No, Our Homes Aren’t a Plaything for Speculators

Disproportionately impacting the low-income and poorly housed, COVID-19 was, in the words of one London politician, “a housing disease.” Historically, working-class people fought for and won public housing as a way of getting homes that wouldn’t cost their lives. Today, we need to improve on that past achievement — but in the United States as in Britain, that will also mean confronting some common foes.

British and American housing policy have been shadowing each other for decades. Both have aggressively pursued private home ownership as an economic and ideological weapon,...