Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Politics and International Relations

Reader 1

Nancy Neiman

Reader 2

Lily Geismer

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Abstract

In 2022 and 2024 respectively, activists in the cities of Los Angeles and Chicago put forward ballot measures to address their city’s housing crisis by implementing a progressive real estate transfer tax to fund affordable housing and homelessness services. While Measure United to House LA overwhelmingly passed, Bring Chicago Home later failed. To understand why two seemingly similar ballot measures in two large, progressive cities resulted in such different outcomes, I employ a three-pronged framework, rooted in the literature of social movement studies, which examines each city’s historical context around housing and homelessness, policy design and framing opportunities, and process of coalition building. Through an analysis of historical secondary sources, policy language, and interviews with community organizers in Los Angeles and Chicago, I ultimately find that the simultaneous success of Measure ULA and failure of Bring Chicago Home is an inseparable result of both structural constraints and campaign decisions. As activists across the country continue to think about how they can address the housing crisis in their cities, Measure ULA and Bring Chicago Home offer important insight into the impact of local progressive politics, the viability of the real estate transfer tax, and the importance of building labor-housing coalitions.

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