A Right to Housing?
Verso, September 2026
Soon to be available as an audio book from Tantor Media
A radical blueprint for universal housing meets an unflinching assessment of why we haven’t won—from the best-selling author of Capital City
In the fight for housing, we are caught between the world we know and the world we want. A Right to Housing?
offers both a roadmap and a reckoning. Drawing from his own experiences
of on-the-ground organizing, Stein lays out practical policies for
enacting a right to shelter, a right to a home, and a right to the city
itself.
With unflinching honesty, he then explores why these
visions continuously crash against the rocks of political reality. From
the power of real estate capital to the inadequacy of our institutions,
he reveals the forces blocking our path—and summons the complex feelings
of a Left that has lost faith in the future.
Written in the
heady weeks surrounding Zohran Mamdani's historic election for New York
City mayor, Stein frames the book around the stirring possibilities and
structural constraints of a socialist administration in the financial
center of a sputtering empire. He opens a space for action in the
absence of hope. This is an examination of life and politics at the
intersection of optimism and pessimism, nihilism and naivety, faith and
doubt—an essential book for activists, planners, and anyone who refuses
to accept the housing crisis as inevitable or immutable.