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THE HOUSING CRISIS IS A DEMOCRACY CRISIS  
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Evelyn Quartz
December 16, 2025
The Lever
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_ This country was founded on the idea of being rooted to where you
live — but the corporate state has flipped the script. Since
America’s founding, housing initiatives have helped citizens to put
down roots in the spirit of Republican self-governance _

Image credit: AP Photo and Pexels/Jan van der Wolf // The Lever,

 

Before Americans imagined a democracy 250 years ago, they demanded
land — the material independence that made civic life and resistance
to tyranny possible. 

Thomas Jefferson believed
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that landownership was the foundation of a healthy republic,
empowering citizens to act independently rather than rely on the will
of a landlord or employer. For Jefferson, independence was not only an
economic condition but a moral one. (Albeit only for white, male
Europeans, and not North America’s Indigenous peoples, from whom
they forcibly took the land).

He wrote [[link removed]], “Cultivators of
the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous,
the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their
country, and wedded to its liberty and interests, by the most lasting
bonds.” 

French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, among the young nation’s
first chroniclers, came to believe that Americans’ propensity to
form civic associations created the lasting bonds that were the
country’s real defense against tyranny. Without communal ties and
shared responsibilities, Tocqueville feared individuals would fall
prey
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to paternalistic “soft despotism,” in which top-down state
administration replaces self-government. 

In such an arrangement, he wrote, “Each [citizen], living apart, is
as a stranger to the fate of all the rest… he exists but in himself
and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may
be said at any rate to have lost his country.”

In 2025, both Jefferson’s and Tocqueville’s warnings could not be
more relevant. An all-powerful corporate state has robbed ordinary
citizens of the ability to put down roots. Without a stable,
affordable place to live, civic associations, and the xxxxxx they
provide against tyranny, wither away. The housing crisis is thus a
democracy crisis.

In 2024, U.S. home prices reached
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an all-time high, with the median home now costing roughly five times
the median household income. As a result, first-time buyers represent
only
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two out of every 10 sales, and the median age for all homebuyers has
climbed to 59 — prompting _Business Insider_ to call
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this “the age of the geriatric homebuyer.”

The crisis of affordable housing has severed the ties that the
country’s founders thought necessary for democratic governance. When
people become rootless, they are more atomized, unable to fulfill
social roles in communities. 

Weekly attendance at church — the main way people came together
during the Founding Fathers’ time — has declined
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from 42 percent of Americans in 2000 to 30 percent in 2023. Just a
quarter of U.S. adults report
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having more than six close friends, with 17 percent reporting none at
all. And despite Americans reporting
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having greater faith in local government than Congress, only 20
percent vote
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in mayoral elections.

As we’ve become uprooted, passive, and isolated, the soft despots
have seized control.

Today, a corporate-fused state manages a housing system in which
financial institutions quietly dictate where people can live, how they
must work, and how secure their lives can be. The result is a great
American untethering — a neo-feudal order in which a small group of
elites control the basic means of life, an oppressive arrangement not
unlike the one the founders sought to escape. A population that cannot
afford to stay in one place cannot build civic associations, and a
society without civic associations cannot resist concentrated power. 

HOUSING UPROOTED 

Since America’s founding, housing initiatives have helped citizens
to put down roots in the spirit of Republican self-governance. The
Homestead Act of 1862, signed
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President Abraham Lincoln, granted 160 acres of land to anyone willing
to “improve” it, expanding small-scale property ownership across
the newly settled frontier. 

During the Great Depression less than a century later, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, pushed by a formidable pre-“Red Scare”
leftist movement, tied democratic renewal to economic reform.
Roosevelt’s New Deal [[link removed]] laid the
groundwork for the 30-year mortgage to expand (white
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homeownership, spurred
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the construction of new homes, and used federal funds to back home
loans. 

In his 1937 State of the Union address
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democracy to housing: “Many millions of Americans still live in
habitations which not only fail to provide the physical benefits of
modern civilization but breed disease and impair the health of future
generations.” 

But beginning in the 1970s, the country’s approach to fostering
homeownership began to change.

America’s housing stock — once supported by strong public
initiatives like the New Deal housing programs — was steadily
financialized
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with the help of policymakers. Under the rhetoric of “individual
choice” and the rise of neoliberal economics, public housing
programs increasingly subsidized the private market. 

The clearest [[link removed]] example
of this is the federal Section 8 voucher program, launched
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in 1974. The program required qualifying tenants to redeem
affordable-housing vouchers in the private housing market. This
allowed policymakers to back away from bold investments in public
housing and hand responsibility instead to private actors. 

In 2008, the neoliberal outsourcing of the housing market to Wall
Street imploded the global financial system. As a result, millions of
Americans lost their homes and were driven deeper into financial
instability, as banks and private equity firms tightened their control
over American life. 

President Barack Obama inherited a collapsing economy, much as
Roosevelt had seven decades prior. But instead of rescuing the common
citizen — a mission central to Roosevelt’s response — Obama
bailed out banking executives while offering struggling homeowners
technocratic private-sector solutions
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like the Home Affordable Modification Program, which sought to modify
loans rather than provide direct relief. 

As a result, private equity giants subsequently cashed
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on the financial crisis by buying
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up hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes to rent out for profit. 

Now, instead of helping more people become rooted in their
communities, housing is dominated by rentier capitalism
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are treated not as places to own, nor to participate in democratic
life, but as financial assets. Today, a handful of consolidated
private landlords dominate the rental market. The largest, Greystar
Real Estate Partners, manages
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nearly a million rental units in the United States and was sued
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by the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year for allegedly
burdening tenants with hidden junk fees. 

Meanwhile, Blackstone — one of the world’s largest private equity
firms, which owns rental company, Invitation Homes — even got help
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from the federal government to buy up foreclosed homes.

The financial elite, meanwhile, now shape housing policy from both
inside and outside the government. BlackRock is the world’s largest
asset manager and holds
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major investments in mortgage securities and residential housing
developments. Its executives donate
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to both major political parties. That includes Mike Pyle, who has
rotated
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between BlackRock jobs and top posts in the Obama administration and
Vice President Kamala Harris’ operations. 

This reality is not lost on voters. A majority say they rarely
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hear politicians talk about the high costs of housing and rent.
Meanwhile, the atomization of society — individuals fending for
themselves without the strong civic ties U.S. leadership once saw as
essential — has left Americans with little capacity to fight back. 

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink recently admitted
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it “really doesn’t matter” who won the 2024 election, implying
that either Harris or President Donald Trump would serve Wall
Street’s bottom line. American democracy has been outsourced to the
corporate-managerial order. It is this despotic order — not ordinary
citizens — that now dictates the basic terms of life, beginning with
whether and where people can afford to live.

DEMOCRACY REQUIRES AFFORDABILITY 

“Our ideological fixation about democracy is just wrong,” social
science researcher Sarah Stein Lubrano told me. Lubrano’s book,_
Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds_,_
_makes the case that social atrophy and democracy are more closely
linked than we may believe. 

She points to a contradiction at the heart of American life: We
glorify voting, yet we live in a society that leaves people too
isolated and economically squeezed to take part in democracy’s
foundational tenet, civic life. It’s this realm, she argues, where
people learn to negotiate differences, find common ground, and put in
place solutions at the local level for the common good. 

Lubrano believes that unaffordability breaks social bonds.“When you
own a home, you are deeply embedded in a community, you’re gonna be
there a long time,” she says. For her, organizing neighbors around
planting more trees on their shared street is the epitome of a small
but worthy civic democratic action. She continues, “When housing is
not something we can afford, that’s a problem of democracy.” 

Data shows that people are more likely
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to volunteer or join community groups the longer they’ve lived in
one place, regardless of whether they rent or own. But longevity can
be misleading. Many renters stay put not because they’re rooted, but
because the cost
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of buying a home has become prohibitive. 

What matters for democratic life is not simply whether someone owns
property or how long they stay there, but whether they can stay or
leave on their own terms. 

The ability to be financially secure affects how Americans view
democracy, with those who feel more stable reporting greater
satisfaction with democracy. Untangling this from centuries of
systemic, often racialized economic segregation is impossible, as
neighborhoods plagued by poverty have long been denied
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access to the robust civic life that wealthier communities enjoy. 

As researchers at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab have found,
housing precarity erodes
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agency — forcing people to move when they don’t want to, or
trapping them in place when they do. When the basic conditions for
participating in civic life collapse, there’s little time to talk to
neighbors and form social bonds. Studies have connected
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poverty with greater social and political isolation, undermining a
community’s ability to organize and demand services and investment
from the government. In poorer neighborhoods, there is even less time
to oppose an extractive, autocratic state. 

Under a corporate-fused state, individuals are too isolated to fight
back. Recognizing that this arrangement is not natural or inevitable,
but instead constructed by those in power, is the first step toward
dismantling it. 

TOWARD A BROADER CONCEPTION OF DEMOCRACY 

The renowned scholar Noam Chomsky might have been channeling
Tocqueville when he observed [[link removed]]
that for a system of “self-imposed totalitarianism” to work,
“people have to be atomized and segregated and alone.” Fighting
back is too overwhelming for any individual to face alone, he argued;
the only remedy [[link removed]]
is civic association.

The opportunity to do so still exists.

Despite a corporate state that seeks to crush organized,
community-based movements that challenge its power, many Americans
have not been deterred from participating in civic life. The continued
existence of community-supported radio, local solidarity networks,
mutual-aid groups, and unions proves this. It will, however, require
rebuilding civic life at a much larger scale to meaningfully dismantle
the corporate-managed soft despotic rule unleashed by neoliberal
housing policy. 

Much of the elite class is counting on us to keep them in power under
the cynical slogan of “protecting democracy.” But the idea that a
public stripped of organization, stability, and civic power can defend
democracy by submitting to the corporate state that manufactured its
disempowerment is a dangerous fantasy. 

We’d be far wiser to notice that democracy eroded long ago, when
ordinary citizens lost the stability that allows them to act together.
If we want to revive democratic life in the U.S., we must start by
restoring the conditions that make collective power possible — by
ensuring that people can live, stay, and put down roots in the places
they call home.

After all, without housing people can count on, there is no civic
life. Without civic life, there is no democratic counterforce to
concentrated power. Housing is not just a roof over one’s head;
it’s the material foundation of self-governance.

_[EVELYN QUARTZ is a former Capitol Hill staffer who served as press
secretary for The Lincoln Project and writes on Substack.]_

_Each day, The Lever ’s staff tirelessly investigates, researches,
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* Housing
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* Housing Crisis
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* land
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* rent
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* self-governance
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* housing programs
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* New Deal housing programs
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* public housing
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* Social housing
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* community
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* democracy
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* Section 8
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* Affordability
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