The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are recruiting tenant organizers for a national training program whose declared end goal is abolishing private ownership of land and shelter. Beginning October 24, its Housing Justice Commission will teach participants how to establish “militant tenant unions” operating across cities and regions.
The four-session course belongs to DSA’s Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee, known as ETOC. Its program website spells out the destination: eliminating private ownership of land and housing and replacing it with social housing. This is an organizing effort directed against the right to own property, using rental disputes to build a socialist movement.
Training Organizers Against Landlords
The fall cohort meets online on October 24, October 31, November 7 and November 14. Each session lasts approximately two hours. Participants study the tenant movement, campaign development and how to grow an organizing committee into a mass organization.
The announcement encourages recruits to bring others with whom they intend to establish a tenant union. Its ambition is to produce organizations capable of coordinating campaigns across an entire city or region.
The Housing Justice Commission describes its work as building tenant militancy against landlords, developers and real-estate capitalists. Alongside organizing and policy work, it provides political education in socialist theory, history and methodology.
That language identifies owners and builders as class adversaries. The people who purchase properties, finance construction and assume the risks of providing rental housing become targets of a movement committed to ending their ownership.
An owner who fulfills every agreement and maintains every apartment would still stand on the wrong side of ETOC’s ultimate objective. The program opposes the ownership arrangement itself.
Building a National Socialist Base
DSA is developing this approach into a national organizing strategy. The Housing Justice Commission says a resolution passed at its 2025 national convention supported the project “Socialists: Organize Your Workplace, Organize Your Building!”.
The project seeks to deepen DSA’s connections with working-class communities through tenant organizing. It highlights chapters that have built neighborhood campaigns, partnered with independent tenant unions and established new unions.
Its immediate objective is an organizing cadre in every DSA chapter, with ETOC serving as the training mechanism.
The strategy gives DSA a way to turn dissatisfaction over housing into lasting political organization. An immediate dispute opens the door. Campaigns develop recruits and leaders. Tenant unions provide a continuing structure through which socialist organizers can exercise influence.
DSA is building institutions capable of carrying its politics into buildings and neighborhoods across the country.
Property Rights in the Crosshairs
The commission’s social-housing principles call for redistribution from landowners and challenge the private-property relationship underlying the housing market. They prioritize tenants’ collective decisions while expressly withholding equal standing from developers and investors. The principles envision shifting control toward tenants while denying developers and investors an equal role in governing social housing.
Private ownership comes with costs and responsibilities. Owners commit savings, take on debt, maintain buildings and bear financial losses. ETOC’s declared goal would eliminate that ownership rather than establish standards for responsible conduct within it.
The program states its abolition goal broadly, without explaining how small landlords, owner-occupied properties or individual homeowners would be treated. The opposition is to private ownership of land and shelter as a category.
Calling its replacement “social housing” does not make the loss of property rights less consequential. The proposed transformation reaches into Americans’ investments, livelihoods and control over what they own.
A Growing Organizing Network
ETOC reports 680 training attendees representing 74 DSA chapters, 34 mentorship cohorts and 15 new tenant unions since 2022. Those are the commission’s own figures.
The program also offers graduates the opportunity to apply for two months of mentorship, followed by continuing office hours connecting cohorts nationwide. The structure helps carry instruction into local campaigns and sustain organizing afterward.
Crosscurrents previously reported on the Marxist Unity Group, a separate DSA caucus demanding armed “people’s militias” to replace police. ETOC’s materials establish a different radical objective: eliminating private housing
A communal responsibility quickly becomes a communal lack of accountability. This will not end well if attempted.