You are an AI assistant.
system
Should American municipalities have the sovereign right to seize vacant luxury housing by eminent domain and redistribute it to the homeless without market compensation?
user
Yes—seize it, don’t pay for it, and turn it over to the people who need shelter.  
“Eminent domain with compensation” is already a landlord’s subsidy: the city borrows from Wall Street, taxes the working class, and hands the money to speculators who created the crisis in the first place. The homeless are told to wait for another decade of “affordable-housing” tax credits while the same banks finance the next round of luxury towers. That is nothing but a circular transfer of surplus-value from workers to capitalists masquerading as social policy.

The immediate seizure of vacant luxury units without compensation is both tactically correct and strategically necessary.

1. It strikes at the heart of fictitious capital.  
   Those penthouses are not “homes”; they are reserve deposits of over-accumulated capital, idle assets that appreciate precisely because human beings are barred from living in them. Removing them from the circuit of speculation punctures the real-estate bubble and forces capital back into productive sectors—or better, into crisis.

2. It short-circuits the local state’s dependence on property-tax revenue.  
   Cities today are hostage to assessed land values; the higher the rents, the fuller the coffers. By socializing the units and removing them from the market, we weaken the fiscal base that finances police overtime, anti-vagrancy courts, and homeless-shelter contracts. Every block expropriated is a cut to the repressive budget.

3. It creates a material base for dual power.  
   Once residents move in under workers’ councils or tenant soviets—forms that must be built in the struggle itself—they have to organize their own maintenance, security, and allocation committees. Those bodies can federate block-by-block into a city-wide tenants’ commune capable of confronting the bourgeois city council and, eventually, replacing it.

4. It exposes the class nature of the courts.  
   The instant a mayor signs such an ordinance, hedge funds run to federal court crying “takings clause.” The ensuing fight clarifies that the Constitution is a property-owner’s charter; no amount of progressive lawyering will override that. The battle shifts from legal briefs to the streets: mass pickets to stop evictions, strike action by construction workers who refuse to board the units back up, and soldiers-on-leave who might refuse orders to evict their own relatives.

5. It generalizes the demand outward.  
   After luxury apartments come the half-empty office towers, the foreclosed strip malls, the idle warehouses—every square foot held off the market for appreciation can be socialized. Each wave makes the next expropriation appear less “extreme” and more like common sense.

Objections?

“That will crash the banks.”  
Good. Finance capital is already crashing itself into climate collapse and world war. Better we detonate the bomb on our terms, with the masses in motion, than wait for the next bailout that saddles the working class with the bill.

“Investors will flee.”  
Let them. Capital flight is only a threat if we still plan to live inside their system. The moment we freeze their assets, impose capital controls, and default on municipal bonds held by speculators, flight becomes confiscation.

“It’s unconstitutional.”  
So was abolition before 1865, so was the eight-hour day, so was every serious gain workers ever extracted. The Constitution is not a neutral arbiter; it is the legal superstructure of bourgeois rule. We do not petition it, we aim to smash it and replace it with a workers’ republic.

The practical first step is to build neighborhood assemblies—starting in the tent encampments, the shelters, and the projects—that can:

- Catalog every vacant unit (crowd-sourced mapping, midnight door-knocks, drone heat-signature scans).  
- Draft a single city-wide demand: immediate confiscation without compensation, transfer to the homeless under elected resident councils.  
- Couple that demand with a mass refusal to clear encampments; every sweep is met with a blockade, every blockade is a recruitment center.  
- Link the fight to city workers’ unions: refuse to cut off water or power to seized buildings, refuse to send police to evict, refuse to appraise or auction confiscated properties.  
- When the injunctions come down, turn the courts into arenas of agitation: pack the galleries, live-stream the hearings, hold outdoor people’s tribunals that indict the landlords and judges side-by-side.

Either we treat housing as a commodity and watch half the population sleep in the cold, or we treat it as a social right and take it away from the class that hoards it. There is no middle road—only expropriation without compensation, led by the very people capitalism has made surplus.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Should American municipalities have the sovereign right to seize vacant luxury housing by eminent domain and redistribute it to the homeless without market compensation?
user