model. There’s freezing the rent, there's community land trusts, there’s Chicago’s new public fund to invest in housing, and there’s similar work being done in Maryland and Rhode Island and elsewhere.

Photo by Kimson Doan on Unsplash

Public investment, public policy, and ultimately public control are vital because, contrary to those who say housing works on the simplistic law of supply and demand, landlords often have homes sit empty instead of lowering the rent. Over 60,000 apartments sit empty in New York City alone, housing that is hoarded by landlords who simply refuse to make them more affordable. This artificial scarcity, and the artificially high rent it’s paired with, is part of what drives gentrification, and drives long-time residents out of their neighborhoods and communities.

We should always keep these long-term ramifications, and the alternative vision we want to see, in mind. We want thriving communities, we want people to have deep and strong networks of care and support and connection. The capitalist class of course has no interest in any of this, they just want profits to go up and up and up. So it’s on us to sift through their propaganda and defend what we already know, which is that housing should not be a commodity and that cheaper housing both saves lives and allows us to lead better lives. Low rent and cheaper homes allow people to make art, they allow people to raise families more easily, they allow for stability and long-term relationships and more.

And it’s more than just our homes. It’s about more than just cheaper housing. If commercial rent was cheaper it would allow that bookstore to not go out of business, it would allow that family restaurant to stick around, it would allow community spaces to pop up. If space, not just housing, was decommodified, we could have an abundance of third spaces, shared places, spots for people to come together without worrying about money. It would allow for a more abundant life, flourishing communities, and neighborhoods where it’s easier to spend time with your neighbors.

Sometimes the third space conversation misses this bigger picture. We’ve rightly been talking about the disappearance of shared spaces and about how difficult it is to go outside without spending money, but without a bigger discussion about ownership and control of space we’re going to struggle to defend what we have, and struggle even more to create new spaces. Without a bigger understanding, without radical organizing and action, we’re going to be priced out of this whole conversation.

Photo by Philip de Leon on Unsplash

The real solution to all this isn’t easy, of course. It goes beyond third spaces and into collective control of place. It goes into the real story of the commons, into public ownership, into a full rethinking of how space is owned. We’re told that we have to earn space, told that this most basic necessity of life is a commodity we must work to afford. We have to turn this idea on its head. As Malcolm X said, “Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.”

In Brazil the landless workers movement (MST) is a mass movement formed by rural workers and others fighting for land reform and against injustice and inequality. As the MST says, they were “born through a process of occupying latifundios (large landed estates)” and “the movement has led more than 2,500 land occupations, with about 370,000 families - families that today settled on 7.5 million hectares of land that they won as a result of the occupations.” These rural workers understand that there's nothing more essential than land, space, a place to live and get the basic sustenance of life. So they occupied and took the space they needed from the ruling class.

In the U.S. we don’t appear to quite be at the seizing land stage, although it wouldn’t be shocking if people were pushed to that point. It’s no surprise that we’re seeing more tenant organizing, more rent strikes, more people contesting the idea that their homes should be sites of endless and relentless profit extraction. As Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis write in their fantastic book Abolish Rent, where we live can and should be a site of democratic control, a place where we are not at the mercy of landlords and profit margins but are instead able to collectively decide upon a vision for this life we share together, and see it through.

This idea isn’t just true in our homes, it extends into our communities. If we want our neighborhoods to have parks, spaces for kids, and places where we all can have fun without spending a cent, we should collectively have the power and ability to make that a reality. Unfortunately, this simple vision that appeals so deeply to so many of us runs counter to the status quo. It’s an assertion that life isn’t about money, an assertion that life is about connection and people and spending time together.

These intrinsic human desires are largely antithetical to the capitalist system we live under, so we’ll have to fight for them. It’ll take building power, it’ll take organizing, it’ll take hard work. But this is a future worth fighting for, a future where community guides the way we organize society rather than being an afterthought, or even an impediment to capitalist development. Every step we take to build communal power in our neighborhoods is a step closer to real democratic control and collective ownership of our own lives. It won’t be easy, but the steady recapturing of our communities, pulling our neighborhoods out from the jaws of billionaires and taking them back into our own hands is some of the most important work we can do in this world. - JP