11/05/2026
Author Event! Samuel Stein’s “A Right to Housing?”
Thursday, November 19th @ 6pm
Symposium Books, Providence
Join us on Thursday, November 19th at 6pm as we host Samuel Stein in conversation with Steve Ahlquist to discuss his latest book, A Right to Housing? Reserve a copy in store or online @ SB
A radical blueprint for universal housing meets an unflinching assessment of why we haven’t won—from the best-selling author of Capital City
In the fight for housing, we are caught between the world we know and the world we want. This book is both a road map and a reckoning. Drawing on his own experience of on-the-ground organizing, Samuel Stein presents practical policies for enacting a right to shelter, a right to a home, and a right to the city itself.
With raw honesty, he then explores why these visions founder on the rocks of political reality. He reveals the forces blocking our path—from the power of real estate capital to the inadequacy of our institutions—and captures the complex feelings of a left that has lost faith in the future.
Written in the heady weeks surrounding Zohran Mamdani’s historic election for New York City mayor, Stein frames the book around the stirring possibilities and structural constraints of a socialist administration in the financial center of a sputtering empire. He opens a space for action in the absence of hope. This is an examination of life and politics at the intersection of optimism and pessimism, nihilism and naivety, faith and doubt—an essential book for activists, planners, and anyone who refuses to accept the housing crisis as inevitable or immutable.
Samuel Stein is the author of the books A Right to Housing? and Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. He works as a housing policy researcher and advocate in New York City. His writing on urban politics and planning has appeared in The New York Review of Books, n+1, The Guardian, and many other publications.
Steve Ahlquist is a progressive reporter based in Providence, Rhode Island. His work has appeared in Rhode Island Future and UpriseRI
