Peter Marcuse - In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis

The symptoms of housing crisis are everywhere in evidence today. Households are being squeezed by the cost of living. Homelessness is on the rise. Evictions and foreclosures are commonplace. Segregation and poverty, along with displacement and unaffordability, have become the hallmarks of todays cities. Urban and suburban neighborhoods are being transformed by speculative development, shaped by decisions made in boardrooms half a world away. Small towns and older industrial cities are struggling to survive.

In America, the housing crisis is especially acute in New York City. The city has more homeless residents now than at any time since the Great Depression. More than half of all households cannot afford the rent. Displacement, gentrification, and eviction are rampant. Two pillars of New Yorks distinctive housing systempublic housing and rent regulationare both under threat.

But housing problems are not unique to New York. Shelter poverty is a problem throughout the United States.

In fact, the housing crisis is global in scope. London, Shanghai, So Paulo, Mumbai, Lagos, indeed nearly every major city faces its own residential struggles. Land grabs, forced evictions, expulsions, and displacement are rampant. According to the United Nations, the homeless population across the planet may be anywhere between 100 million and one billion people, depending on how homelessness is defined. It has been estimated that globally there are currently 330 million householdsmore than a billion peoplethat are unable to find a decent or affordable home.

And yet if there is broad recognition of the existence of a housing crisis, there is no deep understanding of why it occurs, much less what to do about it. The dominant view today is that if the housing system is broken, it is a temporary crisis that can be resolved through targeted, isolated measures. In mainstream debates, housing tends to be understood in narrow terms. The provision of adequate housing is seen as a technical problem and technocratic means are sought to solve it: better construction technology, smarter physical planning, new techniques for management, more homeownership, different zoning laws, and fewer land use regulations. Housing is seen as the domain of experts like developers, architects, or economists. Certainly, technical improvements in the housing system are possible, and some are much needed. But the crisis is deeper than that.

We see housing in a wider perspective: as a political-economic problem. The residential is politicalwhich is to say that the shape of the housing system is always the outcome of struggles between different groups and classes. Housing necessarily raises questions about state action and the broader economic system. But the ways in which social antagonisms shape housing are too often obscured. This book is an attempt to bring them to light.

Housing is under attack today. It is caught within a number of simultaneous social conflicts. Most immediately, there is a conflict between housing as lived, social space and housing as an instrument for profitmakinga conflict between housing as home and as real estate. More broadly, housing is the subject of contestation between different ideologies, economic interests, and political projects. More broadly still, the housing crisis stems from the inequalities and antagonisms of class society.

Many of the examples here are drawn from housing struggles in the city that we know best, New York City. But our target is much broader: the role of housing within contemporary society, economy, and politics. Housing inevitably raises issues about power, inequality, and justice in capitalist society. Much of this book is thus about helping to recover a language through which to understand housing conflicts and to contest residential injustice. We want to refocus the debate around political-economic processes like commodification, alienation, exploitation, oppression, and liberation. And we seek to develop a critical understanding of the actors and forces that have produced the housing system in the past and the present.