“Sewer Socialism” is Ascendant in America’s Big Cities

Along with New York’s Zohran Mamdani and Seattle’s Katie Wilson, this new generation of left-wing municipal leaders are reviving the moniker of ​“sewer socialism,” a label embraced by early 20^th century socialist office-holders in Milwaukee who built modern sewage and wastewater treatment systems, public parks and the nation’s first municipal public housing. Like their forbears, today’s sewer socialists say they’re laser-focused on demonstrating that the public sector can deliver everyday necessities — including housing.

Just days before the November election, Lewis George hosted a packed tenant town hall in a church on the city’s northwest side, where she invited renters to share their housing horror stories.

The crowd obliged, detailing stories of bedbug, roach and even raccoon infestations, as well as dangerous elevators and retaliatory property managers — including in affordable housing subsidized by the city.

“We know we can’t allow negligent landlords to operate in D.C., and we certainly can’t allow them to operate on the government’s dime,” Lewis George responded to applause from the crowd.

In order to deliver dignified and affordable apartments to those being priced out of the nation’s capital, Lewis George has proposed creating a new municipal office of social housing. In addition to reforming zoning restrictions and streamlining permitting, Lewis George’s housing platform calls for a new model of city-owned, mixed-income housing to meet her overall goal of building 72,000 new homes in the city over the next five years.

In April, the Washington Post editorial board denounced spending taxpayer money on social housing as ​“untenable in this economy,” calling instead for a rollback of Washington’s eviction protections and other safeguards for renters in order to coax wary developers into building more.

Lewis George has maintained that boosting private-sector building is important: In an April editorial for Greater Greater Washington, she wrote that while once skeptical of new construction in the name of affordability, she now believes that ​“increasing supply, paired with policies to protect residents, really is critical.”

But Washington currently spends more than a billion dollars annually on affordable housing, much of that going to subsidize private-sector landlords promising to build and maintain apartments for low-income residents. Key programs like the city’s Housing Production Trust Fund have been plagued by accusations of inefficiency and favoritism towards political insiders. A 2021 report from the city’s Office of Inspector General found that D.C. officials had misspent nearly $82 million in funds earmarked for extremely low-income residents, including by over-paying certain private developers.

Meanwhile, the city has a dearth of more than 37,000 rental homes available and affordable to very low-income households, according to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition. While D.C. has an overall housing shortage — the worst in the nation as a percentage of its total housing stock, according to Freddie Mac’s estimates — that gap also reflects apartment construction tilted towards luxury housing.

Could the public sector prove a better vehicle for providing truly affordable housing at the scale required?

Will Merrifield, a housing attorney who ran for D.C. City Council in 2020, believes that incentivizing the private market to provide enough affordable housing is a ​“losing battle.” In order to build, developers often rely on investors who expect hefty returns, pushing housing costs up higher. Cut private equity out of the deal, and the foregone profit to investors can translate into greater affordability for renters — and keep publicly subsidized housing in the hands of the public. 

Now the director of the non-profit Center for Social Housing and Public Investment, Merrifield hopes to help model how Washington could provide a ​“public option” for renters.

“Social housing is expensive, because it’s expensive to produce housing in this country,” he says. ​“But it’s absolutely necessary to reclaim economic planning and development from the real-estate investor class”

At the October tenant town hall hosted by Lewis George’s campaign, renters living in buildings owned by one of the city’s largest affordable housing landlords made the case that the city is not getting its money’s worth — and that residents are paying the price. 

Since the spring, tenants in buildings owned and managed by prolific developer Buwa Binitie have been organizing a citywide campaign, pushing for repairs in their buildings as well as an end to new public dollars or contracts for their landlord. 

“One of the things we want this new administration to realize is that [Binitie’s company] has been cited for hundreds of thousands of dollars [in fees for violations],” said William Bates, a resident of a senior building managed by Binitie, during the town hall. ​“What we want is for him not to be able to get more properties.”

In September, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued Binitie over ​“shocking” conditions at another one of his buildings, including broken elevators in the 10-story building, exposed electrical wiring and stairwells contaminated with human waste and debris. The 166-unit Delta Pearl building was rehabbed and re-opened in 2023 as ​“luxury affordable housing,” using $18 million from the city’s Housing Production Trust Fund. 

The Dumas Collective, the real-estate conglomerate Binitie founded in 2006, comprises a development company that has secured a total of $444 million in public subsidies, encompassing ​“financing from nearly every public capital source available,” according to the firm’s website. A property management arm oversees more than 1,000 apartments in D.C., which have collectively racked up more than 1,600 code violations between them, according to a review by City Cast DC.

A major donor to outgoing Mayor Muriel Bowser, Binitie served for eight years as the chair of the D.C. Housing Finance Agency, which awards tax-exempt bonds and low-cost financing to affordable housing developers. While Binitie has said that he recused himself from decisions involving his own projects while on the board, he appears to have been investigated for an alleged conflict of interest, according to reporting by the Washington City Paper. A separate investigation by the paper revealed that the District forfeited $3 million of federal low-income housing tax credits in 2024, in part due to a swap of newer credits used to ​“bail out” out one of Binitie’s projects that had suffered delays and budget shortfalls.

Binitie’s political connections also created a bizarre scene this fall, when the lawyer defending him, former D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, crashed a press conference where tenants were urging the City Council not to grant public land to the developer for a new project. The bill that would have awarded Binitie development rights has been tabled by the City Council.

Binitie did not respond to a list of questions from In These Times. In a September statement to WUSA9, a representative of the Delta Pearl acknowledged the serious conditions but said that ​“prolonged court delays and widespread rent delinquency have pushed this affordable housing property into a severe financial crisis.”

Nathan Hunter-El, a former resident of Binitie’s Capitol Vista apartments and a leader in Empower DC, a tenant organizing coalition, says the campaign is ​“not just about one bad actor.” Tenants are also fighting to overhaul a system they say lets scofflaw landlords stay in business.

For example, they are advocating passage of legislation that would make it easier to hold serial bad actors accountable, including by wresting control of properties through the courts when owners refuse to address conditions threatening tenants’ health and safety.

That’s where a new office of social housing could come in, says Damiana Dendy, a housing organizer for D.C. Jobs with Justice who is working with tenants in buildings owned by Binitie’s companies. The city intervening to acquire and preserve troubled affordable housing portfolios could represent a more effective approach than the status quo, in cases where public money ultimately goes towards emergency intervention in buildings that have also been publicly subsidized.

“Right now we’re just hemorrhaging money to these slumlords,” Dendy says.

Skeptics of social housing might consider that while we now take for granted public services like clean water, sanitation services and public schools, the very existence of a public sector is part of the legacy of municipal socialism, says labor historian Shelton Stromquist.

Stromquist’s book, Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism examines the legacy of local left-wing governments across the United States, Europe, New Zealand and Australia in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Today’s municipal socialists have an ​“inheritance,” Stromquist says, and an opportunity to ​“expand that public sector in new directions, beyond the limits that it faced in the past.”