Scenes of New York—Lower East Side (1937-1938) | Kindred McLeary / Smithsonian American Art Museum / Public Domain
Samuel Stein’s A Right to Housing? asks more than just the titular question, but it does sit with a particularly troubling dilemma: are we crazy to keep fighting? As the book jacket describes, it offers both a “radical blueprint for universal housing” and an “unflinching assessment of why we haven’t won,” split into two forking chapters. In recent years—as Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will” has trended—when I’ve felt most defeated, I lamented to friends that I would catch myself doing the opposite: embedding myself in intellectual work to cling to past optimism, while remaining pessimistic about prospects in the present and future. Stein himself engages with Gramsci’s call, diagnosing that many of us have instead developed a “nihilism of the intellect” and a “naivety of the will.” He nonetheless finds the fortitude to keep going in the resolve of his comrades, the successes and traditions of the housing movement, his radical Jewish congregation and the sermons given by rabbis at the pulpit and at the barricades, and the awareness that we just can’t stop. “To be an activist, an organizer, a radical, or a revolutionary,” he writes, “is to inhabit both conditions at once, and to dwell in the discomfort of this duality.”
Andreas Petrossiants: Let’s start with the structure of the book, which is built around two different outlooks on the same problem.
Samuel Stein: The book begins with an introductory framework that raises a lot of questions—like what we mean when we chant “Fight, Fight, Fight! Housing Is a Human Right!”—and looks at how people have historically answered them. From there it bifurcates into two chapters: one presents a more optimistic and programmatic answer to those questions, while the other is a more pessimistic and perhaps existential approach. The ending tries to pull from both sections equally. The specifics are about housing and the question of a right to housing, but I think the structure probably applies to anything that we’re grappling with on a serious level. It all started when I was asked to deliver a talk about the right to housing in New York. My first thought was: well, we don’t have a right to housing but we keep saying that we do because on principle, we should. I wanted to open the question of what it means to declare a right that we can’t act on.
Petrossiants: Right. One way you think about this is by investigating the verb “is” in the phrase “housing is a human right.” Is it something like a talisman or a prophecy, or even a Butlerian performative utterance where the chant hopes to make it so by performing that statement at a particular moment of assembly?
Stein: The “is” and the rights question more generally is something that I’ve been grappling with since I was a high school anarchist. At that point, I was rebelling against religion in a way that I revised later in life. But I was like, OK so rights can either come from the state or God, and if I don’t believe in the validity of either one, then what is this doing for me?
Petrossiants: In a way, “no gods no masters” is kind of a letdown.
Stein: Yeah!
Petrossiants: So, what do we have left?
Stein: What we have left is us—which is both the liberatory and the depressing side of it. In terms of the nihilism and the naivety that I diagnose in the book, it’s not a belief in nothing, but rather the collapse of a consensus vision of the future or a better world. And a lot of that has to do with the results of actually existing socialism and communism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Then the naivety side is this compulsion to keep doing it anyway. At the end of my previous book Capital City, I quoted a Latin American anthropologist who said that the pink wave in Latin America had a compass, but not a map. And at the time, I felt comforted by that. But then a few years later, it became discomforting. It is a little weird to have a compass that points us in a direction when we’re not sure where it leads. And, in hindsight, a lot of countries that comprised the pink tide have reverted to neo-fascism. The compass ultimately pointed in a grim direction.
Petrossiants: I’ll confess that, like many, I’ve had something of a spiritual crisis over the last years, tested especially by the inability to stop the genocide in Gaza and the invocation of my Jewish roots to carry it out. Reading your book was quite healing in a lot of ways, especially because it reminded me that I’m not the only one feeling incapable and quixotic for trying anyway. For example, towards the end of the book, you write: “We do what we do, because what else can we do, and we pray that somehow it will work. In a positive light, this orientation to politics reminds me of the form of Judaism I grew up in and continue to practice.” Can you say more about the book’s investigation of doing rather than faith, a belief in our ability to make a better world?
Stein: That connection actually came to me on the subway on the way to Temple one Saturday morning. I’m proposing that “faith” and “doing” are a dialectic, two sides of the same coin, necessary partners. I’m posing them somewhat in opposition to hope, which is the language more commonly used in American politics and spirituality. My argument is basically this: You do because you have faith and you have faith because you do, and that the loss of one would probably jeopardize the other. And “faith” here does not necessarily imply belief. It’s more about a kind of continuity of the past and the future lived through the present. To be specific about my relationship with Judaism, I remember asking my father when I was thirteen or so: you’re an atheist, and yet I’m not allowed to watch TV on Saturday, and we can only eat certain foods, and so on. And his answer was basically, “We’ve been doing this for generation after generation after generation, and I’m not going to be the one that severs that chain.”
Petrossiants: That’s a great answer to a tough question.
Stein: Very good parenting on my father’s part. Maybe he had been waiting for that question for years and had that answer prepped.
Petrossiants: Or maybe he asked his parents a similar question. :
Stein: Yeah, totally. And, you know, he had a break from Judaism during his college days too. But he came back to it and lived his life in a very Jewish way. So that’s the orientation in Judaism: you do it because you do it. And in doing it, you find meaning in it—not unlike Buddhist meditation, for example. And so, my realization was that this is like my orientation of politics. I don’t necessarily have reason to believe that by doing the things we’re doing that we’re going to get the outcome we want, but we have been doing this in one form or another for thousands of years, long before the French Revolution division of left and right sides, and so why would we stop? What kind of a historical abnegation would that be? To put down our mostly metaphorical arms and just let it be? And, again, all of this is in opposition to hope being the driving force. And if you feel hope, that’s wonderful! You just don’t need to. You can keep doing this stuff without it.
Petrossiants: This makes me think about how you somewhat begrudgingly accept your friend Rami Younis’s view that your book is a form of speculative non-fiction. As you say at the end of the preface, “Optimistically, in the future, this book will become an artifact of a worse time … In the meantime, we press on, entirely uncertain of what is ahead.” On the one hand, I understand your reluctance: to declare housing a human right, we are aiming for something concrete rather than speculative. But on the other hand, there is a lot of revolutionary potential in speculation as well. I’m thinking here of Marina Vishmidt’s book Speculation as a Mode of Production and Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O’Brien’s novel Everything for Everyone. How do you view the relation between speculation and political militancy, or even just policy change?
Stein: Well, to address Everything for Everyone first, it’s not that I’m not into it. I just had a hard time being excited about a vision of a liberated future that assumes so much horror in between now and then. And that felt like a pattern that I was seeing in the speculative fictions of the left: only after we lose do we get to win, whether through the mass flooding of New York in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, or the parade of political and ecological horrors in Everything for Everyone. I was actually talking with M. E. recently, and I told her that I write about the novel in my new book and that it’s not a critique—it might be read that way, but it’s really not. I just had a hard time with this assumption that things are gonna have to get so much worse before they can get better. And her response was totally reasonable: “Isn’t that what’s happening?”
Petrossiants: One of the things I appreciated most about Everything for Everyone is how even in a post-capitalist world, where so much violence related to private property had been structurally eradicated, there are still crises to deal with: whether the continuing results of climate catastrophe, or interpersonal violence and abuse. And what I found so inspiring were the mechanics the characters devised to reckon with them. In terms of speculative long shots, there is something to be said for a thirty-year-old DSA member from the state assembly choosing to run for mayor of the biggest city in the US, and somehow winning. I was reluctant to frame this conversation too much around Mamdani’s campaign and administration, but in some ways, it’s impossible to extricate the writing and reception of your book from the glimmer of hope that his mayoralty offers, contradictions aside. Indeed, he seems to be a perfect subject with which to reflect on the possibility/impossibility of social justice struggles, housing especially since that was a core part of his campaign. I remember the Met Council sending out emails in the leadup to the election imploring people to “vote like a tenant.” It’s early, but already we see the structural limits to this type of reformist politics, i.e., the Gothamist newsletter on August 18th: “Mamdani promised tenant protections. NYC still refused most aid requests.” You’ve spent years studying urban housing policy from the perspectives of urban planning, tenant organizing, and political economy. How do you see the two sides of your book playing out in present-day politics, both locally and in a wider context?
Stein: It’s a weird and surreal moment. This would have been science fiction a couple of years ago. And it would have taken hope to believe that it would happen. So, I can’t dismiss the importance of hope and speculation. During the early days of the campaign, when it seemed unlikely that he could win, it appeared that we had only bad choices ahead of us. Or rather, that because of the structural conditions whoever won was gonna have a really rough time. And I wasn’t sure that it was a good idea to put our best socialist face up there to faceplant. Eventually I came around to the idea that I wanted the people of New York to throw Cuomo out and that that was the most important thing. And ultimately, I’m more pleasantly surprised than I am crestfallen by how things have turned out with Mamdani because I came in with those measured expectations. If we can look closely enough, and if we take off the ideological sunglasses, his administration has demonstrated exactly what a mayor can and can’t do under these circumstances. And that’s how it was with de Blasio, too. Certain things were made clear by the de Blasio years: we could freeze the rent through the Rent Guidelines Board, we could put a halt on charter school expansion, which seemed unstoppable just a few years ago, but the modes of policing and development were going to continue more or less as they did. Those things don’t really change with an even better mayor now. But Mamdani has been doing more with the things he can do. We didn’t just get a one-year rent freeze, we got a two-year rent freeze. We have Cea Weaver—a good friend of mine and the best tenant organizer in the city—in a prominent position. And there is real talk of how to take over bad buildings, and how to turn campaign volunteers into a tenant organizing corps. This stuff is really amazing, even if it is also limited. There is only so much money to take over buildings, and the administration can’t pay less than market rate because of the Constitution. And they can’t raise the taxes to bring in the revenue, and so they will only do it in certain extreme cases. I think it’s important for the left to understand what those barriers are and why they were put there and not just blame Mamdani for not being able to do everything that was expected of him, but to also blame him when he genuinely falls short of promises he made or more importantly, things he could do but won’t.
Petrossiants: I was thinking of your essay “City of Meh” about Eric Adams’s legacy, because it makes the convincing argument that the city’s operations are bigger than any one mayor’s administration. There is only so much that can be done or undone. Massive snowballs have been pushed down the mountain, whether they be physical or financial infrastructure, to actively prevent transformative social change. As you write in the new book, “Real estate and finance capitalism have constructed a sort of ransom scheme: deal with the housing problem through means that benefit us [capital] or face the risk of a capital strike.” And then later on, you describe the painfully complicated, and comprised, national system for subsidizing housing: “Rather than direct public funding for the provision of social goods, the federal government procures tax credits and gives them to states, who then award them to nonprofit and for-profit developers, who sell them to tax-dodging investors, all to build housing whose affordability requirements can expire in 10 to 30 years.” All to say, it’s not complicated or immovable by accident. So how do we find room for maneuver in a system that has been planned to make maneuver impossible?
Stein: And it’s also been planned to create a series of beneficiaries along each link of those chains. And that’s why it’s grown to become the main way that we build affordable housing in the US. Initially, this was a sort of small program that Reagan created partly because he slashed the budget for HUD, which was doing more direct provision of housing. But instead, we created this Rube Goldberg machine which produced an entire industry of syndicators and specialists and lawyers and land use experts and others who make their business out of doing this thing. It’s like the healthcare system that we’ve constructed, which seemingly makes no sense except that there’s millions of people employed in the insurance industry all over the country. So first, we have to understand what that system is and why it was created and where it falls short. And I think the convolutedness of it versus the ostensible simplicity of public housing can make some people on the left not even want to look closely at this system, or just say fuck it, it’s bad, get rid of it. But we do have to understand what it is if we ever hope to get rid of it. And we also have to complicate simplistic ideas about what public housing is and how it works because it’s not that simple either.
Petrossiants: You make the case that in a sense, all housing is public housing.
Stein: Or that all housing is a public-private partnership—which is the more depressing case, but it’s true. There’s a facile way we can say all housing is public housing that then blurs the distinction between something owned by a public housing authority and something owned by Blackstone. But what’s true in both cases is that there is public and private money going into it. Even in a fully public system, there are bonds that are sold to build it and the tax revenue that comes in is public money clawed back from private profits. And so there really is no purely public realm under capitalism. I think sometimes the left doesn’t want to look squarely at that fact because it points to their dependency on private sector accumulation. But what I’m saying is that you can’t create a bubble within a capitalist state which operates outside of capitalism. You can certainly have a spectrum, but you’ll never find a full escape.
Petrossiants: Yeah, that kind of escapism seems at the core of a certain kind of nostalgia for the 1960s and 70s that continues to haunt people on the left—me included! Let’s go positive for a second. I want to ask you to return to your arguments in the positive chapter so we can end on that note. Could you lay out a little bit of the plan you put forward?
Stein: So, it starts by trying to operationalize the right to housing. Traditionally that has been done by ascribing a bunch of attributes to housing and asking whether they are fulfilled or fulfillable. Is housing affordable? Is it sustainable? Is it accessible? I think that’s a perfectly valid way of going about it, but in my experience it’s useful to think of the right to housing as three rights in one: the right to shelter, the right to a home, and the right to the city. The left is all in on the right to the city, a bit aspirational on the right to a home, and often critical of the right to shelter. Instead, I make the case that you can’t really have a right to housing without having all three of those rights to some degree. Then I go into a policy program that is based in New York but could be applied elsewhere which argues for four policies (and implicitly a fifth): rental assistance, rent control, social housing conversion (which means taking for-profit housing and turning it into social housing), and social housing development. And the implicit fifth policy that I didn’t go into directly is stronger code enforcement: cities going after landlords to force them to provide habitable housing. In the book, I try not to be too wonkish and instead show the back-and-forth relationship between policy and organizing—that they actually aren’t completely siloed, separate spheres with one more important than the other. And so even if you’re all-in on tenant organizing and don’t want to get involved in electoralism, which I think is totally valid, you’re nonetheless operating within policy and within the rules that have been set. You can push them and try to change them, but you can’t ignore them.
Petrossiants: One policy you go into is “housing first,” which gives stable housing directly to those who need it without setting ridiculous hurdles for people in dire straits, which has been very successful in other countries. And, as you say, this has actually been piloted in NYC for veterans and has been successful but hasn’t been expanded.
Stein: Right! You would think that if something works for a subgroup, that it would then make sense to expand it. But there are practical implications. A thing that the state will allow for a small fraction is not necessarily a thing they have the capacity (or desire) to do for all. And yet that just exposes the limitations of the system, the limitations of the physical housing stock, and so on.
Petrossiants: Preparing for this interview I returned to your excellent book Capital City: Gentrification and The Real Estate State. When it came out in 2019, I remember that every housing group I was a part of was reading it and the moment felt hopeful. We had just defeated Amazon in Queens; in 2019 the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act was passed; we could not see it yet, but the George Floyd rebellions were on the horizon. Things seem different today. Toward the end of the book, you write: “One hundred years ago, the left debated whether or not it was possible to have socialism in one country. Today, we seem to be debating whether or not it is possible to have socialism in one city—only we are mostly not having that debate, and instead we’re trying to find out anyway for lack of any other option.”
Stein: I feel like Hunter S. Thompson saying this, but you don’t know where the crest of the wave of history is at any given moment. You don’t know where you are in the trajectory of past and future. You’re just experiencing it, and you have to guess. There was a lot of energy in that moment—a combination of negative and positive political energy. I think this came in part from having a mayor like Bill de Blasio in New York City. At another one of those Verso events, I remember Bhaskar Sankara saying to me, “He’s kind of a right-wing social democrat, right?” But to have a right-wing social democrat as your opponent is emboldening in a certain way because the things being done are important but so obviously insufficient. You can build on them and you can show people: we did this, we need that. In any case, I agree with you that it felt like a very different moment. And in some ways, it was a moment of possibility. And now we’re living the limitations of achieving some of these things. We now have a democratic socialist mayor operating under the same capitalist structures as any other mayor would have to. We now have tenant protections that are really important but are constantly under attack. This gets to where the second half of the new book comes in: what’s the end game here? What are we building toward? Because we’re getting closer to something at the same time as the world is falling apart, which then heightens the contradictions and raises the importance of figuring out what, exactly, we’re trying to do.
This essay was first published by Woodbine, an experimental hub for developing the practices, skills, and tools needed to build autonomy, on their Substack and Patreon. Reprinted with permission.
