In Defense of Housing. Peter Marcuse

We would like to thank the team at Verso for helping us produce this book, and especially Leo Hollis, whose advice and steady encouragement helped us make the text more lucid and readable. We warmly acknowledge the support of the many colleagues and friends who, through close reading or insightful conversation, helped us improve this book. We are grateful to Neil Brenner for giving us input and encouragement. Jenny Robinson provided helpful feedback on an earlier version of this project. Michelle Rosales provided research assistance early in our collaboration. We thank Desiree Fields, Tom Waters, and the participants in the Wohnungsfrage Academy in Berlin, 2015, for reading and discussing versions of these chapters. And we want to acknowledge all of the friends, colleagues, students, and activists who helped us develop these arguments, especially the people involved with the housing and rent control movements in New York, including the Planners Network, the National Lawyers Guild, various organizations of public housing tenants, Picture the Homeless, Community Voices Heard, FUREE, and many other organizations too many to list.

Some parts of this book include material previously published by Peter Marcuse. Chapter two draws on “Residential Alienation, Home Ownership and the Limits of Shelter Policy,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 3.2 (1975): 181–203. Chapter three includes sections of “The Other Side of Housing: Oppression and Liberation,” Scandinavian Housing and Planning Research 4.Sup1 (1987): 232–70. Chapter four is an updated and rewritten version of “Housing Policy and the Myth of the Benevolent State,” pp. 248–63 in Rachel G. Bratt, Chester Hartman, and Ann Meyerson, eds, Critical Perspectives on Housing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). Chapter five incorporates sections of “Housing Movements in the USA,” Housing, Theory and Society 16.2 (1999): 67–86.

Finally, Peter would like to thank his wife for love, affection, and tolerance over more than twice the twenty-five-year span during which the above-mentioned pieces were written. And he wants to thank the numerous colleagues, activists, and activist organizations listed above with which he has been involved and from whom he has learned most of what is contained here. David would like to thank his family, colleagues, and friends for their care and encouragement. He thanks his colleagues at the LSE for their support, especially Suzi Hall and Fran Tonkiss. Emmanuelle Madden provided excellent company and welcome distraction through the writing and editing. David’s greatest debt of thanks is to Rachel Faulkner-Gurstein, for her generous assistance and loving support.

Introduction

The Residential Is Political

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 today’s 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.¹ Two pillars of New York’s distinctive housing system—public housing and rent regulation—are both under threat.

But housing problems are not unique to New York. Shelter poverty is a problem throughout the United States.² According to the standard measures of affordability, there is no US state where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford to rent or own a one-bedroom dwelling. Nationwide, nearly half of all renting households spend an unsustainable amount of their income on rent, a figure that is only expected to rise. This is not only a big-city issue. Around 30 percent of rural households cannot afford their housing, including nearly half of all rural renters.³

In fact, the housing crisis is global in scope. London, Shanghai, São Paulo, Mumbai, Lagos, indeed nearly every major city faces its own residential struggles. Land grabs, forced evictions, expulsions, and displacement are rampant.

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In Defense of Housing. Peter Marcuse

In Defense of Housing

IN DEFENSE OF HOUSING The Politics of Crisis

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction The Residential Is Political

IN DEFENSE
OF HOUSING

The Politics of Crisis

Introduction

The Residential Is Political