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 radical 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.
"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 Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era
"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, Samuel 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 In Defense of Housing
"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 Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C.