“As long as land and buildings are bought and sold in a private market, there can be no truly democratic control over the city. Capitalist cities are so structured around land and homeownership that it has come to seem entirely natural for property owners to hold enormous economic, legal, spatial, social and cultural advantages over all others, and for most of that privilege to be passed down as a form of inheritance. This logic runs deep through our cultures and societies. As the veteran New York housing organizer Wasim Lone once pointed out to me, even the language we use to describe this relationship is older than capitalism—landlord! A socialist city has no room for such feudal relations.”

(Samuel Stein, 2019)