In Defense of Housing. Peter Marcuse
Though the concept of crisis has a long history in critical theory and radical practice, it can be deployed for other purposes. In the United States, the discourse of housing crisis is often used to condemn state “interference” in housing markets. In the UK, the crisis frame is invoked in support of granting new legal powers to developers in order to override local planning guidelines.
Discrete moments when housing crises become acute tend to be interpreted away as exceptions to a fundamentally sound system. But this is an ideological distortion. The experience of crisis in the residential sphere reflects and amplifies the broader tendencies towards insecurity in capitalist societies. Housing crisis is a predictable, consistent outcome of a basic characteristic of capitalist spatial development: housing is not produced and distributed for the purposes of dwelling for all; it is produced and distributed as a commodity to enrich the few. Housing crisis is not a result of the system breaking down but of the system working as it is intended.16
We should reject ideological versions of the concept of housing crisis. But the term is still useful. For those compelled to dwell in oppressive and alienating conditions, housing crisis is not empty rhetoric; it is daily reality. To millions of households, “crisis” describes precisely the chaos, fear, and disempowerment that they experience. The state of their housing is critical indeed.
Our objective, then, is not to argue for the resolution of some temporary crisis and return to the status quo. We use the concept of crisis to highlight the ways that the contemporary housing system is unsustainable by its very nature. We point to the crisis tendencies in housing under contemporary capitalism, in order to draw attention to the urgent but systemic character of these problems.
In Defense of Housing
We do not seek to defend the housing system as it currently stands, which is in many ways indefensible. What needs defending is the use of housing as home, not as real estate. We are interested in the defense of housing as a resource that should be available to all.
Housing means many things to different groups. It is home for its residents and the site of social reproduction. It is the largest economic burden for many, and for others a source of wealth, status, profit, or control. It means work for those who construct, manage, and maintain it; speculative profit for those buying and selling it; and income for those financing it. It is a source of tax revenue and a subject of tax expenditures for the state, and a key component of the structure and functioning of cities.
Our concern is squarely with those who reside in and use housing—the people for whom home provides use values rather than exchange value. From the perspective of those who inhabit it, housing unlocks a whole range of social, cultural, and political goods. It is a universal necessity of life, in some ways an extension of the human body. Without it, participation in most of social, political, and economic life is impossible. Housing is more than shelter; it can provide personal safety and ontological security. While the domestic environment can be the site of oppression and injustice, it also has the potential to serve as a confirmation of one’s agency, cultural identity, individuality, and creative powers.
The built form of housing has always been seen as a tangible, visual reflection of the organization of society. It reveals the existing class structure and power relationships. But it has also long been a vehicle for imagining alternative social orders. Every emancipatory movement must deal with the housing question in one form or another. This capacity to spur the political imagination is part of housing’s social value as well.
Housing is the precondition both for work and for leisure. Controlling one’s housing is a way to control one’s labor as well as one’s free time, which is why struggles over housing are always, in part, struggles over autonomy. More than any other item of consumption, housing structures the way that individuals interact with others, with communities, and with wider collectives. Where and how one lives decisively shapes the treatment one receives by the state and can facilitate relations with other citizens and with social movements. No other modern commodity is as important for organizing citizenship, work, identities, solidarities, and politics.
It is this side of housing—its lived, universally necessary, social dimension, and its identity as home—that needs defending. Our challenge as analysts, as residents, and as participants in housing struggles is to understand the causes and consequences of the multidimensional attack on housing. Our goal is to provide a critical understanding of the political-economic nature of housing, such that we may develop a greater sense of the actions needed to address housing’s crises today and in the future.
Against the Commodification of Housing
On January 16, 2015, a limited liability corporation named P89-90 bought a single penthouse apartment in Midtown Manhattan for $100,471,452.77. The name of the actual buyer was kept secret, as were the identities of those who control the array of shell companies from around the world that own much of the rest of the building. It hardly matters, as the luxury tower that it tops, branded as One57, is not likely to be a particularly sociable environment. Chances are that none of the building’s ninety-two condominium units will be their owner’s sole residence. In fact, many of the apartments in One57 will remain empty. They will be held as investments or as vanity homes for people who do not lack for places to live. One57 is not high-rise housing so much as global wealth congealed into tower form.1
As One57 was constructed, across town in Bushwick, Brooklyn, residents of a vinyl-sided tenement building at 98 Linden Street saw their home being destroyed. Carlos Calero and five family members paid $706 per month for apartment 1L, a rent-stabilized two-bedroom apartment where they have lived for twenty years alongside friends and relatives. In 2012, the building was purchased in the name of Linden Ventures LLC. On the morning of June 4, 2013, the new owners allegedly hired a contractor to take a sledgehammer to the family’s kitchen, bathroom, and floors. The apartment was left in ruins, and a campaign of harassment followed. According to New York City’s Tenant Protection Unit, the landlords’ purposeful destruction of their own building was part of an effort to drive out the Caleros and raise the rent, a strategy they have used in properties throughout the gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint.2
In every corner of New York City, real estate is attacking housing. In some places it is evident in the weathering steel or blue glass that clads luxury towers. Elsewhere it can be seen in the shoddy materials used to subdivide apartments into tiny, fire-prone warrens. Sometimes the tactic is tenant harassment. Other times it is the state’s power of eminent domain drafted into the service of developers. These are all perverse manifestations of the same basic phenomenon: the subordination of the social use of housing to its economic value.
What is happening in New York is happening around the country and around the world. The form that the housing crisis takes is different in Manhattan than in the foreclosed suburbs of the American southwest, the bulldozed shacklands of South Africa, the decanted council blocks of Great Britain, and the demolished favelas of Brazil. But they have a common root: they are all situations where the pursuit of profit in housing is coming into conflict with its use for living.
Commodification is the name for the general process by which the economic value of a thing comes to dominate its other uses. Products “are only commodities because they have a dual nature, because they are at the same time objects of utility and bearers of value.”3 The commodification of housing means that a structure’s function as real estate takes precedence over its usefulness as a place to live. When this happens, housing’s role as an investment outweighs all other claims upon it, whether they are based upon right, need, tradition, legal precedent, cultural habit, or the ethical and affective significance of the home.4
Our economic system is predicated on the idea that there is no conflict between the economic value-form of housing and its lived form. But across the world, we see those who exploit dwelling space