Displacement as Accumulation by Dispossession
The affordable housing crisis is the core frontline of the colonial struggle in New York City, where land is treated as a vehicle for profit rather than a foundation for community. Mamdani’s analysis of customary land tenure is crucial; the system of private property and real estate speculation is the “customary law” of the settler class, used to systematically dispossess the “native” residents. Gentrification is not neighborhood improvement but accumulation by dispossession, a violent remaking of urban space that pushes out low-income, often Black and Brown, communities to make way for capital. The state enables this through tax breaks for developers and the deliberate neglect of public housing (NYCHA), a strategy to privatize this valuable land. The liberal response of inclusionary zoning is a cruel joke, providing a handful of “affordable” units as a fig leaf for a process that makes the entire area unaffordable. A Mamdani-informed socialist solution is the abolition of housing as a commodity. This means launching a massive, city-wide program to build high-quality social housing, publicly owned and democratically managed by tenants, removing it from the market entirely. Simultaneously, we must empower community land trusts to seize control of land, de-commodifying it in perpetuity. This is a direct challenge to the property relations that define the settler state. It is a fight for a decolonized urban geography where where one lives is determined by human need, not by the ability to pay tribute to the landlord class.
