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New York 2044 is a newspaper from the future. How did you come to this format to speculate on the city’s housing crisis?

Why speculate on the future? That question came out of my activism. I got deeply involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement. When I crossed Broadway into Zuccotti Park each day, I was entering a different country, a different world. We felt we were enacting a better, future-focused democracy.

But then it crashed down hard. It’s been a crazy whirlwind time since 2011. Hurricane Sandy hit right after, then the immigrant crisis and so many unfolding catastrophes internationally, plus, with Black Lives Matter, major social mobilization. And then, boom, Donald Trump comes in, and then the pandemic and January 6th. The times got dim.

How does one respond to all of this? In the Trump presidency, so many people were in emergency mode, and so was I. It was hard to think straight. Increased time online didn’t help; it just made it more and more comfortable to be “anti.” At some point, I identified the problem that I just couldn’t imagine a better future. I have an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist critique encoded deep into my brain, but I couldn’t access a vision of what things could be.

During the pandemic, it occurred to me to work with this problem by writing a science fiction novel. It takes place in New York, and it’s all about, what if kids who met in Zuccotti Park ended up sparking a revolution decades later? How would that play out? When you write a novel, your job is world-building, and you’re constantly confronted with your own limitations of how deeply you can imagine things. You keep having to bust through them. It soon becomes clear that one-dimensional, political slogan ways of thinking do not create an interesting world.

We’re pretty familiar with the science fiction novel as a format for speculating. But a newspaper usually operates in a different register.

Very true. I wrote the novel, and that strengthened my speculation muscles a lot, but the novel didn’t fully answer the question I’d gone into it with. One of the breakthroughs I had in switching to the newspaper format was that it doesn’t have to be me who speculates. I could bust through a lot more mental limitations if I’m interviewing people, tapping into perspectives I’m blind to. The actual future will come from these contrasting perspectives

Another aspect that drew me to the newspaper format was the medium’s relationship to truth. As a society, we’re experiencing a breakdown in how we relate to truth because narratives, data is more and more tailored for us in a hall of mirrors we can’t escape from. This troubled flow of information produces the political subject, who is then supposed to enact a democracy.

It was a big wake-up call to realize that over 90 percent of New York Times readers are Democrats. It’s so easy to consume a well-constructed narrative and forget that it’s so siloed. And you have to watch out for these blind spots that develop. You’re sitting there shaking your fist shouting “fake news” at the other side — but you are also probably also involved in fake news, right?

The extreme examples seem to come from the right wing, which pushes people to do things like storm the Capitol because they’re convinced an election was stolen. That thinking seems far away when you are in New York City, but just look at the discourse on housing. We’re in a time of ever-deeper contradictions, starting with the fact that in a blue city, in a bastion of the left, is where we experience the biggest housing crisis. It’s where the biggest class divides are.

I think it’s critical to invite these contradictions in and study them instead of willing them away. I was chasing after a format that could bring oppositional ways of seeing the world into one space. Newspapers have the front page with headlines telling different stories and opinions all at once. It doesn’t have to be a single narrative, it can be a weird soup. Your eye moves around the page, and you’re making your own story.

The 20-year timeframe is a very interesting one for speculation. It’s not now, but it’s extremely immediate and tangible, nonetheless.

A pretty common timeframe for a left-wing novel is 50 to 100 years. All the old people and all their dumb ideas die off. You need another full generation and then some to banish capitalism. Most importantly, you need enough time for a full revolution, usually a pretty nasty one. The old system crumbles and something new can grow. I wrote a novel like that. But it also kind of offloads responsibility. You’re just willing away a lot of people and a lot of contradictions.

With the 20-year timeframe, you’re either going to be looking at a pretty crappy dystopia, if things like the housing crisis continue on their current trajectory, or you imagine a nuanced shift. I worked with “informed optimism,” which means you are basically working with many of the same institutions, systems, and tendencies that exist today, and understanding how there could be the best possible scenario. When I interviewed people for New York 2044, I asked them if they could use the lens of informed optimism to imagine their scenarios.

The people you interviewed, by and large, are very grounded in the here and now. They are not artists and not in the business of imagining in those ways. How did you select them, and how did you bring them along in this worldbuilding exercise?

I interviewed some powerful activists, one developer, a top housing official, and many others. I think, for example, the perspective of Ingrid Gould Ellen from the Furman Center is close to what the governor put out in her last housing bill. I wanted to have the status quo represented. If I did it again, I would try to get somebody from the Real Estate Board of New York.

I was seeking out people who are deeply committed to a piece of the housing puzzle in New York City. They had to understand the logic of this puzzle in a way that others may not. I was curious how they would build out this 20-year shift.

Some of them would say to me, “I would like to imagine, for example, NYCHA housing being totally preserved. But I already know that’s not happening because I know what’s already in the pipeline.” That knowledge sort of breaks you free from what could be simply misinformed fluff, and then you’re dreaming up future nuts and bolts.

I guess I felt that futurism can be this very cold thing that is primarily obsessed with developments in technology. I wanted my futurism to be humanist. In my experience, a lot of people get involved in social movements and politics from a very emotional place. We have complex behaviors from our family histories and other experiences that drive us and shape the world.

I asked people: “What made you so committed to this? What’s your own personal housing story?” I wanted to bring out details of their identities and class experiences that fueled their perspectives. I was interested in how these different backgrounds might have led to mutually exclusive perspectives on housing.

The subject itself embodies that contradiction: home versus housing, the object of social policy or the incredibly deeply held and lived experience. That also appears in the format of your work. From the interviews you conducted, you created the newspaper reports from the future, but you also published zines with people’s housing stories in the form of graphic memoirs.

Can I ask you, a little bit more practically and prosaically, about your process with the folks that you worked with? I’m curious: How resistant or game were your interviewees, and how did you structure working with them?

I prepared an interview that started with their past. The questions transitioned to their present work. Then, as a transition to the future, I asked them: What is your theory of change and what are major changes you’ve seen in your lifetime?

I would sometimes conduct a sort of meditation into the future with them. It would take the form of a time-traveling subway ride. The idea was: you are moving around the city, you are in your body, going from mundane life today into the mundane, everyday life of 2044. Imagine little things happening, not just big ideas. Imagine what the city looks and smells and feels like.

You can’t just take a slogan like “Housing Justice for All” and build with that. Then you just paint a really flat picture of everyone having a home in New York, awesome, but it’s not interesting. What are the specifics? What are the forces opposed to this doing? There’s no way they’ve just disappeared! What is the new protest movement?

I saw huge contrasts in people’s ability to mentally inhabit the future. Some people seem to have a whole program in their mind ready to go. New York State Assemblymember Emily Gallagher was like that. That was part of what gave them energy. This harkens back to my initial problem with futurelessness, where I couldn’t locate that source of energy. Some people had figured that out, and it was really inspiring.

With other people, it was an impossible task to bring them into the future mentally. It just wasn’t happening, or it was so bleak. And if it had to be bleak, I would have to just report that. It was really interesting to see that contrast.

So many different visions coexist on the newspaper page, yet you’ve also brought them together under a certain shared reality — or imaginary. We understand there was a YIMBY bubble and a housing crash, and things got pretty terrible in the 2030s. Now these figures that we’re familiar with in the political realm are in new positions of power. This narrative fabric creates a certain platform for seeing this 2044 moment that everyone has come to in different ways but are still landing in together.

The newspaper makes a pretty good claim, as much as anything else, of representing reality — that’s one aspect of the medium. But there’s also the editorial part. One could say that the editor of New York 2044, which is me, is somebody who’s trying to go on a political journey.

For example, Alicia Boyd from Movement to Protect the People (MTOPP), is a powerful activist in the city who focuses on stopping construction projects around Empire Boulevard. I’ve known her for a long time. I worked with her on actions years ago. But today, when I have been thinking about the housing crisis, I conclude that NIMBYism is a major problem, even if it comes from progressive activists. More housing needs to get built, alongside opening up unused spaces and protections for existing renters. So I had a little bit of a hard time with what MTOPP was doing blocking almost any kind of construction, even if it included substantial affordable units. Feeling this way, I knew I wanted to include her perspective, and she invited me over to talk.

If you speak to Alicia about her experience in New York, she’s come by that perspective so honestly, through  her identity being a Black homeowner within the borough of Brooklyn. She actually became a homeowner because she won a tenant case in a previous era of gentrification. She has something she’s really fighting for in a way that reflects all experiences. That allowed me to reopen my mind towards that work and say, “No, that is part of what the city is.”

That’s why I’m trying to invite contradictions in and see what’s what. It’s really important that we do not get to choose who shares our reality. You do not get to banish people from your reality. You do not get to banish people from your city. Everyone in New York is a New Yorker, and you have to deal with that or leave.

I even wrote that in the newspaper: “The accumulated experiences of all the people in the city, all the faces the city has shown us. We aren’t going into the future without taking all of it with us and learning from it.” It’s like saying, “Whatever politics and whatever practical means are going to be implemented to deal with the housing crisis, it just has to come from everyone’s experience, and that’s the challenge.”

I was explaining the project to the developer I interviewed, and he said, “Oh, you’re trying to figure out the magic bullet.” Which is a funny way of thinking about it. If you take all these contradictions, is there some route through all of them? Probably not.

So, as the editorial board of New York 2044, who has been listening and learning, what’s the editorial that you would write in a second issue about housing abundance? Maybe there’s not a magic bullet, but a recipe? For all of the dissonance, for example, everybody was clearly imagining or pointing to the moment at which the state steps in to fix the situation with a lot more funds.

Right. Almost everyone acknowledged that’s the only way we’re getting out of this.

I don’t know if I’m ready to write an editorial about, “Here’s what I think from it.” My editorial is more like putting all this stuff together and drawing things in a certain way.  I think in the future-inflected articles, there is a dimension in which without literally speaking to each other, people are speaking to each other.

For example, the developer, who’s thinking mainly about how to make profits in the private market, was explaining to me something that I think is good for people to understand. It’s that, basically, developers do not make money on affordable housing. For decades, the answer has been to give them massive tax breaks, and they still don’t meaningfully build affordable housing, due to loopholes. So we get the worst of the worst solutions, right? The point is to understand that you can’t quite point your finger at developers — the problem is baked in a deeper level than that.

The developer was one of the interviewees who was super bleak about the future. I couldn’t help them to find any hope. But then they paused and said, “I think that there’s going to have to be more Mitchell-Lama-type development for housing to become affordable in NYC. That’s the only solution.” It was an admission that the housing market does not solve housing problems.

Looking for solutions that can magically resolve all the contradictions of housing under capitalism, we look to policy solutions, and of course, many look for the technological fix. It’s not a speculation without drones, and robots, and artificial intelligence, but also some building technologies come up again and again in New York 2044. What’s the place of technology in this future?

There’s no daylight between technology and the system we live in. It’s the closest thing to our modern-day shared ideology and industrialism. There are techno-positivists in the project, and then people who are more Luddite. Marquis Jenkins, an elected official who grew up in NYCHA housing, and active in organizing NYCHA residents in New York, really believes in technology. He was talking about techno-entrepreneurialism, how there could be incubators coming out of NYCHA housing and businesses building repair robots.

I thought that all fit together in a cool way. The contradictions are never ending. If you think about robots doing the work that unionized people do now, you come to a labor problem immediately. Solve one problem and another pops up. Felice Kirby, from the North Brooklyn Angels, said something interesting on this topic. She’s imagining these buildings providing tailored housing serving different stages of your life and cross-generational social connection, but also robots and drones involved in delivery and stuff like this. And she said that if you’re imagining a better future for people, you can’t necessarily imagine a beautiful future. Practical things have to happen. It’s not necessarily what you want to happen, but it’s serving people, so you make space for it. You have to create space for ugliness.