America Can’t Build Homes Anymore
Cities stopped building not by accident but by design. Our housing system is constructed on scarcity, speculation, and private veto power.
Blog
What Zohran Can Learn From the Sewer Socialists
From Milwaukee’s sewer socialists to La Guardia’s New Deal metropolis, urban reformers changed their cities by forging alliances beyond local power.
When the Leaning Tower Leaned Left
In the 1970s, the Italian Communist Party was again on the rise in Tuscany. Then it all toppled over.
Politics Is Something We Do
The hard part is over. The harder part is about to start.
Issue 60: Dossier
Everything you need to take over your city.
Issue 60: Letters + Internet Speaks
Keeping up with our constituents.
Ezra Klein on Abundance and the Left
“When the state can’t deliver, people stop believing in collective solutions altogether.”
Paint the Town Red
Jacobin contributor Paul Heideman’s reading list on municipal socialism explores how workers’ movements, from Milwaukee to Liverpool, built power at the local level — and how they were defeated.
A Poet in Practice
Aimé Césaire’s time as the mayor of Martinique’s capital city was characterized by his practical, progressive politics — but also by his poet’s eye for beauty.
The German Take on Gotham
Fritz Lang’s masterful visual depiction of class stratification in Metropolis remains unrivaled by its would-be inheritors.
Stand-In Cities
New York isn’t what it used to be.
Bernie’s Fireside Chats
Before there was a YouTube, and even before there was an internet, there was public-access television. Low-budget, talky, unglamorous, and unfiltered, it was the perfect venue for the political rise of none other than Bernie Sanders.