The New York City Mayoral Candidate reveals his plan to eliminate privately owned housing and replace it with government owned communes, by getting rid of luxury communities and upscale neighborhoods
“We’ll have to go beyond the market. We can establish a Community Land Trust to gradually buy up housing on the private market and convert it to community ownership.”
“We can give tenants a right of first refusal to buy out their landlords when buildings go up for sale, and we can fully commit to a new era of social housing.”
“Ending subsidies for luxury housing development and using our wealth to build beautiful, high quality social housing projects that offer good homes and strong communities to everyone.”
“We won’t do commodified housing overnight, but we know what we have to do and we have history to guide us.”
Here’s a little bit of that history of social housing and its outcomes (a few of the many examples)
Soviet Union (Russia), 1917–1991
The government nationalized housing, creating communal apartments to redistribute wealth.
It resulted in overcrowding, poor construction quality, and bureaucratic allocation that led to a housing crisis.
Government overreach ruled through state control and surveillance, fostering poverty with dilapidated living conditions.
150,000 apartments became uninhabitable each year by 2000.
Venezuela, 2011–Present
Launched under Hugo Chávez and continued by Nicolás Maduro, aimed to build 3 million homes to address housing shortages.
The program resulted in unfinished units and rapid decay, with the program stalling because of economic collapse due to socialist policy resulting in hyperinflation starting in 2015.
Poverty deepened, with many families left in substandard or incomplete homes, reinforcing government power through propaganda of housing provision while masking systemic failure and suppressing dissent.
East Germany 1949–1990
Post-WWII, the socialist government built Concrete blocks to house workers, expanding rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s to meet industrial demands.
The project led to poor insulation, structural issues, and overcrowding, with construction lagging behind population growth – only 1.2 million units by 1989 against a 2 million need.
Government overreach ruled in centralized planning and forced relocations, while poverty was sky high because of the inadequate living conditions, with many units abandoned post-reunification in 1990 due to cost.
China, 1950s–1970s
Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward included mass housing projects to support rural collectivization, with urban work-unit compounds expanding in the 1960s.
The program led to shoddily built structures, with many collapsing or becoming uninhabitable. Poverty intensified because of resource misallocation, and government overreach ruled due to the work-unit control over residents’ lives, limiting mobility and personal freedom, with lasting negative impacts.
Bottom line – socialist housing projects have led to a pattern of government overreach where centralized control led to economic failures and impacting the poor at a greater rate and deepening inequality.
