Yet the truly unrealistic position is believing that deregulated housing markets will somehow, after decades of failure, suddenly begin producing widespread affordability. The evidence is overwhelming that they will not. Left to themselves, housing markets maximize return on investment, not human stability. Luxury construction thrives; low-income units stagnate. Rent rises faster than wages. Speculation accelerates displacement. Public housing deteriorates under chronic underfunding while private capital flows freely into high-yield developments.
To call this "natural" is to mistake policy choices for inevitability.
If anything, the realistic position is the one Mamdani actually represents: that reversing these dynamics will take sustained political will, public investment, and institutional rebuilding -- none of which can be accomplished by executive decree or cable-news bravado.
This is why ideological labels matter less than practical institutional policies. Passing tenant protections may not make headlines, but it changes lives. Securing funding streams for public housing repair may not trend on social media, but it prevents future crises. Rewriting zoning laws to allow community-controlled development may not satisfy the appetite for spectacle, but it reshapes what becomes possible over time.
In other words, housing reform requires democracy -- not performance.
In Against All Odds, accountability is not about scapegoats. It is about public reckoning with systems that were allowed to persist because they benefited the powerful and numbed the rest of us into acceptance. That kind of reckoning, whether in fiction or in real cities, cannot happen instantly. It unfolds through institutions slowly being repurposed for the common good rather than private extraction.
What Mamdani's first weeks in office really reveal is not failure, but the size of the inheritance: decades of bipartisan accommodation to a housing system that treats insecurity as an acceptable cost of growth.
If we are honest, the scandal is not that housing has not been fixed in three weeks. The scandal is that it was allowed to deteriorate for thirty years while political leadership congratulated itself on "vibrant markets" and "urban renewal."
Progressive politics, if it is to mean anything beyond branding, must be judged not by speed alone but by direction: by whether public institutions are being rebuilt rather than hollowed out, by whether power is shifting toward those who have long been excluded from shaping their own living conditions, and by whether economic life is being reorganized around human needs rather than speculative return.
Those metrics take time to register.
The Arc of Justice Alliance grew out of this same realization: that without new public imagination -- and new public institutions to match it -- we will remain trapped in systems that treat structural injustice as unfortunate but inevitable. Stories, movements, and policies must reinforce one another if democratic repair is to be more than a slogan.
That is why I write fiction alongside essays like this one. Not because stories replace politics, but because they can help us picture futures that our current institutions make difficult to imagine -- and therefore difficult to fight for.
Three weeks is not a verdict. It is barely the opening scene.
The real question is not whether Zohran Mamdani has solved housing yet, but whether liberal America is willing to stop mistaking ideological comfort for political realism -- and to admit that serious reform will always look dangerous to those who have grown accustomed to a system that works, more or less, for them.
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