Housing in Ithaca and Tompkins County is notoriously expensive. Teresa Halpert and Tom Eisenberg explain that many erroneously assume that adding any new housing -- even luxury housing -- will make excess housing filter down to the bottom. This doesn't work. It's too slow. Landlord upscale rather than reduce rents. Worst of all, there are not enough middle-income people through whose hands housing units would have to pass to make filtering work. New projects must be required to include affordable units.
Ithaca DSA members produce a half-hour radio program on WRFI Community Radio called The Inquiring Socialist. The program airs at 10:00AM on alternate Fridays.
Ithaca DSA has a weekly cable access television program "Ithaca DSA Presents", a half-hour talk show covering local, national and international politics, economics and labor. It airs Tuesdays at 7:00 pm and several more times each week on Spectrum Cable Channel 13 in Tompkins County; DVDs of the program can be borrowed from the Alternatives Library in Anabel Taylor Hall on the Cornell Campus.
We will also be working on making Cornell pay for better and free TCAT, putting socialists in City government, supporting labor unions and affordable housing, and opposing police militarization and jail expansion in this community.
What We Believe
Democratic Socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically—to meet public needs, not to make profits for a few. To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed through greater economic and social democracy so that ordinary Americans can participate in the many decisions that affect our lives.
We are dedicated first of all to democracy, and to bringing democracy into the economic sphere. We are not a political party that runs candidates. Rather, we are a political organization that engages in many activities as needed: electoral politics, issue politics, organizing, protest, and education.
