The Democratic Party Doesn’t Care About Your Housing
Summer Miller
Mamdani ran as a “socialist” promising a break with New York’s housing status quo, including a demand for 200,000 new affordable homes financed by the city instead of relying on private developers.
The promise of more public housing was too good to be true: Mamdani apparently had a late-campaign revelation about the “role of the private market in housing construction,” pointing to the “success” of Austin, Minneapolis, and Seattle. An interesting set of cities to cite as proof that the private market has cracked the affordability problem. Now he is mayor, and the private developers are still in charge.
His “Block by Block: Housing Plan for a New Era” says the city will partner with the private sector, bring in new private financing, and continue PACT—the program steadily moving New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments out of traditional Section 9 public housing and into Section 8 with private and nonprofit management.
At the same time, Mamdani is advertising $5.6 billion for NYCHA and promising to “reboot NYCHA as a public developer.” But what his administration means by that is increasingly using NYCHA’s land, vouchers, development rights and other public assets to bring in revenue and private investment. NYCHA is the largest landowner in New York City, and instead of using that enormous public resource for a massive expansion of public housing, the plan is to “leverage” it for private development deals.
PACT keeps moving apartments out of Section 9, handing management and redevelopment over to outside firms while NYCHA keeps the title.
This is how Mamdani can claim a “historic” investment in public housing while continuing the privatization of the public-housing system underneath it. Billions can flow into NYCHA while fewer apartments actually remain real public housing.
Democrats have been pulling this trick for decades:
Defund public housing → let it deteriorate → use the repair crisis to justify demolition and privatization → shift housing toward Section 8 and private development → roll out another “affordable housing” plan.
The pattern goes back to New York’s 1970s fiscal crisis, when Democratic mayor Abraham Beame slashed NYCHA funding, helped drive the system into decay, and then blamed tenants for the conditions austerity had created. Clinton’s HOPE VI turned that decay into a pretext for demolition: public housing was torn down around the country and replaced with mixed-income development, officially under the banner of “urban revitalization”—a useful phrase if you would rather not say “demolishing public housing.” Obama’s administration took the next step with RAD, giving housing authorities a mechanism to convert Section 9 public housing into Project-Based Section 8 and bring in private financing; Bill de Blasio then massively expanded that model in New York through PACT. Every piece of public housing dismantled leaves more workers at the mercy of a housing market they can’t afford and puts more working people at risk of eviction.
New York needs a massive expansion of publicly funded, publicly owned, and publicly operated housing. Working people need a new party to fight for it.
NEW YORK, SEATTLE, AND EVERYWHERE
We’ve watched Democrats use the same pro-landlord playbook in Seattle. In 2020, after years of skyrocketing rents, the Tax Amazon movement forced the issue. Hundreds of renters and socialists built a campaign and collected 30,000 signatures for a ballot initiative to raise $500 million a year to fund public housing and Green New Deal programs. Democrats watered it down and gave it the deeply nonthreatening name ‘JumpStart.’
The Amazon Tax was meant for affordable housing. But since 2022, the Democrats have siphoned roughly $735 million in JumpStart revenue into the city’s General Fund. This year alone, the proposal is to take another $200 million from the fund to plug the city’s deficit. Amazon Tax money is now being used, in part, to prop up the bloated $500 million per year police budget.
The contradiction is especially glaring now with Seattle’s purported “socialist” mayor, Katie Wilson, in office. Wilson ran for mayor promising publicly owned, permanently affordable housing and a $1 billion affordable-housing bond. She even attacked Bruce Harrell during the campaign for diverting “the bulk” of JumpStart revenue to plug a budget hole instead of raising new progressive taxes.
And now Seattle is heading into another budget crisis, and the same money is still being taken from a tax whose largest dedicated purpose was affordable housing. The city faces a projected $175 million deficit for 2027, and Wilson has said that “all options are on the table”.
Seattle’s housing crisis did not get smaller. Amazon did not get poorer. Yet instead of dramatically increasing the tax on big business and using that money to build public housing, Katie Wilson and City Hall Democrats keep raiding affordable-housing funds—almost as if the Democratic Party doesn’t care about your housing!
That is exactly the road Mamdani is taking in New York: the demand for a massive expansion of public housing gets pushed through the Democratic Party until what comes out the other side leaves private wealth intact and the private housing market happy as a clam.
The lesson from New York and Seattle is pretty simple: the Democrats are not going to solve the housing crisis. They have spent decades defunding and privatizing public housing, watering down demands to tax the rich, and then raiding the money workers manage to win. Calling Mamdani or Wilson “socialists” will not change the reality that their policies do nothing to fix the housing crisis. And the “progressive” Democrats will never do what’s needed.
We need a massive expansion of publicly funded, publicly owned, publicly operated housing, paid for by taxing landlords, corporations and the rich. Winning what working people need starts with breaking politically from the Democrats and building an independent workers’ party that can fight for the interests of our class instead of the landlords, corporations and billionaires.