Credit: Peter Serocki
Urban life today is marked by severe economic and social polarization. Gone is the old way of life in the middle class when young couples could start their families in their own homes in stable communities. That middle class is being replaced by a wide economic and social canyon. As James Baldwin famously wrote, being poor is expensive and if you are not ultra-rich in the big city, then you are ultra-poor. That is the reality when wages, salaries and subsistence cannot keep up with the rising price of practically everything it needs to stay fed, housed, clothed and healthy.
In two of the largest U.S. cities – Chicago and New York – a new movement around the idea of public wealth for public good may be taking shape. It does not come from Wall Street or Silicon Valley, but from working-class neighborhoods and their lived struggles. And it has made itself heard in recent elections.
The idea of public wealth for public good revolves around the concept that the resources and assets owned collectively by the public should be utilized in ways that benefit society as a whole. This can include a wide range of initiatives and policies aimed at improving the quality of life for all citizens, promoting social equity, and ensuring sustainable development.
Public wealth can take many forms, such as natural resources, public infrastructure, government-owned enterprises and financial assets. The key principle among them is that these resources should be managed and invested in ways that maximize their positive impact on the community. This might involve funding public services like education, healthcare and transportation. It might also involve investing in renewable energy projects or supporting social programs that address issues like poverty and inequality.
By prioritizing the public good, governments and institutions can create a more inclusive and equitable society, where the benefits of economic growth and development are shared more broadly. This approach also emphasizes the importance of transparency, accountability, and public participation in decision-making processes, ensuring that the management of public wealth aligns with the needs and aspirations of the community.
In Chicago, where the median household income is around $72,000, the cost of living index is at 120 – above the national average – and the notable expense is transportation. The basic one-way public transit fare is $2.25. Chicago’s poverty rate in 2024 was estimated at 17.2 percent and poverty is concentrated on the city’s South and West sides. Overall prices for food at home in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin region rose by 2.7 percent from August 2024 to August 2025.*
Brandon Johnson was elected Chicago mayor in 2023 on a program aimed at undoing the economic and social damage left by four pro-corporate mayors who followed progressive Chicago mayor Harold Washington after his death in 1987.
In New York, where the median household income is around $76,000, the cost of living index is at 178 and the notable expense is housing. New York’s poverty rate was estimated in 2024 at 17.3 percent and poverty there is attributed to high housing costs. Overall prices for food at home in the New York-Newark-Jersey City area jumped 3.5 percent from August 2024 to August 2025.*
In the 2025 New York Democratic mayoral primary, Zohran Mamdani, a progressive state legislator, defeated a former governor. With the general election coming on November 4, the workers in the city’s five boroughs must mobilize to elect Mamdani. Among his rivals on the ballot are the same former governor (listed as an independent) and the leader of a controversial local group (who is running as a Republican).
Johnson’s Green Social Housing initiative for Chicago asserts that housing is not a commodity to be traded, but a right to be protected. In New York, Mamdani’s platform for city-run grocery stores and fare-free transit challenges the logic that basic survival must be monetized.
These are not technocratic tweaks of the billionaire-backed housing policy. These initiatives are radical breaks. They defy decades of austerity budgets, privatization of social services and widespread dispossession of workers and their families. They represent a growing refusal to accept the capitalist premise that public institutions must serve private interests. Instead, they ask: What if the city itself became the builder, the provider and protector – not in order to extract profit, but to deliver justice?
PHILOSOPHY OF CHANGE
This movement around public wealth for public good is philosophical at its core. It asks what kind of society we are building – and for whom. It challenges the architecture of governance to reflect not just efficiency, but ethics. Not just growth, but dignity.
The philosophy of such defiance is:
- In Chicago, the city becomes a developer of green, affordable housing – reclaiming land and labor for the public good.
- In New York, the city becomes a grocer and transit operator – dismantling the capitalist myth that markets alone can feed and move us.
Programs such as these are rooted in class solidarity, environmental justice and democratic control. They do not manage inequality – they confront it. They do not conform to what exists; they envision what ought to be. They are not utopian fantasies; they are the political seeds of a future way of life planted in the soil of the present.
In communities everywhere in the United States, the question is no longer whether reform is possible. The question is whether we the working class will seize this moment – not as a policy window, but as a moral imperative and as a political opportunity to promote class unity.
Whether this is the beginning of a revolutionary transformation depends on what happens next. The dark shadow of military occupation is growing longer in America’s cities and ICE is terrorizing workers struggling for their basic needs. But if proposed models like the ones in Chicago and New York spread, if they inspire organizing, if they awaken a deeper political consciousness – then they may mark the birth of a new urban order. One where cities that today are engines of extraction become tomorrow sanctuaries of solidarity, bringing us that much closer to the final defeat of fascism.
*(Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index; American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau)
Published on October 1, 2025
This article originated in Rally!
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Good Job !