In Defense of Housing. Peter Marcuse
to use housing as their home.
The Making of a Commodity
In the contemporary era it may be difficult to conceive of a housing system that is not ruled by the commodity form. Yet in the history of human settlements, the commodity treatment of dwelling space is relatively new.5
Historically, housing was not an independent sector of the economy. Rather, it was a by-product of broader social and economic relationships. When peasants were tied to the land, housing and work together formed the harsh feudal system to which they were yoked. Dwelling space was shaped by what Lewis Mumford describes as “the intimate union of domesticity and labor.”6 The loosening of this bond proceeded over centuries.
The historical precondition for the commodification of land and of housing was the privatization of the commons. Before land and housing could become exchangeable sources of privately appropriated profit, ancient systems of communal regulation had to be swept away and traditional tenures destroyed. Marx calls this original or “primitive accumulation,” when peasants are “suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.” This entire historical process is, Marx writes, “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”7
The enclosure movement in early modern England was the classic example of primitive accumulation, and a crucial episode in the early development of capitalism.8 In a sequence lasting centuries, common land was fenced off and claimed by individual landowners. Masses of dispossessed people migrated to cities, where they became laborers. For Karl Polanyi, this process constituted “a revolution of the rich against the poor,” where the “lords and nobles … were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regard as theirs and their heirs’.”9
Enclosure was a violent and complicated process that laid the groundwork for the eventual commodification of land on a planetary scale. What was accomplished in early modern Europe by the alliance of the landed aristocracy, large manufacturers, and “the new bankocracy”10 was brought to the world through colonialism. In the process, countless precolonial systems of land tenure were destroyed.11
Even in early commercial-capitalist society, housing was still predominantly shaped by the organization of work rather than being produced as a commodity in its own right.12 In American colonial cities, households acted as integrated economic units providing both the dwelling space and the work space for the artisans, indentured servants, slaves, and other laborers involved, willingly or not, in the value-production process. “For artisans and merchants in the colonial city, the internal integration of house and shop, of living space and work space, was social as well as spatial.”13 In exchange for labor, property owners provided housing for their workers on terms ranging from violently exploitative to obligingly friendly.
Elsewhere, housing also remained stuck within traditional structures of landownership. In seventeenth-century England, for example, vast estates controlled by aristocratic families were usually held in trust, unable to be sold. A complex, speculative building-lease system developed in cities like London. Landlords maintained ownership of land that they leased for decades to builders, who might construct housing directly or sublease their plots to other builders. Rent gouging, displacement, and other features of the modern housing market emerged in what was in many ways still a feudal system.14
Even as industrialization and commercialism proceeded to transform urban space throughout Western societies, home and work remained connected—especially so for laborers. In the nineteenth-century metropolis, the sharp division between work and home was a sign of class privilege. Successful merchants and other wealthy urbanites created a world of domesticity that they sought to distinguish, architecturally and culturally, from the savage world of the market. Meanwhile, working-class households were forced to resort to homework, child labor, and taking in boarders.15
Slowly and fitfully, housing was disembedded from the circuits of work and production to become a direct bearer of economic value in itself.16 In the nineteenth century, Western cities came to feature an industrial proletariat no longer housed in—or chained to—their place of work. Now, for the first time, majorities of people looked to the open market to secure their place of residence. Cash payment became the main nexus between house and householder.17 The conditions that enabled the commodification of housing had emerged.
In the 1840s, when Engels was surveying the dwelling conditions of the great towns of industrial Britain, he was in part describing the emerging impact of the commodification of housing.18 The residential landscapes of industrial capitalism created enduring urban patterns. Industrialization saw the rise of new forms of segregation in metropolitan space and the unprecedented misery of the “slum problem” that, in Western cities, reached its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.19 Even in this context, market forces did not operate alone. In cases where commodified housing did not provide adequate shelter to ensure the reproduction of the industrial workforce, some municipalities and charitable organizations built some of the earliest examples of social housing.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, it became clear that the commodification of dwelling space had proven to be a social disaster. Many governments moved to contain or neutralize the resulting unrest. Reformers created new rent regulations and building standards, and social housing was developed on a larger scale. At the same time, the value of housing within the overall political economy was becoming clearer. Residential and urban environments were becoming crucial circuits of investment that could act as an escape valve through which capital sought to manage the problem of over-accumulation.20
In the United States after World War I, Herbert Hoover, as secretary of commerce and later as president, promoted housing as the key to growing the consumer sector. By stoking demand for refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and other domestic appliances, the privately owned home became the heart, both economically and ideologically, of a world of commodities.21
When consumer purchasing power collapsed during the Great Depression, governments moved to shore up effective demand for housing. In response to the crisis posed by the Depression, the federal government created the regulatory structure that made the modern housing system possible. Through the Federal Housing Administration, the Glass-Steagall Act, and other New Deal initiatives, the standardized mortgage was born. Without this stabilizing federal presence, widespread homeownership would have been impossible. But in the process, government and real estate together used redlining, discrimination, and restrictive covenants to entrench racist patterns of land use and to exclude African-Americans from home finance, creating unjust housing patterns that continued to have destructive consequences far into the future.22 The oppressive potential of the housing system, harking back to its function as a locus for the supply and exploitation of the workforce, was apparent—a function that was not in conflict with housing’s commodity character, but supported by it.23
Many of the national housing systems that emerged after World War II had a partially decommodified character. In the socialist world, and in many countries throwing off the shackles of colonialism, housing was established as a social right, and state-owned housing sectors accounted for most or all residential growth. In the growing Fordist–Keynesian economies of the West, housing organized the mass consumption that underpinned mass production.24 In the UK and other European countries, for example, national and local government built a majority of new homes.
In America’s postwar boom years, the housing system was also anchored by state support. In some cases this involved the direct provision of dwelling space. But the postwar expansion of housing in the United States did not take the form of the partial or total nationalization of the housing system that it did in Europe. Instead, it was built upon massive government investment in infrastructure and equally massive government action around mortgage lending to finance private dwellings with debt. The result was a state-supported system dominated by private ownership. Only in the