Samuel Stein
Samuel Stein is a geography PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center and an Urban Studies instructor at Hunter College with a background in tenant organizing, labor research and policy advocacy. His work focuses on urban political economy, with an emphasis on housing, real estate and gentrification in New York City. His dissertation uncovers the complex structural linkages between unions and non-profits, the real estate industry, and the New York City planning apparatus, in order to reveal why many working class institutions have supported planning programs that accelerate gentrification. In February, 2019, Verso will publish his first book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, which analyzes how the growing concentration of capital in real estate has altered the profession of planning.
Collected Work
A Right to Housing?
In the fight for housing, we are caught between the world we know and the world we want. A Right to Housing? offers both a roadmap and a reckoning. Drawing from his own experiences of on-the-ground organizing, Stein lays out practical policies for enacting a right to shelter, a right to a home, and a right to the city itself. With unflinching honesty, he then explores why these visions continuously crash against the rocks of political reality. From the power of real estate capital to the inadequacy of our institutions, he reveals the forces blocking our path—and summons the complex feelings of a Left that has lost faith in the future. Written in the heady weeks surrounding Zohran Mamdani's historic election for New York City mayor, Stein frames the book around the stirring possibilities and structural constraints of a socialist administration in the financial center of a sputtering empire. He opens a space for action in the absence of hope. This is an examination of life and politics at the intersection of optimism and pessimism, nihilism and naivety, faith and doubt—an essential book for activists, planners, and anyone who refuses to accept the housing crisis as inevitable or immutable.