For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960–2010 by Edward Murphy

Abstract

Edward Murphy, For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. 360 pp.In For A Proper Home: Housing Rights in Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010, Edward Murphy blends anthropology and history to tell story of generations of Chileans who have fought for right to a home of their own. No other quest, he argues, has so absorbed Chile's successive political regimes than making possible universal home ownership. Right wing governments believed that home ownership would turn urban rabble into obedient subjects. Christian Democrats believed that home ownership would weaken support for Marxist parties and turn urban poor into moral and proper citizens. Even Chile's Marxist parties prioritized home ownership, building thousands of single-family homes when they were in government and mobilizing illegal land occupations when they were outside.Murphy begins his book by discussing a dilemma: how to best help a poor family deal with immediate and dire circumstances they are confronting. Ironically, family's desperate situation coincides with fulfillment of their dream of home ownership. They are one of an array of families whose lives Murphy follows over a period of decades. In course of their valiant, almost futile, efforts to secure a home of their own, families face illness, job loss, drug addiction, beatings, torture, arrests, and multiple indignities. By end of book, most of these families have attained a home of their own. Contrary to their expectations, however, their suffering is far from over. By insisting that home ownership is an essential and non-negotiable right of citizenship, Murphy argues, Chileans now find themselves constrained by their achievement of home ownership and bounded notions of poverty reduction (270).Tracing theoretical literature, Murphy ponders paradox of Marxist parties promising private property in form of family homes. In Part One: Unsettled Foundations, he takes us back to mid-19th century Santiago to explain exactly how that happened. In colonial Chile, poverty and homelessness went hand in hand. President Vicuna Mackenna (1831 - 1886) constructed a sanitary buffer to protect Santiago's elegant, civilized, and enlightened center from barbarian and diseased African hordes on its periphery (45). The barrier rived city in two, a spatial layout that-despite shift of wealthy from center of Santiago to northwest suburbs-remains a defining feature to this day.1 Although President Mackenna renovated some existing tenements and low quality housing stock, his effort only succeeded in driving up rents, leading to mushrooming of makeshift shanties and spread of disease.Anarchist and Communist organizers in Santiago and Valparaiso responded to homeless crisis by launching massive rent strikes in 1925. A representative of Renters League, the umbrella group that had spearheaded protests, made following demand: We want each worker or employee to have his own hygienic and comfortable home... That is patriotism (54). Not only did Left make home ownership a central feature of society they proposed to build, they rhetorically mirrored elite's equation of home ownership with moral caliber, personal discipline, and appropriate forms of behavior (57). The homeless crisis grew more acute during Great Depression. Migration from countryside soared, continuing to climb even after country recovered. Between 1940 and 1970, Santiago tripled in size. Migrants slept in temporary shanties, pubic parks, and under bridges. Their dire situation made housing a central issue for left wing parties that constituted Popular Front (1938-1942) as well as for center left and center right governments that followed. Beginning in late 1950s, Marxist parties embraced illegal land occupations as a principal tactic and form of class struggle. …