A landlord sees an asset; a family sees its home. That difference helps explain why building more does not, by itself, end the housing crisis. Under capitalism, land and buildings can generate rent, capital gains and power for those who own them. The need for shelter is subordinated to the prospect of profit. This is not about blaming someone who lives in the home they own. It is about who controls housing and what it is for.
A strike against rent
In Barcelona in 1931, unemployed workers and families in overcrowded homes demanded a 40% rent reduction. The CNT construction workers’ union established an Economic Defence Committee, and the strike spread through working-class districts. Refusing rent together let tenants challenge a power relationship that isolated households could hardly change. There were evictions, repression and neighbourhood solidarity. The decisive force was not individual cleverness: it was collective organisation. The CNT recounts the struggle (in Spanish).
The conflict reaches far beyond Barcelona. Wherever housing is first an investment, an owner may profit by raising rent, waiting for land values to rise or pushing existing residents out. Tenants need security; capital seeks returns. That contradiction runs through cities across the world.
Another starting point: build to live
Socialist housing starts with a different question: how many homes do people need, and how can we build and allocate them? From 1957, the Soviet Union undertook a mass housing campaign that transformed access to private apartments. Research based on Soviet archives records 38 million apartments built during the campaign. Housing was allocated through the state, local soviets and workplaces, using criteria of need and priority rather than simply going to the highest bidder.
Cuba took another path: its Urban Reform of 1960 turned many tenants into owners of the homes they occupied. These were different solutions, but they broke with the same assumption: housing need not exist to enrich a landlord. Construction, renovation and allocation are political choices that a society can organise around people’s needs.
A board game you already know
Even Monopoly began with a critique of land monopoly. Lizzie Magie patented The Landlord’s Game in 1904; a later edition included “Prosperity” rules, where the goal was to improve the position of the poorest player. Magie advocated Georgist ideas, not communism, but she understood something important: the rules decide who wins. Read her patent and the 1932 rules.
Now it’s your turn. In The City Is Not for Sale, you can organise tenants, build cooperatives and defend public housing against speculators. Its scenarios are fiction inspired by real processes; each card separates game mechanics from historical context and links to its sources.
GO DEEPER
- Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (1872–73) — why the housing question is bound up with the mode of production.
- CNT, history of the 1931 rent strike (in Spanish).
- Granma, Cuba’s 1960 Urban Reform (in Spanish).