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. This book is both a roadmap and a reckoning. Drawing on his own experiences
of on-the-ground organizing, Samuel Stein lays out practical policies for
enacting a right to shelter, a right to a home, and a right to the city
itself.
With raw honesty, he then explores why these
visions founder on the rocks of political reality. He reveals the forces blocking our path—from
the power of real estate capital to the inadequacy of our institutions,
he reveals the forces blocking our path—and captures 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.
Praise for A Right to Housing?
"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
"A deeply thoughtful and provocative exploration of housing politics in the current conjuncture."
-David Madden, co-author of In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis
"Stein provides the socialist movement a rare gift: that of honesty. A powerful little book, precisely because it demands that we start from the truth of our situation, and what a dismal truth that is, but that we nonetheless keep fighting."
-Kafui Attoh, author of Rights in Transit: Public Transportation and the Right to the City in California's East Bay
"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.