War for Living Space: Affordable for Who? An Analysis of ‘Affordable” Housing in NYC

Mass-led Affordable for you Campaign paving the way forward.

By Yasmine Tiana Salama

Note: This essay and its title were inspired by Frank Morales’s zine The War for Living Space: Spatial Deconcentration History in the Making (New York, NY, 1997), held in the MoRUS Zine Library, MoRUS.Zine.2021.Hi.005. The framework of spatial deconcentration discussed here draws on Morales’s work. I found a copy at the Museum of Reclaimed Space in the Lower East Side, and the rest is history.

Lebensraum, — Living Space was a term used by the Nazi Germans to justify their plans to systematically mass murder and forcibly displace 31 million people in Eastern Europe. 

There’s a war for living space going on all over the world. In Palestine, Zionist settlers build over the homes of the rubble… of Palestinian men, women and children. In Brooklyn, the homes owned by Black families since the Great Migration are stolen from under them, homes  cut into apartments,  homes split into 3 or 4 units with rent that no one who is currently living in the neighborhood can afford.

What happens when the physical traits, the function and utility of a home become secondary or less important to its ability to generate profit? Where your material need of shelter is negated. Violence. A society where home is not a right, and a culture that accepts a perpetual housing crisis.

New York City along with many other cities across the United States is in a “perpetual housing crisis.” Year after year politicians like Mamdani come to the fore and talk about the creation of “affordable housing.” But “affordable for who?” As they aren’t fooling anyone— it has long been known by those who need affordable housing that the metric which determines affordability in our city is skewed in favor of those who make more. This leaves the working class majority vulnerable to the market.  A market that is volatile, full of contradictions, and takes no prisoners. Hence, the over 350,000 New Yorkers without permanent shelter while units lie empty in these “affordable housing” complexes (Coalition for the Homeless 2026).  

We need a system that challenges and changes this metric.  This is why we created the Affordable for You Campaign. Not as a top down approach, where politicians tell you what you can and can not have. But a campaign that demands what we, the majority, need.

"Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it."  (Mao Zedong)

The Affordable for you (A4U)  campaign was birthed by a series of social investigations, where countless New Yorkers replied “affordable for who?” , when asked about a new “affordable” building that popped up in their neighborhood. As those who study scientific socialism we investigate to solve problems. 

 The A4U campaign takes the scattered and often isolated ideas, demands, experiences, and knowledge of working class New Yorkers and concentrates them into a systematized process. Rather than allowing the question of affordability to remain an abstract one, determined from above, we are building a process through which people can collectively investigate what they need, identify what is affordable for them, and turn those findings into concrete demands. In this way, we move from “affordable for who?” to “affordable for you” from a question posed to those in power to a concrete standard determined by the people who must live with the consequences. Self determination.

The "Affordable for You” campaign is a mass led campaign fighting for our self determination and dignity. Housing is a material need —four walls and a roof to protect us from the elements; essential for our physical survival —but it is also an ontological one; it is the ground upon which we build our lives, raise our children, and root ourselves in community– but for the dispossessed that community and material need has always been under attack. This essay will attempt to explain the historical and material forces behind this structural attack and systematized violence, why the “Affordable for You” campaign was created as a solution, and by the end of it paint a picture for how we plan to take the question of affordable for who and turn it into a concrete system to ensure it is affordable for you.

Times have Changed 

For the first time in decades more people are moving into New York City than out. Far from the days of white flight, and romanticized suburbia, newer generations are opting for city living. This has resulted in what seems to be a “housing crisis” with mounting contradictions and no material solution in site. 

The solution touted by politicians on all sides of the spectrum is that we need to build more housing. Even the so-called social democrats who claim to stand with working class people refuse to acknowledge that a solely supply sided solution will not solve the “housing crisis.” That is because this acknowledgement would force them to admit that this very crisis has been engineered by the powers that be to displace. Let’s talk about it.

The Plan to Deconcentrate the HOOD.

There has been a concentrated and highly funded effort (to the tune of billions) by the ruling class to deconcentrate urban communities since the 1970s.  Outlined precisely by Yolanda Ward, a 22 year old housing advocate from Washington DC who was mysteriously murdered after the publication of her essay Spatial Deconcentration. The essay outlines the “hidden agenda behind the phenomenon of displacement.” Ward connects the momentum of “riots” by Black communities in urban cities across the country in the 1960s to governmental plans to make sure that this could never happen again. These rebellions did not happen in a vacuum, in fact they were in response to the mounting contradictions of race and capitalism in the belly of the beast… In her seminal essay, Ward correlates the displacement of more than 50,000 poor inner city residents from D.C. and their subsequent replacement with an affluent class to documents from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). These plans were and are directly connected to the Kerner Commission’s recommendation “that low income housing projects and the Blacks that lived in them, should be relocated from inner city neighborhoods to sites outside the central city.”  The purpose of this being to stifle the potential and eventuality of the success of rebellions in response to the harshly imposed economic conditions that made up Black urban life. It is important to note that the Kerner Commission’s recommendation cannot be separated from U.S. intelligence agencies including but not limited to: the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, and the FBI as The Kerner Commission’s real name is the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders. This committee was formed in 1968,  (the year, MLK Jr was assassinated, and the year the Civil Rights Act was passed) and was “composed of police and army specialists, FBI and CIA agents, and civilian consultants who worked at "thinktank" institutions like the Brookings Institute, the Rand Corporation, and the Urban Institute.” The commission's recommendation systematized the displacement we are seeing today, resulting in the creation of programs like Section 8, a government program which subsidizes privatized housing, but abdicates your choice to pick the location in which you reside. This program alone has pushed many low-income Black families into the outskirts of the city or into the Suburbs. The push to privatization with government subsidies has coincided with the gutting and privatization of public housing (Section 9) in major cities today. Take for example the backwards “Plan for Transformation” implemented by the Chicago Housing Authority  (CHA) which demolished all of its public housing between the years 2000 to 2011. This move displaced thousands of low-income families and resulted in a permanent loss of tens of thousands of traditional public housing units that were replaced with mixed income developments. 

Now, it seems the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)  is attempting to follow suit. The current struggle to save Fulton Elliot Houses from privatization and its inhabitants from dispossession is not an isolated one but a protracted war on the urban poor. 

Over 50 years later from when Ward initially wrote about “spatial deconcentration” it seems that the plan continues to take effect.  NYC alone has lost over 200,000 Black residents in the past decade. However, even calling it a loss or a “reverse migration” like Mayor Mamdani recently said in a video, only serves to obscure the true forces behind this displacement.  As outlined in the paragraphs prior, what we are seeing is NO natural phenomenon but the result of the systematization of the removal of the Black urban poor. 

The mass led Affordable for You Campaign seeks to make clear what they obscure. 

Mamdani and politicians like him can’t fix this. 

Can there be “affordability” under capitalism?

The masses have identified a problem, one, that the first part of this essay proved was engineered. In NYC, like many other major urban cities ( Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington D.C), it seems like everyday a new “luxury”  mixed- used and somehow simultaneously “affordable” building is being built.  Especially in the communities that have historically been underdeveloped. Targeting neighborhoods that have, since the Great Migration, been made up of working class African American, and (more recently but still historically)  Black and Latino immigrant communities. 

To track this violence, we must first understand how these neighborhoods became underdeveloped and why developers now want to build in places that were once considered undesirable. Despite policy decisions made during the years of segregation and de facto segregation that stripped vital resources from Black working-class communities in the name of in the name of neo-liberal “benign neglect”, these communities found ways to survive, creating in ways that would shift popular culture— producing the Jay-Zs of the world. Yet rather than using the cultural capital created through struggle to improve conditions for the people who still live in underdevelopment, the Black misleadership class has sold us to the highest bidder. This has made it easy for developers and corporations to aestheticize poverty, turning working-class areas into spectacle, with a Biggie mural on every corner. This is part one of how you begin to “gentrify” a neighborhood.

After creating a spectacle of the neighborhood, a more mobile middle- and upper-class population—often college-educated—moves in, seeking an “authentic” urban lifestyle. These newcomers inflate the market, driving up costs across the neighborhood and intensifying the already existing contradiction between landlord and tenant. Landlords across the city (including the federal government), looking to increase and retain profit, increasingly neglect “their properties”—allowing buildings to develop mold, refusing to fix hot water—in hopes that long-term tenants will leave their often rent-stabilized, or heavily subsidized apartments. That way, landlords can chop this living space up and rent it to the highest bidder. 

Karl Marx would argue that this is precisely what occurs when a material necessity—such as housing—is reduced primarily to its exchange value (its monetary price in market transactions) rather than its use-value (its tangible, physical utility). Housing constitutes a universal need, one that is fundamental to human existence and essential for survival. This means if we truly value the survival of our species, any social system we choose to reproduce must prioritize fulfilling this fundamental need. 

And right now our current social and economic system, capitalism, is failing humanity. 

We can build, but to build without conscience is a grave mistake… When thinking about which way forward and the way humans should be in relation to each other and the things we need to survive, we need to be looking towards socialism. Moving from building for private profit to building and having ownership in a way that supports the working class majority, not just private business owners.  

Evicted for less than $4600

To live as a working class person under late-stage capitalism means to have a contentious and erratic living situation, one where one missed paycheck can mean that you’re out on the street. This instability and already existing contradiction is only intensified when the landlord-tenant relationship shifts from individual to private corporation. Corporations that possess the money and time to pursue evictions aggressively. For example, Housing court is disproportionately filled with tenants from these "affordable" housing units. Data from the New York Housing Conference reveals that owners of government-subsidized properties filed more than one-third of the city's roughly 120,000 eviction lawsuits in 2024, with a median back-rent balance of less than $4,600 (Brand,2026) . This number is lower than the average owed by market-rate renters—showing that subsidized tenants in “affordable” housing  are not more secure; rather, they are being subjected to legal action over comparatively small sums, undermining the very purpose of affordability programs.

Don’t fall for the lie

Meaning, if you are even eligible for this “affordable housing” who is to say you won’t be evicted easier than if you were in a market rate apartment. The data above is actually saying it’s more likely. We haven’t even scratched the surface of the Affordability metric, which is the primary failure of the flawed system that is “affordable housing.” Let’s get into it. 

Affordable for who?

The definition of "affordability" in our city is determined by The Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) policy, which was passed by the city council in 2016, which dictates that a development is considered affordable if 25% to 30% of its units are priced at 60% to 80% of the Area Median Income (AMI). 

On paper, this may sound reasonable, in reality, it’s a scam. The AMI for New York City is calculated at around $145,800, a figure that includes the affluent suburbs of Westchester and Rockland counties alongside the five boroughs. This is the artificial inflation of the median with, to be clear, white suburban wealth— by using this metric, HUD (remember them from the Spatial Deconcentration plan) ensures that "affordable" rents remain out of reach for Black working-class families. At 80% of AMI, a household must earn around  $116,640 to qualify. At 60%, they still need $87,480.

Let us compare these numbers to the actual economic reality of our Black and Brown neighborhoods. The median household income in Brownsville is $43,460. In Harlem, it is $59,176. In East New York, it rests at $51,220.  In the South Bronx it’s $48,610. Even relatively higher-income areas like Bedstuy which is $78,040 (keeping in mind that this number has changed drastically in the past ten years because of rapid gentrification)  and Jamaica, Queens ($78,090) still fall very short of the $87,480 required for the lowest tier of "affordable housing.” So again, the masses ask  “affordable for who?”

The conclusion is clear: the majority of residents in these neighborhoods cannot afford a single "affordable" unit in their own communities. To add in salt to injury, the MIH policy only mandates that 25% to 30% of a new building’s floor area be set aside for these already unattainable rates; the remaining 70% to 75% is handed over to developers to charge market-rate. This is a huge part of the plan to displace our communities. It is a driving factor into why 200,000 Black people have been pushed out of New York City over the last two decades, and why 140,000 New Yorkers slept in shelters this past October alone. 

So why is it that the development of “affordable housing” keeps being pushed in everyone’s faces even though by its own metric it’s not for the average working class New Yorker? Take for example, the Atlantic Avenue rezoning, which is taking a 21-block stretch of industrial zoning and turning it into mixed use development.  Led by City Council members Chi Osse and Crystal Hudson, the plan is to turn it into 4,600 units of housing, 1,900 of which will be "permanently affordable.” Let’s break this down, that’s 2,700 market rate apartments, and 1,900 units that are not actually affordable to the majority of people who make up the neighborhood. So why are politicians who are supposedly to the left touting a development that will inevitably lead to more rapid displacement as a success? Again, a solely supply sided approach will not solve the housing crisis, in fact it will only exacerbate it. Politicians like Chi Osse see the writing in the wall which is why after campaigning heavily to approve this project he is now changing his tune, advocating for “deeply affordable housing” rather than “permanently affordable.” Whatever the case, the masses are tired of the 'affordability’ word play.

We want Self Determination. And we will have it.

After months of grassroots organizing by the Affordable for You Campaign (A4U), Brooklyn-native politician Chi Ossé released a video acknowledging the flaws in the current system that determines affordability. Of course, Ossé didn’t offer a viable path forward—and frankly, we weren’t expecting him to. That is precisely why A4U is helping him out: by organizing the masses to force a real path forward ourselves.

Our demands are simple: If we, the working, toiling masses that make up New York City, can’t afford it, you can’t build it. For a building to be deemed “affordable,” 70% of its units must be capped at 30% of the Area Median Income. This would set the maximum qualifying income at $43,740—a figure that, while still tied to the deeply flawed AMI, aligns far more closely with the actual median incomes of Brownsville, Harlem, and the South Bronx. We also require that this policy be paired with substantial legal protections that strip corporate landlords of their ability to weaponize eviction over small sums. Affordability must mean both rent price and tenant security—otherwise, the rapid displacement of Black and brown working-class New Yorkers will continue.

But A4U is not just a set of demands. It is a project of mass self-determination. Yes, our proposal is struggling for a reform because it works within existing structures to win material relief, but what distinguishes A4U from reformist campaigns led by politicians is that we are not strengthening the bourgeois electoral process or the politicians who manage it. We are doing the opposite: taking power away from developers and politicians and putting it in the hands of the masses. By organizing people around something they care about—their hoods, their blocks, their survival, we build the capacity of working class New Yorkers to govern their own conditions. Self determination. 

We also expose the contradictions at the heart of this system. Developers do not care about you. Our relationship with them is antagonistic, because they are predators chasing profit. Politicians are not our saviors; they are managers of a crisis they cannot solve. Every meeting, every action, every demand sharpens that contradiction and shows the masses exactly who is responsible.

The time for abstract conversations about “affordability” is over. Through disciplined organization, direct action, and political pressure, we will force New York City to adopt our definition of affordability—one that prioritizes the survival of our people over the profits of developers. The future of Black and working-class New York depends on it. Join the fight! Affordable for who? Affordable for you!

Bibliography
Brand, David. “Mounting Eviction Cases Show Even NYC's 'Affordable' Housing Is Getting Too Expensive.” Gothamist, February 25, 2026. https://gothamist.com/news/mounting-eviction-cases-show-even-nycs-affordable-housing-is-getting-too-expensive.

Chicago Housing Authority. Plan for Transformation: Improving Public Housing in Chicago and the Quality of Life. Chicago: Chicago Housing Authority, 2000. thecha.org.

Coalition for the Homeless. “Basic Facts About Homelessness: New York City.” Last modified August 2026. coalitionforthehomeless.org.

Mack, Emily. “How the Plan for Transformation Started — And How It’s Going.” City Cast Chicago, September 30, 2025. https://chicago.citycast.fm/explainers/chicago-housing-plan-for-transformation.

Mao Zedong. “Oppose Book Worship.” May 1930. Marxists Internet Archive. marxists.org.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. 1867. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1990.

New York City Department of City Planning. “Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan.” City of New York, 2026. https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/our-work/plans/brooklyn/atlantic-avenue-mixed-use-plan.

Tiana, Yasmine. “Benign Neglect Is Responsible for Gentrification in NYC Today.” Uprooted (blog), June 20, 2025. https://uprootedbutdocumented.substack.com/p/benign-neglect-is-responsible-fo.

United States. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968.

The Yulanda Ward Memorial Fund. “Spatial Deconcentration.” Midnight Notes, no. 2 (1980). Accessed October 11, 2026. https://libcom.org/article/spatial-deconcentration-dc-yulanda-ward.

Wilson, Tamar. “The Role of Black Misleadership Today.” Socialist Alternative, April 1, 2022. https://www.socialistalternative.org/2022/04/01/the-role-of-black-misleadership-today/.