If you are 22 and still on a roommate’s couch, the pitch is easy. Rent is a joke. The starter home vanished. Groceries did not go back down. DSA walks in and says: we will end rent, socialize housing, put the biggest companies under “public ownership,” write a new constitution, and put “workers in charge of the government.” That is not a vibe. That is their program, in their words.
Socialism is not “be kind.” It is the state — or the party that captured the state — deciding who builds, who prices, who hires, and who gets the apartment. When housing is taken off the market, you do not get a key. You get a waiting list. When the largest firms are “democratically controlled,” that control is a ministry, not your group chat. The freedoms that go first are the ones you use every week: start a shop without a permit maze, keep what you earn, move cities without asking a housing board, say the wrong thing and still keep the job. Venezuela and Cuba did not lose those things by accident. They lost them because the program requires them.
Young America did not get poor because capitalism “ended rent.” You got squeezed because supply was blocked while money was printed. From 2019 to 2024, inflation-adjusted home values jumped about 30 percent while income for households under 40 rose about 9 percent. The share of young renter households who could afford a typical mortgage payment fell from 56 percent to 37 percent. Food-at-home prices are still roughly a quarter above 2019. First-time buyers now average 40. That is not a mystery. Cities zoned out apartments. Stimulus and cheap money bid up the same scarce houses. Rent control and “social housing” talk freeze new building. The Democratic design of the last decade was spend big, regulate tight, and call the bill compassion. You paid it in rent.
DSA’s answer is to double down: end private housing as a market, universal rent control, public ownership. That is how you turn a shortage into a permanent assignment office. If you want a life you own — a lease you chose, a paycheck that is yours, a country that does not rewrite the Constitution to enthrone a class party — do not outsource it to people who say the enemy is “the entire global system of capital.” Build more units. Cut the red tape. Stop lighting the currency on fire. Freedom is not a slogan on a tote. It is the right to keep the keys.
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