How Did the Build Public Renewables Act Get Passed?
This spring, a coalition of climate justice organizations led by DSA activists successfully passed the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) through the New York State legislature. It was the culmination of a years-long campaign to make the state the first in the nation to pass a climate justice law that supports publicly-owned renewable energy production and green union jobs. Details about what’s contained in the legislation can be found on the Public Power NY site here.
It is somewhat surprising that a bill that directly challenges the interests of a major private industry with close ties to many powerful politicians actually got passed. To help DSA members understand how and why the campaign to pass BPRA succeeded, Socialist Forum spoke with two leading campaign organizers, Stylianos “Scott” Karolidis of NYC-DSA and Timothy Karcich of Suffolk County (Long Island) DSA. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Socialist Forum: Tell us about the origins of the campaign. When did people start talking about working to pass a climate bill, and who was involved?
Scott Karolidis: In 2018 or 2019 the New York City DSA Ecosocialist working group was in the early stages of forming. At that point it was kind of unfocused, working on issues regarding the environment and ecosocialism in general. A few folks started coalescing around the idea that we should do a public ownership or a public power campaign. The idea came that we would do a few different bills at the state level to try and change energy grid and politics in New York. One of them was inspired by another comrade, Shay O’Reilly, who had the idea of addressing the fact that New York State already has this huge public power authority, the New York Power Authority (NYPA). It just doesn’t do anything. It’s been completely hamstrung by laws that restrict what it can build and what it can do. But it’s actually kind of amazing, it’s the biggest public power entity in the United States. It originally did all of that massive hydroelectric power building under Franklin D. Roosevelt when he was the governor. The idea was that we should expand it. So there was originally a bill to expand NYPA’s authority to enable it to build. That was in addition to two other bills. One of them was called the Downstate Power Authority Act, and the other would have banned ESCOs and done other regulatory things. Eventually over time those bills consolidated. One of them became the New York Utility Democracy Act (NYUDA), which would essentially take over ConEdison to form a downstate power authority that would cover the Westchester County area, the New York City area, and ideally link up with a democratized Long Island Power Authority (LIPA). The other bill was the BPRA, which took all of those things from the ESCO ban and expanded NYPA and consolidated it into one bill. That was in 2019 or 2020. From there, it snowballed and became a different beast.
Tim Karcich: My main contribution to the bill was talking with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1049 to get them onboard with BPRA, or at least neutral. So I came in later, but I do have some family history with the grid. My dad worked for LILCO, which was the Long Island Lighting Company. Before they closed down, he worked at the Shoreham Power Plant in their environmental department for a little while. so I jumped at the chance to work on the campaign when another member of ours told us about it. I’m also involved with the Reimagine LIPA campaign here, which is kind of like BPRA for this power authority on Long Island.
Socialist Forum: Where did the specific policy ideas in the bill come from?
Scott Karolidis: In addition to Shay O’Reilly’s idea I mentioned earlier, I think everyone in the working group knew that climate change is a big problem. We recognize capitalism and the profit motive as a major driver of climate change. If we want to deal with climate change, we need to move to a public electric grid because it’s never going to be more profitable to do clean energy than it is to do dirty energy. Neoliberals can incentivize it all they want, it’s just never going to work. That was the real core of the bill. We have this power authority in the state, it makes a lot of money, and it’s flush with cash. Let’s use it to sell bonds so that it can build instead of using ratepayer revenue and money. All of those together formed the core idea that we need a public takeover of the electric grid so the public is making the decisions about how energy is produced and distributed.
Tim Karcich: There was a big struggle to get the most impacted unions like IBEW and UWUA Local 1-2 on board with the campaign. It’s easy to get, say, a teacher’s union to be in support of something like this. At first, people like IBEW Local 1049 Business Manager Patrick (“Paddy”) Guidice were not into BPRA. It took a while for them to come around, but we were able to convince them once the just transition language in the bill was going to stay in the bill.
Socialist Forum: What were some of the main strategies and tactics the campaign adopted to push the bill forward?
Scott Karolidis: We came at it from many different angles. We did some issue-based canvassing around the bill, and lots of chapters across the state did that. There was a significant communications element, including a lot of social media. We were going viral on Twitter fairly often, and lots of people that don’t normally engage with this sort of stuff started engaging in 2022. Another big thing is that at one point we realized that under the formerly existing political conditions, it was unlikely that we would be able to pass the bill. So we decided to try to change the conditions. We had a big strategy summit in 2021. We had lots of discussions, and we decided collectively that we would avoid doing too much issue-based work in order to focus on electoral work. We decided to endorse David Alexis’s campaign against the incumbent Kevin Parker, who was the bill’s primary sponsor in the State Senate. We endorsed Sarahana Shrestha against the incumbent Kevin Cahill in the Mid-Hudson Valley. And we worked to have a kind of national Green New Deal slate that included Sarahana and David Alexis and Vanessa Aguduelo in the Lower Hudson Valley and a few other candidates nationwide.
The reason we made that decision in 2021 was because we needed more people in both chambers of the state legislature to help us organize there in order to pass the bill. We wanted to beat Kevin Parker, who was intentionally blocking the bill by holding onto it as prime sponsor so he could prevent it from passing. We had to dislodge or defeat some powerful Democrats. We failed to beat Kevin Parker, but we scared him a lot, and he “magically” unblocked the bill when he realized he was getting a very credible threat from David.
Another big moment was when State Senator Mike Gianaris of Queens got on board with BPRA, because he played a key role in bringing the labor unions around to the bill. This ultimately resulted in the state AFL-CIO writing the bill’s labor language, and the federation stayed neutral on the bill. We ourselves were not powerful enough to cause labor to talk to us, but we were able to pressure leaders in the state legislature who in turn pressured labor leadership on our behalf.
Socialist Form: It seems like the decision to focus on electoral fights to make the terrain in the state legislature more favorable to passing BPRA was the right one.
Scott Karolidis: Absolutely. I don’t think we anticipated to be as successful as we were in 2022. We just thought we’d win an election or two and that in itself would help us pass the bill. We didn’t realize all the side effects and ramifications of the electoral work that wound up happening. Another critical tactic was all of the lobbying we did. We decided to focus mainly on electoral fights but we didn’t want to just drop lobbying completely. So we agreed to form a small lobbying committee that would do that kind of inside work, which included me, Aaron Eisenberg, Patrick Robbins, Lizzy Oh, and a few other people in New York that took up this inside component of the inside-outside strategy at the time.
Socialist Forum: DSA played a leading role in winning BPRA, but it wasn’t the only organization involved. How did the Public Power NY coalition come into being, and who is part of it?
Scott Karolidis: DSA was already working with a lot of these groups under the Movement for a Green New Deal banner, progressive left climate groups including New York Renews which is very large. These are not really socialist groups, but many of them realize that if they want to tackle the climate crisis they also have to address the economy. Generally these groups agreed that the government should be in control of energy production and distribution, not private companies. So that’s how we were able to get a lot of these folks together but I would say DSA does the vast majority of work in the coalition.
Socialist Forum: Which groups and business interests came together to fight against BPRA?
Tim Karcich: At first the unions were against the bill. There were Climate Action Council meetings all around the state, and the unions brought a lot of people to the meeting on Long Island, like hundreds of people. It was pretty wild. And a lot of testimony was kind of nonsense like, “how are they gonna bring in the electricity, on trucks?” I met Paddy Guidice from IBEW Local 1049 there, I just shook hands with him and told him we’d like to have him at the table. I guess the person—to–person interaction combined with the push from Mike Gianaris is what helped to make the connection happen. A couple of LIPC folks and I went down to the Local 1049 office and had a real conversation with them. They were really concerned about NYPA not bargaining in good faith with their union contracts. That was a big problem for them. They were really concerned about becoming public employees. Those IBEW members have been in the private sector, and if they became public employees their pensions would have gotten screwed up, they’d go all the way down to the worst state pension tier. A 45-year old electrician doesn’t want to hear that their pension is going to get hit, right?
So we did a lot of listening at that meeting. They saw that the bill was gaining steam and they saw that we were there in good faith and had always been there in good faith, like just waiting to have this meeting. We wanted to make sure they knew that if the bill was going to close down a peaker plant, which the BPRA does do, by 2030 that the members were going to get money for retraining or to just retire if that’s what they’d prefer. I remember telling this to Paddy and he was like, this is something that’s never happened before. When he first saw the labor language the AFL-CIO wrote for the bill, he said in the meeting that it was the best labor language he’d ever seen. And that was his concern, it was so good that it could never pass!
His job is to protect his members. If I put myself in his shoes, here’s this young guy coming up to you saying “let’s talk about public power, let’s talk about doing stuff that’s never happened before anywhere in the country, and just take what we’re saying on a leap of faith,” I can see why it took a year for him and the union to come around.
Socialist Forum: What about business and energy interests? Where did they stand on the bill, and what did they try to do to block its passage?
Scott Karolidis: Basically, if you were a private energy producer in New York State and you read this language and you had a brain, you would realize this bill was a direct threat to your interests. A lot of them told on themselves because in all the quotes they gave to the press, they said they could never compete with NYPA, which would do everything better, faster, cheaper. I personally would never admit that!
Socialist Forum: That sounds a lot like the arguments the private health insurance industry made against a public option for health insurance coverage.
Scott Karolidis: Yeah, it’s literally the same thing. So yes, private energy interests – fossil fuels and “green energy” alike – were against BPRA. A lot of legislators are very much in the pocket of these industries, whether they’re “clean” or not. If a corporation is willing to drop money into your reelection campaign and you don’t have any principles of your own, you love private industry. State Assembly member Amy Paulin was one of our biggest opponents. She was the chair of the corporations committee in the Assembly where this bill was last year. After the bill was passed afterwards she was saying things like, we are worried it would be competitive to our industry. She is identifying herself with private industry! So in addition to the private energy interests our opponents included lots of regular Democrats who are very cozy with private companies. It’s their ideology that they’re going to solve all the problems with “friendly” capitalism rather than anything else.
There’s a whole story about a fun legislative maneuver we used to get around Amy Paulin. I’ll tell you about it very briefly because I feel like it’s interesting. It’s this thing called “99ing” a bill, a procedure in the Assembly where you basically force a bill to come up in committee. We had Bobby Carroll do that last year, and Paulin was extremely upset about it because she was the chair of the committee and absolutely didn’t want it to happen. Carl Heastie was extremely upset about it. It passed out of committee because we had the votes. This year, the Assembly leadership changed the rules so that 99ing is significantly curtailed. They were so pissed about it that they have dramatically reduced the practice for every single legislator, it’s now very difficult to 99 bills in committees.
So that was fun. But Paulin and many other allies of the private industry were opponents. Of course, they made some changes to the legislation we weren’t happy about. The law that passed is not the original, perfect version we would like. What we really wanted is essentially a public takeover of energy production in the state, but we had to compromise in order to get something passed. The original version of BPRA included a clause called the right of first offer and refusal for any Request for Proposals (RFPs). This would have given NYPA the first go of new energy built in New York State, NYPA would have had to turn down a project before private companies could do it. That was a non-starter for most Democratic Party officeholders, who are deeply connected to private industry. So that came out. We had to take out the ban on ESCOs, building retrofits, and other things.
Tim Karcich: The bill had to compromise a little bit to pass, which is understandable. I’m very interested in the NY Utility Democracy Act (NYUDA). But BPRA was hard enough to pass, going for NYUDA right away seems like a mistake to me. I would like to pass it, but we need to think through what Public Power NY works on next, and we shouldn’t put NYUDA on a shaky foundation. So we’re talking about how to implement BPRA. I don’t really love electoral work myself, but I understand coming out of the BPRA fight that we have to move a bit slowly. I think the compromise was worth it, and it sets us up for fighting for things like NYUDA in the future.
Scott Karolidis: A really important thing to understand about BPRA and NYUDA is that we operate in the political conditions we have. We constantly had to grapple with that. We met every year of the campaign to discuss our strategy, meaning we constantly changed the strategy. We made decisions I didn’t always agree with. But it was great to be part of a democracy where you have to let a majority decide and then go along with it and try to make it work.
One of the things we’re really clear-eyed about is that one major goal of BPRA is to change the political conditions in the state. For a long time, we couldn’t get labor on board very easily because they have contracts with private industry, and they were happy with a lot of those contracts. They didn’t want to be public employees. The socialists couldn’t give union members jobs, but National Grid could give them jobs. We are changing the paradigm so now the socialists, through the capacities and mechanisms created by the bill, are the ones giving them jobs. When they get the job retraining, and full titles, and the same pensions and benefits and salaries in the new jobs through the just transition provisions, they will know to credit DSA for this. They know that DSA is the group that stands by their word when it comes to the promises we make to labor. When it does come time to start talking to them about how ConEdison is a bad deal for New Yorkers, we can say that we know you guys like your contracts, but can we work together? We would need labor in lockstep with us to do NYUDA. When it comes time to do that, we can point to BPRA and hopefully the many new unionized energy projects under NYPA that they’re happy with and say, look at what we did before. Let’s do it again.
Socialist Forum: The primary election challenges were one big way DSA was able to change the political terrain. It also seemed like developments in federal-level politics also helped to make passage of BPRA possible, namely certain provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the influence of left-wing New Yorkers in Congress like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman. What role did federal policy and politics play in this process?
Scott Karolidis: The IRA provision that really helped was “direct pay.” Before the IRA, private companies got tax incentives to build renewable energy. Public companies already weren’t paying taxes, so they weren’t really more competitive when it came to building energy projects. Under direct pay, the federal government just gives money to public companies to build renewable energy. Now, if you don’t have a public company in your state building renewables, you’re leaving an infinite amount of money on the table. Direct pay is written in such a way that a state could get up to 30% of your renewable energy projects paid for by the federal government.
This boosts the competitiveness of public companies. Now, they’re not just not costing the state tax incentives, they’re covering 30% of project costs through Washington. Now, they are extremely competitive with private industry. A funny story about that is DSA was a little bit personally involved in terms of forcing Chuck Schumer to that deal. There were widespread internal reports that Chuck Schumer was giving up on doing a climate deal with Joe Manchin, that he just wasn’t trying that. Basically he was saying, Joe Manchin doesn’t wanna negotiate, but it was really Schumer who was just giving up. We didn’t get particularly involved because we had our hands full with our electoral work, but some folks were supportive behind the scenes in pressuring Schumer. There was a staffer sit-in at Schumer’s office, demanding he do his job instead of giving up because it’s hard. A few other federal allies were instrumental in pushing Schumer not just on negotiating IRA, but on including direct pay too.
So yeah, that was really helpful. In terms of federal, we had been working on federal electeds for a really long time. Not just AOC or Bowman, but also Reps. Grace Meng and Adriano Espaillatt who spoke in favor and signed a letter during the Assembly hearing last year. Right. A lot of these mainstream Democrats were like this is Democratic climate policy, sounds great. It was really beneficial that we did a lot of federal outreach.
Tim Karcich: I’ve been critical of AOC and Jamaal Bowman at times, particularly regarding the Israel stuff. But I have to say the moment I first knew that BPRA was going to pass was when their letter to Governor Hochul made the New York Times. When the first draft of the state budget came out in February, the coalition was excited that what we called “BPRA-lite”was in it. It had no labor protections at all. It was a trash bill, but you could see a version of BPRA in there. Over the next couple months, the Senate passed the stronger version of BPRA again. I think the federal electeds did push it over a hill, and that put the heat on Hochul. They should get some credit for that, and it was a big deal for us.
Scott Karolidis: We work really closely with the Socialists in Office (SiO) committee here in New York. We have a committee with them, we spend a lot of time organizing them, we work really closely with them. We worked with them to organize federal officials. I don’t think people like Reps. Grace Meng, or especially Sean Ryan, who DSA State Assembly Member Sarahana Shrestha has a relationship with at this point, are used to getting asked to do things by organizations like ours. Usually the thing people ask allied electeds to do is co-sponsor or vote for a bill. But we were reaching out to Jamal Bowman and AOC and telling them, we need you to sign this letter, we need you to organize your colleagues, we need you to call the governor. I think in a way AOC and Bowman were happy to have this kind of direction from us. They didn’t do everything we asked, but we were very persistent. We gave them lots of different asks and we organized them. They were people to organize just like everyone else that we had to organize, and they in turn organized their colleagues. That was really effective, and it’s a big lesson.
In terms of lessons regarding lobbying or insider strategy, you can’t just get your electeds to co-sponsor a bill and that’s it. You must organize them to organize internally. Your electeds have power, and you need to act through them to use it. So it’s not just me asking Zohran Mamdani to tell Carl Heastie something’s a priority. It’s me giving Zohran a list of 10 other assembly members and asking him to talk to those people and ask them to sign on to the bill. We did that with lots of electeds, some that weren’t even Socialists in Office, like Anna Kelles or Michaelle Solages, who really came through in a phenomenal way.
Tim Karcich: For most of my political life I’ve identified as anarchist, and I still mostly identify that way, but as an organizer you have to think about what’s possible now. This campaign was hard, but it was winnable, and you have to do what you can to pass the bill. I wish we could just go straight to NYUDA or the New York Health Act or whatever, but we don’t have a majority for this yet and sometimes change is slow. I’m grateful that the just transition aspect of BPRA seems like a legacy bill to me, it’s a big thing. I just finished the book The Future is Degrowth and I’m a degrowther myself. “Just transition” is all over the literature, but what does it look like? Well, we finally have an example we can point to, and I’m extremely proud to have been a part of it. And it was won through electoral, you know, who knew?
I also want to mention that campaigns like this are something everyone can be involved in, you just have to play to your strengths. My thing was soft skills like talking to this labor guy who wasn’t super into the bill. It involved a lot of patient listening and waiting for your moment, and the moment eventually came because of the behind the scenes stuff that I wasn’t involved in. But, you know, no one else had success talking to him, and I contributed how I saw that I could. It’s gonna be a fun story to tell. I’m just very heartened by the just transition stuff and having won a bill that was winnable, and we did it electorally – for me that was kind of cool.
Socialist Forum: What advice would you give to DSA members or anyone else who might be interested in doing something similar in their states?
Scott Karolidis: I have two main pieces of advice. The first is to be strategic about everything. What I mean by that is don’t try to do just the most realistic or easiest or most practical campaign. You should be ambitious. You should try and push something that’s aggressive, that actually changes conditions. But don’t do the thing that’s absolutely impossible and you’ll never win. Be strategic. Choose something, whatever it is, that is realistic for you to win based on your existing capacity or the capacity you expect to have in the next few years. Everything you do should be building your organization up to eventually win some other goal. The way we talked about BPRA and doing the electoral stuff in service of that, and then even doing BPRA in service of NYUDA – having this larger strategic vision of what is the goal for our energy system in New York helped us figure out what are the constituent pieces of that goal. So that’s number one, be strategic.
Number two is to be hopeful. I think there’s a lot of doomerism in the climate world, a lot of doomerism on the left, and there’s a lot of good reason for it. But truly, if you don’t feel hopeful, if you don’t think you can win, then you’re going to lose. If you don’t feel inspired to do something with your comrades, if you’re not operating in a collective group and feeling good about it, then you are going to lose. You need to be hopeful. You need to believe in what you’re doing and you need to believe that you will win.
Tim Karcich: I very much echo those points. You also need somebody who’s a consistent face with the people who are your targets, an IBEW was a major target for us. I would consistently text Paddy, we had that meeting. I was consistently talking to him about this stuff and whether he took me seriously or not, I don’t exactly care about. But I was a face he could point to and tell his people that I was the guy representing this organization and coalition, and we have to start listening to them. To Scott’s point, don’t be afraid. Go out there and shake hands with the person you need to shake hands with and have the conversation. Listen and listen and listen and be painstakingly patient. It took a while for labor to come around. They had to see that the Senate passed it. They had to see that we had momentum throughout the summer and into the next legislative session.
We’re mostly happy with the bill and I’m happy with the relationship that I have with Paddy, because that’s going to play a part in the LIPA fight as well. Find someone who has good soft skills and who can be consistent, and just talk to people and be as friendly as you can. We’re on labor’s side here, you just have to prove that you’re on their side. I think we’re proving it and, I know for a fact that Paddy’s going to go to other union leaders and be like look at this bill, this just transition language is something we’ve been looking at and before the employers were telling us to get out of their face with that.
Aim high, and be outgoing and be consistent with relationship building.
Teamsters Prepare For Huge National Strike if UPS Doesn’t Deliver the Goods
By Jonathan Martin
On August 4, 1997, 185,000 members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) led by president Ron Carey began a fifteen-day strike that would cost the United Parcel Service (UPS) over $600 million. They won 10,000 full-time positions with higher salaries and benefits, and preserved Teamster’ pensions from UPS takeover.
John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO at the time, said of the strike, “You could make a million house calls, run a thousand television commercials, stage a hundred strawberry rallies, and still not come close to doing what the UPS strike did for organizing.”
On August 1, 2023, UPS Teamsters, now numbering 340,000, are ready to strike again if the company refuses to meet their demands. In an economy increasingly reliant on drivers to deliver online orders, and a logistics sector awash in COVID profits, the leverage of such a large strike is unmistakable. This would be nearly twice as large as the powerful 1997 strike; in fact, it would be the largest strike in the United States since the 1959 strike of around 500,000 steel workers.
Burned by concessions, Teamsters elect new leaders
Yet just five years ago, militant action by the Teamsters was off the table. In 2018, when a weak UPS contract was brought to the membership by James P. Hoffa’s bargaining team, they rejected it. Invoking an obscure provision in the IBT charter, Hoffa Jr. forced the contract through, angering many Teamsters.
Especially contentious was the creation of a “two-tier” system for drivers. New full-time positions that split time between driving and warehouse work would earn less pay overall, and have no protections from overtime abuse. Teamsters say that in practice these workers largely act as delivery drivers, earning less pay for the same work as others. (This video offers an in-depth explanation.)
For many Teamsters, the overriding of their vote rejecting the contract was the final straw. Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) had been organizing for decades to reform the union and elect a more militant and democratic leadership, and in November 2021 they saw success. Teamsters United, a coalition made up of Hoffa critics and TDU members, successfully elected fourth-generation Teamster Sean O’Brien as president, and TDU leader Fred Zuckerman as its secretary-treasurer.
O’Brien has promised militancy and a win for the Teamsters, no matter what it takes.
Teamsters pose an array of demands
This year, the “two-tier” system implemented in 2018 is a key bargaining issue. Removing the so-called “22.4” category for drivers would see thousands of full-time workers get an immediate bump in pay, bringing them in line with the other full-time drivers doing the same job.
The Teamsters also seek to raise the pay of part-timers, who often earn little more than minimum wage. In 1997, part-time work was a key issue that resonated with the public, and became a rallying cry for the striking workers. In an economy driven by gig and part-time work, this demand could once again be key to winning the support of the public and could galvanize demands by workers in other sectors.
Another key issue is forced overtime, where workers are required to work a sixth day of the week (called the “six-day punch”). The Teamsters also want to address the driving conditions of workers. Many UPS trucks lack air conditioning units, hospitalizing workers during heat waves.
These are some of the top national demands. However, the national contract only entered bargaining 3 weeks ago, as regional “supplements” to that contract are still being negotiated. (Currently, Oakland’s Local 70 and Zuckerman’s former Louisville local, the massive Local 89, are in the two regions that have not yet settled supplements.)
UPS has already begun to cry poor, making negative predictions about revenue in an attempt to undermine the Teamsters position. In reality, however, profits at UPS continue to grow.
According to data from TDU, UPS ships around 20 million packages each day, and made $13.8 billion in profit in 2022. It dwarfs its competitors, controlling nearly two-fifths (37%) of all revenue from package delivery services in the US. The company plans to reward its investors with $8.3 billion in dividends and buybacks 2023.
A crucial link in the supply chain, UPS moves 6% of the United States’ GDP each year. A strike could cost UPS $185 million a day.
Solidarity Delivers the Goods
In the past year, East Bay DSA and the broader community have stood in solidarity with thousands of workers on strike. This includes public education workers in Oakland, and last year’s strike of 48,000 academic workers at the University of California.
UPS Teamsters supported both those strikes, turning out to the picket line at Global Family Elementary in solidarity with OEA. Many honored loading dock pickets at UC, helping build the power of UAW’s strike.
The Teamsters’ contract fight is already mobilizing UPS workers in every state in the country, but if they are forced to strike, it could galvanize workers across the U.S. in the way that the West Virginia teachers’ strike did for education workers nationally in 2018. The current struggle represents a huge opportunity for national organizing both in the broader labor movement, and for community supporters here in the East Bay.
We can stand in solidarity by contributing to organizing funds, educating other workers about the working conditions and demands of UPS Teamsters, and preparing for a possible strike on August 1. These networks not only strengthen the power of contract fights and strikes across union lines, but represent important linkages as unions like the Teamsters seek to unionize Amazon.
DSA members and their communities are getting strike ready with UPS, and helping strengthen the wave of labor militancy sweeping across the country. Many have already pledged to support a strike. From Trader Joes and Starbucks, to the Teachers’ Unions, to UPS, our solidarity is critical in the working class’s fight against the bosses and billionaire class.
Add your name to DSA’s pledge to support a strike.
Jonathan Martin is a member of East Bay DSA.
No Justice For Faisal – Cambridge City Council Rejects Move For Police Accountability
In January, Cambridge police killed Arif Sayed Faisal, a 20-year-old UMass student experiencing a mental health crisis. Despite multiple protests and community outrage in the 5 months since the shooting, neither Cambridge Police (CPD) nor the established Police Review and Advisory Board (PRAB) have taken any concrete action to address the situation.
On February 14th, CPD determined that “based on all of the information that has been reviewed so far, the department has not identified any egregious misconduct or significant policy, training, equipment, or disciplinary violations.” Perhaps this is true – but this pronouncement comes from the very party whose actions are under scrutiny. Why should we accept it at face value?
Decades ago, the PRAB ceded its power back to CPD – the very organization PRAB is supposed to monitor! The PRAB, instead of investigating allegations of police misconduct themselves, decided to let the “Cambridge Police Department conduct investigations on behalf of the board.” This is ridiculous on its face. It should go without saying that Justice without impartiality is not justice. But if the history of US police violence over the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that the police cannot be trusted to police themselves.
Per current ordinanc language, the PRAB is hand-picked by our City Manager – who is themself not elected. It is past time for an elected PRAB – not one that is 3 steps removed from the voters and that has given up on its job. If we want any transparency or accountability from CPD, we must have a review board that is (1) independent from CPD and (2) accountable to our community, not an unelected bureaucrat.
On May 22nd, City Councillor Zondervan proposed a policy order that would do just that – by putting the question of electing the PRAB on the November ballot.
This would be an opportunity for our community – a community that has shown its disappointment in the lack of police accountability and transparency in our city – to have input on police disciplinary procedures.
The process around this policy order – Order #96 – was an embarrassment to democracy. After Zondervan introduced the order, typically it would have been discussed, debated, delayed (if councillors wanted more time for consideration), and ultimately, voted on. Instead, Councillor Toner did something virtually unprecedented: he motioned immediately to end debate and move straight to a vote.
His motion passed with a 6-3 vote, with Councillors Zondervan and Nolan, as well as Mayor Siddiqui, dissenting. (It’s worth pointing out that besides Zondervan, the other two dissenting voices presumably voted no because they wanted to speak on the order.)
Councillor Toner’s platform lists “promoting civil and inclusive dialogue” as his number one campaign priority. It was anything but civil and inclusive for Councillor Toner to end debate before his colleagues had had a chance to speak. His motion was disrespectful and anti-democratic, and it flew in the face of his own stated highest principles. Disgraceful.
The other five councillors who supported the motion to end debate are also to blame. It’s one thing to disagree with the proposal, but it’s another altogether to stifle debate on it. What were they afraid of?
Once that motion passed, Order #96 was voted on and failed 1-8, with Zondervan as the lone “aye” vote. Many councillors expressed that their “no” votes were based not on the content of the order itself but the spontaneity of its introduction and the lack of prior discussion on it. But these are the same councillors who voted to close discussion!
If these councillors had wanted more time to consider the order before open debate, there is a separate option for that: City Councillors have the right to delay a vote on a proposed order until the next council meeting. This is a commonly used tool among councillors to ensure they can make informed decisions before taking votes. That six of our nine councillors chose to close discussion outright rather than exercise this option has no justification. All six of these councillors say they want to do everything they can in the aftermath of what happened to Faisal, but when given the chance to discuss legislation that’s popular with their constituents and could have actually made a difference, they abruptly abandoned those commitments.
When they did so, they also abandoned their commitment to listen to their constituents. In fact, the idea of a democratically elected PRAB was conceived not by Zondervan but by a group of constituents who asked him to propose the order.
This episode was a gross miscarriage of democracy and showed a disturbing disconnect between the City Council and their constituents – the working-class Cambridge community. The order’s failure shows that the council is not listening to the growing movement of people demanding justice for Faisal and accountability from the police, which is itself beyond disheartening, and the manner in which the bill failed is equally, if not more, infuriating.
The Council’s redundant policy rules forbid any councillor from reintroducing this legislation this cycle, meaning no one will be able to propose this order until 2024. Cambridge won’t have the option to vote on whether we want an elected PRAB in 2023. With this shameful, anti-democratic vote, the Council has determined that the voters can’t be trusted to decide what police accountability looks like – despite the complete inaction and lack of transparency surrounding Faisal’s murder.
I hope the voters will keep this in mind as we elect our council this November – and that we replace these vanguards of the status quo with a city council that will uphold democracy and fight for police accountability. As proud socialists, we know that civilian monitoring and investigatory oversight of the police is not the end of the road. We know that the only thing that will stop police brutality is defunding and abolishing the police. But we have to start somewhere. We can start by watching and recommending discipline.
Atlanta DSA condemns charges against Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers and calls for Democratic Referendum on Cop City
Yesterday, three organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund were arrested by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation on charges of “money laundering” and “charity fraud” in an apparent effort to develop a RICO-like case against the Stop Cop City protest movement. These charges against civil rights organizers represent yet another scare tactic and unwarranted escalation by the same elite forces conspiring to build Cop City. We call for the immediate release of the arrested organizers with all charges dropped.
The Atlanta Solidarity Fund has for years provided bail and legal support for peaceful protestors — it is not a criminal organization. We stand in solidarity with the defendants against the corrupt politicians, police foundation, billionaires, and corporations pushing to undemocratically destroy public forests and build Cop City. It’s notable that the same Georgia prosecutors who routinely ignore blatant corruption at City Hall and the State Capitol are instead taking aim at working-class Atlantans fighting to preserve public land through peaceful protest. These arrests are acts of political repression by a right-wing, minoritarian regime which rules society to serve a handful of wealthy elites.
Since 2021, thousands of Atlanta residents have peacefully campaigned to oppose Cop City by legal and democratic means. All violent conflict over Cop City has been instigated by Mayor Andre Dickens, Brian Kemp’s State police, and the major corporations behind the Atlanta Police Foundation. Mayor Dickens and the Atlanta City Council have repeatedly and brazenly ignored the concerns of local residents and voters in authorizing the destruction of public Atlanta forest land and the violent eviction raid on peaceful protestors — all culminating in GBI’s violent murder of an environmental protester.
No amount of police repression can silence the voices of working-class Atlantans who are united in our resolve to stop Cop City. The crisis over this development has been ongoing for two years, and the popular resistance against Cop City will continue until Atlanta residents are able to decide on this issue in a free and fair election. We call on the Atlanta City Council to vote NO and reject the allocation of construction funds for Cop City. Instead, the council should order a democratic referendum to let the people of Atlanta decide whether the construction should proceed in the upcoming general election already scheduled for November 7, 2023.
Statement from the Atlanta DSA Steering Committee
Capitalocene Q&A (with Joerg Rieger)
Theology in the Capitalocene | Joerg Rieger, Jason Moore, Filipe Maia
Denver DSA HJC Land Use Bill Statement
A major housing bill is making its way through the Colorado legislature, SB23-213 – referred to as ‘land use’ – has driven much of the recent discussion over state housing policy. The bill, among other things, would enable greater housing density in municipalities around Colorado by compelling municipalities to change their land use regulations. In many cities, including Denver, it would effectively end single-family zoning and allow multiple units (currently up to 4) to be built on lots previously zoned for only one unit.
This legislation has much to like. Exclusionary and restrictive land use policy has made our housing and environmental crises worse, and it is important to use state power to break down this land use status quo. The rules to change occupancy limits are welcome, as are water audits, reforms to HOAs, and reduced parking requirements. We also recognize the importance of encouraging development patterns that are environmentally sustainable, promote housing density, and push cities away from suburban sprawl. We know that the status quo of single family zoning primarily serves to protect the interests of wealth and property values, not the interests of tenants. We do need more housing, and ultimately, housing for all. While this bill can inch us closer to housing for all, it is only one piece of a much larger puzzle.
Denver DSA’s support for SB23-213 is conditional. We demand that this land use bill passes together with two other critical housing bills: local control of rents (HB23-1115), which would enable municipalities in Colorado to enact rent control (aka local control of rents), and just cause eviction protections (HB23-1171). These bills are absolutely essential to defending tenants at a time of ever-increasing housing instability and exploitation from landlords.
Through this legislative session, we have seen attention and support diverted away from these bills and towards land use, leading to a situation in which land use is upheld as a magic bullet for the state’s housing crisis. We reject this framing and demand that land use is passed together with local control of rents and just cause eviction protections. Otherwise, lawmakers are abandoning the immediate needs of tenants and instead opting for a legislative track that avoids direct confrontation with capital – namely the developer and landlord interests that wield substantial power over Colorado’s politics and that are invested in policy “solutions” to our housing crisis that prioritize their profits, not the needs of tenants. This imbalance of legislative attention, typical in prior sessions, is unsustainable in a context where renters are more cost burdened than ever while owners reap record profits.
This legislation could very well be beneficial to our state in the long run. However, we have to temper our expectations for what it can achieve. We can’t rely on market-rate housing to solve our housing crisis. Moreover, the slogan of this bill, “More Housing Now” is misleading, as it will take many years, if not decades, for a significant amount of new housing to be built as a result of these policy changes to land use law. Without other major efforts to transform our housing system, including social housing, rent control, community land trusts, robust tenant protections, metro district reform, and tenant organizing — many tenants will continue to find themselves living in unstable, exploitative housing arrangements, and housing will continue to be financially out of reach for working people in our state. We are ultimately fighting for a transformation of our housing system to one in which enough housing is under democratic and community control to make housing a basic human right. It is imperative that we struggle for this transformation and build tenant power in all of our organizing and policy efforts. The land use bill does not, in any meaningful way, alleviate the necessity and urgency of this struggle.
Land Use Reform is a good step, but its benefits are contingent on choices beyond the bill itself. 213 will not meaningfully address our housing crisis on its own, and must be implemented in conjunction with legislation that enables cities to pass rent control and just cause eviction protections, and must be amended to protect against displacement. Otherwise, we are continuing to neglect tenants and are missing an opportunity to bring about the fundamental changes that we so urgently need in our housing system.
Decolonizing Pedagogy with Haitian Spirituality | Dr. Wideline Seraphin
East High School Shooting Statement
Denver DSA is appalled by the shooting of two East High School staff members, the latest incident in a string of gun violence that has occurred in our city and our schools. We grieve together with our community and we stand in solidarity with the students and staff who continue to suffer trauma in a place where they deserve to feel safe. We empathize with the parents who must see their children go to school every day, not sure if they’ll come back alive. And we send our love and hopes for a quick recovery to the East staff members hospitalized in the shooting. This is unacceptable.
Our community is in pain. Parents and students are afraid, and they have reason to be. People are demanding that those in power do anything to prevent continued gun violence in our schools. It’s not surprising to hear members of our East High School community calling for the only resource that has ever truly been offered to them in moments of trauma – more police. And we’re watching real time how quickly and enthusiastically DPS and the City of Denver is offering up that resource, while similar calls for improved mental health care, violence interruption programs and community and family supports – root cause interventions that are proven to be effective in preventing violence and strengthening our communities – go unheeded and unheard.
Denver DSA joins the resounding calls of the community leaders, student activists and elected officials who wholeheartedly reject the reactionary decision by Superintendent Alex Marrero and the DPS board of education to place armed Denver Police officers in all comprehensive high schools. We stand with the DPS students, teachers and parents who have tirelessly fought for – and previously won – the right to attend school free from armed police. Especially during times of intense fear and tragedy, it is incumbent upon us to call out the dangerous and carceral reality of the police, and reject the idea that guns of any kind – including those carried by police – belong ANYWHERE in our schools.
Putting cops back in schools will do nothing to protect DPS students and staff. Exhaustive research — as well as our collective lived experience with the tragedies at Uvalde, Parkland and countless other schools — has shown that armed police officers do almost nothing to prevent or interrupt school violence. Rather, they perpetuate it, particularly on Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, queer, and trans young people, as well as students who experience poverty, abuse, and neglect. Police presence in schools increases rates of violence, arrest, suspension, expulsion and the harassment of students of color, and drastically lowering educational and mental health outcomes. And it makes students feel less safe, funneling thousands into the racist school-to-prison pipeline that locks countless students into brutal systems of incarceration.
Cops, metal detectors, lockdown drills, and schools that look like prisons are not the way forward. DPS and the Colorado Department of Education should be stocking schools with an army of counselors, psychologists and de-escalation experts to address the root causes of violence: poverty, poor mental health, and the systematic abandonment of youth in our underfunded public school system. The City of Denver should be offering robust violence intervention programs and more resources for parents and families. And the Democratic supermajority in the Colorado legislature should be acting to support all community members and enact statewide policies to make this violence impossible. We must work to prevent violence in the first place – not invest in failed “solutions” that will harm students and staff.
No guns in schools, no violence in schools and no cops in schools.
In solidarity,
Denver DSA
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.