Mamdani Won’t Decommodify Housing, and Neither Will Anyone Else
Practicing the art of the impossible
Someone recently dug up this tweet from New York City Pre-Mayor Zohran Mamdani:
I don’t know if this is still Mamdani’s view, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it is. Socialists often talk about “decommodifying” housing; AOC uses the word in headlines of press releases, it pops up all the time in Jacobin, and far left think tanks use it in their research. The basic idea is that housing being a “commodity” — a thing that can be bought and sold — is a problem, because everyone needs housing but not everyone can afford it. The solution, some argue, is to remove housing from market pressures by having the government control the housing market. That would ideally happen through large-scale public housing, though measures like rent control and eviction moratoriums will do until the Glorious Revolution arrives, which it should any day now despite being 177 years behind schedule.
If I drink a bottle of absinthe, ride a roller coaster, and then immediately stand on my head, I can see what the “decommodify” people are getting at. Housing isn’t like most goods; if a person can’t afford, say, a $100,000 a bottle of wine salvaged from the wreck of a 15th century Spanish galleon, I’m comfortable saying “tough shit”. But that isn’t true with housing. Everyone needs a place to live, so it’s tempting to think that housing should be in a special category removed from the pressures of market forces.