Land as a Tool of Colonial Control and Displacement
The battle for housing in New York is a battle over land tenure, a central pillar in Mamdani’s analysis of the colonial project. The real estate developers and the city planning apparatus function as a modern-day colonial administration, systematically dismantling any form of customary or community-controlled land access. Public housing (NYCHA) is left to crumble, a deliberate strategy to make the land available for private capital, while rent stabilization is constantly attacked. This is the logic of enclosure, forcing the “native” population into a state of perpetual precarity and displacement to clear the way for “settler” profit. A Marxist-feminist reading sees the home not just as a commodity, but as the site of social reproduction; attacking its stability is an attack on our capacity to live and care for one another. The solution is not merely to build more “affordable” units within this predatory system, but to de-commodify land and housing entirely. We must fight for community land trusts, universal social housing, and the recognition of a right to the city that supersedes the property rights of the settler class, reclaiming land from the market and placing it under the democratic control of those who inhabit it.
