Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

Category: Housing (Page 1 of 3)

A photo of an interestingly shaped set of boxy apartments in a new housing development.

A Tale of Two Housing Developments

July 13, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Housing is always a hot topic in Iowa City. And it’s one I write about from time to time. Most recently, I wrote a couple of posts about how both YIMBY and NIMBY positions get it wrong.

I’ll continue that theme in this post.

Obviously housing is one of our most basic needs. It stands alongside food and water as one of the essentials. But it’s also an issue that brings to bear many of the central problems with life in an advanced capitalist country full of inequalities of wealth and power. It also shows our political shortcomings.

Nowhere do we see all this more clearly than in two recent housing developments in Iowa City.

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Coda: People-Powered Planning

March 3, 2025 /

This week’s post is a follow up to last week’s post. We might call it a coda.

I recently read an article on housing and zoning in Current Affairs. It’s called In Sprawl We Trust, and it’s written by the consistently compelling Allison Lirish Dean.

Indeed, about a year ago, I wrote about her take on ‘strong towns.’ There we discovered the limits of the term.

In this article, Dean provides us with a different frame for thinking about debates over zoning. Housing, of course, is one major focal point of those debates. Rather than thinking about the debate as split between a NIMBY and YIMBY side, she frames the debate as one between private capital and people-powered planning.

We can surely see the appeal.

Both NIMBY and YIMBY sides reject popular power. But Dean calls these sides ‘market suburbanists’ and ‘market urbanists.’ This phrasing places the two sides within broader zoning debates. They share a trust in the free market to deliver the goods, differing only in terms of how they want to use market power to protect private interests.

This contextualization helps. Indeed, it takes us all the way back to the idea of tenants unions. After all, what better way to prepare people for democratic decision making?

An artistic depiction of three homes - one displaying a NIMBY sign, one displaying a YIMBY sign, and one apartment building.

The NIMBY vs. YIMBY False Dichotomy

February 24, 2025 /

Housing is a top issue in Iowa City politics.

It’s not difficult to see why. We’re a growing college town of about 75,000 people. And while social and economic change have hit many parts of rural Iowa hard, we’ve weathered the storms relatively well. Iowa City faces more problems of gentrification than universal despair.

However, the prosperity of Iowa City pushes out many long-term and/or working-class residents. For one, the rent is too damn high. In addition, rising property values push less wealthy homeowners to foreclosure and prevent tenants from buying their first homes. Many move to Coralville or North Liberty. And as even those places see the same problems, some move further out to Hills, Tiffin, or Oxford.

Back in Iowa City, our housing debates degenerate into a false dichotomy between NIMBY and YIMBY views. Neither view serves the interests of working people and tenants.

And so, getting past the NIMBY vs. YIMBY false dichotomy is essential to understanding housing from a leftist perspective that’s centered on workers and tenants.

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A large number of apartments in Sacramento. Intended as the cover photo for an article on the book Abolish Rent.

Abolish Rent: On Tenants Unions and Housing

February 3, 2025 /

I recently read Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. It’s a book by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, two co-founders of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) and early backers of the Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN), a collection of tenants unions around the country.

As I read, I quickly realized I wish I had the book 5 years ago. In those days, I was working with our local DSA chapter to organize a tenants union, and I joined the Iowa City Tenants Union (ICTU) as one of its founding board members. I also joined the city housing commission in the fall of that year.

This book could’ve prepared us for the struggles ahead. It would’ve been a great resource to share with early tenants union members. Instead, we learned many lessons the hard way.

So, let’s talk a bit about the book and what it might teach us.

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