On September 9 the incumbent mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, Brett Smiley, lost his reelection bid to a twenty-seven-year-old democratic socialist named David Morales. It was the first time an incumbent mayor failed to win his party’s primary in the city’s history, and the latest in a wave of progressive victories over establishment Democrats that began with Zohran Mamdani last year.
Under the slogan “A Providence for All,” Morales emphasized the cost-of-living crisis, public education, protecting immigrants, and a Mr. Rogers-style neighborliness. He cut a whimsical figure on the campaign trail, in his signature bright blue suit and floral tie. In videos shot around the city, he shook hands with passersby as they recounted their struggles to pay rent, cover bus fare, and educate their children. The Smiley campaign spent more than $1.7 million, the lion’s share on television ad buys (much of it fear-mongering attacks on Morales for being soft on crime). The Morales campaign raised about $500,000, mobilized thousands of volunteers, and knocked 80,000 doors in a city of 190,000 people.
More than anything else, Morales ran on housing, which has become the animating issue in Rhode Island politics. When rents rose precipitously during the Covid-19 pandemic, Providence arguably felt the effects even more intensely than cities that had long been expensive, like San Francisco or nearby Boston. Between 2020 and 2024 the median rent increased more than 40 percent. In 2024 The Providence Journal reported that the city had seen the highest year-over-year rent increase in the country—16 percent. What was already a crisis for low-income Rhode Islanders became a problem for the middle class, too, as home values shot up all over town. More and more people entered homelessness for the first time.
The Providence left, including Morales, has spent the last six years arguing that the housing crisis epitomizes the inequality that defines our era. They have responded in part by organizing poor and working-class tenants to negotiate with their landlords for better conditions and more affordable rents. Smiley, meanwhile, sided with a political establishment that has catered to investors and wealthy transplants to Providence and blocked efforts to curtail landlords’ power over their tenants. In the eyes of many Rhode Islanders, he also came to represent the landlord class itself: although the Morales campaign almost never mentioned it on the campaign trail, it’s common knowledge in the state that Smiley owns three homes, including a modernist manse in the pricey beach community of Tiverton, and is married to the real estate tycoon Jim DeRentis.
This turned the mayoral race into a proxy for a broader contest between renters and the real estate industry over who would determine the city’s direction. The same themes were central to the campaigns of eight left-wing candidates for city council who ran alongside Morales—all of whom won their races, installing a progressive majority in City Hall. According to The Providence Journal, it was tenants who decided the election, with three renter-heavy neighborhoods likely delivering Morales’s victory.
A week after Morales won the primary, he celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday. He posted a photo on social media of a gathering at Charles Place, a subsidized housing development. Earlier in the summer, the tenants of that building formed a supermajority tenant union to demand that their landlord collectively bargain a new lease. In the photo, the presumptive mayor sat beaming in front of his cake, the members of the union—of his coalition—arrayed behind him.
Morales grew up in Soledad, California, where his mother raised him on her own. When we spoke after the primary, he remembered couch surfing when the family was between apartments, until they were able to secure a public housing unit when he was twelve years old. Diligent and driven from an early age, he graduated from the University of California, Irvine, as a teenager, and in 2019, at twenty, became the youngest person to complete Brown University’s public affairs master’s program.
The next year Morales challenged his state representative, Daniel McKiernan, who was running for a fourth term representing a working-class section of Providence. On the campaign trail he talked about housing, education, and the need to raise the minimum wage in Rhode Island, which at the time was $10.50 an hour, significantly lower than in neighboring states. Morales won, securing nearly 50 percent of the vote.
By the time he took office in 2021, everyone in Providence was talking about “the housing crisis.” There was a general sense that the moment’s defining issue had been met with an inept and inadequate response. Since 1991 all thirty-nine cities and towns in Rhode Island have been required to ensure that at least 10 percent of their housing stock meets affordability requirements, but as of last year only eight cities had reached the benchmark. Rhode Island ranks among the lowest in the nation for housing production. Activists covered the city in stickers reading “Freeze Rents, Not People,” the letters icy blue and snowcapped. More and more people stood on street corners and meridians with signs pleading for help.
For elected officials, the central question was what the government could or should do to address the problem. The state created its first-ever cabinet-level housing secretary position in 2022—a move that was intended to pave the way for a statewide housing plan, and which Morales supported—but in its first three years the department ran through as many directors. Meanwhile, establishment Democrats responded by trying to facilitate affordable housing production. Between 2022 and 2025, lawmakers in the state proposed historic bond measures alongside legislation that loosened regulations around accessory dwelling units, revised zoning laws and the state building code, and repurposed vacant buildings, among other measures. These policies promised more units and a more stable housing market in the future but didn’t ameliorate the struggle many Rhode Islanders faced writing their rent check every month. Of the fifty-two bills that leadership put forth in a four-year period, only one directly addressed tenant issues—a ban on rental application fees that had been introduced by one of Morales’s progressive colleagues in the statehouse, Cherie Cruz.
Smiley likewise responded in Providence by trying to spur developers to build housing. He eased zoning regulations, sped up permitting processes, and increased funding for new construction. In campaign literature this year, he claimed to have overseen the creation of thousands of new housing units across income levels during his term.* “I talked to people in the business community, construction and development people, along with nonprofit developers,” Smiley told me. “What we tried to do was do everything. It was our belief that there was no silver bullet.” In the most recent budget, Smiley also continued funding for legal services that provide eviction defense, as well as funding to enforce minimum housing standards, and proposed a $1 million fund that would provide up to $3,000 in emergency relief to people facing eviction or foreclosure. But although he acknowledged the crisis tenants were facing, he allocated far more resources to new development—through tax breaks and subsidies—than to tenant protections.
At the same time, a vision in which the public sector assumed more responsibility for the crisis was taking shape on Providence’s grassroots socialist left. One organization in particular, Reclaim Rhode Island, begun after Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, was increasingly focused on challenging the power of real estate developers, financial institutions, and landlords. Its first major foray into housing organizing was a 2022 campaign to create the country’s first state-level public developer. Modeled on efforts in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Seattle, Washington, such an institution would not only provide state-backed financing for building affordable housing, but also maintain public ownership—an alternative to the prevailing approach, which relies overwhelmingly on the private sector. The goal, Reclaim and its allies argue, is to build the kind of “social housing” constructed in Red Vienna in the 1930s: dense, thoughtfully designed apartment buildings that appeal to people at a range of income levels. Since 2022 the state has appropriated $20 million for public development, but the funds have ultimately been redirected to existing public housing authorities rather than put toward exploring a new model.
For Reclaim, the campaign went beyond the effort to build new units, as significant as that might be. “We are not ‘housing people’ who started a housing and tenant organization,” said Daniel Denvir, the group’s cofounder and current cochair (and the host of a popular left-wing podcast, The Dig). “We’re socialists who were exploring how to build power and decided upon housing as the way to do that.” To push the public developer model was to insist that the government should use public resources to reduce the power of the real estate industry and private financial institutions.
At the same time, Reclaim had started knocking on tenants’ doors. Nationwide, tenant organizing picked up steam during the Covid-19 pandemic; a few tenant union efforts had flared up in Providence but quickly fizzled out. Hoping to seed a broader movement of organized poor and working-class people, Reclaim pursued a strategy pioneered by the Connecticut Tenants Union and SEIU 1199 New England, in which tenants form a supermajority in a building and collectively bargain leases with their landlord.
The tenants of the first landlord Reclaim took on were living with floods, rodents, and malfunctioning toilets. Accustomed to being ignored, many were eager to talk to the organizers who showed up at their doors. “I was fighting all this on my own for the first, like, two years,” one woman—who had been trying in vain to get the landlord to fix her apartment’s exposed drywall, broken heaters, and cockroach infestation—told me when I reported on these efforts at the time. Within two years the group had helped organize the tenants of two corporate landlords who collectively owned more than four hundred units. But the project never coalesced into the statewide movement Reclaim envisioned. In both cases, the landlords retaliated, stoking fear among tenants, and novice organizers struggled to respond; the fledgling unions soon petered out. (They did result in legal action against the landlords; both cases are ongoing.)
Meanwhile, Morales had been working in the statehouse to advance tenant protection legislation. During his first two years in office, he introduced bills to limit rental application fees, cap rent increases, and replace lead pipes carrying water into people’s homes—but without a broad tenant movement behind them, and facing a well-funded landlord lobby, the bills never made it out of committee. (Morales did work on successful legislation that facilitated access to health care for pregnant people, lowered the price of insulin, and legalized cannabis, as well as a bill that required landlords to accept Section 8 housing vouchers, which preceded the leadership’s push to introduce housing packages.)
The attempts to empower tenants in their buildings and in the statehouse began to come together in late 2022. Reclaim was encountering an issue that often exemplifies landlord impunity in Rhode Island: childhood lead poisoning. Organizers met several families whose children had been exposed to lead paint, and at least one whose children were severely poisoned, despite state laws requiring landlords to safeguard tenants against such hazards. At around the same time, the attorney general in Rhode Island decided to prioritize enforcing lead laws and asked legislators to pass new protections. While Reclaim knocked doors, Morales and his progressive colleagues in the legislature (many of whom Reclaim and other left-wing organizations like the Rhode Island Working Families Party had helped to elect) introduced several bills to protect tenants from lead.
Reclaim and other housing advocacy groups backed the legislation and a bigger slate of pro-renter bills by turning out dozens of tenants to the statehouse for a rally. Morales spoke, as did Cruz (the two are among a small minority of lawmakers who are also renters). “We flooded the statehouse with over one hundred tenants in red shirts and delayed session from starting,” Morales remembered in a recent interview. “They made it very clear they had to pass tenant protections.”
In hearings over the next few months, fierce and coordinated opposition from landlords attempted to convey the opposite. One landlord wrote in a public comment that the rental registry law was “a gross, tyrannical step by the statewide government and an attack on a citizen’s privacy,” and “a blatant attack on those that are trying to provide housing.” Another threatened that he was “done in RI, because of your shenanigans, I am liquidating.” A third warned: “If you pass this, I’m going to evict every single tenant.”
Tenants also told their stories to lawmakers. One mom testified with a Ziploc bag of lead paint chips in her hand. Organizers from Reclaim had knocked on her door a few months earlier, and she was ready to speak out. “This is what falls off my walls every day, and this has lead,” she said at a hearing. “I have to live in fear of this right here falling off every day. And nothing gets done.” Less than two months later, the governor signed the lead safety measures into law.
Morales decided to primary Smiley in January 2025. At the beginning of the year, a polar vortex sent temperatures in Rhode Island into the teens. Homelessness outreach workers warned that many people faced spending the night outside, in tents. Since the pandemic, the state’s homelessness response system has been overwhelmed, leading to long waits for temporary shelter beds. Advocates called on Smiley to open an overnight emergency shelter for the duration of the cold snap, but he refused.
On the night of January 7, when the temperature outside was 17 degrees, two young, progressive city councilors, Miguel Sanchez and Justin Roias, decided to take action. Against the mayor’s orders, but with the blessing of the council president, they turned the city council chambers into a makeshift shelter for the night. At the time I covered housing in Rhode Island for the local NPR station. I showed up to find that they had worked with social service agencies to coordinate warm meals and a coat drive, and had placed a sign in front of the council chambers that read “Welcome, Warming Area / Bienvenido Área de calentamiento.”
Over the next few hours, dozens of people showed up to sleep on the benches in the council chamber. Many seemed tentative as they climbed up the marble stairs and passed through the heavy wooden doors. A team of legal observers stood by, and community members and other elected officials, including Morales, arrived to help. Donations of blankets, food, and hot chocolate poured in from the community. About thirty homeless people ultimately spent the night. So did Morales, who recalled in a recent interview that he left feeling an urgent need to respond further. “We had to keep our neighbors from dying on the street,” he said. “It made it very clear to me we needed a shift in leadership.”
At the time the Providence left was casting around for a way to build on its victories from 2023. Morales and other legislators, with the backing of Reclaim, spent two sessions pushing a package of legislation that they named a “tenant bill of rights.” At its core were just cause eviction protections, which prevent landlords from evicting tenants unless they have a qualifying reason. Two years in a row, the bills died in committee. “It was clear we’d hit a wall,” Denvir told me in a recent interview. “We had some power in the statehouse, and we had achieved everything we could with that power.”
But a new fight over housing was taking shape in the city council. The council president, Rachel Miller, had expressed support for the idea of a rent stabilization ordinance when she began her term in 2023, while Smiley, then the incoming mayor, had made clear that he opposed such a measure. In the summer of 2025 a special election for a city council seat in one of Providence’s toniest neighborhoods unexpectedly became a referendum on the issue; after an establishment candidate came out adamantly against rent stabilization, voters chose the only candidate who supported it (she also got a boost from a Reclaim endorsement and the organization’s help campaigning). In January Miller introduced the ordinance.
Rent stabilization became a new focal point for the debate about how the government should respond to the housing crisis. The proposal fiercely divided the city council, but a coalition of groups, including Reclaim, worked to secure a majority, and the measure passed in April. Polling showed 74 percent of likely Democratic voters in Providence supported it (only 59 percent of households rent in the city). Yet Smiley vetoed the law as promised. He said in our interview that he “did it on principle because it’s wrong for the city,” and that “sometimes you have to do what’s right, even if it’s unpopular.” That decision made David Morales the rent stabilization candidate. Morales’s campaign was already focused on the cost-of-living crisis, but after the veto he began to more explicitly cast the mayor as the pro-developer, anti-tenant choice. “That was the evidence that we needed to solidify to our neighbors that the city mayor is not on the side of working people,” Morales said. It showed, he told me, that “we had a mayor that was more susceptible to corporate interests than he was paying attention to the needs of our community.”
The rent stabilization fight also fueled a number of other primary races in the city and the state—especially after the council failed by a single vote to overturn the mayor’s veto. To left-wing groups that had scrambled for a supermajority, the city councilor who decided their defeat was John Goncalves, who represents Ward 1, which encompasses much of the Brown University campus, all of downtown, and the mostly residential neighborhood of Fox Point. That neighborhood, which was once the heart of Rhode Island’s Cape Verdean community before a highway redevelopment project displaced many residents, has among the highest density of renters in the city, many of whom are college or graduate students. Campaign finance records show that Goncalves received large political donations from real estate developers and the landlord lobby in Rhode Island. The day of the vote, he sent a clear message when he neglected to show up in the council chambers.
In June Miguel Martinez Youngs, a policy staffer for the city council who was the principal author of the rent stabilization ordinance, quit his job to primary Goncalves. (Prior to working for the council, Youngs was first the organizing director and then a cochair of Reclaim.) Over the course of the campaign, Goncalves spent over $140,000 dollars—believed to be the most any city council candidate has ever spent on a race in Rhode Island. Youngs spent just over $20,000, and drew for his field operation on the coalition of progressive political organizations and volunteers that had also coalesced behind the Morales campaign. He ran on a clear message: he was the guy who wrote the ordinance, and he was challenging the guy who ensured it never became law.
In electing Youngs and his allies, many Providence residents seemed to be consciously voting for their own interests as renters. To Reclaim, this was a clear vindication of its strategy. After its first two tenant union campaigns dissolved into slow legal processes, the group raised money to hire full-time organizers, including a former union staffer from the militant SEIU 1199 New England who brought his experience with labor to housing. The group with which Morales celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday, the Charles Place Tenant Union, is one of four supermajority tenant unions that Reclaim has helped organize in the past year, all of which are in the process of collectively bargaining leases with their landlords; Reclaim envisions them as the first chapters in its project to build a statewide Rhode Island Tenants Union.
In the meantime, these unions may have tipped the scales in one of the fall’s closest city council races. Justin Roias, who had worked to turn the council chambers into a makeshift shelter that cold January night, and who has supported the tenant organizing efforts in his ward, faced a primary challenge from a pro-business centrist. On election day, the ward saw a 30 percent increase in voter turnout. Denvir of Reclaim suggested that formerly disaffected, now organized tenants may have been inspired to take part in the political process. Roias won by fifty-five votes.
At an election night party for the entire leftist slate on September 9, hundreds of people gathered in the courtyard of one of the repurposed mill buildings in Providence’s West End. The local brass band that often punctuates progressive gatherings in the city set the tone. Surrounded by the remnants of a long-gone industrial economy, campaign volunteers, local politicians, and the grassroots groups that carried Morales and his allies to victory gathered under a common vision for what the city could become. One after another, the candidates took the stage. Morales climbed the steps to chants of “David! David! David!” (Few people call him by his last name.) “Solidarity was on the ballot!” he proclaimed. “We chose to believe. We chose hope over fear.”
Also on the ballot: a movement that has swept leftists into city government in a growing number of places across the country—not just New York but Seattle, Ann Arbor, and Washington, D.C. As they take office, their challenge will be to deliver on a mandate for transformative change while facing down material constraints, especially fiscal ones. As Piper French wrote in a recent article about New York City DSA and the Mamdani administration in The Drift, “The terrifyingly high-stakes reward is the chance to make these intellectual questions material—to determine, together and apart, precisely what different could look like.”
The young Mamdani administration suggests just how complicated that task can be, as it tangles simultaneously with a federal government sending ICE agents into the city and a leftist base incensed by the NYPD’s collaboration with them—all while launching a 2-K program and filling more than 200,000 potholes. But unlike other socialist mayors, Morales will be working with a legislative branch that largely shares his vision for the city. A month after the primary, the Providence City Council threw its support behind the socialist Miguel Sanchez to serve as the next council president come January.
The Democratic establishment has yet to articulate a clear response to this wave of challengers. But the results in Providence show that a vague appeal to affordability falls short when twelve million tenant households in the United States spend more than 50 percent of their monthly income on housing. None of the candidates denied that the city and the state face a crisis. Yet as Morales’s campaign manager Ben Shanahan said in an interview, many establishment leaders still “refuse to actually commit to any material, immediate relief for people who really need it.”
Morales has vowed to sign a rent stabilization ordinance within his first one hundred days in office. He plans to establish a public developer at the municipal level, and to expand the city’s capacity to hold landlords accountable for unsafe living conditions. Smiley, meanwhile, has declined to endorse Morales in the general election. A few days after the primary, the outgoing mayor advertised a rental unit he owns at $5,500 a month—a 47 percent increase since 2020.