The Block and Build framework has been a key component of Right to the City Alliance’s  strategy development over the past couple of years. Convergence’s “Block and Build 2.0” framework resonates with our own understanding of the moment, and is valuable in guiding our movement’s path forward in contesting for power against MAGA, and attempting to construct a left alternative. Because the authors of Block and Build 2.0 invited feedback and reflection, we’re excited to offer some thoughts on our sector’s task to meet the moment, and where we see opportunity in the coming years.

Right to the City Alliance (RTTC) is a network of more than 70 grassroots base-building organizations spread across the country focused on land and housing justice. We believe that by waging public fights for urgent and popular solutions like rent control, we can organize the working class—especially in Black and brown communities—towards social and economic alternatives, drive wedges into the MAGA bloc to halt its momentum, and build durable progressive governing power. If we do these things well, we believe we can open a pathway to achieve our long-term vision of creating a social housing system that puts human needs over profits. 

Housing as the demand

The rent is too damn high and everyone knows it. Of the 35% of US households that rent their homes, most spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. A full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a one-bedroom rental home at fair market rent in only 6% of counties nationwide. Who is feeling this pinch? The majority of Black and Latine households rent, as do most people under the age of 35. Renters represent a key constituency in the broader multiracial pro-democracy coalition against authoritarianism.

The speculative housing market, geared towards maximizing profit, is responsible for the lack of genuinely affordable housing.  As hedge funds and large corporate landlords increasingly seize upon land and housing as sites to accumulate capital and exploit working-class people by spiking rents and evictions, the struggle to find affordable housing has expanded from major cities to suburban and rural areas, impacting working people across party affiliations. The housing crisis has reached such a critical point that even far right politicians like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott have called for limiting Wall Street’s presence in the housing market by  banning corporate investors from purchasing single-family homes. Given the scale of the crisis, it’s no surprise that both US presidential candidates made housing a centerpiece of their 2024 campaigns, opportunistically naming the pain point without offering real solutions.

We believe that it is our responsibility as the social movement Left to offer real solutions – in ways that are clear, tangible, and winnable. Policies like rent control prevent displacement, stabilize neighborhoods, help to regulate otherwise unfettered corporate greed, and support working-class voters who rent to stay civically engaged. Policies that create and expand social housing provide a public option for housing that is both permanently affordable and democratically governed by the residents who live there.

Social housing serves as an important alternative to both the ever-inflating costs of private market housing and to traditional models of affordable housing where residents are effectively treated as tenants without the power of self-determination traditionally afforded to landowners. There are many forms of social housing. It can be owned by public agencies, mission-driven non-profit organizations (such as community land trusts), or cooperative entities (such as permanent real estate cooperatives or limited equity housing cooperatives). But any form social housing takes must maintain the core principles of permanent affordability and meaningful democratic governance by residents. 

We are at a tipping point. Now is the time for strong demands and campaigns that confront the housing crisis in a way that unites working-class communities across the country and constricts the sphere of influence that MAGA—and their billionaire backers—have over our communities.

Lessons from the election

The Harris campaign’s housing platform probably didn’t lose Kamala Harris and Tim Walz the election in and of itself, but it was certainly emblematic of the types of missteps that did. Their housing platform centered on down payment assistance for first time homebuyers, the kind of policy that would have done little to address the majority of working people’s immediate material needs. What good is down payment assistance when you can barely afford the rent as is? Centrist and center-right Democrats, many of whom are landlords themselves, didn’t have an answer to the rising cost of rent faced by working-class voters. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, stooped lower by unscrupulously scapegoating immigrants for rising housing costs. 

As the authors of Block and Build 2.0 noted, moving forward we will need to aggressively contest for new narratives that help millions of voters make sense of the problem, the solution, who is with us, and who is truly to blame. The GOP is increasingly connecting with Black and brown voters, especially men. It is clear we need narrative interventions that popularize a shared identity, demystify the bad actors within the housing system, and cohere around material solutions that put us on a path to our long-term vision of removing land and housing from the speculative market. 

Housing organizers, including members of Right to the City Alliance, are calling for broad, popular, and sustainable solutions to the profit-driven housing crisis. Rent control is an example of a widely popular solution that brings immediate material relief to millions of people, and cuts across race, gender, age, geography, and political ideology. Notably, rent control is especially popular in many of the swing states where Harris lost or failed to turn out critical portions of the working-class vote.

Coming out of the elections and into this next period, we are looking at the specifics of geography differently. We must not cede any terrain when it comes to communities that are being organized by MAGA, and housing is a widely felt issue with the potential to bridge the partisan divide. RTTC member organizations are organizing manufactured home parks in rural communities with large emerging populations of Latine immigrant residents living alongside aging working-class white residents. This work is supporting residents to fight off private equity firms looking to buy up their parks and, in some cases, the residents are purchasing the parks themselves. The problems may not be exactly the same in each community, but the culprits that cause housing to be so unstable and unaffordable are largely the same: corporate landlords and private equity firms. The mutual well-being and shared interests of the park residents in resisting these threats offers a path towards racial solidarity. It also targets the true villains for the rising cost of housing, not our neighbors. We see huge opportunities for forging struggle across rural, suburban, and urban communities against shared adversaries, in our mutual interest. 

Where do we go from here?

In the next few years, we will need to defend our communities from the onslaught of attacks on the social safety net and our fundamental civil rights. Under the new administration, we are seeing access to affordable housing slashed, renter protections eroded, and regulations undone. These are prime conditions for corporate landlords and private equity to hike rents, continue their mass purchase of single family homes, and extract as much profit as possible from working people. 

At RTTC, we are enthusiastic about bringing the Block and Build 2.0 framework to nationally coordinated rent control fights in cities, municipalities, and states across the country, while advancing social housing where possible. Fights to regulate rental costs bring diverse communities together around mutual demands against shared enemies, while constricting capital’s ability to profit at will off one of our most basic human needs. We believe the time is now for us to organize working-class renters at scale. We aim to use these issue fights to contribute to building independent political power on the ground. This can reshape the terrain for future elections by expanding the broad coalition of forces ready to fight for a left exit out of the debris of neoliberalism, or—at the very least—to actively reject all rightward exit routes on offer.

Rent control is a vitally important step in stabilizing working class communities, but we know we have to go even further towards reimagining and reconstructing our entire housing system. Any land system based on profit, even with the strictest regulations and protections, will inevitably produce some level of exploitation of working-class and marginalized people. That is why we need to create a social housing system that removes profit from the equation and gives people the power of self-determination over their homes and communities.  

We must also meet our people where they’re at. The myth of single family homeownership is so deeply ingrained into our collective consciousness that it is difficult to ask working-class people to reject that dream. But we can organize working-class people to take on the true villains like private equity firms, venture capitalists, and multinational corporate landlords. In doing so, we can pose the question of whether the system that produces such terrible actors is redeemable (we obviously think not) and start to put cracks in the fable that opens up a pathway for a dialogue and a movement through which we can build a better world.  

We can and should continue to block and build at the same time. We will need to focus ourselves geographically, keep listening and learning from our base constituencies, aggressively contest for new narratives, and deepen strategy within the progressive movement in part through taking bigger and braver risks together. So much hinges on the next four years. Let’s set our sights on 2028 and dig in.

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