Decommodifying Housing

Social Housing

A series of works examining the past and present movements/efforts for alternative housing models, often called “social housing.” This housing is “decommodified”, meaning to “reduce the extent to which the private market determines the price of housing and access to it.”

  • “Social Housing: How a New Generation of Activists Are Reinventing Housing.” 2023. Nonprofit Quarterly. 6 June. (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi).

    • Examines the growing grassroots movements for social housing in the U.S.

  • Social Housing 2.0: Viable Non-market Tools for Today’s Housing Crisis. 2022. (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi).

    • A report documenting international examples for creating social housing, and what exactly “social housing” means

  • “Housing is a Social Good.” 2021. Boston Review. (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi)

    • Makes the case for thinking of housing as something more than a simple private good, and deeply enmeshed in social relations, which thus requires institutions to make housing as a right more than a slogan. This is the basis for a forthcoming book of the same title, under advance contract with University of Chicago Press.

  • “The Case for a Rent Moratorium.” 2020. New York Times. 1 April. (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi).

    • Op-ed in the early days of the pandemic calling for rent cancellation.

  • “Beyond the Market: Housing Alternatives from the Grassroots.” 2018. Dissent. Fall. (with Marnie Brady and Gianpaolo Baiocchi).

    • An account of emerging grassroots campaigns for social housing, summarizing the findings from the “Communities over Commodities” report.

  • “Communities over Commodities: People-Driven Alternatives to an Unjust Housing System.” 2018. New York City: Right to the City Alliance. (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Marnie Brady, Anamika Jain, and Tony Romano).

    • A report by the Right to the City Alliance, documenting four distinct modes of decommodified housing.

  • “Opportunity through Decommodification: Limited-equity Cooperatives in the Gentrifying City.” 2025. Working Paper. (with Kiara Thomas)

    • An analysis of limited-equity cooperatives (LECs), finding that they are increasingly likely to be found in gentrifying neighborhoods and on average cost $1,000 per month less than comparable market rate units. Coauthored with a student.

The Social Housing Development Authority (SHDA)

This has been a project to present an institutional design for a government agency that can expand the supply of social housing, done in collaboration with Gianpaolo Baiocchi. Our initial 2020 white paper was then developed into the Homes Act of 2024 (introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Tina Smith).

Building coalitions for social policy

In this series of works, we think through how social policy can be passed and kept, given the diverse constituencies who might benefit from it and their interests. This work engages with the debates over whether policies should be “targeted” for those most in need or more “universalist” to serve a broad constituency of beneficiaries.

  • “Who Will Decommodify Housing? Race, Property, Class and the Struggle for Social Housing in the United States.” (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi). 2024. Engaging Wright: Between Class Analysis and Real Utopias. Edited by Michael Burawoy and Gay Seidman. New York: Verso.

    • Part of a volume of students of Erik Olin Wright, examining how the tools of class analysis can help us think through people’s housing interest, and their amenability to real utopian policy.

  • “Redistributive Universalism: Urban Inequalities and the Struggle for Social Housing.” 2025. Working paper. (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi).

    • “Redistributive Universalism” is a hybrid between targeted and universalist policies, where a broadly majoritarian policy has specific priorities for the neediest. Includes empirical analysis of unaffordability across the “AMI” spectrum, finding that even at 100% of AMI, nearly two-thirds of both renters and owners have unaffordable housing.

  • “The Emerging Movement for Social Housing in the U.S.: Contradictory Class Locations within Housing Relations.” 2025. Working Paper (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi)

    • Drawing on analysis of three ballot initiative and an original survey, we examine the contradictory interest between high- and low-income owners and renters and the challenges of fostering a “housing class consciousness”

The Legacy of Segregation

This work examines the history of segregation in the United States, motivated by, in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s words, how “the real estate industry wielded the magical ability to transform race into profit with the racially bifurcated housing market.”

Gentrification and Displacement

  • “Measuring Displacement: Assessing Proxies for Involuntary Residential Mobility.” 2020. City & Community. 19(3): 573-592.

    • Proposes 3 distinct methodologies of measuring displacement (the “population”, “individiual”, and “motivational” approaches), finding that the one least often used (the motivational approach) does find a positive association with gentrification, contrary to a body of literature suggesting a null relationship.

    • 2020 ASA Community and Urban Sociology Section Graduate Student Paper Award

    • Summarized in Metropolitics.

Public governance, state policy, and democracy

This work examines how governments engage in social policy that creates broad welfare benefits for their constituents, while practicing varying degrees of democratic practice.