The Housing Crisis
January 8, 2026
Amid the growing cost of living crisis, Marxist firebrand Zohran Mamdani has been elected to the position of Mayor of New York. Mamdani’s popularity, which is based largely on unease about prices, most notably rents, augurs a possible American turn towards radical collectivism.
Mamdani’s brand of leftist politics is not socialism as practised, for example, in Sweden, which never nationalised its main industries, embraced home ownership and whose welfare state was financed by a dynamic export-oriented economy. The founder of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the late Michael Harrington, would barely recognise his offspring. He warned against Leninist control of the “commanding heights” of the economy, detested communism and its Third World offshoots, and supported Israel’s right to exist. The current DSA and its supporters, as writer Pamela Paul points out, believe that “capitalism isn’t something to be regulated or balanced, but is itself the problem.”
