Perhaps Zohran Mamdani has some thoughts we should all finally listen to, not just in New York, where he serves as an Assembly member from Astoria, but across the global archipelago of expensive, increasingly unlivable cities. Mamdani’s voice cuts through the polite language of “housing crises” and “affordability challenges.” He calls it what it is: a system working perfectly for the few who own, and against the many who rent.
Walk through any major European capitals, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Lisbon, even once-affordable Athens and the pattern repeats itself like a grim refrain. Local residents, teachers, artists, baristas, cleaners, and nurses have been squeezed to the city’s edges, while short-term rentals bloom like fungi in every historic district. Cities that once pulsed with human variety now feel like curated museum pieces polished, photogenic, and hollowed out. The European model, long believed to be a buffer against the extremes of American capitalism, has quietly adopted many of its worst habits. Speculation now dresses itself in chic urbanism.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist who helped lead New York’s “Good Cause Eviction” movement, speaks with the urgency of someone who understands that housing is not a moral metaphor it’s a material condition. His arguments are simple, maybe even too simple for politicians who prefer the camouflage of complexity: people need homes; homes should not be financial instruments. Yet this simplicity exposes a profound truth. When we say “housing crisis,” we imply accident. Mamdani insists there’s nothing accidental about it.
Across continents, governments have adopted a language of helplessness, as though the laws of physics, not the laws of property and profit, determined why a teacher can’t afford rent in her own city. But housing doesn’t work like gravity. It’s written policy by policy: tax incentives for developers, deregulated short-term rentals, public housing defunded and left to rot. What Mamdani’s perspective demands is not tinkering but moral realignment. To paraphrase him, if the market fails to house people, perhaps the market should no longer be in charge of housing.
The European capitals, once defined by civic pride and human scale, have become laboratories of financial extraction. Consider Lisbon, where entire neighbourhoods are ghosted by Airbnb hosts who live abroad. Or Berlin, where tenants’ movements fight billion-euro conglomerates like Vonovia whose business model depends on driving rents upward, not stabilizing them. Paris, with its rent caps and social housing, is still losing ground. London, the spiritual home of property speculation, stopped pretending long ago. The city’s skyline, crowded with glass towers, serves less as housing stock than as a storage vault for global wealth.
The irony is that many of these cities know what works. Vienna’s vast stock of municipal housing proves that rent stability and livable design are possible under public stewardship. The Netherlands once excelled at non-profit housing associations before neoliberal reforms chipped away at them. Even post-war Britain, through council housing, built entire communities based on the belief that decent shelter was a right, not a privilege. These histories linger like forgotten recipes, evidence that the current model is not inevitable but chosen.
Mamdani’s American context may seem far from Europe’s cobblestoned centers, but the underlying mechanics are the same. When private equity firms buy entire blocks of apartments, when pension funds treat housing as a hedge against inflation, when cities compete to attract “investment” while driving out residents that’s not free-market dynamism; it’s a slow, sanctioned eviction. Mamdani’s challenge is to puncture the fatalism. What if we believed that housing justice was not utopian but simply overdue?
Critics dismiss this as radicalism. They say things like “the government can’t solve everything” or “we must respect the market.” But the market, in housing, is not a neutral force; it’s a decision-making apparatus for a small, wealthy class. When rents rise beyond reason, when families spend half their income to remain in the cities that raised them, when landlords treat homes like chips in a casino... what, exactly, are we respecting?
To take Mamdani’s logic seriously is to admit that the crisis is not a failure of supply but of purpose. The housing system produces exactly what it’s designed to: profit from scarcity. Developers build luxury units, not because there’s a shortage of space, but because that’s where the highest return lies. The myth of “build more to fix it” ignores who the new homes are for. As Mamdani might put it, the issue isn’t that we aren’t building enough, it’s that we’re building the wrong things for the wrong reasons.
The question, then, is whether European capitals so proud of their humanist traditions, are willing to confront their own complicity. They have the tools: rent control, public land, cooperative housing, and the political infrastructure to act. What they lack is courage. The courage to tell investors no, to treat housing as infrastructure rather than investment, to reimagine property as belonging to the many rather than the few.
The danger isn’t only economic. A city that loses its residents loses its soul. When every café conversation is in English because the locals have been priced out; when laundromats give way to co-working spaces; when young families can no longer imagine a future where they grew up, that’s not urban vitality. It’s gentrified decay, disguised as progress.
Perhaps Zohran Mamdani doesn’t have all the answers. But he’s asking the right questions, the kind that European policymakers have learned to avoid. Who benefits from the current arrangement? Who decides that housing should yield profit before shelter? And who will remain when the last affordable apartment is gone, replaced by yet another “luxury development” overlooking a city that once belonged to everyone?
The rent is too high, yes. But more than that, it’s too intentional. The system is working exactly as designed. The rest of us must decide whether we’re willing to live or leave inside its logic.
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