Can we talk about housing now?

Note: posts by individual CVDSA members do not necessarily reflect the views of the broader membership or of its leadership and should not be regarded as official statements by the chapter.

We lost our City Council race.

CVDSA and UVM YDSA members will continue to assess where we went wrong internally. But our defeat on the Progressive Party’s ballot line also happened to take place as part of a “wave election” for the Burlington Democrats, who, if we include the Democrat-endorsed independent Mark Barlow in the North District, won four out of the five of seats up for grabs on our municipal legislature. To make matters worse, both of the citizen-initiated charter change proposals – opposed by our Democratic mayor, supported by the Progs – flopped at the ballot box.

In Ward 8 – where Jake Schumann, the Progressive nominee for the overlapping East District, earned slightly more votes than his competitor Tim Doherty, though Doherty would ultimately prevail thanks to an advantage in Ward 1 – our failure appears to belong to us. We feel bad not only for failing to put Rhone Allison in office but also for opening the door to what looks, possibly, to become a long and extremely dispiriting journey of political advancement for the Democratic victor: Burlington’s blandest 22-year-old careerist, already an entrenched establishmentarian, who, while working for the local branch of the Chamber of Commerce, campaigned without an articulated policy platform of any sort, promising little beyond the assurance that, unlike her Progressive predecessor in Ward 8, who had resigned after seven months of chronic absenteeism, she would actually attend the City Council meetings. And who could doubt it?

Sometimes it’s a little unclear why people who have no political goals or interests (of their own, that is) seek to spend their lives as centrist placeholders in our city halls and statehouses. There are plenty of other ways to feel important and get your name in the paper. Rhone’s campaign, by contrast, took every opportunity to emphasize its ideological intensity: if nothing else, it brimmed with notions.

The biggest notion was socialism. According to Rhone’s literature, they were a Democratic Socialist, not a Progressive, irrespective of their ballot line. Chased by campus police for a month and half, our relentless YDSA volunteers knocked every door in Ward 8’s dormitories on multiple occasions to tell their classmates about the socialist candidate for City Council and their endorsements from the Vermont State Labor Council and Teamsters Local 597.

What did the campaign’s socialism consist of?

It aimed to center workers as much as possible, but pragmatically, given the role of the City Councilor, the bulk of the platform sought to address Burlington’s increasingly obvious housing shortage and its devastating effects on tenants.

We borrowed from models across the country for our proposals to rejuvenate the local public housing authority, to empower tenant unions, and to convert rental buildings into housing cooperatives. In a less clearly socialist fashion, we also wanted an aggressive liberalization of Burlington’s zoning laws, with reforms including, but not limited to, permitting fourplexes in all low-density residential districts and high-rises near UVM; expanding the South End Innovation District plan to reuse the old industrial parcels near Pine Street; and approving the Trinity Campus rezoning.

Of all the housing planks, this last component – or some version of it – seemed, thanks to a measure of preexisting pressure, to stand the best chance of becoming a reality in the near term. A slightly more dramatic addendum to our land-use agenda asked for a rezoning of the Burlington Country Club, a massive waste of valuable urban land that currently pays taxes according to the property’s value as protected “recreation/greenspace” – that is to say, very little. Redesignating its 150 acres as a high- or even medium-density district would generate an unsustainable tax burden for the sprawling, low-revenue business, forcing a sale and a change of use: housing, for instance. We imagined an engaging, left-populist crusade to take on the country club elites and repurpose their exclusionary oasis toward a useful social end.

Students, including an abundance of UVM freshmen and sophomores, constitute the vast majority of Ward 8’s electorate, and Rhone’s campaign operated according to the theory that contact mattered most. Presumably few of these newcomers, living on campus, had developed detailed views on local municipal problems or attachments to specific policy prescriptions to address them, but we believed that most of them had a generally left-wing outlook and would, with enough direct and persuasive encouragement to participate in the election, overwhelm the small minority of grownups in the ward, to our benefit. For one reason or another, it didn’t happen.

Elsewhere in Burlington, however, a specific issue did seem to occupy voters’ minds. Unfortunately, it wasn’t housing. In the year 2023, our election was still about the police.

We all know the story. Emboldened by a summer of vibrant demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, the Prog-led Burlington City Council passed a resolution in 2020 to reduce the size of the police department by 30 percent through attrition. They didn’t know how fast the activism would fade, or how soon the backlash would set in.

On the national level, it didn’t take all that much cleverness for reactionaries to turn the radical-liberal dictum that our politics should emerge from a process of “centering the voices of marginalized communities” to their own purposes: easily enough, journalists in the corporate media found impoverished Black and brown families who would speak eagerly of the police as a crucial source of protection from violence and danger that pervaded neighborhoods wholly unfamiliar to the coddled, quixotic, white academics and NGO leaders who favored abolition. Subsequent sensationalized upticks in certain categories of crime in certain cities (including Burlington) solidified the consensus that progressives (and, in Burlington, Progressives) had gone much too far.

When will the Progs stop paying for this decision, which they’ve already reversed? New York Times stories like “The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont” don’t help, but one possible answer is the Progs will continue to pay until the moment they make it clear that their politics are, in fact, about something other than policing.

In 2023, with a controversial ballot question on the subject of police accountability dominating most of the news coverage of Burlington’s city election, that wasn’t easy to do. Question 7, also known as Community Control of Police, aimed to create a civilian review board with binding powers to investigate, suspend, and fire officers. Even if it had passed locally, it would have faced slim odds in the statehouse, with a near-certain veto ahead from our Republican governor, but a well-funded “no” campaign drew rank-and-file conservatives to the polls, and 63.2% of voters rejected the item in Burlington. Presumably, they didn’t leave the rest of their ballots blank.

CVDSA has always rooted for the Progs. But if only as a thought experiment, we might ask ourselves why. For many of us, our allegiance owes, above all else, to a well-founded contempt for the Democrats and an appreciation that, in Vermont at least, a viable alternative structure exists to provide a route to elected office for left-wing candidates.

Of course, we hated to see the Progressive Party lose its plurality on the City Council. But have the Progs demonstrated what the import of that loss will be for constituents in the now Democratic East District and Ward 8? For instance, will it make their rent go up or down?

Talking about housing didn’t win Rhone the election on March 7, but moving forward, it remains the issue with the strongest chance of displacing “public safety” as a primary subject of concern and debate in our local elections. Everyone who cares about Burlington should aim to find new ways to center housing as a political topic, not only because it represents a potentially viable electoral strategy in the future but also because – unlike Burlington’s out-of-control crime wave – it is real. But Progs who want to play a productive role here will have to demonstrate how their positions on housing actually differ from the Democrats’.

With Burlington now taking tentative steps toward adding new housing in the South End, we should remember that it could have done so years ago. In 2015, the Progs unanimously signed on to a resolution by Councilor Joan Shannon, a Democrat, to prevent a residential rezoning along Pine Street. Local artists had protested out of fear that their studios would soon become apartments, since apartments command higher rents.

The brand of cultural leftism that ranks rich people’s desire for subsidized spaces in which to engage in personal self-expression by making quirky paintings and sculptures ahead of working-class people’s need for shelter isn’t rare in the United States. But future Progs on the City Council may want to ask themselves if this should be their brand of leftism.

More recently, the Progs have prioritized punishing UVM (which, owing to its size, functions as Burlington’s not-for-profit, state-subsidized stand-in for the careless, impersonal greed of Corporate America) for raising its admissions totals over hastening the construction of new, badly needed student housing on the Trinity Campus.

The Progs’ political fixations – trying to protect homeowners from property tax increases, for instance – point to the influence of one of the party’s bases in Burlington: aging hippies who bought houses back when they were cheap, with the aim of defending a small, friendly, oddball city from, among other things, overdevelopment. Permitting the construction of big apartment buildings would – in addition to increasing the housing supply – allow for the development of younger, non-student constituencies, whom we could work to organize around newer, less foggy approaches to ecosocialism and housing justice. But getting there would require the Progs to suffer through some uncomfortable moments during public comment periods at City Hall.

CVDSA members vote for the Progs, but we can’t by ourselves control where the party stands on housing. We can try to make a difference. We can control where CVDSA stands.

Coincidentally, a couple weeks after Rhone’s loss, Denver DSA stirred a tempest online when it announced that its membership had voted to oppose the construction of a mixed-use neighborhood – with market-rate and income-restricted housing, a grocery store, and a public park – on the site of the abandoned Park Hill Golf Course, just below an A Line commuter rail stop. Two of the chapter’s elected officials had already said they would vote against Referred Measure 2O, the local ballot question that would enable redevelopment if approved.

The parallels to our own proposal were unmistakable. Our comrades in Colorado had taken a different view.

The understanding that DSA’s housing organizing will focus principally on building tenant power, advocating for rent control and Section 9 repairs, and advancing various forms of social ownership is uncontroversial; the open question is whether or not DSA should actively oppose the private development that other organizations – YIMBY Denver, for instance – regard as the sole solution to our cities’ housing crises. DSA chapters across the country have defended their partnerships with local anti-gentrification groups against charges of “Left NIMBYism,” but critics can point to stranger bedfellows: specifically, the unproductive minor nobility of conservative homeowners and mom-and-pop landlords who, in a historical materialist analysis, would seem to represent a more regressive political force than the corporate developers whose intentions to expand their real estate holdings threaten the former groups’ ability to build personal wealth strictly by contriving conditions of scarcity.

In the case of the Park Hill Golf Course, Denver DSA could hardly make a convincing case that it is on the verge of realizing a socialist vision for its 155 open acres, if only voters next month reject the plan put forth by Westside Development Partners. Denver doesn’t have a public developer to turn to on the city or state level, let alone one with enough capital to take on a project this big. Last year, socialists in Rhode Island achieved a major victory when their legislature authorized a $10 million pilot program to build new mixed-income housing under state ownership, but even if housing organizers in Colorado managed to win similar legislation, it would not create anything close to enough public-sector capacity.

To many observers, the usual complaint that the development will displace Black and brown residents fell flat this time: it is, after all, a golf course – an enormous empty space – not an embattled gentrifying community. Westside’s plan could be better, surely, but it underwent what has become, by now, a more or less standard process by which developers seek to win public approval before a zoning change, with the signing of a community benefits agreement that promised 25% affordable housing; recreational, cultural, and commercial facilities; and token financial giveaways to adjacent low-income residents and nonprofits.

Activists might have pushed the Denver City Council harder to demand a little more before agreeing to rezone the golf course on Westside’s behalf, but that vote has already taken place. If the general public now refuses at the ballot box to remove the conservation easement that bars all construction on the site, there is no clear path to building housing of any kind in the near future, at any level of affordability.

As it is, Westside’s mixed-use, transit-oriented plan represents a clear upgrade in relation to the surrounding development pattern, with its long, uninterrupted rows of overpriced ranches. The proposal is, in a basic sense, urban.

Most socialists would like to be urbanists; they just can’t stomach becoming market urbanists. Virtually all of us ardently support public transit, pedestrian infrastructure, and bike lanes. Most of us identify suburban development as an ecological catastrophe that will contribute more and more carbon emissions until we create opportunities for people to live closer together instead. Many of us, moreover, share a conception of great cities as uniquely supportive and enriching social fabrics that, by providing an abundance of free, easy-to-access amenities, from parks to cultural programming, as well as constant opportunities for human interconnection, use the wealth of the public sphere to mitigate some of the inequalities of class society in deeply meaningful and empowering ways.

Few American metropolises have a built environment capable of embodying this ideal. Burlington has much to recommend it, but it falls a little short of the minimum density threshold for total walkability, which, especially given its inadequate bus service, is another way of saying that it cuts off people who don’t own cars from full, democratic participation in its civic life. Like most cities, it would be better if it had more people living in it.

But how do we get them there, except by giving capitalists permission to build expensive new homes? This is where DSA begins to balk. The left-wing caricature of private development, which pictures every new building as a stack of glossy condos that will, after their purchase by billionaire foreign investors, sit forever vacant, is an exaggeration; in fact, the shoddy, faux-luxury “gentrification buildings” in places like New York City’s Bushwick, for instance, house many of the debt-saddled, downwardly mobile college grads who turned North Brooklyn into one of DSA’s strongest bases. But it’s true, of course, that market-rate construction will not serve those who struggle most to find shelter. So why would we want more of it?
Socialists, understandably, view the question of upzoning through the lens of “What is the socialist thing to do here?” Naturally, the building trades unions – long derided on the Left, anyway, for their supposedly immovable conservativism – always want to build, but it doesn’t feel socialist to pave the way for private profit. That’s because, in the most straightforward sense, it isn’t socialist.

As we all know, our socialism does not yet exist, except as an embryonic force. But where can it begin to achieve its expression? Sometimes we look in the wrong places.

For example, we may imagine disputes between big developers and the “communities” that oppose them as secondhand iterations of the capital-labor conflict, playing out in a modified arena but with the same underlying dynamics. This can allow us to claim victories that, on the 21st-century shop floor, come all too rarely. America’s unions may be weak, but its NIMBYs are reasonably strong, and by positioning ourselves as ideologically distinct junior partners in anti-development coalitions dominated by the latter, we can take part in their wins. The recognition – open or suppressed – that the primary political forces behind these “victories” would mount even more combative campaigns against the development of housing for low-income renters, if the possibility of it ever arose, may only slightly dampen the celebratory mood when a market-rate project fails.

When anticapitalists seek power within the capitalist state, they face the awkward reality that, alongside pushing for alternative ways of organizing our society, they must also think seriously – if they want to protect their electoral futures as well as the here-and-now material interests of their constituents – about how to manage a profit-driven mode of production in order to yield the least bad possible outcomes. Nobody benefits when we collapse specific, correctable market failures into the broader inadequacy of capitalism as an economic system. Until we win socialism, we will never have a society where all of us can thrive, but the question of exactly how few of us will thrive in the meantime should still concern us, and not only in areas where potential gains for working people would derive from class struggle in a traditional sense.

The uninspiring nature of YIMBY “success stories” – where a flurry of new construction in one city or another proved to reduce the size of rent increases in subsequent years, relative to a comparable city, without eliminating them altogether, let alone solving homelessness – offers a temptation to dismiss their significance. Rezonings tend to increase the housing supply by less than their advocates promise, and the effects of increased supply play a smaller role than advocates purport in increasing affordability. But the effects remain real, both for existing tenants and those hoping to move into an area. Few renters would turn down a chance to knock a few bucks off the monthly check to their landlord, and we shouldn’t allow our distaste for YIMBYs themselves, in their stereotypical libertarian form, to convince us, through an inevitably convoluted logic, that superficially positive zoning reforms would contravene our deeper revolutionary aims.

In many political disputes – like Denver’s, for instance – there is no structurally socialist entity with which we, as socialists, can align ourselves. Instead, we must choose sides among various partially or fully malignant forces within capitalist society. But that doesn’t have to mean losing sight of our long-term vision. As we weigh in on conflicts that pit land-use patterns that, even under capitalism, have the capacity to promote a measure of social solidarity against the sprawling, car-dependent infrastructure that undergirds American individualism, we should do so, naturally, with the goal of socialism in mind.

All sorts of issues come before DSA’s elected officials, as they do any other. They may find themselves in a position to craft new industrial regulations to protect consumer safety or the planet, to the detriment of corporate profits; less comfortably, they may also – if the ideology of the organization doesn’t constrain them – notice the necessity of shrinking misguided regulatory apparatuses in order to stimulate the production of essential goods: unavoidably a boon for capitalist firms, which will dedicate a portion of their proceeds to political donations for right-wing candidates and causes, as the real estate lobby reliably demonstrates.

It’s not the only one. In New York, private solar and wind energy companies helped fend off NYC-DSA’s attempt to pass the Build Public Renewables Act last year. We should never mistake investors in commercial clean power for friends, but neither can we, in this parallel case, afford to lend a hand to NIMBY activists or municipal officials in their aim to develop new land-use hurdles that would make it more difficult for these firms to site solar and wind farms on scenic hillsides, even if doing so would serve to drain some of the companies’ political influence by depriving them of revenue. We can’t meet our goals for clean electricity without their contributions. As we fight for a better approach, we cannot pretend that will not, for the foreseeable future, continue to rely, at least in part, on on our enemies.

Housing can be more complicated. How, for instance, should we sort the competing claims for space between residential and industrial uses under our cities’ zoning regimes? When, if ever, does it make sense to raze functional middle-density neighborhoods in order to construct high-rises?

But in housing-starved cities, multifamily construction on obviously underutilized parcels – on parking lots, golf courses, and other sites of minoritarian dominance, including single-family neighborhoods – is as close to an unalloyed good as we’re going to get. In the lead-up, we can negotiate with developers, when possible, over rates of affordability and public amenities, but it is a mistake for frustrated socialists to prioritize the cathartic act of “standing up to big real estate” over the production of housing. Zoning offers a rare veto power over capital, which elsewhere does more or less whatever it wants whenever it wants, and the desire to wield this power punitively, understandably, is strong. But all zoning can do is say yes or say no to someone else’s proposal; it can’t create anything.

Such zoning-based showdowns with developers become less exciting when we realize how little we can actually win. At times, the socialist position on striking real estate deals can embody a strange paradox: we loudly insist that private development can never truly serve the needs of the people, yet simultaneously we seem to believe that, if only we hold fast to an impossibly ambitious list of demands during each rezoning, we can turn a proposed condo tower into something like public housing.

In reality, when a city councilor boasts that they forced a developer in their district to exceed, by a significant margin, the maximum level of affordability that it said it could meet on a project without compromising the project’s viability as a profit-making endeavor, what they usually mean – as in the case of Innovation QNS in Queens – is that the mayor quietly agreed to kick in an extra subsidy from the city’s coffers in order to boost the number of income-restricted units, allowing the councilor to save face among gentrification-sensitive voters without tanking the project. This additional concession doesn’t come from capital; it comes from the public, which props up the developer with cash that could, alternatively, have funded a democratically managed community land trust or a limited-equity co-op.

Under capitalism, capital rarely ever really loses. At worst, it walks away and finds a more agreeable home elsewhere.

This, of course, is one reason why it’s so vital to fight for the establishment of state- and city-owned real estate development corporations. But DSA’s orientation toward housing in general would improve immeasurably with the realization – possibly a tough pill to swallow for some of our tenant organizers – that we will not win socialism through an obstructive struggle against real estate capital specifically. To tell ourselves otherwise is to lose a piece of our Marxism: specifically, the piece through which we can regard capitalist development as a progressive force, delivering the hard infrastructure that our socialist revolution – which we will win as workers (for instance, in the “conservative” building trades), not as consumers of housing – will inherit.

This is not a call to reduce DSA’s emphasis on housing in municipal politics. It is the opposite: Burlington may not yet have caught up, but in most places, housing already sits at the center of the debates about our cities, and we must engage with it through a wider set of political lenses, including some that feel more wonky than radical. Electorally, DSA has no choice but to build itself up from the local level, and to do that, we need a municipal agenda that will measurably improve America’s cities in short order. We can’t afford to be right on the big questions and wrong on the small ones.

Our housing organizing will continue to focus on tenants, but our policy positions should reflect a common-sense climate-conscious view on land use and a normal recognition of the need to increase the housing supply, unclouded by a fetishistic hatred of “empty luxury condos.”

After all, it’s the capitalist’s role, not ours, to look at an apartment building and see only a spreadsheet of projected profits. We can notice the plumbing, the electrical work, the sturdy walls and roof, and know that, one day, it will be social housing – like all the other housing will be – because the private developer that built it, like every other capitalist, will no longer exist.

This will happen in Burlington. Until then, we want to make it as nice a town as it can be, with plenty of apartments to rent. Some of the new units, we hope, will be public housing, and we’ll continue to work on making that happen. But at first, most of them probably will be private.