Cracks within capitalism: Alternative rental practices and a politics of care among small-building owners in Chicago

Abstract

ABSTRACT The United States is currently in the fourth decade of an ongoing, and worsening, affordable housing crisis, due in part to neoliberal financialization and the retrenchment of social safety net programs. Research has illuminated the role that landlords play in maintaining, and profiting, from this neoliberal turn in the housing market. Meanwhile, low-income renters and other marginalized people have engaged in strategic resistance and activism, drawing on a politics of community care and collectivism that runs counter to neoliberal market ideology. It is within this wider context—a housing market where neoliberal and collective care politics clash—that I analyze the viewpoints and rental practices of a unique group of housing market actors: resident landlords, or people who live in the same buildings as their tenants. Among a wider sample of 52 owner-occupants, I interviewed 22 owners who held anti-oppression viewpoints, and who attempted to put their politics into practice by adopting atypical rental practices. Drawing on Black radical and feminist traditions in urban political economy, I theorize these activities as political decisions that created sites of opportunity, where building owners and residents attempted to reconfigure their relationships under capitalism, providing a window into possibilities for more caring housing arrangements.