From Lenin to Los Angeles : The Roots of Green Social Housing
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The revolutionary of our age speaks in the polished cadence of the managerial class and has mastered the art of laundering the vocabulary of conquest into the vocabulary of compassion.
"Confiscation" now reaches the public as "housing justice." "Expropriation" puts on the friendly costume of "community control."
The seizure of a man's home is offered to a free people under the clinical phrase "decommodifying housing." Every syllable is engineered to slip past the moral reflexes of a nation that would recoil from the thing itself.
The disguise holds no longer. The movement has begun to publish the old word under its own name, plainly and without blush. The euphemism was a phase. The appetite was permanent.
The real question can now be put directly: what becomes of these utopian ideals once they are dragged from the seminar room and enforced by the armed power of the state?
History has already run the experiment and recorded the cost.
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Democratic Socialist legislators in New York press the Social Housing Development Authority, a five-billion-dollar state mega-developer empowered to build, buy, and hold residential property forever. Its advocates promise housing that is "permanently affordable" and "protected from market forces."
The design is acquisition. The authority buys housing with public money, retires it from the market, and holds it in perpetuity. Its champions in the New York City DSA have made the bill the centerpiece of their "House the Future" campaign, part of a "Green Social Housing" strategy carried into the 2026 legislative races.
The program takes its housing by checkbook, and what it takes, it keeps. The tenant gains a landlord he can never escape. The bureaucracy gains a tenant it can never lose.
The Los Angeles DSA writes the ambition into its housing platform: the "decommodification" of housing, the removal of homes from any system that allocates them "on the basis of residents' ability to pay or to generate rent."
The program demands that Los Angeles "expropriate privately owned housing" and explore "the creative use of eminent domain" to draw private homes into public hands.
The slogans promise power to the people. The mechanism delivers the people into the hands of the state.
The socialist keeps an answer ready for this. Your home, he will explain, is merely personal property, and the revolution covets only private property, the kind that yields profit. The distinction belongs to Marx alone. American law disagrees with them.
Your home is private property under the Constitution, deeded, taxed, and shielded by the Fifth Amendment against taking without just compensation, and every courthouse in the land treats it so.
The Marxist category draws the line between use and profit. Rent a spare room and your cottage becomes capital. Inherit a duplex and you join the landlord class.
The line moves at the pleasure of the party that draws it.
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When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they reached for Marx's old formula, "the expropriation of the expropriators," and aimed it at the apartment houses of Petrograd and Moscow.
On the twentieth of August, 1918, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee abolished private ownership of urban land outright, along with every city building of consequence.
Lenin claimed that a wealthy apartment was any dwelling where the number of rooms equaled or exceeded the number of residents. The remedy was uplotnenie, or compaction. When a revolutionary committee judged an apartment underused, the state marched strangers across the threshold and packed unrelated families into one home until "equity" was satisfied.
This is how the kommunalka was born, the communal apartment that became the quiet prison of the Soviet citizen. The state owned the walls, the floors, and the air between them, and so trust dissolved.
Neighbors turned informant. Families hung iron padlocks on their kitchen cupboards to guard a single loaf from the household sleeping on the far side of the stove. They wired separate switches for one shared bulb and kept anxious ledgers over a common toilet.
The regime promised community. It delivered a paranoid misery in which human dignity was ground to powder beneath the heel of collective ownership.
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When the state "decommodifies" a home by force, it enacts tyranny and baptizes it as justice. It strips the citizen of the moral agency God gave him and supplants the sanctifying labor of voluntary charity with the cold machinery of seizure.
In that act the state climbs onto a throne that belongs to God alone, declaring itself the final provider and the supreme landlord.
True housing justice will forever lie beyond the graveyard of twentieth-century tyranny. A flourishing civilization rests upon free men and women, rooted in their communities, governing their own property as faithful stewards, bound to one another by love freely given.
A home is a hearth, an altar, and an inheritance. The collectivist sees a filing cabinet for human capital, a unit to be assigned and reassigned at the pleasure of a committee.
The socialist housing dream is a blueprint for theft, a rebellion against the natural law, and an assault on the family. We must refuse it with every ounce of our strength.
Deus Vult.
- Marcus Sterling
