Rent control is back on the agenda. Its presence on the ballot recently in California and Chicago suggest that rent control has found new life amid a countrywide affordable housing crisis.

While it will take years of struggle to win, both campaigns have awoken the real estate lobby, long ago convinced that rent control was a dead letter. Although the lobby’s massive spending was critical to the defeat of Prop 10 this year, and landlord groups are gearing up for similar expenditures in Illinois, the demand for rent control is not going away anytime soon.

For the Left, these votes suggest an important question: with the future of decommodified housing still a distant reality, why should socialists organize for market reform now?