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.”

• “Security through Decommodification: Limited-equity Cooperatives in the Gentrifying City.” Forthcoming. Journal of Urban Affairs. (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 25% per month less than comparable market rate units. Coauthored with a student.

• “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.

• “Yes on Proposals 2-4 for Social Housing.” 2025. New York Daily News. 31 October. (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi)

  • Op-ed on proposed charter revisions in New York City.

• “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.

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).

• “The Social Housing Development Authority.” 2026. Game Changers: Economic Policies for a Working America

  • Part of a series of policy proposals of “bold, new ideas to build a stronger, fairer, greener, and more inclusive economy for all Americans.”

• “A Federal Solution to New York's Housing Crisis: The Case for the Green New Deal for Public Housing and the Homes Act.” 2026. (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Katelin Penner, Dee W. Perry, Laura Wolf-Powers, and Nina Young.

  • A report analyzing the potential impact on New York State of the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act and the Homes Act. Argues that public housing and “social housing” are twin pillars of a progressive building agenda.

• “Decommodifying Housing: The Social Housing Development Authority.” (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi). 2025. Edited by Raquel Rolnick, Marnie Brady, and Tom Malleson.

  • A broad analysis of decommodified housing policies, focusing on the SHDA. This essay will be the “anchor essay” of the next volume of the Real Utopias book series.

• “Green Social Housing at Scale: How a Federal Green Social Housing Development Authority can Build, Repair, and Finance Homes for All.” 2024. (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Ruthy Gourevitch, and Daniel Aldana Cohen).

  • A report estimating total number of (affordable) units and jobs that could be created with an SHDA. These were the estimates used in the publicity in the initial release of the Homes Act.

• “Our Housing System isn’t Working – We Need a Public Option” (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi). 2024. The Hill.

  • Op-ed emphasizing the importance of government involvement in the housing market.

• “Learning from Barcelona: The Importance of Public Acquisition as a Transition Strategy.” (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi) 2023. in Housing Barcelona, pp. 139-141. Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona (trans. Spanish and Catalan).

  • Comparing the policies of the Barcelona City government under the Ada Colau administration, with a focus on acquisition policies.

• “A Crisis Too Big to Waste: What Comes after Private Housing?” (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi). The Long Year: A 2020 Reader. Edited by Thomas J. Sugrue and Caitlin Zaloom. New York: Columbia University Press.

  • An account of housing movements in the U.S. during the pandemic.

• “How to Fix Housing for Everyone Except Corporate Speculators.” (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi) 2021. New York Times. 4 March.

  • Op-ed introducing the case for the SHDA.

• “The Case for a Social Housing Development Authority” (with Gianpaolo Baiocchi). November 2020.

  • The original white paper proposing the SHDA idea.

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.

• “Redistributive Universalism: Urban Inequalities and the Struggle for Social Housing.” 2026. Urban Affairs Review (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.

• “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.

• “Housing Assets and Their Discontents: 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.”

• “Buying into Segregation: How a Nation of Renters Became Segregated Homeowners.” 2026. Working Paper.

  • Traces the growth of tenure segregation and its relationship to racial segregation from 1900-2020.

• “The Changing Spatial Pattern of Metropolitan Racial Segregation, 1900-2020: The Rise of Macro-Segregation.” 2025. Social Forces. (with John R. Logan and Jongho Won)

  • Traces 120 years of Black-white segregation, finding that the growing dominance of “macro-segregation” began after 1950.

• “From Side Street to Ghetto: Understanding the Rising Levels and Changing Spatial Pattern of Segregation, 1900-1940.” 2024. City & Community. 23(2): 155-179. (with John R. Logan, Benjamin Bellman, Elisabeta Minca, and Amory Kisch).

  • Shows how segregation grew from separation between streets to eventually encompassing large sections of the central city.

• “The Role of Suburbanization in Metropolitan Segregation after 1940.” 2023. Demography. 60(1): 281-301. (with John R. Logan, Samuel Kye, H. Jacob Carlson, Elisabeta Minca, Daniel Schleith. 2023.

  • Examines changes in segregation between 1940-1970, and the growing importance of macro-segregation. Also finds suggestive evidence that the Home Owners Loan Corporation’s (HOLC) security maps (or “redlining maps"), likely replicated existing practice in the private real estate market, making HOLC’s impact on segregation rendundant.

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”, “individual”, 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.

• “Testing the Participation Hypothesis: Evidence from Participatory Budgeting.” 2021. Political Behavior. 45(1): 3-32. (with Carolina Johnson and Sonya Reynolds).

  • Uses voter file data to provide causal estimates that voting in New York City’s “participatory budgeting” leads to a 8.4% increase in the likelihood of voting in regular elections, with largest increases for those groups traditionally least likely to vote.

• “Model Employers and Model Cities?: Bangalore’s Public Sector and the Rise of IT.” 2018. Urban Geography. 39(5): 726-745.

  • As the “Silicon Valley of India”, Bangalore has an earlier history, led by large public sector companies that helped provide homes and social services that cultivated a growing middle class in the city.

• “State Phobia, Then and Now: Three Waves of Conflict Over Wisconsin's Public Sector, 1930-2013.” 2018. Social Science History. 42(1): 57-80. (with Jane L. Collins)

  • Archival research on a Wisconsin-based taxpayer organization, and how anti-state rhetoric emerged in three key conflicts on the role of the public sector, culminating in the 2011 protests in Wisconsin.