From Tenant Power to Social Housing: Pathways to a Just Housing System

By Fernando X. Abarca Abarca

December 4, 2025

Source: Non Profit Quarterly

Image Credit: “Migrant Imaginary” by Layqa Nuna Yawar, layqa.info

I have lived all my life in Los Angeles, but I have never seen anything like the level of destruction we experienced this past January due to the fires that ripped through our neighborhoods. In real time, I saw the devastating impact of climate change. At the same time, landlords across the city were spiking rents because the wellbeing of their tenants was last on their list of considerations.

Unfortunately, while moments of crisis make visible so many amazing acts of solidarity, generosity, and support from people looking to help those in need, they also present us with the ugliest side of greed and profit-seeking under our capitalist system.

It’s the need to respond to this greed that’s leading more and more tenants to join tenant unions and demand that public officials pass legislation that protects against price gouging and price fixing. Rent control is one key policy that can protect tenants, but ultimately we need solutions that put land and housing into social ownership. And the success of these efforts starts with all of us, collectively, as tens of millions of people who make up our renter nation fight for housing as a human right.

A Pattern of Vulture Capitalism

Grotesque approaches from private equity companies and investors in times of profound tragedy and chaos did not appear out of nowhere in 2025. We have seen this movie before. After the foreclosure crisis–induced Great Recession, the United States experienced one of the biggest-ever wealth transfers from families to Wall Street. We saw it yet again during the COVID-19 pandemic as families struggled to keep up with rents and mortgages in the face of widespread job losses.

Banking on disasters as opportunities to make profits at the expense of the planet and marginalized communities has become the norm in a pattern of vulture capitalism. Increasingly, a small number of large corporations are using their financial capital to acquire our cities’ remaining affordable housing stock.

The constant land grabs consequently give these large corporations expanded control. To date, traditional private market solutions have not relieved the problem. This is not by accident. It is by design.

As long as we continue to treat housing as yet another Wall Street lever for profit generation, those with financial power over the market will continue to make massive windfalls through the current system, and we will continue to be unable to solve this housing question.

The Roots of US Tenant Organizing

In 1872, Friedrich Engels published his pamphlet, The Housing Question, writing that “the housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution, and it can be abolished together with all its effects on health, etc., only if the whole social order from which it springs is fundamentally refashioned.”

The economic concept of supply and demand encourages us to believe that the only way out of the housing crisis is to build more housing. But after 150 years of building housing, the question Engels wrote about in 1872 troubles us still. It turns out that while building new affordable and accessible housing is necessary, it is insufficient to solve our housing crisis.

To help those who are most marginalized, we must also focus our attention on preserving the remaining affordable housing stock we have.

Tenant fights and organizing efforts have occurred in the United States since the turn of the 20th century. New York perhaps best encapsulates the success of tenant organizing efforts during that period, with a series of successful rent strikes and eviction blockades throughout the state, leading to policies that improved the living conditions of low-income tenants living in slum dwellings. One key policy win was the passage of rent control in 1920.

During World War II, rent control became national policy (and remained in effect until 1947), but New York has been one of only a handful of states that have maintained the policy since then. Two other states—California and Oregon—have passed statewide rent control guidelines. There are also several municipalities that have similar policies in place.

The Pandemic Lights a Fire

During the COVID-19 pandemic, tenant organizing expanded rapidly, as millions of people mobilized when faced with the threat of eviction. Tenants galvanized to advocate for rent cancellation and eviction moratoriums to maintain their housing during the pandemic, and organized for stronger renter protections for the long haul.

Organized tenant efforts became part of the national conversation. For example, Moms for Housing in Oakland, CA, drew attention to and challenged the notion of a housing shortage when they occupied vacant units owned by a real estate investment firm. Due to their action, they were able to move in, and the units were ultimately placed in a community land trust. More recently, in 2024, local tenant unions joined forces in forming the national Tenant Union Federation.

Rent control remains a central tactic to protect tenants from landlords who spike rent without remorse or concern for tenants’ health and wellbeing. Rent control is also a key mechanism that tenant unions and organized groups can use to fend off speculation in their neighborhoods.

Rent control fights are inherently fights against corporate control. In concrete terms, it is a government program that limits the amount of money a landlord can demand for leasing a home. Rent control laws are usually enacted by municipalities, and the details vary widely, but all are intended to keep housing affordable.

As demonstrated in the Swing State Housing Poll, conducted by Right to the City Action and the Center for Popular Democracy, rent control is wildly popular. According to the US Census, nearly half of all renters (21 million families) are housing cost-burdened, meaning they spend over 30 percent of their income on housing; over half of those renters (12.1 million families) are severely cost-burdened (paying more than 50 percent of their income on rent), according to a 2025 Harvard study. Many families facing such constraints are put in the impossible position of making life-or-death decisions each month to either pay rent, feed themselves, or cover their medication.

Until policies like rent control are implemented across the United States, housing will remain widely unaffordable. The fight for rent control is worthwhile, not only because it ensures that rents are capped to maintain affordability, but also because it weakens large investment firms’ interest in distressed housing assets. If we can cap the rents of our units, we can limit the profits of these companies, and that is an important step to enable advocates to advance our society toward a more just system where housing is treated as a human right.

A housing supply strategy that does not rely on “the market” is required to at least supplement private housing.

A Social Housing Vision

Controlling rent is only a first step. Many conventional economists say that rent control discourages private landlords from building. The data are less clear on this point than many landlord advocates claim. What is clear is that both in cities that have rent control policies in place and those that do not is that the cost of housing is far too high for far too many US families. The market system of housing supply is not working, period. This means a housing supply strategy that does not rely on “the market” is required to at least supplement private housing.

Social housing is a public option for housing that has three key qualities: It is permanently affordable, protected from the private market, and under democratic community control of the residents who live there. There are various models of social housing such as public housing, community land trusts, and housing cooperatives. In all forms, public backing is critical in order to bring social housing to scale.

In Los Angeles, tenants have been at the forefront of some of the most innovative social housing initiatives in the country. In 2022, voters in Los Angeles approved the ballot initiative known as Measure ULA (United to House LA), which has already collected $375 million through a “mansion tax.” This imposes a 4 percent tax on property sales over $5.1 million and a 5.5 percent tax on sales over $10.3 million, with the goal of investing a substantial portion of that money into affordable and social housing solutions.

In February 2025, in Seattle, voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1A, which authorizes a 5 percent tax on employee compensation over $1 million per year to fund social housing citywide and is expected to generate about $53 million annually.

Policy wins such as those in Los Angeles and Seattle will make it possible for resident-owned housing cooperatives and homes stewarded by community land trusts (CLT) to become a much larger percentage of overall available housing. In other words, public funding can allow social housing to be built to scale.

In Los Angeles, ULA funds can be used both to support housing preservation, such as tenant acquisitions for distressed properties at risk of being flipped, as well as build new housing for some of the city’s most vulnerable residents—like farm workers, day laborers, and restaurant workers—and others, including teachers and nurses.

While most cities have yet to achieve policy gains like these, ground-up tenant organizing efforts elsewhere provide guidance and inspiration for what is possible. A well-known example is the Sky Without Limits Cooperative in Minneapolis, MN.

After close to a decade of organizing and court dates, the residents of the five buildings that make up Sky Without Limits were finally able to remove their landlord and buy the building, allowing residents to collectively manage and make decisions about their own homes.

For years, these tenants (who would eventually become housing co-op co-owners) in Minneapolis fought to have their slumlord make repairs to their almost uninhabitable units. With support from their sister organization, United Renters for Justice/Inquilinxs Unidxs, residents of the five buildings created bylaws and agreements for their housing cooperative. The city’s land bank, supported by the nonprofit Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Twin Cities, raised the capital, and the tenants are currently in the process of raising $2 million to take direct ownership and transition the buildings to community housing co-op control.

Projects like Sky Without Limits give us a glimpse into what it will take to establish governing structures and decision-making practices where residents are involved, leading the strategies and developing the best infrastructures for them. Democratic governance is at the center of these solidarity economy models. Within this alternative economic system, we can tap into our biggest advantage: ourselves, the people that make up the renter nation within the United States.

But as we attempt to move away from the extractive toward the regenerative, we will need both the private and public sectors to play a role in providing the resources and policies to move toward a more solutions-oriented approach to solve our modern-day housing question.

A People-Centered Strategy

We cannot transform our current housing system without tenant organizing. We know tenants are best positioned to bring the solutions and strategies required to reinvent our housing system and have a more harmonious relationship with the land.

From policy fights at City Hall to the development of resident-owned and -controlled property management companies that prioritize transformative justice practices instead of punitive measures to ensuring residents have all the amenities they need to thrive, tenants are rising and putting new ideas and strategies to the test.

While our movements have yet to build the level of connection to the land needed to prevent the continued natural resource extraction, we are seeing organized tenants take the fight to both the public and private sectors through strategies to stem the loss of the limited affordable housing stock that still exists in our cities.

The formation of strong tenant unions that enact policy change at all levels of government to ensure renters are protected from speculative practices weakens the financial sector’s hold over the market.

These vital wins and long-term fights will lead to new opportunities to get creative and try alternatives that shift the current economic system to one that centers solidarity—on the path toward a more social and democratic land and housing system.Email

Fernando X. Abarca Abarca

Fernando X. Abarca is a Salvadoran American housing justice organizer based in Los Angeles/Tongva Lands, CA. He is currently the loan fund organizer for Right to the City Alliance.

Trumpian Nonsense on Employing Native-Born Workers

Dean Baker

 December 3, 2025

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There are so many absurdities coming out of the Trump administration on the economy that it’s hard to keep up. But one recurring theme with a solid basis in a misunderstanding of statistics is the claim that employment of native-born workers is exploding under Trump, after plummeting under Biden. We even got an official tweet of this ignorance from the Labor Department over Thanksgiving weekend.

The problem, as I and others have explained, is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has no direct count of native-born workers. It derives a number for native-born workers from its population controls, which are set in stone at the start of the year from Census data, and the number of foreign-born people, which it gets from the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS).

The number of native-born people is calculated by subtracting the number of foreign-born people from the CPS. The number of employed native-born workers is then calculated from the percentage of native-born people who report working. This methodology means that if fewer people answer the survey saying they are foreign-born, it will automatically increase the number of people that are reported as native-born, thereby raising the number of native-born workers.

There are three obvious reasons why the CPS would show fewer foreign-born workers. The first is that some number of immigrants have actually left the country, either through deportation or “self-deportation.” There is little doubt that our foreign-born population is lower today than it was a year ago.

The second reason is that immigrants might refuse to answer the survey. In the current environment, an immigrant, even someone here legally, may be reluctant to answer the door when someone says they are from the government doing a survey.

The third reason is that immigrants may not answer the survey accurately. In the current climate, many foreign-born residents who choose to answer the survey may simply say that they were born in the United States. This is especially likely since the current administration insists it does not have to respect commitments of confidentiality.

Anyhow, we know that the number of people reporting that they are foreign-born has plummeted. As of September, it was down almost 400,000 from the prior year. By contrast, the number of native-born people over age 16 had risen by more than 5.5 million. In the prior year the native-born population over age 16 had shrunk by more than 400,000.

That implies more people died than turned 16 in the year from September 2023 to September 2024. That may not be accurate, but that is the nature of the population projections that underly the jobs numbers in the CPS. The population controls are set at the start of the year and then the number of native-born reported is calculated by subtracting the number of foreign-born people reported by survey.

The Trumpers apparently want us to believe that Trump somehow got an additional 5.5 million native-born people to turn 16 in the last year. That is how they get the explosion in employment for the native-born they are boasting about.

The simple point that any serious person should understand is that the numbers on native-born workers reported in the CPS are essentially meaningless, given its construction. However, the CPS does give useful information about the labor market for native-born workers. The data on employment to population ratios (EPOP) and unemployment rates are reasonably accurate.

Here the picture was pretty good under Biden, with little change during Trump’s current term.

The EPOP quickly bounced back from its pandemic troughs, and by the summer of 2023 it was just below 60 percent, less than 1 percentage point below its pre-pandemic peak. This number is depressed somewhat in the post-pandemic period by the large-scale retirement of the baby boom cohorts, most of whom are now over age 65.

This can be controlled by just looking at prime age workers (ages 25 t0 54) or alternatively by focusing on the unemployment rate for native-born workers. The latter shows a better performance under Biden than Trump. The low point for the unemployment rate under Biden was 3.1 percent in April of 2023, compared to a first-term low for Trump of 3.4 percent for three months in 2019. The unemployment rate for native-born workers was 4.3 percent for September, the most recent month available.

That is still a relatively low unemployment rate by historical standards, but it is not anything to brag about compared to the Biden years or even Trump’s first term. As with so many other great things about the economy Trump touts, the employment boom for native-born workers exists only in Donald Trump’s head.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. 

How Trump Fueled an Affordability Crisis

David McCall

 December 4, 2025

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The clients begin arriving at the Lansing Community Food Pantry, about 25 miles southeast of Downtown Chicago, before the doors even open on Tuesday mornings.

Some line up in their cars. Others arrive on bicycles. These days, clients are even known to bring suitcases to carry away the fruits, vegetables, canned goods, and other items that Jim Lange and other volunteers ready for them.

While all of these signs of need and struggle sadden Lange, he’s bothered most of all by the sight of seniors who trudge to the pantry pushing empty carts, their shoestring budgets stretched to the breaking point by America’s growing affordability crisis.

Donald Trump won the election in 2024 with a promise to bring down costs of groceries and other items on “day one” of his administration.

He failed. Instead, he’s making life harder, observed Lange, a longtime member of the United Steelworkers (USW).

Americans spend more on groceries and other essentials today than they did a year ago. The cost of beef alone soared 15 percent, while the prices of bananas and coffee jumped about 7 percent and 19 percent, respectively.

Yet it’s more than food. Electricity bills spiked 5 percent, and families also have to dig more deeply into their pockets to pay for cars, homes, household goods, house insurance, mortgages, baby supplies, and many other items.

In all, the average U.S. household shelled out an additional $700 monthly between February and September due to inflation under Trump.

Rather than honor his pledge to ease the pain, Trump denies it even exists, calling the cost-of-living crisis a “con job” that he doesn’t want to discuss. Lange knows the growing demand at the food pantry tells the true story.

“It’s a real thing,” declared Lange, calling the lines there the longest he’s seen in the decade or so he’s served as a volunteer. “When you see older people walking six or eight blocks to get food, you know it’s a real thing.”

“People don’t want to ask for food,” he added. “It’s a tough decision to have to come here. But when the time comes, they’re going to come here.”

As a union member, Lange learned to look out for others and leave no one behind. That’s why he joined the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR) and began volunteering at the food pantry after he retired 12 years ago, after a 28-year career in Republic and LTV steel mills.

It angers him to see Trump not only abandoning his own obligation to help working families but also using the power of his office to inflict additional harm.

“Everything he’s done has aggravated it,” Lange said of food insecurity, referring to cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as well as large-scale layoffs of federal workers and the slashing of child care programsthat helped to keep families in the workforce.

In addition, Trump’s ham-handed economic policies—such as indiscriminately applied on-again, off-again tariffs—continue to kill jobs and investment while fueling higher prices. At the same time, his mass deportation campaign is shrinking the economy, imperiling businesses, and gutting still more jobs.

It’s only going to get worse, Lange said, noting that the Republicans’ unprecedented cuts to Medicaid and refusal to address skyrocketing Affordable Care Act premiums will devastate millions more families.

“They’re going to skip health care as long as they can. Eventually, it will get them,” he said, describing Lansing as a largely middle-class town.

If people here are already struggling, he pointed out, that means the economy in much of the country is also slipping.

“It’s got to be close to catastrophic elsewhere,” he said.

Yet Trump brags about having “solved” inflation. He blithely dismisses growing public concern about affordability as “fake.” He claims Thanksgiving dinners from Walmart cost less in 2025, when that patently isn’t the case.

His incompetence and callousness make the efforts of good-hearted Americans like Lange and his fellow union activist, Gerry Parzino, ever more important.

Parzino, president of the Twin Cities SOAR chapter in Minnesota, asked members to bring donations of canned goods and other staples to an upcoming meeting. He plans to transport the food to one of a number of local food banks, all of which he described as “tapped out” and needing help.

Parzino benefited from strong union contracts during his career in the paper industry. His children are employed and doing well. He doesn’t have to support his grandkids.

But he knows that many families aren’t as fortunate. They’re resource-strained and hanging by a thread, just one financial hit away—like an unusually severe winter that pushes up heating costs for Minnesotans—from financial disaster.

In addition to all of the other rising costs, Americans find it tougher and tougher to cover mounting utility bills, according to research by The Century Foundation and Protect Borrowers. Some families already went into debt trying to keep the lights on, the study found.

“These are the things on seniors’ minds,” Parzino said.

But while everyday Americans struggle, Trump prefers to party with the rich.

He hosted a tacky Roaring ’20s party at his Florida golf club during the government shutdown in October, a perfect metaphor, in Parzino’s view, for a billionaire who exploited working people all his life and has no intention to start helping them now.

“That’s completely obscene,” Parzino declared. “It’s robber baron. It’s Gilded Age. It’s such a slap in the face.”

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

David McCall is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

The Biggest Heist in America Is Being Sold as a Gift to Children

Sean Carlton

 December 4, 2025

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Image by Avinash Kumar.

America loves a good illusion. It loves the performance of generosity from people who built their fortunes on systems that leave everyone else scrambling. That’s why the country is celebrating Michael and Susan Dell dropping $6.25 billion into “Trump Accounts.” Twenty-five million kids will get $250 each in a special savings account that they can’t touch for almost two decades. It sounds like generosity. It plays like hope. It sells like opportunity. But it isn’t any of that. It’s a corporate heist dressed up as philanthropy, and America is too exhausted or too desperate to notice.

The Dell announcement isn’t about helping children. It’s about normalizing a future where the only people who can fix failing systems are the same corporations and billionaires who helped break them. The government could’ve built real support for families. It could’ve raised wages, stabilized housing, funded public education, or given parents actual resources instead of symbolic ones. Instead it built a program where kids get locked into market accounts, and then it waited for a billionaire to swoop in and finish the job. That isn’t policy. It isn’t progress. It’s the privatization of the public good.

A one-time $250 deposit isn’t lifting anyone out of anything. At best it turns children into unwilling investors in a financial system that’s already eaten their parents alive. At worst it shifts the entire idea of welfare into something that only functions if wealthy people feel like playing savior for a news cycle. This isn’t social support. It’s a handshake between private wealth and a government that no longer knows how to govern unless the market approves.

The trick here is simple and old. You starve the public systems until they’re so weak that anything looks like relief. Then you let a billionaire deliver a drop of water and call it a miracle. Americans have been trained to applaud the spectacle. They forget to ask why one of the richest men in the country gets to decide how twenty-five million children experience their first introduction to money. They forget to ask why the richest people get public praise for giving back pennies compared to what they extract. They forget to ask why children need investment accounts instead of stable housing, food, medical care, and schools that aren’t falling apart.

The applause is the point. When billionaires are cast as heroes, no one has to admit that the system has collapsed so thoroughly that private charity is now doing the work of the state. This is how the social contract dies without anyone calling it what it is. People look at the $250 and say at least it’s something. They say maybe it’ll grow. They say maybe it’ll help someday. They don’t say what’s obvious. They don’t say the quiet part. They don’t say that America now expects the financial markets to raise children because the country has decided it won’t.

There’s also the quiet financialization happening underneath. These accounts invest in index funds. That means millions of new dollars flowing into the same corporate structures that already dominate the economy. Kids become passive capital generators before they can read. Their “gift” enriches the very companies that helped create the inequality this program is pretending to solve. It’s a perfect loop. The wealthy get to look generous while reinforcing the machine that made them wealthy. The public gets a story about hope. The corporations get the money.

The cruelty of it is that it works. It works because people are tired. Everything’s expensive. Everything feels unstable. Families will take whatever crumbs show up because the alternative is nothing. They’re told this is opportunity. They’re told this is investment. They’re told this is how you get ahead. They don’t ask why a country with the wealth of America is giving children numbers in an account instead of conditions they can survive.

The real collapse is right here. It looks like a billionaire being framed as a public institution. It looks like a government outsourcing its responsibilities to private wealth and calling it innovation. It looks like children being turned into financial products. It looks like the normalization of scarcity. It looks like the public begging for symbolic solutions because no one can imagine real ones anymore.

This isn’t generosity. It isn’t progress. It isn’t a path out of inequality. It’s the same old ownership playing out in a new costume. A billionaire writes a check, the headlines glow, the markets smile, and everyone pretends it’s a step forward. But look at the scale of the theft underneath. Look at the stories we tell ourselves to avoid saying the truth out loud. A country that expects billionaires to fund children has already chosen its future. It’s a future where the public good is a privilege and every solution is a product. It’s a future designed to keep people grateful for scraps.

The Dells aren’t giving children a head start. They’re giving everyone a warning. This is what it looks like when a nation forgets how to take care of its own people and starts handing the responsibility to the highest bidder.

Sean Carlton is an author and farmer who writes about collapse, institutional failure, and what life looks like after systems stop working. He is a former federal employee and the author of Exit Farming: Starving the Systems That Farm You. He runs Carlton Hill Farm and the Farm for Better community food pantry in West Virginia.

Trump Crazy #27542: Replacing the Income Tax with Tariffs

Dean Baker

December 2, 2025

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Everyone in my public school third-grade class learned arithmetic. Apparently, this puts us way ahead of Donald Trump and much of the punditry. They somehow take seriously the idea that we can replace $2.6 trillion in annual income tax revenue with $280 billion in Donald Trump tariff revenue. My third-grade class all know better.

While this is absurd on its face, Donald Trump keeps repeating the idea. He draws approving nods from Republican politicians and the conservative punditry.

The arithmetic here is straightforward. We currently are running annual budget deficits of around $1.7 trillion, a bit less than 6.0 percent of GDP. The deficit, measured as a share of GDP, is projected to rise gradually over the next decade as the growing debt leads to a larger interest burden.

This is the context in which Donald Trump is saying that he wants to replace the income tax with his tariffs. This is the story on the relative size of the two taxes.

We are currently raising around $2,600 billion a year from the individual income tax. If we take tariff collections over the last three months for which there is data (Sept-Oct) and annualize the amount, it comes to around $280 billion. (This is the increment to tariff revenue that resulted from Trump’s tariff hikes. The full amount of tariff revenue would be around $360 billion a year.)

If the government relied on $280 billion in new tariff revenue to replace an income tax that pulled in $2,600 billion, almost ten times as much, it would raise the annual deficit by roughly $2,300 billion. That would push the size of the deficit to around $4 trillion, roughly 13 percent of GDP.

The government ran deficits of this size during World War II, but at no other time. The current deficit of 6 percent of GDP is already extraordinarily large. I’m about as far from being a deficit hawk as anyone around, but I would be very worried about the consequences of running deficits of 13 percent of GDP. It would almost certainly be inflationary, and it would likely lead to the sort of run on the dollar and generalized financial panic that the deficit hawks always warn about. I am certain that none of Trump’s economic advisers would advocate this sort of switch.

It is also worth noting that, contrary to what Trump seems to think, the story gets worse over time, not better. If we actually brought back manufacturing jobs to the U.S. and imports fell, there would be less tariff revenue over time. That would make the Trump budget deficits even larger.

This raises the question of whether Trump has any clue what he is talking about? Does he really not know that the income tax raises almost ten times the amount of revenue that he is getting from his import taxes (tariffs)?

If Trump is really that clueless about the basics of the federal budget, then it should be 25th Amendment time. The president doesn’t have to be a budget wonk, but he should have some idea of where federal revenue comes from. Suggesting we can replace a tax that raises $2.6 trillion with a tax that raises $280 billion indicates Trump has no clue.

Perhaps Trump is just lying, but this is the sort of question that media need to be asking. Is Trump just spewing crazy lies or is he crazy? The American people have a right to know.

One other point, if Trump actually does put up legislation to replace the income tax with his tariffs, the Democrats should all abstain. Rather than play a role in Trump’s craziness, let the Republicans all go on record saying that Trump is nuts or go ahead and wreck the economy. There is no reason for Democrats to get involved in this idiocy.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.