Okay here are all my bookmarks on the topic. Its from my personal stuff so its not very organized. Sorry about that. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OW5fGAQuAT7kxg0xOOUoG2O5m6tdNIA23I4yX819F_E/edit?usp=sharing
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
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traingang
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Public housing and rent control.
Public housing means state-owned and often built, offered to the residents at cost. To make this really move, you need a housing authority that can build. The bigger and better run the housing authority, the cheaper the housing. This cannot eliminate the financialized spiraling of real estate costs but it can ameliorate their impact and create a vision for decommodification.
Rent control can be implemented in various forms. Every argument against it is specious liberal nonsense with no grounding in the real world. At best they appeal to a cherry picked set of price controls in general enacted by countries facing serious challenges, then attribute those challenges to price controls. They ignore most cases of price controls because they are typically successful.
You can implement more complex policies like "rent to own" for housing but I think simplicity is best for a first project.
Do not expect the politicians, bureaucrats, and capitalist lobbyists present to accept your ideas. They may try and shoot them down, even, rather than just ignore common people like usual. The most you can expect from suggesting these ideas is to agitate everyone else. So plan accordingly with the goal of building an organized effort. You would ideally come with a disciplined contingent with clear messaging and you'd use this opportunity to build a list. You would be pleasant and "on" at almost all times and making sympathetic pleas when advocating for housing, ready with sympathetic examples of harm and ideally people with stories of their own horrible experiences and fears. You'd organize around your own follow-up event, ideally an educational event on this topic, and use that premise to get people to fill out lists that include contact info for that event. And that becomes your next action.
If your role will soon be to be a bureaucrat, you will find yourself massively limited. It is a useful position to have for this project but you'll find that it will be marginal in directly changing policy (marginal is still better than nothing). That role is more useful for feeding information to an organizing effort and getting a sense for how much money is moved around by real estate vs. rent prices and how much work the state does on behalf of them.
Rent control sadly is not in the cards. The state does not allow municipalities to enact any form of rent control from my reading of the municipal powers section of the law.
Public Housing is in the cards though. They have a housing trust currently and non profit that they use to build and maintain ownership over affordable housing properties. I don't know all the details though. They just finished building a housing unit on our main street.
They've done a lot to I think insolate new housing from the market but what's might be more radical would be a community land trust.
Our states head of housing was a drunk divorced landlord Democrat, so were fuckin cooked out here.
If rent control is not possible, maybe getting an elected rent adjustment program board set up could help. It's basically an elected board that tenants can bring housing issues toand the board can decide to lower or waive rent in response to grievances. They generally also exist to mediate tenant landlord disputes. Often times landlords spend money to get "their guys" elected on these boards (like every elected position) but there could be some clause that landlords and their agents can't be on the board or something like that
I have to check and see if we have a high enough population for that. We might be just over the threshold. There is a minimum required level of population before we're allowed to do that for some reason.
Nice a housing authority of some kind is very useful
I hate to frame it this way, but housing first initiatives is the most cost effective solution. It literally boosts the local economy. (Normally a good point to stress with liberals)
I have a bunch of other studies I have saved over the years. I'll post them to this thread when I can.
What little I know about successful public housing initiatives are that they're very rarely successful on their own. Housing first, yes, but support needs to be an immediate second. Addiction support or mental health support or medical support or food support, etc. It's rare at least in my area that someone is unhoused and has zero other issues that either contributed to their being unhoused or became an issue as a result of them being unhoused. Putting someone in a safe place is critically important but also will not fix anything on its own beyond "now you are in a safe place."
So anything you can do to keep people safe and healthy in their home will mean the dollars spent on putting them in that home are more effective.
Not sure what you could impact on that front but if you can include some guidance or future planning or even direct funding for those other things too as part of the program it'll be more successful.
Yeah at work we have a whole Augmented Case Management program for folks getting into housing while still having a high support need. It is kinda expensive per person but helps reduce housing churn and utilization of other services
ultimately, housing should be de-commodified. Anything else is a reform that might improve working peoples lives- but can be turned back in a heartbeat no matter how much struggle brings positive reform
De-commodified housing can just as easily be privatised, see the UK.
Not the main point, but watch the youtube-channel Not Just Bikes theor series on Strong Towns (a research group about urbanisation), if you might have an impact on the urban planning as well:
Strong Towns are neoliberal dumbasses who promote the (proven false) claim that "building more housing drives down prices".
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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that people moving around is a function of porkies investing in some places due to arcane laws and causing worker movements, thus they can keep doing that charade every time they make investment decision. you can have 50 million empty homes and housing shortages in places people have to live to work in actuality.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: