Abstract
This article treats housing stigmatization as a social process of symbolic ascription, connected to inhabitants, housing form, housing tenure, and/or housing location. Stigmatization research tends to focus on personal stigmatization, or to examine housing only in relation to territorial stigmatization, while housing research tends to focus on health and policy. This article demonstrates that housing stigmatization, which is differentiated from personal stigmatization and territorial stigmatization, is a viable unit of analysis in its own right for stigma research. Seven core elements are identified, showing that housing stigmatization is: (1) relational; (2) contextual; (3) processual; (4) reinforceable; (5) reversible; (6) morally loaded; and (7) treated as contagious. Comprehending the elements of housing stigmatization will benefit destigmatization efforts.
Highlights
In May 2017, Toronto Life magazine, a popular self-styled “guide to life in Toronto,” ran an article titled “We Bought a Crack House.” Authored by one-half of a young affluent couple, the article tells their story of purchasing a “threestorey detached Victorian on a corner lot” (Jheon, 2017) in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, renowned for its poverty, single room occupancy housing, community organizing, and gentrification
In the case of housing stigmatization, this means that the negative symbolic ascriptions that attach to a particular housing unit, for example, must be repeated and reasserted
This article demonstrates that housing stigmatization is a viable unit of analysis in its own right for stigma research, by attending to housing as a central point of mediation between persons and broader societal membership, and to the specificity of the place of particular housing units in their immediate context
Summary
In May 2017, Toronto Life magazine, a popular self-styled “guide to life in Toronto,” ran an article titled “We Bought a Crack House.” Authored by one-half of a young affluent couple, the article tells their story of purchasing a “threestorey detached Victorian on a corner lot” (Jheon, 2017) in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, renowned for its poverty, single room occupancy (hereafter, SRO) housing, community organizing, and gentrification. The house was a “crumbling Parkdale rooming house, populated by drug users and squatters and available on the cheap,” with a “post-apocalyptic vibe inside,” but the couple sensed that “[b]eneath the grime, dust, junk and assorted drug paraphernalia was a potentially stunning home” (Jheon, 2017). The article recounts their travails evicting existing residents and deconverting the rooming house, and throughout it is peppered with the beforeand-after images that so thoroughly infuse the propertyporn obsessed age of real estate speculation. I consider potential applications and limitations of the general theory
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