A Right to Housing?

Reviews / Votes

Stein has written a book for those tired of merely describing gentrification and displacement, who are looking for explanations as well as new programs for action to do more . . .This is a lively user's guide to the changing landscape of the American city. * Peter Marcuse, co-author of In Defense of Housing * Explicit in Stein's narrative is the idea that a different, more democratic kind of planning might lead us to more democratic kinds of cities. -- Nikil Saval * The New Yorker * What does it really mean to demand a right to housing? What needs to be done to actually build a world that includes such a right? Drawing freely from housing studies, social philosophy, history, literature, Marxism, Judaism and his own experience as a tenant organizer, Sam Stein provides a deeply thoughtful and provocative exploration of housing politics in the current conjuncture. This is a readable and well-informed overview of research and strategy around the right to housing. But it's also an artifact of the culture of radical housing activism today. The book simultaneously channels the hope for revolutionary transformation, explores the limits of housing reform under capitalism, and meditates on the challenges of being an activist in New York City in our era of multiple intersecting crises -- David Madden, co-author of <i>In Denfense of Housing</i> In his signature electric prose, Stein explicates the complexity of our present moment, when activists teeter on the knife-edge between possibility and despair. With radical honesty, Stein acknowledges difficult truths about progressive victories, while never suggesting a retreat from working to achieve them. Highly recommended for activists of all stripes, but a "must-read" for everyone who has struggled to instantiate a human right to housing. -- Gail Radford, author of <i>Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era</i> In this refreshingly honest look at the fight to secure housing as a human right, Samuel Stein turns his attention inward. What do we mean when we demand a right to housing? And how do we square this demand with a political and economic reality so at odds with its realization? As much a treatise on the undiminished power of the real estate state, Stein asks the reader to acknowledge the relative hopelessness of our aims. In leaning into the despairing aspects of our current conjuncture, Stein provides the socialist movement a rare gift - that of honesty. The hope, of course, is not to encourage complacency or retreat but to ask readers to face, forthrightly, the dissonances (cognitive and otherwise) within the struggle itself. For those engaged in the fight for socialism, A Right to Housing? will remain a powerful little book, precisely because it demands that we start from the truth of our situation - and what a dismal truth that is -- but that we nonetheless keep fighting. As Stein puts it beautifully, "it is entirely sensible to be hopeless, but it is entirely senseless to give up." -- Kafui Attoh, author of <i>Rights in Transit</i> What a pleasure to see inside the doubting mind of Samuel Stein as he grapples with the impossibility of our housing quagmire. If you too have the uncomfortable suspicion that solving housing might be hopeless: read this book. -- Amanda Huron, author of <i>Carving out the Commons</i>