Housing Crisis Archives - Public Seminar

New York City

What Makes Cities Go BANANA?

On zoning, New York City’s housing crisis, and Abundance

November 4, 2025 • by Achilles Kallergis

The nearly hundred-year-old Holland Tunnel, the first mechanically ventilated underwater vehicular tunnel, opened in 1927 after just seven years of work. By contrast, the humble subway station elevators unveiled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2020 took three years and approximately $80 million to realize. (The MTA, sensing commuter suspicion, even made ...

Activism

If Eviction Is Personal for Us, It Should Be Personal for Our Landlords Too

A conversation on Abolish Rent

March 21, 2025 • by Gabriela Rendón, Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis

How do we remake our cities for the people who actually live in them? Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, two cofounders of the largest tenants' union in the country, propose an answer in their new book, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis (Haymarket, 2024). In November 2024, the authors and ...

If Eviction Is Personal for Us, It Should Be Personal for Our Landlords Too

Activism

Rent Is the Crisis

Framing it as a “housing crisis” ignores that from the perspective of its winners, the system works just fine

March 21, 2025 • by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis

Every first of the month, we hand over a share of our wages to meet our human need for housing. Our rents rise faster than our incomes, and inequality grows. Every first of the month, more tenants go without food, medication, and basic necessities to pay this tribute. More people ...

Migration

“Blame It on the Immigrant”: The Housing Crisis Edition

Meet the infamously deep-pocketed, undocumented construction laborers building and then stealing American homes

October 18, 2024 • by Achilles Kallergis

Here’s a tip from the US political playbook: if your campaign is struggling, if you don’t have actual policies but “concepts of a plan,” if you secretly or openly wish for the “good ol’ days” when black people did “black jobs,” if you “forgot” to declare the lavish perks from ...

“Blame It on the Immigrant”: The Housing Crisis Edition

Corporations

An Ethics of Refusal

Beyond “The Great Resignation”

November 14, 2022 • by Benjamin P. Davis

In the United States, we live in a country where someone who works for a law firm that services Big Oil is by and large considered intelligent and successful, maybe even ethical due to their pro bono representation, no matter that such a firm, for instance, did not represent foreclosure ...