Jacobin Radio: DSA; Generation Priced Out

Suzi talks to DSAers Jeremy Gong and Magally Miranda Alcazar about the larger issues they are confronting after two years of Trump, a midterm election that saw radical democratic socialists elected to Congress, and the beginning of a second Bernie Sanders campaign for president. How do they see the challenges ahead, in a more favorable national context for Democratic Socialists, thanks to Bernie, AOC, #Red4Ed striking teachers, and the Trump administration’s retrograde policies? Can the Left take over the Democratic Party and should that be their aim? Or should the social-movement work of DSA, independent of the Dems, be their focus? How do they define socialism, and what should socialists do given the structures of our politics and economy?

Then, Suzi talks to Randy Shaw about his new book,Generation Priced Out — which is a call to action that addresses the national crisis of housing, city by city, looking at how policy and neglect, as well as economic crisis, has led to skyrocketing rents and home values that have priced out the working and middle class of urban America such that young people today join the exodus from the city or face homelessness because they cannot afford to live in our cities. Generation Priced Out not only tells the stories of those impacted by the national housing crisis in more than a dozen cities, he makes the argument that cities can and must address the housing needs of residents of all income levels — and he offers specific strategies, honed from his own decades of experience as a housing activist to reverse rising economic and racial inequality.