Horizons in the Housing Struggle

A basic human need for everyone, the place for social reproduction, and a universal human right, housing—together with land—is still primarily understood as a commodity, and its commodification is contributing to expanding inequalities within and between countries, regions, and cities. As the planet shows its natural limits in some areas and profit rates in many manufacturing industries have plummeted, the unfinished capitalist project has reinforced its neocolonial, extractivist, and racial logic and reaffirmed land as a fundamental accumulation frontier. The financialization of the economy is part of the process, where housing has become a spearhead for market expansion for institutional investors such as hedge funds, private equity firms, or insurance companies (Aalbers 2016 ; Christophers 2020) : according to Savills, the value of global real estate is about $379.7 trillion. It is not by accident that a corporation like Blackstone became the largest landlord in the world in 2020.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns it entailed brought the importance of housing for health, well-being, and survival into sharp relief and called attention to significant disparities in access to housing and in mortality rates. In this context, the United Nations Secretary-General published the organization’s first-ever report on homelessness in 2020, which stressed the increase of unhoused people worldwide, and by 2022 they were stressing these same concerns about housing in relation to climate change. The UN‑Habitat 2023 annual report estimated that 2.8 billion people globally are living in inadequate housing, over 1.1 billion of them in slums and informal settlements with highly deprived conditions. Because the situation is not new, the 11th UN Social Development Goal on sustainable cities and human settlements had identified housing as a global challenge and thus included a target to ensure adequate, safe, and affordable housing for everyone by 2030. However, a recent report by economist Mariana Mazzucato and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing Leilani Farha pointed out the shortcomings in achieving this goal, with states failing to ensure effective policies and the private sector prioritizing profits over human rights. The UN’s incapacity to prevent the financial, racial capitalist accumulation frontier from advancing into housing and triggering shelter insecurity and homelessness contrasts with the struggles that have amplified their horizons, with stark disparities across geographies worldwide.

The most complex battles are in the Global South, where housing deprivation is higher and many people live in inadequate conditions. On the one hand, grassroots movements are struggling to decommodify housing by claiming universal access to land for everyone ; it would be the reverse action to Modern Age European land enclosures in the metropolis and colonies that gave birth to contemporary capitalism. From Africa to Latin America, Cape Town to Buenos Aires, these movements, usually inspired by decolonial theories and legitimated in Indigenous communities’ practices, sustain land as a communal right, and they are either promoting massive land occupations by low-income or unhoused people (usually meeting foreclosures by states violently) or fighting land grabs by wealthy individuals and corporations (Rolnik 2019). On the other hand, activists in these contexts work to improve conditions across the informal settlements where most people live, from Indian shanties to Brazilian favelas. Although they might impact specific people’s lives, movements geared toward improvement are focused on secondary instead of structural problems, helping to solve specific day-to-day issues, yet being simultaneously less revolutionary or even tending to preserve the status quo in some cases.

Beyond these issues, in Global South countries, where there is barely any public housing, working and middle classes have found other solutions—for example, housing co‑ops. The Argentinian Movimiento de Ocupantes e Inquilinos (MOI) and the Uruguayan cooperative movement are good examples that have advocated for solutions in parallel to state action (direct or indirect—for instance, through lines of credit with low interest rates and backed by the state) or, sometimes, despite it (Rodríguez 2009). Nevertheless, these movements needed the state’s umbrella to legitimate their activity, and they have often sought public help in acquiring land or getting below-market leases too. Their origins differ from other co‑op solutions in Western contexts, like labor unions’ housing cooperatives, or as an answer to private and public abandonment, such as in 1970s New York City. Today, other community-based models include mutual housing associations or community land trusts (CLTs), whose success is remarkable, but challenging to scale. That also happens with other decommodification examples in the Global North, such as public-led, collectively owned, and self-managed housing policies in local contexts, like Marinaleda, a rural village in southern Spain, or the squatting movement. This latter responds to a myriad of political strategies and structural conditions, but it always entails a right-to-housing claim, especially so when the objective is to give shelter to subaltern groups and unhoused populations (Vasudevan 2017). Because of their questioning of private property and autonomist counter-hegemonic projects, squatting movements have recently suffered from stronger repression and criminalization from Western governments, but this has not prevented their expansion (Martínez 2020).

Most large-scale housing decommodification solutions in the Global North are based on public housing. We could draw a line here between two large spheres. On the one hand, we find most Western countries where public-housing communities are disinvested, buildings are neglected, and complexes are privatized en masse. These include the US and Canada, where public-housing residents are almost exclusively from Black and other racialized populations whose neighborhoods were sometimes razed to erect developments. In Europe, we find former Communist countries where public housing was privatized in the 1990s, so the rental market is very thin ; renters are just 10% of the population in Romania, Hungary or Bulgaria, making it a problem for younger generations to emancipate. In southern European countries, the situation is similar : homeowners make up 75% of the population in Greece, Portugal, or Spain, where leftist movements were strong in the 20th century, and fascist repressive regimes fostered homeownership, either by privatizing public estates or by promoting a vast mortgage system. On the other hand, Northwestern European housing regimes preserve a degree of policy regulation despite free market dogma and the EU neoliberalization approaches. In countries like Austria, Germany, and Denmark, housing tenures are evenly split between private owners and renters, with ample public housing and rental price-control policies, illustrating a very different policy landscape from their Eastern and Mediterranean counterparts. Figure 1 shows the housing cost overburden rates for low-income populations, i.e. the share of the population in the bottom quintile of the income distribution spending more than 40% of disposable income on mortgage or rent.

However, preserving a welfare state does not always mean solving overburden rates, as Figure 1 shows, for example, with respect to Finland and Sweden. This latter Scandinavian country has municipally decentralized, good-quality public housing, where renters have security in their tenancies with for-life leases and a system of housing allowances and soft rent controls. However, many low-income people are struggling to find affordable housing. This is why the state-wide Swedish tenant union, with half a million affiliates in a country of 10 million people, still plays a key role in the country’s political landscape in the fight against housing policy rollbacks. Following this and other examples, tenants’ unions have rapidly grown across Europe in the past decade. From Dublin to Athens, many young, vulnerable populations are suffering increasing rental prices, and social unrest is focused on rental housing : tenant unions are advocating for more public housing and rent controls or, in specific cases like Lisbon, for a referendum to ban short-term tourist rentals. The strength of the tenant movement is also visible in the US, where the Autonomous Tenant Unions Network (ATUN) was created in 2018 and has continued to grow in a context where landlords can warehouse apartments to gouge prices, as in New York, or where they profit out of catastrophes, as with the 20% increase in rental prices in Los Angeles County after the recent fires, illustrate the increasing importance of unionization.

Tenants in public housing programs have also been at the forefront of social mobilization, especially when governments are ending them. In this context, social housing has become a renewed catchphrase used to describe a broad category of housing models, including existing public housing and a new distinct public housing model. In this period, social housing has been enshrined in a new paradigm of so‑called affordable housing, which revises the traditional meaning of “social” and “public” by tethering it to private and financial dependencies and risk. With large corporations and elites taking a turn into real estate markets through a diverse range of direct and indirect investment instruments (REITs, or real-estate investment trusts, being probably the best-known), we should be especially cautious about using biased conceptualizations such as affordable or social housing that hide a frontal attack on public housing schemes and other forms of policy associated with housing decommodification. We should also keep organizing in unions and take other community-based actions to protest neoliberal solutions that delve into the current crisis and do so by networking at different geographical scales. Similarly, we should come together to think about new ways of imagining socialist and communitarian utopias for the 21st century. This special series is a modest contribution to that endeavor.

Articles in this series :

• “Marielle Franco and the Fight for the City Statute in Rio de Janeiro”, by Ty Redden
• “Can the Market Solve Los Angeles’ Housing and Homelessness Crisis ?”, by Katherine Smock
• “Dusting off the Archives : Connecting Historical Renters’ Activism to Contemporary Housing-Justice Efforts”, by Céline Drieskens
• “Using Cross-Class Politics to Challenge Urban Housing Inequality in Islamabad, Pakistan”, by Hafsah Siddiqui
• “The Uruguayan Housing Cooperatives : The Miracle of the ‘Commons’ / Las cooperativas de vivienda uruguayas. El milagro de los ‘comunes’”, by Benjamín Nahoum
• “Massive Evictions and Housing Crisis in Chile”, by Santiago Castillo Braithwaite
• “Argentina : The Rental Issue in the Milei Era / Argentina : la problemática del alquiler en la era Milei”, by Nicolás A. Trivi
• “Integration or Chainsaw : Some Reflections on the Policies of Cruelty in Milei’s Argentina Based on the ReNaBaP Case / Integración o motosierra : Reflexiones sobre las políticas de crueldad en la Argentina de Milei a partir del caso ReNaBaP”, by Facundo A. Corti
• “Settling on the Financial Periphery : Alternative Housing Practices in Hegang, China”, by Yimeng Yang
• “Unleashing Finance Capitalism in the City : An Interview with Isaac Rose, Author of The Rentier City”, by Jonathan Silver

Bibliography

• Aalbers, M. 2016. The Financialization of Housing : A Political Economy Approach, Abingdon/New York : Routledge.
• Christophers, B. 2020. Rentier Capitalism : Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It ?, London : Verso.
• Martínez, M. A. 2020. Squatters in the Capitalist City. Housing, Justice, and Urban Politics, Abingdon/New York : Routledge.
• Rodríguez, M. C. 2009. Autogestión, políticas de hábitat y transformación social, Buenos Aires : Espacio Editorial.
• Rolnik, R. 2019. Urban Warfare. Housing under the Empire of Finance, London : Verso.
• Vasudevan, A. 2017. The Autonomous City : A History of Urban Squatting, London : Verso.