Housing Justice Research Articles

Practicing urban citizenship: housing justice activism from Jakarta’s margins

Notwithstanding the claims to equality associated with (neo)liberal democratic citizenship, capitalist cities are characterized by stark inequalities in access to land and living space. In response, grassroots movements and marginalized residents are struggling for a more socially and ecologically just urbanism. We conceptualize these movements as democratizing cities by practicing urban citizenship, following the tradition of scholarship that loosens citizenship from its confines as a bundle of rights and responsibilities conferred by nation-states on individuals. Such practices seek to realize existing rights rarely extended to marginalized urban residents and advocate for novel rights, e.g. to shelter, place, the city, and a voice in governance decisions affecting residents’ lives. We analyze the strategies and tactics pursued by Jakarta’s housing justice movement from Indonesia's democratization (reformasi) in 1998 to the present, seeking to assert and expand urban citizenship rights. Creatively moving between existing invited political spaces of citizenship and newly invented spaces, depending on political opportunity structures, movement leadership styles and local circumstances, the movement has experimented with strategies and tactics ranging from confrontation to negotiation, signing political contracts with governors, to now seeking to participate in the formal political process. We critically reflect especially on using a political contract to facilitate rights to place and security of tenure in ‘illegal’ kampungs. We conclude by reflecting on the insights our case study brings to how urban poor social movements’ citizenship practices contribute to democratizing cities and advancing socio-spatial justice.

Rethinking housing inequality and justice in a settler colonial city

This paper brings the housing studies literature into conversation with scholarship on settler colonialism to consider questions of housing justice in settler colonial societies. It begins from an understanding of Indigenous dispossession as not simply an historical context but an ongoing process in which housing is deeply implicated through its embeddedness in colonial land and property regimes. Furthermore, processes of exclusion, neoliberalisation, financialisation and gentrification have made housing central to the production of racial inequality in (and beyond) settler colonies. Liberal notions of inequality that dominate most housing policy and some scholarship are, therefore, inadequate; what is required is research and intervention oriented towards housing justice – the meaning of which is best understood through intellectual and practical engagement with movements struggling for it. In this spirit, the paper presents the story of a prolonged struggle in so-called Sydney, which suggests how housing initiatives and campaigns led by Indigenous people are iteratively reconstructing existing political and economic structures in ways that address commodification, dispossession, exclusion, and displacement. This story points to a need for housing justice scholarship to engage with concepts of reparations – an engagement towards which this paper, in its final section, makes some small but hopefully helpful steps.

CATALOGING PROTEST: NEWSPAPERS, NEXIS UNI, OR TWITTER?*

What is the best source for tracking protest activity? Newspaper sources remain dominant, but other options are tempting. This article compares three differently sourced catalogs of protest events in Toronto from July 15 to September 15, 2020. The widely discussed Movement for Black Lives and housing justice cycles of protest are visible in all three catalogs, but apart from this, the field of protest they reveal is very different. While the coverage by the newspaper with the largest circulation, the Toronto Star, shows Toronto protest as state-centered, domestic, and progressive, other catalogs that include television, radio, and social media content reveal a more diverse, fragmented, and globalized protest field. Catalogs sourced from Nexis Uni and Twitter show the significant presence of diasporic protest. These observations suggest new limits to relying on mainstream newspapers for representing the full array of protest activity. We recommend that, moving forward, researchers experiment with media aggregators to incorporate sources such as television coverage and social media into their research while remaining aware of the additional challenges such data generate.

Contesting Housing Inequality: Housing Rights and Social Movements

This article engages with a leading contemporary criticism of social and economic human rights, namely that because such rights are organised around sufficiency norms, they are ill‐equipped to challenge and overturn forms of material inequality. The sufficiency thesis raises issues around the nature of social rights and their capacity to deliver transformative change, and lays a direct challenge to social movements employing human rights talk and practices in campaigns for social justice. This article breaks new ground by taking the right to housing as a case study for assessing the sufficiency thesis. It is argued that while there is some support for the sufficiency thesis in dominant institutionalised legal forms of the right to housing, the wider claim of the thesis, that social rights are incapable of challenging forms of material inequality, does not hold water. This argument is supported by a broad approach to housing rights that engages with the work of the UN Special Rapporteurs on housing and which takes seriously the way in which contemporary social movements in Spain and Scotland employ housing rights in their struggles for housing justice.

Life-Affirmative Struggles for Home Across Borders

Issue 5.1 of the Radical Housing Journal (RHJ) examines the current state of struggles for housing and home amidst capital-accumulation-induced urban restructuring worldwide. The authors discuss the enduring impact of settler colonialism on land and housing rights, particularly for Indigenous peoples. Feminist, queer, and trans perspectives are brought to the forefront, emphasizing the leadership roles played by marginalized communities in housing justice struggles. The issue showcases the important contributions of Black women, women of color, and queer activists in fighting for housing justice and challenging oppressive power structures. Additionally, this issue presents alternatives to the current dangerous status quo, urging us to envision radical futures where humanity respects ecological limits, ensures universal access to resources, and grants autonomy in their utilization. It envisions a world where housing is available to all, allowing individuals to choose their desired living arrangements. The 'Pursuing Tenant International: Learning from the Struggles in Abya Yala' conversation series further amplifies the voices of tenants, organizers, activists, artists, and thinkers engaged in cross-border struggles. These conversations shed light on the challenges faced by communities fighting for their right to home and dignified living conditions in Los Angeles and Mexico City.

Indigenous organizing for housing justice: Lessons and challenges

What are the particular challenges to organizing for housing justice in Cancún, Mexico? How has the pandemic altered strategies? In January 2023, anthropologist M. Bianet Castellanos met with Magda (a pseudonym), a Maya activist who was one of the leaders of the quest for housing justice in the Colonia Mario Villanueva in Cancún. Castellanos documented this struggle in her book Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtedness in Mexico (Stanford University Press 2021). This conversation was an opportunity for Magda to provide an update on the status of the informal settlement’s longstanding battle to procure formal land titles to their plots. They discuss the lessons learned from this decade-long struggle in the hope that this case will resonate and inform housing struggles in other parts of the world.

Learning from Barcelona’s grassroots housing struggles: Towards a transformational Degrowth agenda

This article contributes to the nascent literature on housing for Degrowth. It recognises that housing plays a pivotal role in the creation and perpetuation of socio-ecological injustices, and therefore must be a core strategic element of a transition towards a Degrowth society. I argue for a deeper integration of bottom-up, scalable strategies and class politics in Degrowth housing proposals in order to create the widespread and emancipatory social transformation called for by the Degrowth agenda. The militant research for this paper was rooted in a case study of the Sindicat d’Habitatge de Vallcarca (Vallcarca Housing Union; SHV), which is part of Barcelona’s multifaceted grassroots movement for housing justice. The analysis first explores the synergies between Degrowth and the SHV using a Degrowth framework, and then looks beyond this framework, asking what both movements can learn from each other’s theoretical and strategic approaches. It highlights the SHV’s grassroots, class-based politics of solidarity and social inclusivity, and explores how the SHV could benefit from engaging with the ecological and intersectional politics of Degrowth. The article raises the importance of building connections between post-growth theories and radical housing struggles on a broader scale, in order to tackle top-down and growth-based ‘sustainable housing’ initiatives and create genuinely transformational and emancipatory housing alternatives.

Navigating the housing crisis: A comparison of international students and other newcomers in a mid‐sized Canadian city

AbstractThis article investigates the housing experiences of international students in comparison to other newcomers in the mid‐sized Canadian city of St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, with a focus on how they navigate housing crises. Drawing on recent literature on housing justice, a quantitative survey of 188 participants, and 30 qualitative interviews, the findings reveal that international students and other newcomers are at different stages of their housing careers, have different needs and goals, and are experiencing the affordability crisis differently. Housing discrimination is a pressing concern, especially for international students who are subjected to intersectional prejudice, exploitation by landlords, and amplified challenges due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. The article argues for inclusive housing and immigration policies that acknowledge international students as part of the Canadian housing market and ensure their rights to housing.

Cracking buildings, cracking capitalism: antagonism, affect, and the importance of squatting for housing justice

In this paper I argue that squatting provides a concrete and theoretical location for dismantling binaries between successful and failed resistance. Focusing on the development of a political and affective consciousness and the inherent antagonism within squatting above the temporality of an individual squat or occupation helps to recentre the ‘urban political’ and understand the value and power of the urban commons. I combine radical democracy and affect theory to argue for the centrality of squatting in challenging urban capitalist hegemony. Not only does squatting transform consciousness, but the physically and emotionally supportive practices that it engenders helps to return the emotive as well as the political to the urban environment. I support this claim with reference to the successful 2015 Aylesbury occupation in London, which the occupiers approached with affective solidarity and a desire to reclaim space through antagonistic urban insurrection.

Redress and worldmaking: Differing approaches to algorithmic reparations for housing justice

A reparative approach to algorithmic justice provides a compelling alternative to existing fairness-based frameworks, which are often inadequate for challenging the technological perpetuation of unjust social hierarchies. The definition of “reparations,” however, is philosophically contested. I discuss two interrelated but distinct notions of reparations: reparations as accountability and redress for past injustice, and reparations as a constructive worldmaking project focused on present and future justice. Each of these perspectives offers different recommendations and provocations for how to implement algorithmic reparations. I apply this to a case study of housing injustice in the US and offer three interpretations of “algorithmic reparations” in context: first, we can litigate instances of algorithmic discrimination in housing. Second, we can use computational methods to compute damages and demand redress for structural housing injustice in the past. Finally, we can repurpose algorithmic methods to imagine more radical resistance efforts that connect incremental reform to large-scale structural change for the future.

Radical Housing Justice Within and Beyond Caring

AntipodeEarly View Introduction Radical Housing Justice Within and Beyond Caring Michele Lancione, Corresponding Author Michele Lancione [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-9018-3562 Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning (DIST), Polytechnic and University of Turin, Turin, Italy[email protected]Search for more papers by this author Michele Lancione, Corresponding Author Michele Lancione [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-9018-3562 Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning (DIST), Polytechnic and University of Turin, Turin, Italy[email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 15 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12958Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. 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Real Property Supremacy: Manufactured Housing and the Limits of Inclusion through Finance

Manufactured housing (MH) communities have emerged as a high-profile and lucrative asset class. Despite this, it is costly or impossible to get loans to buy homes in most mobile home parks. This article explores this ostensible contradiction—that whereas MH parks are desirable and liquid assets, the individual homes that compose them are not. We explore the implications of this contradiction for housing justice as well as financial and environmental vulnerability. We argue that the marginality of MH in U.S. housing markets is rooted in the privileging of real property above personal property. We describe the origins and impacts of this “real property supremacy” in two parts. In the first, we outline the macro-historical context of real property supremacy using a variety of sources, including interviews with federal officials and industry experts as well as document analysis. In the second, we connect this macro context to its micro consequences, drawing on interviews with MH residents, nonprofit and social-service practitioners, and park managers and owners in Tucson, Arizona. We conclude that state-supported property hierarchies create conditions where constrained housing options, semiformal financial practices, and unique tenure forms combine to (re)produce unique and intersecting forms of vulnerability in MH communities.

Part B Drawing the Curtains in the House of Justice: Analyzing the Impact of Pandemic Measures within Manitoba Courts on the Open Court Principle, Access to Justice, and Charter Rights

Part B Drawing the Curtains in the House of Justice: Analyzing the Impact of Pandemic Measures within Manitoba Courts on the Open Court Principle, Access to Justice, and Charter Rights

Homeless youth‐led activism and direct action: Lessons from a participatory research project in Tio'tia:ke/Montréal

AbstractThis article explores the involvement of youth with lived experience (LE) in activism and research aimed at addressing youth homelessness in Canada. Based within a youth‐participatory action research project in Tio'tiá:ke/Montréal, Canada, we reflect on how young people described their own activist organising, as well as the practical ways we may harness actions that homelessness youth are already doing to create communities and solidarity. The authors are members of Youth Action Research Revolution (YARR), a research team primarily made up of youth with LE of homelessness. We position the analysis at an intersection of our own experiences and 63 interviews with youth aged 16–29 conducted by YARR from 2018 to 2021. Conceiving of participatory, youth‐led research as a form of direct action we outline lessons learned from our own research and LE. Young people within our team and participants in YARR's research shared critiques of State systems while outlining the work that they undertook with their peers to act on issues of housing precarity, often eschewing activism aimed at State processes or institutional reform in favour of direct action. This article proposes a mode of fostering youth‐led, socially just change around homelessness—one that shifts conversations from inclusion to solidarity, and recognises the radical potential of research by‐and‐for young people. The authors conclude that research and advocacy on homelessness is always inherently political for young people with LE, and that harnessing the direct action that youth already do to survive is not only a socially just form of mobilising, but can contribute to broader activism towards housing justice.

The Intersections of Energy and Housing Justice: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Intersections of Energy and Housing Justice: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

‘Stop the monster, build the marvel’: movement vulnerability, youth organizing and abolitionist praxis in late liberal San Francisco

ABSTRACT Based on a larger ethnographic project in San Francisco, this essay illustrates the housing justice work of youth participants in San Francisco’s Mission Roots youth organizing program. I introduce the concept of movement vulnerability to describe how developing ideology and political vision was central to their activism. This article draws from abolitionist political thoughtto highlight the carceral dimensions of displacement and gentrification in San Francisco. More importantly, an abolitionist lens allows us to recognize the creative and visionary dimensions of Mission Roots youth organizers’ work. Furthermore, this article offers a reminder to youth studies and education scholars that organizing is a method of transforming material conditions and pursuing social justice projects, rather than a mere ‘intervention’ to promote conventional notions of academic and youth development.

Housing justice, mobilization, and financialization: A conversation from the Antipode Institute for Geographies of Justice

In June 2022, a group of activists, students, and scholars gathered in Barcelona for the 8th annual International Geographies of Justice Summer Institute (IGJ), Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, co-sponsored by Antipode and the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy. IGJ attendees included people from within movement and activist spaces, academics, and non-profit organizations who share the common vision of working toward housing justice. This article features a collective conversation that took place with IGJ attendees who participated in a public panel discussion attended by activists, community members, and people interested in hearing from local and international panelists about the state and direction of the housing justice movements in Glasgow, Berlin, New York, and Barcelona respectively. Thematically, the conversation held among IGJ attendees to produce the following manuscript focused on the broad and interconnected pillars of housing injustice that repeatedly arose in conversation throughout our time together in Barcelona, including financialization, activism and organizing, and housing justice movements broadly speaking.

The Housing Question a century and a half later: Notes from New York City

New York City serves as an entry point for a brief reflection on today’s housing question. Drawing on Friedrich Engels’ inspiring work in the late 19th century, it is argued that some issues he pointed out are still present and have become endemic to the capitalist city, while others have emerged amidst recent economic and health crises. In the US economic growth machine and in one of the global capitals, working-class, vulnerable, and unemployed populations still suffer precarious and unworthy dwelling conditions, and finding a place to live is gradually becoming more complex. With many people struggling after the pandemic, homelessness is also growing. The situation comes after decades of defunding public housing, dismantling rent regulations, and neglecting welfare protections in an increasingly financialized housing market that privileges profits over human rights. However, these issues are not unique to NYC; similar accounts can be found throughout urban geographies worldwide. We need to think locally and globally about the current housing question, improve cooperation across housing justice groups and social movements, and prompt a debate about ways to rethink the tenancy regime alongside the capitalist system that has proven incapable of providing housing for everyone.

Careful Data Tinkering

In this paper, we describe and analyze the data practices of an activist non-profit, the Housing Justice League. We focus on their Tenant Power Hotline, a community outreach tool for tenants facing eviction and seeking organizing support. This research contributes to existing scholarship that examines data practices and the use of information and communication technologies in non-profit and grassroots organizations. To this existing scholarship, we share the structure of a counter-institution: an organization that strives to operate outside the non-profit industrial complex. We then interpret the work of Housing Justice League through the lens of care, identifying homebrewed databases and data fragmentations as negotiations between care and efficiency. We argue that care is enacted through the assemblage of the technical systems, and present tinkering as an alternative approach to developing data practices.?

Earning Housing: Removing Barriers to Housing to Improve the Health and Wellbeing of Chronically Homeless Sex Workers

For many sex workers, accessing and maintaining housing is one of the central reasons for engaging in sex work. Simultaneously, one of the most stringent barriers to accessible and affordable housing is the stigma and discrimination against sex work as a livelihood. This paper explores the relationship between barriers to accessing housing for sex workers and the systems that hold the barriers in place. This paper is based on qualitative research conducted by Ocean State Advocacy’s research team. Using quantitative analysis of 100 surveys and qualitative analysis of 35 interviews conducted with sex workers living in Rhode Island, this paper discusses the ways housing improves the physical health, mental health, and overall wellbeing of sex workers. By including sex workers and centering their human rights in movements around housing equity and access, sex workers’ needs are prioritized while increasing understanding of stigma and systemic disenfranchisement within the field of housing justice.