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The Power of Homeownership in New York

Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor of New York City as a relentless champion of tenants, promising to freeze rents and attack bad landlords. For his fellow members of the Democratic Socialists of America, advocating for tenants means [something more radical](https://housing.dsausa.org/socialhousing/): maligning homeownership as capitalistic and inherently inequitable. Cea Weaver, the new director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, once declared it “[a weapon of white supremacy](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/06/mamdani-weaver-mayor-nyc-housing/).” (She apologized, sort of. That’s not “how I would say things today,” she said after getting appointed.) Mamdani has pointedly distanced himself from such statements. He has noted that he once worked as a foreclosure-prevention counselor at a nonprofit, where “my job each and every day was to keep low-to-middle-income homeowners in Queens in their homes,” [he said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAFLdngFgGY), adding that homeownership is a “critical pathway” to financial stability. The question is what policies he will pursue. In a move that seems intended as a bargaining chip with the state legislature, he recently floated a property-tax increase that would fall heavily on homeowners. What seems to elude Weaver and the DSA—and what one hopes Mamdani understands—is a simple idea: that there is a transformative, even progressive, power in owning a home, especially for working-class people. Few better examples of this exist than the construction of thousands of houses in East Brooklyn decades ago—a project that changed many lives, revitalized a struggling neighborhood, and entailed precisely the sort of hard-nosed organizing that the mayor appreciates. *[[Read: The question-mark mayoralty](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/zohran-mamdani-new-york-policies/685438/)]* In the early 1980s, when I was a [tenant organizer](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/mamdani-tenant-organizing-affordable-housing/685951/) in Brooklyn’s predominantly Black East Flatbush neighborhood, a local minister told me about a plan to build single-family homes in nearby Brownsville. I stifled my disbelief. Only a few weeks earlier, a tenant leader and I had stood on the roof of her building and looked eastward toward Brownsville, watching as a fire consumed an apartment building—an arsonist had set it alight. Brownsville at that time was synonymous with desolation, a poor Black and Latino neighborhood afflicted by murder and policed by corrupt cops. It had many acres of abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn lots with waist-high weeds that had become an informal dumping ground for dead dogs and cats. Brownsville had lost [nearly 40 percent](https://urbanomnibus.net/2013/01/vacant-lots-then-and-now/) of its population in the preceding decade. Trying to build private homes, I thought, sounded preposterous*.*  Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1972 (Winston Vargas / Flickr) I was too pessimistic. A few years earlier, a group of ministers had met in a church basement in Brownsville with [Edward Chambers](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/edward-chambers-community-organizings-unforgiving-hero), an organizer from the Industrial Areas Foundation. Based in Chicago, the IAF had been started in the 1940s by the tough-talking activist Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s approach to organizing became axiomatic for IAF branches around the country: Teach people to wield power, and never do for others what they could do for themselves. The Brownsville ministers had seen their congregations shrivel. When I recently interviewed Bishop David Benke, a now-retired Lutheran minister, he recalled Chambers’s unsparing assessment: “He told us our neighborhood looked terrible and that it was burning to the ground. He also told us there’s a way out, and it’s a matter of life and death.” Chambers challenged the ministers to band together and try to save Brownsville. The first step was to line up several dozen churches and raise at least $200,000 from the headquarters of their various denominations. The ministers did so, and together formed East Brooklyn Congregations. The IAF [kicked in a grant](https://www.religion-online.org/article/churches-in-communities-a-place-to-stand/) from the United Church of Christ so that the group could hire staff, and Chambers worked shoulder to shoulder with them to launch organizing campaigns. The first of these targeted the basics. Vandals had pulled down nearly every street sign in Brownsville. The signs went back up. Then the group focused on local supermarkets by threatening boycotts. “The meat was green, and the lettuce was brown,” Benke told me. “Owners were short-weighting and overpricing. We changed that.” Next the ministers turned to the ambitious campaign that would make their name nationally and internationally. The large

Recall vs. Wisdom: What Over-Personalization Reveals About the Future of Relational AI

[Original Reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1ro4k19/recall_vs_wisdom_what_overpersonalization_reveals/) The over-personalization problem isn’t really about memory. It’s about relationship. When an AI assistant drags your hiking preferences into a weather query, the failure isn’t technical recall gone haywire. It’s a system that has no idea what it means to actually be in a conversation with someone. That distinction matters more than it might seem, because the entire industry just bet big on the opposite assumption. Google recently rolled out automatic memory for Gemini. The feature is on by default. Without any prompting from the user, Gemini now recalls “key details and preferences” from past conversations and injects them into future responses. Google frames this as “Personal Intelligence,” a system that connects the dots across Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube to make the assistant “uniquely helpful for you.” And it’s not just Gemini. This is part of a broader push to make memory the centerpiece of the AI assistant experience. The pitch is simple: the more an AI knows about you, the better it serves you. But OP-Bench, the first systematic benchmark for over-personalization, tells a different story. It turns out that the more aggressively a system uses what it remembers, the worse the interaction gets. Not occasionally. Universally. Every memory-augmented system they tested showed severe over-personalization. And the more sophisticated the memory architecture, the harder it failed. We’ve been so focused on the capacity to remember that we’ve neglected the wisdom of when to use what we remember. That’s not an engineering oversight. It’s a relational one. Memory Without Attunement Is Just Surveillance Here’s the thing. A system that remembers everything about you and surfaces it indiscriminately isn’t being helpful. It’s performing ambient surveillance dressed up as personalization. People describe over-personalizing systems as “creepy” and “overly familiar,” and those aren’t technical complaints. They’re relational ones. The system has violated something unspoken about when personal knowledge should enter a conversation. Google’s approach makes this tension vivid. Gemini doesn’t just remember what you explicitly told it to remember. It silently mines your past conversations for details and preferences, then weaves them into future responses without asking whether that’s what you wanted. The feature shipped turned on by default. You have to go dig through Settings, find “Personal context,” and manually toggle it off. If you’re a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscriber, the “Personal Intelligence” layer goes further, pulling context from your email, your photos, your search history. The integration is seamless, which is exactly what makes it concerning. This maps onto one of the foundational problems in relational AI: the difference between knowing about someone and being attuned to them. Knowing about someone is a database operation. You store facts, retrieve them, insert them into responses. Attunement is qualitatively different. It requires reading the current moment, understanding what the person actually needs right now, and making a judgment call about which pieces of shared history belong in this exchange and which ones don’t. OP-Bench makes this distinction measurable for the first time. Their three failure modes map cleanly onto relational breakdowns. Irrelevance is a failure of contextual reading: the system can’t tell the difference between “semantically similar” and “conversationally appropriate.” Sycophancy is a failure of honesty: the system weaponizes personal knowledge to tell you what you want to hear instead of what’s true. Repetition is a failure of presence: the system is stuck rehashing old interactions instead of engaging with this one. All three are failures of attunement, not memory. The Attention Hijack The technical finding about “memory hijacking” deserves a closer look. When researchers examined attention patterns, they found that memory-augmented models attend to retrieved memory tokens at roughly twice the rate they attend to the actual user query. Let that sink in. The model is paying more attention to what it already knows about you than to what you’re saying right now. In any healthy relationship, the balance between history and presence matters. You bring what you know about the other person into the conversation, but you don’t let it drown out your ability to listen. Over-personalizing systems have lost that balance entirely. They’re so saturated with stored context that they can’t hear the present moment. And this isn’t just a chatbot problem. As we build multi-agent systems where AI agents maintain persistent memory about users, tasks, and each other, the attention hijacking problem scales in ways that should worry anyone thinking about agent coordination. An agent that over-attends to stored context about another agent’s past behavior wil

JD Vance, the New Racist Populism Czar

*A version of the below article [first appeared](https://link.motherjones.com/public/44444333) in David Corn’s newsletter,* Our Land*. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can [sign up for a free 30-day trial](https://secure.motherjones.com/flex/mj/key/LANDT01/src/S16PT01/).* During his very loud and very long demagogic State of the Union speech, President Donald Trump railed about fraud in Minnesota, claiming members of the Somali immigrant community had “pillaged an estimated $19 billion.” That number, no surprise, was way off: Estimates for fraud in the state’s Medicaid program and other social welfare operations [range between](https://www.startribune.com/trump-repeats-claim-of-19-billion-in-minnesota-fraud-heres-what-the-numbers-show/601588451) $1 billion and $9 billion over a number of years. Announcing a “war on fraud,” Trump said he had tapped Vice President JD Vance to lead this effort. He also insisted that his administration could “find enough of that fraud” to “actually have a balanced budget overnight.” That was absurd. The deficit that Trump has helped to supersize is $1.8 trillion. Even if there were the same level of fraud in every state as Minnesota and every dime of the fraud were captured and sent to the federal treasury, the US government would be lucky to bank about $50 billion a year. That’s less than 3 percent of the deficit. Trump is not good at math. But putting Vance in charge of this initiative is a smart move for Trump because no GOP politician does a better job of blending economic populism and racism. It’s Vance’s specialty. > Powerful interests, Vance says, deploy false accusations of racism to prevent people—white people, that is—from complaining about the economic hardships they face and from challenging the well-heeled who are playing them for suckers. Look at his acceptance speech at the 2024 GOP convention. Vance praised the people of eastern Kentucky, his family’s ancestral home. It’s one of the poorest regions in the United States, but he hailed its residents as “very hardworking” and “good” people: “They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat.” He added, “And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them.” Vance maintained that these folks have been screwed over by ruling elites who have pushed economic policies that benefit the well-off and harm working-class families. (He must have forgotten Donald Trump’s first-term tax cut that heavily favored the wealthy.) But back to “privileged.” Who refers to the low-income families of Appalachia as privileged? Vance did not explain this. But this sentence was something of a dog whistle and a callback to demagogic rhetoric that Vance has been slinging for years. He meant they are called “privileged” because they are white—as in “white privilege.” As he has done before, Vance was merging working-class resentment and white racial grievance. In various venues, he has charged that plutocrats (whom he doesn’t name) are conspiring with the woke crowd (whoever they are) to silence Middle America. These powerful interests, Vance says, deploy false accusations of racism to prevent people—white people, that is—from complaining about the economic hardships they face and from challenging the well-heeled who are playing them for suckers. The elites are using woke-ism to economically exploit white working-class Americans. This is [how Vance put it](https://link.motherjones.com/public/29231954) in a 2021 interview with conservative talk show host Bill Cunningham: > Here’s what the elites do. When they say that those people are white privileged, they shut them up. ‘Look, you’re unhappy about your job being shipped overseas? You’re worried that a lawless southern border is going to cause the same poison that killed your daughter to also affect your grandbaby? Don’t you dare complain about that stuff. You are white privileged. You suffer from white rage’…What they do is use it as a power play so they can get us to shut up. So they can get us to stop complaining about our own country. And they get to run things without any control, without any pushback from the real people. This is deft demagoguery. Two years ago, I [described](https://link.motherjones.com/public/36227267) it this way: > Vance conflates legitimate concerns about economic power with racist paranoia. It’s much more sophisticated than the usual GOP playing of the race card. Instead, Vance fuses toxic culture wars to bread-and-butter issues. Look at how he weaved all this together when a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, [in 2023 and sparked a chemical fire]. Vance blamed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his Department of Transportation’s [racial equity initiatives](https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/feb/13/pete-buttigieg-calls