The rallying cry “the rent is too damn high!” animates much of the popular and policy discourse around the twenty-first-century housing crises from San Francisco to Shanghai, Lagos to London. As a resident of the Bay Area, I can personally confirm that, indeed, the rent is too damn high.

While it makes for a good slogan, it opens up a potential pitfall. Liberal politicians and “new urbanist” think tanks promise to solve the problem of the too-damn-high rent with technocratic solutions that they say will lower or stabilize the steep rise in rents. They circulate policy papers and blog posts, debating supply and demand, inclusionary zoning, and tax incentives. And many working people in hyperinflated urban rental markets see these technical tweaks as the only available options for alleviating our housing crisis.

Certain reform-oriented struggles, especially those around rent control and expanded provision of social housing, offer important opportunities for on-the-ground socialist organizing. But we also shouldn’t be shy about our big-picture diagnosis.