Housing Justice Research Articles

‘This is not a ghetto’: Residents’ resistance and re-negotiation of neighbourhood narratives

Over the past few decades, there has been a wave of urban renewal of multi-ethnic neighbourhoods across cities in the Global North, and movements for housing justice have emerged. The literature on housing struggles has mainly focussed on collective acts of resistance, neglecting mundane and individual forms of resistance. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Mjølnerparken—a multi-ethnic public housing neighbourhood in Copenhagen, Denmark, targeted by the ‘ghetto legislation’—this article highlights residents’ various forms of resistance. Combining the ‘ABC of resistance’ framework with conceptions of place as continuously becoming, the analysis shows how residents enact a homeplace and re-negotiate the hegemonic narrative of their neighbourhood as a ‘ghetto’. Thus, the article contributes to the literature on housing struggles by broadening the understanding of resistance using ethnographic methods and an analytical framework from resistance studies. Simultaneously, it adds to the ABC framework by underscoring the place-making dimension of resistance.

Latin American networking and cooperative struggles in Argentina: A conversation with the Movimiento de Ocupantes e Inquilinos (MOI)

This conversation examines the Movimiento de Ocupantes e Inquilinos (MOI) in Argentina, a grassroots organization promoting cooperative, self-managed housing for over 30 years. Based on a conversation with Néstor Jeifetz, the article traces the origins of the MOI from the 1980s building occupations in Buenos Aires, through its connection to the broader Latin American cooperative housing movement, including the creation of the Latin American Secretariat for Popular Housing and Habitat (SELVIHP). The article explores how MOI’s efforts to reclaim vacant urban properties—such as the La Fábrica cooperative housing project—address the critical need for secure, affordable housing in a context of neoliberal economic policies and external debt crises. Jeifetz discusses the political ramifications of recent far-right victories in Argentina, which threaten hard-won social rights and self-managed housing initiatives, as well as the MOI’s role in resisting these policies through a framework of collective ownership, democratic decision-making, and mutual aid. By highlighting the intersections of housing with education, health, and labor, and situating the MOI’s work within a larger history of land and building occupations across Abya-Yala, this article provides a nuanced understanding of the ongoing struggles for housing justice in the face of both local and global neoliberal forces.

Marginalised agrarian traditions as a tool for climate justice

Many marginalised communities have long-standing food-growing traditions, yet the climate crisis imperils global food security and disproportionately impacts marginalised communities. Increasingly, researchers posit that networks of decentralised peri-urban agriculture can strengthen food security. In this qualitative study, I ask: what can we learn from marginalised agrarian traditions that might be useful to those marginalised communities in collectively surviving climate change? To answer that question, I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 23 marginalised food growers and community leaders in the deindustrialised city of Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA. I find that growing food helps to build resilience to food insecurity and climate change but is difficult because of land injustice. Policy and practice implications include the need for the following: (1) housing justice; (2) proactive planning in areas that are expected to serve as climate refuges; and (3) reparations and land rematriation to address the disparate impacts of climate disaster in marginalised communities.

Dispossessed exposures. Housing and regimes of the visible

Literatures and organising show us how, in contemporary racial financial capitalism, housing is formed through dispossessive histories and geographies. Here, we query how these enter into play in the visual regimes through which housing is seen and experienced. For if the visual realm is as much a construct as any other housing matter, finding a grammar to tap into its workings might become handy when its violent outcomes come to the fore. What is reproduced in the visual regimes of housing? What is offered and taken anyway? What might never be seen, and by whom? The article offers a tentative analytical approach to questioning what we call dispossessed exposures: the (en)visioning of homely futures that are deprived, already in the social construct of seeing with the house, the possibility of radical care for and of habitation. These ideas are unpacked through reflection on two films: Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables and Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouihl’s Gagarine. We offer these reasonings as a contribution to ongoing conversations in the renewed field of housing justice scholarship.

Housing Limitarianism: What’s Wrong with Owning Excess Homes?

ABSTRACT There is a growing contention in the Housing Justice movement from activists, theorists, and politicians that not only should everyone have enough housing, but there is something wrong with having too much of it. This paper provides a framework to articulate and defend efforts to create housing wealth ceilings. Building on the work of Ingrid Robeyns, it develops the moral and political doctrine of housing limitarianism. This doctrine asserts it is morally wrong to have too much housing while others, human or animal, do not have enough, and that governments ought to limit the excessive acquisition/consumption of housing by individuals and corporations. I employ the Rawlsian ideal of property-owning democracy to argue for the dispersal of homeownership throughout society. Lastly, I discuss how housing justice can ethically negotiate the apparent conflict between increasing the supply of affordable housing and the preservation of natural habitat for wildlife.

Tenant right to counsel and health: Pathways and possibilities

Since 2017, more than a dozen municipalities and five states have passed Right to Counsel (RTC) legislation that guarantees access to free full-scope legal representation for eligible tenants facing eviction. Given the novelty of RTC, much remains unknown about the impacts of these programs or policies on individual renters and their communities. Among these unknown impacts is the way that RTC may affect individual tenant health and population health more broadly. Qualitative research is critical to understanding how these policies are experienced on the ground and how they may affect health and well-being. Responding to this need, we collected qualitative data with more than 100 RTC tenants and other stakeholders in Connecticut, during the first year of the state's statewide RTC policy. Our data show the multiple ways that RTC can help tenants stay in their homes, preventing the well documented health consequences of eviction. Our data also suggest ways that RTC can help tenants secure less health harming outcomes, even when a forced move is unavoidable. Beyond individual impacts, we observe both potential and limitations of RTC in addressing tenant health and health equity more broadly. We do not see evidence in our data that, by itself, CT-RTC substantially changes dynamics between landlords and tenants in ways that would support tenant health. However, we do see ways that RTC can support building collective tenant power that advances systemic changes in the service of housing justice and health equity.

DID INDIA EVER HAVE A RIGHT TO THE CITY MOVEMENT? Rethinking Housing Justice in Violent Times

AbstractIn this article I look into the weakening state of housing justice in India, especially in the context of the Covid‐19 pandemic and increased state violence. I ask how and why housing rights in India have mostly remained limited in their approach without being able to demand broader access to the city through right to the city discourse. In trying to find answers to this question, I examine housing rights activism in India historically. I show how, while some movements and campaigns organically began to make such broader claims without even invoking the term ‘right to the city’, these efforts were short‐lived and those spaces were taken up by policymakers and courts. In this article I trace how a relative absence of a political language and movements’ growing proximity to the policy world has shaped a very particular trajectory of housing rights in India. Within the context of this relative absence of a right to the city discourse even quiet encroachments of the poor have failed to claim their moral right to the city. In this moment, as the Indian state takes a more hostile turn towards the poor and to civil‐society organizations, I argue that it may be time to rethink ways of bringing back housing to the centre of political struggles in India.

CLIMATE‐JUST HOUSING: A Socio‐spatial Perspective on Climate Policy and Housing

AbstractFocusing on the nexus of climate and housing policy, this article analyzes the socio‐spatial consequences of urban climate mitigation policies and the resultant need to broaden the concept of climate justice. By using the example of energy retrofitting in a low‐income district in Kiel, Germany, the article examines cities’ dependence on real estate companies to reach low‐carbon goals in a privatized housing market and the (potential) need to provide incentives for investment. As the case study shows, this can lead to a highly sensitive confluence of climate policy, private real estate investment and neighborhood development policy, which leads to a higher financial burden as well as the potential displacement and further political marginalization of current tenants. In light of these results, the article argues for the application of a climate justice frame in analyses of urban climate policies that integrates housing justice with spatial justice. Specifically, it calls for the right to climate‐just housing; that is, for the right to affordable housing to be connected with the right to energy‐efficient housing in one's own neighborhood. This implies the right to information and to urban space as political space, which in turn means the politicization of the targets, strategies and, not least, spaces of urban climate policy.

Sharing risk in shared housing: rental regulations and housing justice in Australia

Shared housing in the private rental sector (PRS), where people rent with non-family, is becoming more significant across many countries. However, from a housing justice lens, it is unclear whether housing policies and regulations based on normative understandings of households are equipped to effectively support shared housing renters. Through a case study of Australia, which operates on a ‘consumer protection’ model of rental regulation, we ask how current Australian rental regulations enable or restrict housing justice for people in shared housing in the PRS. We conduct a critical discourse analysis of consumer-oriented tenancy information published by Australian state governments and identify explicit or implicit risks in the text that may be experienced by shared housing renters. Results indicate that risks in relation to finance, eviction, and disputes are variously not acknowledged within the text or responded to with warning, guidance, or stated inability to help. We argue that the unfair distribution of risk in shared households, coupled with the severity of the consequences, constitutes a form of housing injustice. We suggest how the consumer protection framework of rental regulation could be amended to advance housing justice and assist shared housing renters.

‘The rent is too damn high’ meets ‘pay the rent’: practising solidarity with the dispossessed*

This paper reflects on the Housing Justice in Unjust Cities Project that unfolded in so-called brisbane in 2021, in response to concerns over how the framing of demands and solutions to the present housing crisis in so-called australia can reinvest in and further legitimise colonial-carceral-capitalist logics and structures. Using critical co-constructed autoethnography as methodology, the authors reflect on their own involvement in housing struggles as settlers on unceded Aboriginal land, the recent history of these struggles in so-called brisbane, and the lessons and reflections that instigated the Housing Justice in Unjust Cities Project, and which emerged from our experiences organising together. The project, comprising a series of radio interviews and broadcasts followed by a public forum, was an attempt to foreground what ongoing Aboriginal sovereignty means for struggles for housing justice, and to challenge the colonial logics and common sense that often permeates settler-led housing politics. Drawing on Indigenist research approaches and police and prison abolition discourse, we offer some partial reflections on building communities of struggle that refuse to accept a housing justice that begins and ends with a more equitable distribution of stolen land.

Struggling for Housing Justice – New Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

ABSTRACT How can struggles for housing justice act as a lens to expand housing researchers’ understanding of the rental crisis and of the systems that underpin this crisis? By presenting papers from Sweden, Spain, Greece, the UK, and Australia this special issue contributes with knowledge on how housing struggles can inform new theoretical and methodological approaches within the field of housing studies. In turn, the SI presents three tenets that together form a framework for housing scholars: institutionalization as politics, tenants as political actors, and learning housing justice. We argue that it is crucial for housing scholars to recenter on struggles for housing justice in their readings of contemporary housing systems.

Discrimination in the time of digital real estate: Illustrating a rental schema in the Australian setting

Digital real estate technologies (Proptech) have rapidly become ubiquitous in many nations—including Australia—their presence reshaping how tenants, landlords and agents navigate private renting. How Proptech are mediated by regulatory settings and responses shapes their presence, impacting on their potential for both subtle and overt forms of discrimination. In this paper we draw on our Australian-based research to illustrate the utility of a rental schema to develop understandings of digital reconfigurations and their discrimination effects in the private rental sector. Our research sought to identify and examine discrimination against renters across the entire experience of renting—particularly in relation to new and emerging forms of discrimination arising from, or exacerbated by, digital technologies. By focusing on the experiences of renters, the schema that we employed inverts Proptech approaches that create and target new assets for financial extraction through the rental sector, instead recognising the discriminatory potential of such approaches. We signal the utility of this renter-experience-centred approach to examine the rental sector through a discrimination lens, and the real and potential role for regulation including, but not limited to, a focus on digital technologies. Incorporating research, alliance-building and advocacy into our schema bolsters its renter-centredness and reiterates the necessity of these efforts at housing justice for urgent regulatory reform. We point to our own nascent efforts in collaboration with Australian tenant advocacy groups—inspired by others—to use digital technologies to subvert embedded power imbalances that drive discrimination in Australia's private rental sector.

Justice and Housing

AbstractThis article surveys various topics that link questions about housing with considerations of economic justice. Housing has received increasing attention from philosophers within the last decade. In political philosophy, some aspects of a topic attract more attention than others. Presently, philosophical reflection focuses on the value of a home; homelessness; gentrification; segregation; and spatial justice, with a substantial body of literature developing on these interconnected themes. We highlight some of the recent contributions to the field of housing justice while also identifying areas that have received less attention. Specifically, we emphasize the importance of further philosophical exploration into how macroeconomic factors, like fiscal and monetary policy, impact housing justice. Additionally, we advocate for normative approaches that underscore justice issues not readily addressed by frameworks prioritizing human flourishing or relational equality.

How Can Scholarship Contribute to Housing Justice? Three Roles for Researchers

ABSTRACT This article discusses three ways that research, within and outside academia, can contribute to housing activism. First, we discuss the role that documentation, using non-traditional methods such as film, art, and social media, can play in expanding the visibility of struggles and in politicizing people in the process. Second, we consider how a “politics of resourcefulness” can support activism, by channelling material support from universities and other institutions, asking research questions of interest and relevance to activists, and by investigating the barriers to, and opportunities for, sustained participation in activism. Third we analyse how recent and historic scholarship has re-imagined what housing means by locating it in a wider political sphere, of (anti)racism, participatory justice, and self-determination. We argue that such works, whilst not necessarily directly engaged in on-the-ground struggles, create a conceptual “guide for action”, that stretch the question of housing (in)justice beyond (re)distribution to questions of (anti)racism, (anti)colonialism and participatory justice.

“Resetting” the Neighbourhood: Residents’ Resistance to Place Destruction in Gränby, Uppsala

ABSTRACT By following tenants who resist the destruction of their common yards in a post-renoviction neighbourhood of Uppsala (Sweden), this article examines how the local resistance by marginalized communities intersects with the effects of the financialization of housing. The article explores the concept of unhoming, as a violent, structural, and multi-scalar process that, in the name of urban renewal, destroys the places of marginalized communities in the capitalist city. For residents in a post-renoviction neighbourhood, the real-life experience of “creative destruction” entails navigating paradoxical and conflicting discourses, inflicting material, immaterial and emotional harm to the residents. The local resistance play out as a demand for housing justice, and as a forced balancing between patient dialogue and more confrontative action, in an increasingly authoritative context. Finally, the article suggests the use of a theoretical frame of place destruction in the analysis of contemporary urban struggles.

Powered by gentrification: The uneven development of residential rooftop solar in Atlanta, Georgia

Rooftop solar is widely seen to be a crucial piece of the puzzle for addressing both greenhouse gas emissions and reducing household energy burdens. But studies from across the United States have consistently pointed to inequalities in the adoption of rooftop solar that limit its ability to address these overlapping problems. This paper examines these social and spatial inequalities in rooftop solar adoption in Atlanta, Georgia, using a novel dataset of residential rooftop solar installation permits from 2018 through 2022. Through this analysis, we demonstrate that while more affluent and white neighborhoods are home to the majority of residential rooftop solar installations within the city, the most significant growth in rooftop solar in recent years has been in majority Black neighborhoods. But by combining these records with an analysis of property-level characteristics and transaction histories, we are able to understand how the installation of rooftop solar, especially in predominantly poorer and Blacker communities, is not, in fact, being driven by a narrowing of racial inequalities in rooftop solar adoption or a greater concern for energy justice. Instead, as gentrification unfolds in previously marginalized neighborhoods, these newcomers become the vanguard of rooftop solar adoption rather than longstanding residents who would have the most to gain from such technologies. This paper ultimately clarifies the distinction between spatial redistribution and social redistribution of renewable energy, and the need for both finer-grained analyses of inequalities in clean energy access and adoption and a greater commitment towards both energy and housing justice.

Envisioning Abolition in Our Local Asian American Communities

Abstract: The Chinatown Art Brigade hosted a teach-in in 2021 inspired by the uprisings for Black liberation and growing public discussion of abolitionist demands during the summer of 2020. The public dialogue highlighted the myriad ways Asian American leftist movements resist the carceral state through work in housing justice, mutual aid, sex worker organizing, racial justice, participatory defense, and prisoner solidarity.

Environmental Justice as Housing Justice: HUD, Land Use, and the Case for the Fair Housing Act’s Application to Discriminatory Siting Claims

Environmental Justice as Housing Justice: HUD, Land Use, and the Case for the Fair Housing Act’s Application to Discriminatory Siting Claims

Combating the Slow Economic Violence of Rescue

Abstract: This paper contributes to the growing consensus of voices who articulate how the newfound North American consciousness around “anti-Asian hate” must connect individual acts of violence to structural forms of state and white supremacist violence. Focusing on the policing of Asian massage work, the essay argues that this unique human-itarian commitment reflects the slow economic violence of rescue. It contextualizes the 2021 Atlanta massage murders alongside the work of Red Canary Song (RCS), a grassroots coalition of migrant massage workers, sex workers, and allies organizing against the policing of massage work in New York. The essay echoes an abolitionist call to not only dismantle policing and punishment mechanisms—as these forms of policing have penetrated most aspects of civilian life—but demands the urgency to build a vast network of community resources coupled with imaginative ways of organizing. Abolitionist feminist frameworks must necessarily encompass economic justice, migrant justice, housing justice, and language justice to name a few. One strategy espoused by RCS builds worker power and the capacity for organizing towards the decriminalization of poverty, migration, and low-wage informal and sex work alike. For Asian migrant workers, the fight for justice is not only about the resources needed to live, sleep, and work safely, it is also about changing the deep-seated mix of paternalism and resentment that refuses to acknowledge Asian working-class communities to ability to make choices within constraints.

Mothers, wives, friends: women’s role in London squatting struggles since 1969

Squatting has long been a crucial form of direct action in housing struggles across the globe, in which women have always played an important part. However, despite recent calls to inflect housing studies with feminist, decolonial, and queer praxis, scholarship on women’s role in London’s squatting story remains significantly underdeveloped. Their absence becomes even more apparent when we consider that squatting’s second wave occurred simultaneously with that of feminism, during which time the home was articulated as a key site of feminist struggle. This paper therefore draws from materials authored by and about women during this period to trace broad contours of their involvement in London’s squatting history, focusing in particular on two avenues which call for further critical inquiry, namely: (1) the mobilisation of the ‘mother’ figure in press and public narratives, contrasted against the demonisation of young, single women for whom squatting defied popular understandings of how femininity should be performed; and (2) the world-building capacities of squatted domestic violence refuges, which provided safe spaces for women escaping violent partners and shared with squatting an autonomous, self-help ethos. At stake here is an understanding of what it meant for women to take (up) and remake space in late twentieth century London, and how similar feminist actions continue to enrich contemporary understandings of squatting as a radical, intersectional, and vital practice in ongoing struggles for urban housing justice worldwide.