LOS ANGELES — Over the past decade, two movements on the left have emerged to explain the housing crisis punishing America’s big cities.
One has branded the real-estate business as a villain, blaming realtors, landlords and developers for soaring costs that force people from their apartments. The other has pointed the finger at homeowners for blocking new construction in their neighborhoods, limiting supply and raising prices.
With their dueling diagnoses and solutions — call them Socialism vs. Abundance — the factions have been at each other’s throats in online flame wars and combative public hearings.
But now, a pair of ascendant politicians in the country’s largest metropolises are asking, “Why not both?”
“What we need is actually for progressive people to come together and have more alignment on the solutions to really shift the boat towards a more equal and affordable city,” said Leila Bozorg, the top housing deputy for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “Those solutions involve addressing our housing shortage and they involve protecting tenants in place.”
The 34-year-old Mamdani rocketed in less than a year from little-known assemblymember to big-city mayor on a promise to “freeze the rent” before finding common cause with President Donald Trump on “a new era of housing,” as Mamdani put it during a White House visit last week.
Across the country, another millennial lawmaker evolved from market skeptic to market enthusiast and is making the idea of a Socialist-Abundance synthesis central to her recently launched campaign for mayor.
“My philosophy is you need protection and production in order for cities to thrive,” said Nithya Raman, a 44-year-old Los Angeles City Councilmember who like Mamdani owes much of her unlikely political rise to the Democratic Socialists of America.
Mamdani and Raman are pushing for nothing less than a fundamental redrawing of urban housing politics. More than a half century of land-use debates in cities have centered on fights between real estate interests who bring big money to campaigns and homeowners who come to the polls in droves. Yet in both New York City and Los Angeles, two-thirds of residents are renters, making them fertile ground for a progressivism that blends robust tenant protections with unleashed housing production.
Momentum extends beyond America’s two largest cities. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson came out of her city’s socialist wing to win an underdog campaign in November on a platform of building public housing and taking on “bad actor” landlords while also removing barriers to growth.
Some activists see this potential realignment as a skeleton key to unlock a new coalition that could boost renters’ political heft and living conditions, while cracking a longstanding political alliance between builders and landlords.
“We need to be pro-housing development while at the same time making sure people can comfortably stay housed,” said Azeen Khanmalek, executive director of the Abundant Housing LA advocacy organization. “That’s the way we’re going to turn this into a mass movement.”
The stakes for success are high. The affordability crunch has put an unrelenting strain on Mamdani and Raman’s constituents, who remain stuck paying sky-high rents at a time when buying a home is getting further out of reach. Roughly half of tenants in each city are considered rent-burdened, meaning they devote more than 30 percent of their income to housing costs. Median home values have nearly doubled to $800,000 in New York since the market hit bottom 15 years ago, and almost tripled to just under $1 million in Los Angeles over that time, according to Zillow data.
Yet the two politicians’ proposed solution remains in a fragile infancy. Centrist skeptics have derided the platform as an unworkable mix of “capitalism for developers, communism for landlords.” Politically, the path to abundance-minded socialism is mined with as many opportunities to make enemies as win friends.
In late January, two weeks before announcing her run for mayor, Raman attempted to cut a local tax on property sales that funds low-income housing. Even though her argument that it stymied growth echoed developers’ claims, few of them rallied behind her. At the same time, Raman’s progressive base branded her a traitor. The proposal ran aground.
The experience hasn’t discouraged Raman from campaigning on both pro-tenant and pro-homebuilding policies, which she called “a very potent vision for LA.” But it reinforced the challenges of assembling an alliance of renters that can outweigh the power of homeowners and landlords and overcome widespread suspicion of profit-driven development.
“Even now, there isn’t a lot of political advantage to believing in the need for more market-rate housing,” Raman said. “There may be in the abstract, but there isn’t really in the concrete.”
From homeowners to renters
In the Oval Office last week, Mamdani looked on as Trump grinned ear to ear. The president was displaying to the camera the mayor’s gift to him: a mock tabloid front page headlined, “Trump to City: Let’s Build.”
“I’m looking forward to building more housing in New York City,” Mamdani captioned the photo in a social media post.
This improbable kinship between Mamdani, who has branded Trump a “fascist” and “despot,” and Trump, who has called Mamdani a “communist” and “lunatic,” is possible only on housing policy. Unlike health care, immigration and just about every other big issue in American politics, partisan lines on housing not only are unclear but filled with contradictions.
A Republican might argue against government restrictions on growth because they infringe on property rights, but support them because of local control. A Democrat might oppose restrictions because they serve to segregate communities, but support them so as not to despoil the environment.
Modern housing politics, and all the inconsistencies wrapped into them, emerged in the 1970s. The dominant fissure pitted the growth machine — real estate and building-trades unions — against newly organized groups of homeowners fighting construction near them. The homeowner movement, a reaction to the bulldozing excesses of the preceding urban renewal era, painted government anti-growth regulations as victories over profiteering developers.
The Great Financial Crisis of the late 2000s further scrambled the dynamics. As big cities turned bluer, the housing debate within them began to play out entirely on the left. Once the raft of foreclosures cleared, costs shot up, and young people — unable to buy houses at the same age their parents did — cast about for blame.
One school of thought pointed again to developer greed. The Occupy Wall Street movement, which formed in 2011, condemned corporate behemoths, and by extension real estate interests, for rigging the game against the poor and working classes. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders harnessed this energy in his 2016 presidential campaign, and scores of his supporters joined the far-left Democratic Socialists of America. DSA members in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere worked in concert with a revived tenant movement to organize against landlords’ rent hikes and evictions.
Other Millennials found a culprit in the same development restrictions their parents championed. This group derided the regulations as Not In My Backyard — or NIMBY — initiatives that pursued parochial interests at the expense of broader affordability.
Activists in San Francisco, a city with high costs and low homeownership rates, playfully called themselves Yes In My Backyard as they promoted an academic literature that showed more building lowers costs for everyone. Such YIMBYism has formed a key plank of the Abundance movement, popularized nationwide in a book published last year by two liberal columnists who contend that government restrictions are holding back Democrats’ ability to achieve progress.
The perspective flips an anti-regulation argument traditionally held by conservatives into one that aligns with a pro-growth liberalism popular before the 1970s, said Jacob Anbinder, a historian at Cornell University who is writing a book about homeowner politics.
“It can be progressive to get government out of the way,” Anbinder said of the Abundance message.
The biggest cleavage between YIMBYs and DSA members emerges over the profit motive in the housing market. YIMBYs argue letting developers make money means they’ll build more homes to bring down costs for everyone. (Many YIMBYs believe subsidies would still be required to house lower-income residents.) DSA groups contend applying an investor’s logic to the basic need for shelter is inherently exploitative. True affordability, they argue, comes only with public or community-led development.
This fundamental dispute has sparked years of scorched-earth debates between the groups, through rival memes from their terminally online members and in-person protests and counterprotests.
Yet Mamdani and Raman contend the divide isn’t as unbridgeable as it might seem. Their attempted union pairs stronger tenant protections with the removal of regulatory obstacles to all kinds of housing, both public and private.
The perspective can enlarge the tent all the way to Trump, the country’s most famous property developer. When Mamdani recently visited the White House, he requested federal support for more than 12,000 new homes in Queens, his and Trump’s home borough. The vision unites the mayor’s push for growth with the president’s dreams of all the skyscrapers he could have built by unraveling New York’s mind-numbingly complex land-use rules.
“We put forward a proposal to build more housing in a single project than the city has seen since 1973,” Mamdani said following his gathering with Trump. “I was heartened by the fact that the president was interested.”
Tokyo drift
Mamdani’s meeting of the minds with the president is all the more unlikely considering how the mayor started his campaign.
He surged out of a crowded field of mayoral candidates last year on the back of DSA support, clever and constant social media and a list of promises to reign in New York’s high cost of living. One of his most recognizable positions, a pledge to halt rent increases for 2 million residents in rent-stabilized apartments, hit a sweet spot for a DSA-aligned candidate seeking mass appeal.
At first, Mamdani criticized new private development as unaffordable for working families. But by the Democratic primary last June, he had changed his mind. Mamdani told The New York Times that the city needed to make it easier for developers to build near mass transit and in wealthier neighborhoods that have restricted growth.
Paul Williams, executive director of nonprofit think tank Center for Public Enterprise, recalled watching a general election debate where the future mayor referenced homebuilding in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Tokyo — two cities celebrated by YIMBYs as exemplars of high supply and stable costs.
“I was like, ‘This guy has read all of the posts,’” said Williams, who later served on Mamdani’s transition team. “If he’s talking about Tokyo permit numbers in a New York City mayoral debate, it’s over. He’s on the train.”
Mamdani has staffed his administration with figures tied to both ends of the housing-policy spectrum. He recruited Bozorg, his top housing official, from the developer-friendly administration of predecessor Eric Adams, while selecting a controversial activist to lead a reinvigorated Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants.
On his first day in office, Mamdani visited a rundown apartment complex owned by a bankrupt corporate landlord to declare, “We will stand up on behalf of the tenants of this city.” Weeks later, Mamdani joined Gov. Kathy Hochul to call for reforms to the state’s environmental laws, contending that building more would slow the growth of rent.
New York’s business and real estate titans, who’ve warned that Mamdani’s pro-tenant policies would cause the housing market to collapse, remain skeptical of the socialist mayor despite his pro-development turn. Grumbles about Mamdani moving in a too developer-friendly direction have emerged among the city’s left as well. But while acknowledging potential tensions, its leaders have been willing to give Mamdani room.
“The important thing when we develop housing is, who are we developing it for and how are those people going to be protected?” said Sumathy Kumar, head of Housing Justice for All, a prominent tenant coalition, and a former leader of NYC-DSA.
The mayor’s ability to hold his coalition together will be tested as he pursues the Sunnyside Yard megaproject he proposed to Trump. Details about the development, including who would build it and future residents’ income restrictions, remain thin. So far the Mamdani administration has said all the housing would be “affordable,” with half of it set aside for middle-class residents.
“This will take many, many years,” Mamdani said.
‘Our members express such hatred for her’
When Raman ran for city council in 2020, the MIT-educated urban planner drafted her housing platform with clear vision from the left. Renters were “under incredible stress” and homelessness had been "criminalized," she argued, thanks in part to a “rigged” planning system that allowed too many “expensive luxury buildings” to “eat up precious land” better used for affordable housing.
Now, more than five years on, Raman talks about for-profit development in much different ways.
“I've become more aware of how much of a role the private market plays in providing housing that may not be deed-restricted affordable housing, but that is affordable for people,” she said in an interview.
Raman’s transformation on the issue has come more slowly than Mamdani’s. She had no political experience before she filed to run in a sprawling council district of mishmashed communities, stretching from gentrified eastside neighborhoods like Los Feliz and Silver Lake to Hollywood to the northwest.
Her novel strategy was to put renters at the center of the campaign, a departure from decades of conventional wisdom that the way to win in Los Angeles was by prioritizing homeowners who showed up to the polls.
But the district had a hefty base of tenants, including Park La Brea, the largest apartment complex west of the Mississippi River. The city had recently changed its election calendar to align council races with federal campaigns, a move strategists believed would bring out voters who had never before cast a municipal ballot.
The solutions in Raman’s platform were red meat for renters: more protections against eviction and tougher restrictions on rent hikes. Her campaign even called for a “rent freeze” in Los Angeles five years before Mamdani’s made it a rallying cry in New York.
Raman made her case to the local DSA chapter, which helped recruit an army of volunteers to march through the district’s bungalow courts and mid-rise apartments and knock on tenants’ doors.
On election day, she became the first candidate to defeat an incumbent in 17 years and the first DSA-endorsed candidate to win public office in Los Angeles. Raman also gained more votes than any councilmember in city history.
Raman’s coalition has proven durable. In the post-2020 redistricting process, her council colleagues maneuvered to weaken her renter base, trading Park La Brea for neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley, one of the birthplaces of the organized homeowner movement. But despite getting outspent by challengers who campaigned that she was too progressive, she won reelection in 2024.
On tenant protections, Raman has largely followed through on her promises. Across both terms in office, she spearheaded the biggest wins for city renters in decades, including blocking evictions without cause, providing a grace period for overdue rent and tightening limits on rent increases for 1.5 million Angelenos who reside in already rent-stabilized apartments.
Those positions, along with Raman’s socialist affiliations, made lasting enemies of housing industry representatives. Dan Yukelson, the head of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, referred to Raman as “Nikita.”
“Our members express such hatred for her,” he said.
Over time, however, Raman questioned whether a focus on construction of government-subsidized developments restricted to low-income renters would be enough to address the city’s housing shortage. She read academic research showing neighborhoods without growth became less affordable over time. The perspective resonated with her experience when construction was proposed in her district: Residents in wealthy areas tried to block new homes, which prevented younger, more diverse people from moving in.
“I really kept thinking to myself, where are middle-class people going to live?” Raman said. “Where are teachers going to live? Public sector employees? Unless you were able to make this into a place where families were able to live, you would just see people choose to leave.”
By 2024, her views were aligning with those in real estate on the value of private development. She supported greater density in single-family-home communities as part of a state-mandated rezoning effort. Last year, Raman backed a high-profile state law to build more around mass transit.
Both positions put her at odds with most of the city council and Mayor Karen Bass, a fellow Democrat whose housing positions fit into traditional homeowner-centered politics. Khanmalek, who runs the largest YIMBY organization in the region, called Raman “by far the most pro-housing person in LA city politics. Bar none.”
Dave Rand, a prominent development attorney, found himself won over by Raman’s support for contentious housing proposals and willingness to delve into the industry’s technical concerns, including how long it takes LA’s municipal utility to hook up new buildings to electricity.
Yet when he’s tried to make the case for Raman to his developer clients, all Rand hears is vitriol about her supporting rent control.
“She will never be the darling of the development community,” Rand said.
Indeed, it may be harder to place a wedge between developers and landlords than some on the left hope. Many who build apartment buildings later own and operate them as rental properties, and they value stability in the market. Making it easier to get projects approved may not encourage developers to actually break ground if they’re unwilling to swallow the potential for ever-changing tenant protections once the buildings are up.
“Right now, to me she has absolutely no credibility for supporting developers,” said Yukelson, whose group represents more than 10,000 landlords, property managers and developers across Southern California. “She’s done quite a bit of damage since she’s been in office.”
Raman’s recent gambit to cut the city’s “mansion tax” marked her biggest YIMBY play yet. She proposed changing the tax — which applies to all sales of property over $5.3 million — to exempt new multifamily and commercial development for 15 years. Raman, who backed the measure when it was before voters in 2022, argued the tax was slowing apartment construction and that her changes would fend off more draconian initiatives to eliminate it.
But the progressive coalition that helped to pass the measure painted Raman’s move as a surprise sellout. The tax has raised more than $1 billion that has helped to fund low-income housing construction and eviction-defense efforts, and its supporters believed Raman was capitulating to development interests that have never accepted their defeat at the ballot box.
Cynthia Strathmann, executive director of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, an advocacy group for low-income tenants, said Raman’s decision likely would diminish election-year support from progressive groups she’s relied on as the bedrock of her coalition.
“Will she be able to make up that deficit by now being in the good graces of developers who are a very powerful constituency in Los Angeles?” Strathmann asked.
Raman said the hearts and minds she’s focused on changing are not those of a still-skeptical development industry. Instead, she is trying to convince voters they will benefit from new apartments in their neighborhood.
“My goal is to lay out a vision for Los Angeles that I think is the right one, and the one that is necessary for this moment,” she said. “That is all I can do.”
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