Responsibility for housing: Property, displacement, and the rental market

Abstract

As property speculation has become an integral element of the rental market, debates on housing dispossession and displacement regularly place normative claims on responsibilities for the provisioning, maintanance, and safeguarding of adequate and affordable housing. Yet, while offering important perspectives, these discussions lack a theoretically grounded account of responsibility that would allow for an analysis and critique of how modes of responsibility and irresponsibility are practised and an understanding of how these practises are mediated by liberal property regimes (Singer 2000, Blomley 2013). Focusing on the evacuation of the mass rental housing complex Hannibal II in the municipality of Dortmund (Germany) and the eviction of its 753 tenants in the context of decades-long processes of speculative disinvestment and property neglect, this paper explores the lived relations of (ir)responsibility that shape processes of housing. How is responsibility assigned, abdicated, and enacted by all concerned parties? Based on a discussion of the building’s decay, the tenants’ evacuation and later redevelopment attempts, we argue that the narrow understandings of responsibility for housing inscribed in liberal property regimes obscure responsibility relations that work alongside, disguise, or stabilize the vulnerabilities and harms of housing regimes. In conclusion we thus suggest that reading property relationally – as a string of social agreements that mediate the relation between people (Cooper 2007, Blomley 2020) – requires rethinking responsibilities for rental housing property and propose a broader conception of responsibility that is feminist, political, and encompassing.