From Urban Housing to Rural Nursing Homes, the Working-Class Fight to Protect Public Goods From Private Buyers

“It’s all ideological,” says Judy. “It’s not based on reason or what’s best for people.” When these homes are sold to private buyers, the quality of care goes down and the costs for families go up as the corporations who have purchased them squeeze out every last dollar of profit.

But still, many county boards are putting the nursing homes up for sale. Why? Because for two whole generations now we’ve been told that public goods are no good at all.

I was a baby when Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’“ I grew up, and now have raised my own child, in the long shadow of that sentiment. While the public schools I went to had libraries full of books and brand-new blacktops on which we played dodgeball, by the time my son went to school, the roof of his gym leaked into mop buckets, and he didn’t have a science teacher for two full years.

These conditions are not due to something wrong with public education; they are due to lawmakers’ stripping away all the money. We live in North Carolina, where, for the last two decades, state legislators have prioritized tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy few over public education for the rest of us. Our state now, embarrassingly, ranks 50th in public school funding.

Lawmakers now point to the leaky roofs and lack of science teachers that they caused to rationalize subsidizing privately run charter schools. In 2023, our General Assembly dramatically expanded the state’s voucher program and eliminated the income cap—diverting $4 billion in taxpayer money over the next 10 years to pay for wealthy people to send their kids to private schools.

Kaaha has a phrase for this: “Demolition by neglect.” She says that what is happening to Glendale Townhomes—and to Wisconsin’s nursing homes and to my North Carolina neighborhood’s school—is not because public goods are no good, but because private interests and the investor class make the government rotten to the core.

Kaaha was 14 when she and her mother learned that MPHA wanted to tear down their home. This felt terrifying because Glendale had been such a source of stability for them.

Neighbors began organizing under the name Defend Glendale. Over the next decade, they canvassed the neighborhood, drove turnout at public meetings, and petitioned MPHA and their local government to no avail. In what Kaaha describes as a “true Hail Mary move,” they decided to document the neighborhood’s history by researching, collecting artifacts, and interviewing current and former residents. They hoped to bring people together through the history project, and maybe their documentation could secure historic designation for the neighborhood, protecting it from demolition.

It didn’t work. While the exhibit and documentary they made won multiple awards, they were unable to get historic designation or prevent demolition. This past June, the official announcement was made: Glendale will begin to be torn down next year.

“At least we documented that this was here,” Kaaha said to me as we walked around. “So everyone can know.”

From urban Minneapolis to rural Wisconsin, pooling our resources to create public goods can change Americans’ lives for the better. The seniors in Wisconsin have repeatedly told me they remember a time when the government invested in people and it worked well for them. That’s one reason why they are fighting so hard to preserve what’s left of that better system, such as the publicly owned nursing homes. One woman told me that both her children attended government-funded daycare during World War II—at the time, it was provided to any working mother, regardless of her income. Another told me about the government subsidies and loans she and her husband were able to get to purchase a farm in the 1970s, changing their life trajectory. An older man described to me how he received a well-funded public education that prepared him well for his livelihood while accruing no debt—something that seems foreign, distant, and impossible to me. So many of us have not experienced the goodness of having public goods; we can hardly imagine what is possible.

Between Musk’s DOGEing of the federal government and the Big Beautiful Bill’s decimation of SNAP and Medicaid, we are experiencing the destruction of public goods at a breakneck speed. So while it’s probably cold comfort to the families who are losing their homes, the fact that they documented Glendale is important. We can’t let ourselves forget what is possible just because profiteers are rewriting the rules.