Does the middle class have rights to the city? Contingent rights and the struggle to inhabit Stuyvesant Town, New York

Abstract

From the housing project's inception, New York's Stuyvesant Town has been an unlikely site for struggles over inhabitance and social justice. Robert Moses used a public–private partnership to displace residents of the Gashouse district for the initially whites-only affordable housing project. Assisted by local rent-stabilisation legislation, Stuyvesant Town persisted as an affordable housing option until the early 2000s, when the new owners began converting the properties to market-rate rentals. An unlikely coalition of residents mobilised to block the sale, and by the late 2000s rent controls were re-established. This case links significant themes regarding social justice and housing including rent stabilisation, community activism, and neoliberal marketisation. We evaluate the utility of the right to the city perspective for understanding middle-class struggles in the context of housing financialisation. We argue that Lefebvre's right to the city applies to the Stuyvesant Town context, although the movement to protect affordable housing was led by middle-income residents who are not the traditional working-class agents associated with his concept. While remaining sympathetic to recent critiques over the vulgarisation of Lefebvre's principles, we argue that a focus on spatially contingent rights can transcend both a limited ‘politics of turf’ and empty ‘rights talk’ to create space for broadly empowered and inclusive communities.