S2, Episode 6: Home & Housing

You can also listen on Apple podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, TuneIn, Stitcher and Google Podcasts. Search for ‘That Feels Like Home’ to subscribe, follow, favourite, and share!

Reading List

MoDA Reading List – Social Housing

Transcript

I think the thing that I really realized in that move is that it felt really stressful initially and quite difficult, and I missed my home a lot and I missed having, you know my kind of community around me and my things around me. If it was kind of missing the kind of material stuff as well, I guess, but.  how I was doing all of that with the resources to be able to afford to pay for somewhere for an interim to stay and have family support that offered me a place to stay There are elements to it I found difficult and stressful, but also I’ve been very lucky and privileged to be able to do it. there was never a kind of real risk of not having somewhere to live and I suppose there are likely to have been lots of people in situations where it didn’t feel possible. Where you didn’t kind of have a secure safe environment to live in and you either weren’t able to move or had to move and didn’t have those resources to be able to move somewhere.

Ana Baeza: Welcome to That Feels Like Home, a podcast by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA), reaching you from Middlesex University in London. I’m Ana Baeza, and I’ll be hosting this second season to explore the multiple stories around home in the current Covid crisis. This time, we’re recording from less favourable conditions, from our homes, so please bear with us if the sound isn’t always of studio quality. And in this season I’ll be talking with historians, anthropologists, activists and practitioners to reflect on the many changes brought about by this pandemic on our homes. As usual we draw inspiration from the museum’s collections to reflect on the present through the lens of the past.

In this season of That Feels Like Home’ we’ve been discussing different aspects of the experience of living in, and being at home, from the sounds of home, to the question of who does the washing up. In this episode we’re taking a broader view, to look at the more fundamental question of the right to a place to live.

Over decades market-centric reforms have had a huge impact on housing in the UK and beyond, and so too on people’s ability to make a home. Policies including the right to buy along with the gradual disinvestment in affordable housing and the growth of large scale private investment, are just some of the factors that have contributed to making housing a more liquid commodity. While this state of housing crisis as a new COVID-19 has amplified its effects with many struggling to pay their rents and make ends meet, it’s also put into relief more so the ways in which housing provision and racism intersect. Black and brown people experience higher rates of homelessness and overcrowding. So we’re going to be talking about the changing context of housing, reform, activisms and futures, bearing in mind the COVID situation in the UK and beyond. And with us to discuss this is David Madden, sociology professor. Welcome David, thanks for joining us.

David: Thanks for having me

Ana: David is Associate Professor in Sociology and Co-director of the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics. He works on urban studies, political sociology and social theory. His views which interest include housing, public space, urban restructuring and critical urban theory. He has conducted qualitative, ethnographic and archival research in New York City and London. He’s co-authored together with Peter Macuse In Defence of Housing, The Politics of Crisis published by Verso in 2016. His writing has appeared in leading sociology journals as well as The Guardian, The Washington Post and Jacobin. So there’s a lot of things to discuss here today David and it’s not going to be possible to unpack all of it but I’d like to start with asking you about your book, In Defence of Housing because at the very start you draw this distinction between housing as a lived social space, what we might call home, and housing as an instrument for profit-making, so we might think of real estate. Can you start by explaining this and saying more about how in the book you’re the housing question?

David:  Well in the book we wanted to try to develop a perspective from which we can understand the current housing problem as a political and economic problem. And there are a lot of different ways to understand the housing problem. An interesting thing about our current era is that this is not one of those problems that its very existence is contested, I mean everyone agrees that there is a housing problem and it’s sort of undeniable. So the challenge is how to pose it in a politically useful way and as a social scientist how to pose it in a way that is analytically useful.

So Peter and I looked to critical theory and critical housing studies, specifically to get at this distinction between housing as home or the use value of housing, and housing as real estate or the exchange value of housing. So you see how this sort of comes from sort of classic critical theory language about the distinction between use value and exchange value. And we think this captures a lot about this present moment when the different ways in which housing as a commodity are really undercutting a lot of the ways in which people use housing. And I think you can see this in a lot of ways, you can see this in the sort of broad shape of the housing system where what gets built, where it gets built, for whom, all of these things are shaped by economic considerations, shaped by the real estate industry, and you can see this in terms of the residential experience as well, and the experience of being a renter. And also trying to buy, trying to be an owner/occupant is incredibly brutal these days, I mean rents are much higher, people trying to buy housing are competing with all sorts of global real estate capitalists. And you can see this on smaller scales as well I mean in terms of the extent to which people can take certain things for granted. I mean a lot of people talk about precarity in housing, this sense that housing is unstable, that it is not a secure place for people and this is also a consequence of the relative importance of housing as a commodity. So the real estate dimension of housing as opposed to the use value of housing as opposed to housing as home.

So in our book in our book we’re detailing this, in part we’re detailing this history of the commodification of housing, this long process of turning housing into a commodity and also looking at the people who have struggled against that. So I mean this idea of in defence of housing, we’re not trying to defend the housing system as it currently exists because a lot of it is indefensible, we’re trying to defend the idea of housing as a social space, as a lived space, and we’re also trying to describe the social movements and the activists over generations who themselves have acted in defence of housing as lived social space. So I think that this contrast between home on the one hand and real estate on the other captures this sort of dynamic and conflictual relationship that we think can really help us grasp our current housing problem

The ‘crisis’ in housing crisis

Ana Thanks David and I think that fleshes out some of the many things that I want to ask you about that I’m sure we’ll be talking about at length in the course of the podcast, but I also notice that you’ve been referring to commodification, to housing problem, but the word crisis has been absent in anything that you’ve said and I know that this is something that you actually pick up in the book as well is this idea of crisis which everyone is talking about the housing crisis but you warn that this could imply that the currently housing situation is abnormal but in actuality, as you say in the book, for working class people in poor communities the housing crisis has been the norm. So could you expand a bit on that and also maybe thinking about the current context of COVID in which this word crisis has also been bandied about a lot.

David: Yeah I mean I’m not…I’m not someone who shies away from using the word crisis, I’ve been accused even of overusing it in many different contexts but in the book we are…we do sound a note of caution about this concept of crisis and partly we’re thinking about an argument that Engels makes on the housing question where he says… and this is a sort of class, the classic statement on sort of radical housing thought and he’s talking about the discourse of crisis in the 19^th century when he’s writing and he’s saying, you know that this idea of crisis is a bit misleading because for oppressed classes throughout history crisis has been the norm and to say that there’s something exceptional about the housing crisis then was to sort of miss this point that it’s not…crisis is not a sort of historical period it’s a process, it is something that is uneven, that unfolds unevenly and unequally and impacts different groups in different ways and for some people the historical norm is to be living in crisis and to be struggling with crisis, just as a sort of baseline. And so that is…that’s one of the reasons why we think it’s important to be a bit cautious with this idea of crisis.

Another reason is that, as I said, everyone’s talking about housing crisis but it means really different things for different people, so I mean you can hear David Cameron or Boris Johnson, I mean there’s a whole series of Tory responses to the housing crisis and they really do use this idea of crisis to sort of invoke this sort of temporary breakdown of a system that is otherwise working perfectly and this idea that, you know we just need to sort of fix the market mechanisms and the crisis will ease. And I think it’s, again somewhat dangerous to think that the crisis, really refers to the idea that there’s only one crisis but to think that the crisis is a temporary problem and we just need to return to the status quo ante, I mean it’s precisely the status quo that is the crisis, that is the problem.

Ultimately we do use the term and continue to use it and I think you know it’s useful in a lot of ways as well, one of the things we say in the book is that it really captures the connection between the sort of broad political economic changes that have transformed the housing system and transformed the residential experience for many people and people’s everyday lives. I mean everyone is sort of familiar with this idea of a crisis is something that they’re living and that they’re struggling with and I think one of the useful things of critical housing studies is to get people to connect many of the crises that they’re living through, mental health crises, employment crises, just general crises of sort of health and wellbeing and to connect these to these broader changes in the housing system. So I think the concept of crisis can sort of snap that relationship into clarity for people. And I mean if you add the pandemic on top of it, you know you really do see the sort of collision the health crisis and the housing crisis.

So one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is sort of intersecting crises and how they…how they shape each other and…and all the consequences of the…of multiple cr– and there’s, you know the crisis of social reproduction, there’s crises of planetary existence. …we live in a time of multiple intersecting crises. And as critical social scientists and as politically engaged people we need to figure out how to work with this and try to grapple with it and transform it. And the pandemic, you know it’s often important to be critical of this idea of crisis with regards to the pandemic because it’s not something that is only a result of COVID I mean there’s this…there are long-standing health inequalities and…and pre-existing conditions that are really shaping the social life of this illness and it’s really important to bear that in mind

But yeah we’re seeing right now what happens when a housing crisis meets a health crisis and it’s not pretty. I mean the housing system is…is really the front line where a lot of this is…is playing out and I mean there’s a long-standing line in housing and health research that says that housing is health and we can…we can clearly see that housing is absolutely health, is absolutely a matter of life and death right now.

Ana:  Yes, I  think the connection between health and housing has become absolutely clear during this period, and in your book you make the point that we need to think of housing in relation to other forms oppression, so we can think of it as something in isolation. So I wanted to ask you what does a residential politics look for emancipation might look like, which brings together those different fights against different forms of oppression?

David: Well there’s a…there’s one radical tradition that says that housing is not a political site and that actually is the tradition that Engels is located in and one of the interesting things about the housing question is that for all of Engels…all of his incisive analysis, in critique of the housing reformers of his day and his incisive analysis of the political economic role of housing, he says, ultimately struggles surrounding housing are epiphenomenal, they’re sort of secondary manifestations of the…of real political struggles which happen in the workplace and famously he says the housing problem cannot be solved under capitalism, you know if you want to sort of solve the housing problem or answer the housing question then you need to end capitalism.

Obviously his argument makes a lot of sense within his broader framework but you can see how this current record does relegate housing struggles to this sort of secondary circuit. And I think that’s a mistake. I think first of all I mean this is something that we can see in social reproduction theory and a lot of feminist political economy obviously it is a big mistake to create some sort of sharp separation between domestic politics and domestic activity and domestic practices on the one hand and so-called economic practices and struggles and activities on the other hand. I mean they’re intricately linked and, you know Engels was a subscriber to the separate spheres doctrine as a lot of politic analysts were in his day.

Ana: Right

David: But you know if you move past that you see that there’s nothing uneconomic or unpolitical economic about what happens within housing. And it’s also that any sort of radical movement needs to grapple with the housing question in some way, I mean housing is just so central to political economic, cultural, social life. you can’t have a programme to transform society without transforming the housing system. And so I mean I think these are…these are the things that really do need to be thought together and that really do need to be, you know integrated into…into some sort of analysis that doesn’t see housing as a sort of separate specialist problem.

Property and Capitalism [14.41]

Ana: I’d actually like to go back a bit in time, in history and just think a bit about how, at what point housing becomes an asset a kind of financialised asset that we’re talking about. because I mean as I understand, we need to start thinking about the forced enclosures in England when this wasn’t just about fencing physical land but also about the extinction of certain common uses of land which many depended for their livelihood. So this is the beginning of agrarian capitalism but then there are these consequences that extend all the way to now don’t they? So could you explain a bit of what happens in that historical period and then how does that link to what we see now still today?

David: Well enclosure historically was a very long process I mean it unfolded over centuries in the early modern world and I mean it happens differently in different places and it occurred differently in different periods, but the basic idea was the dis-embedding of land from the feudal social relations in which it had been embedded, in which it had been contained, and housing was a part of that. So one of the arguments we make is that historically housing was not a separate sector, it was really in its own way a sort of outgrowth of the labour process. People’s housing was distributed through the same processes that controlled and regulated labour and inhabited in the same way and it was not something that was seen really as a source of profit accumulation and zone rate.  And it was not something that was not something that was freely circulating as such. So I mean the process of enclosure leads to…ultimately leads to the commodification of land.

And this is one of the sort of preconditions of the commodification of housing. But I mean we…we trace this process over…over centuries, I mean even in the 19^th century housing in sort of industrial capitalism, housing was not commodified to the same extent that it is now and it was not seen as a…as a major site for people to make their fortunes. I mean, certainly real estate development was a commercial practice and local elites shaped the housing market, controlled the housing market, but it was not a global commodity the way it is now. I mean the current historical period is really unique in terms of the commodity character of capitalism and it’s a process, and some people use the idea of enclosure as a sort of overall metaphor to describe this process now.

Ana: Right

David: But you know it’s really a process of dis-embedding housing from social relations, dis-embedding housing from political regulation and also creating these economic circuits that allows housing to become a commodity and allows it to be a liquid commodity. So creating markets for residential debt, creating financial products that people can trade globally, new forms of ownership over housing. So it’s…I mean it is this sort of this long process but it’s something that’s variable.

I mean you can see in the first half of the 20^th century there was a strong turn against the commodification of housing. So the late 19^th, early 20^th century housing crisis spurred all sorts of radical movements, reformist movements and ultimately demands for government regulation and the sort of commodity character of housing was greatly restricted through things like rent control, through things like housing standards, maintenance standards, ultimately through the building of social housing which was partially decommodified and you know you had this… sort of turn against the commodification of housing and it’s really sort of after World War II when this housing is not a massively commodified sector. It’s really in the 70s that things start changing and sort of accelerating after that with the invention of…of real estate investment trusts with the invention of new sorts of insecure tenancies with the right to buy in this country that is a way to start deregulating the housing system in a piecemeal fashion.

And it’s really only in the last decade and a half that housing really is this globally circulating commodity where people are investing in housing, you know through apps on their phone in distant cities where people are participating in all sorts of new forms and like residential fintech and buying mortgages that have been cut up and repackaged, foreign direct investment in housing. These are all historically unique. …housing was not something that was really subject to global speculation in the same way before the contemporary period. So I mean I think if you…if you want to understand housing struggles now you really need to understand this context and people are struggling against landlords that might live in other cities or other countries or might be corporate bodies that are located in tax shelters. This is not; you know it’s not the way housing struggles looked in the early 20^th century when it was clear who the landlord was and how to target them.

Ana: Yeah which I think raises lots of questions of how does activism, and housing struggle kind of position itself in relation to the new challenges of having this global financialised housing market. But I guess there’s also an issue that you’ve raised in the past also that there are these global investors but they aren’t by any means the only culprits, there is all political class that is also enabling that these global financialised investments are happening in the first place?

David: Yeah I mean the fact that housing is controlled by foreign investors I think is often used quite misleadingly and the problem is that it’s controlled by investors not inhabitants, not that the investors are foreign. So I mean you can…you can see here in the UK and in…in Canada, in Australia and many other countries this tendency by political leaders to say yeah there’s definitely a housing crisis but it’s…it’s kind of caused by foreigners. And to…to…to sort of try to use xenophobia as a way to answer the political demands of…of housing movements and yeah I mean I think this is…I think this is missing the point, I mean …it doesn’t matter if the investors are foreign or domestic. I mean what matters is that housing is still commodified and hyper commodified, you know and it really doesn’t…it really doesn’t matter who the investors are who own it. I mean they’re…it’s a matter of social relations and social structures. I mean it…globalisation is a part of the story because it opens up new forms of investment to housing, it opens up you know huge amounts of…of resources that are looking to be invested in the housing market. But it is the sort of foreignness of foreign ownership is not in and of itself the problem

Housing Activism

Ana: David you’ve been talking about how there’s quite complex and layered history to the enclosures that also has been variable over time and a long process up to now when we think about global and foreign investment into housing, so I’d like to ask you about the historical trajectories that activism has taken in response to these housing struggles because I imagine that in the same way housing activism is also manifold, it’s changed over time, place, so maybe it can’t be considered in a unitary way. So how would you characterise the different trajectories of housing activism but maybe also some of the similarities across time and space? I know it’s a big question so maybe you can just address specific examples from your research.

David: Well Peter and I are mostly writing about housing activism in New York but there’s an interesting sort of shared history of housing activism in London and a lot of things are true about both cities. And one thing that’s true about both of them is that housing activism has always been cosmopolitan, it’s always been internationalist in its own way, always been something that has grown from immigrant communities, working class immigrant communities I mean. Housing activism in London would be nothing without Jewish radical movements, Irish radical movements, Bengali radical movements, Afro Caribbean radical movements. You can trace the history of housing activism by looking at the history of working class migration to this city and to New York as well. And I think this is quite a notable part of housing history.

I mean in New York State the first housing movements were connected to Irish republicanism and people who had been involved in anti-colonial struggles in Ireland who migrated to New York, who had been involved in the land war and specifically struggles over tenure, so moved to New York and started the first housing movements. And in the early 20^th century it was really was led by Jewish radical movements, many of the participants of these movements had experience with radical politics in Europe before migrating to New York, as well as black radical politics, connected especially to the inter-war civil rights movement in New York.

So there’s always been this cosmopolitan sort of atmosphere that’s shaped housing activism. And it has always been something that has struggled in the name of inhabiting housing against those who tried to use housing for other purposes. So I think this is something that we can say transhistorically about housing activism; it has always struggled to assert the rights of the occupants of housing, the rights of those who inhabit housing, the rights of people who use housing as social space. And has struggled against landlords, has struggled against the state and especially the way that the state has allowed landlords, various exploitative landlord practices to continue, sometimes have struggled against other inhabitants of the city who have made communal life difficult or impossible.

But housing activism is all about trying to protect housing as something that can be inhabited and something that can be lived in. And I mean the nature of housing struggles changes with broader changes to the housing system. So in the early 20^th century there was a lot of struggling against local landlords and, you know this was a period where it was, you know it was possible to organise rent strikes that would do serious damage to the income of landlords, I mean unlike now where I mean some people, since COVID have been trying to get rent reductions from companies that are owned by Blackstone or other sort of gigantic multi-national investment firms. And that’s a very different kind of struggle.

But I mean housing movements have also organised against, both with and against the state in a lot of ways, and I’m thinking about movements located in council housing or in public housing that have in many ways been protesting what housing authorities have been doing and really see housing authorities as the enemy in a lot of ways.  But they’re also trying to improve social housing and public housing as a practice or as an institution and trying to protect it as something that should exist and should be better.

So I mean there are different targets, there are different tactics.You know today there…I think we are living in a golden age of housing movements in a lot of ways. There is just a huge amount of organising in so many cities across the world. A lot of them are harkening back to older tactics or older rhetoric so there’s been a real sort of revival of the idea of a tenant union, which is an old idea in housing activism and that’s coming back. You know but movements are organising against the housing system as it currently exists so trying to find ways through alliance building and global mobilisations, trying to find ways to get some sort of leverage over global landlords and global real estate capital and trying to get states that are very closely aligned with real estate capital to respond to them.

Ana:  You’re listening to That Feels Like Home. I’m Ana Baeza and in this episode I’m talking with David Madden about housing struggles and right to a home. Now we’re going to talk about effecting change, what kinds of change, and housing movements.

The right to the city [26.53]

Ana: Okay I wanted to pick up on something you said David because you were talking about something that is transhistorical in common to these different activist groups which is that assertion of the right to occupancy as a social space.  And I think, because we’ve been talking about people’s houses or maybe we can say homes, but this idea of social space suggests something broader and it just reminded me of this idea of the right to the city which, you can explain a lot better than me, but links to the French theorist Henri Lefebvre and…and I guess the way in which we think that we’re not just living in houses we’re living in broader networks, we’re part of the social fabric, which I think is what you were hinting at earlier. So I wonder if you could expand a bit on what this idea of the right to the city means? It’s not a legal thing is it; it’s more of an ethical or political sense that’s being invoked by that expression?

David: Yeah Lefebvre uses the idea of the right to city in a very broad way, so it’s certainly not a legalistic right, it’s not…it’s not even really a sort of juridical term, it should not be understood as housing rights in a strict legal sense. It is…I think he means it more as a set of claims that people make about a place and to a place as well as a sort of political subjectivity from which they make it. So he’s saying that there are a lot of struggles… So he, Lefebvre, was writing about the right to the city in the late 60s and he’s…he has a lot of vices as a writer actually but he has a lot of virtues as well and one of his virtues is sort of being prophetic and sort of writing in a sort of prophetic vein. And so when he’s talking about the right to the city he’s sort of prophesising and he’s saying, you know the sort of struggles, the struggles of staying and especially the struggles in the future are increasingly going to be the struggles for a place within urban society, a place within an urban world.

And he means people will be struggling for a social space, and social space is not a Lefebvrian category but you know people will be struggling to be able to shape their own space for community space; fighting to not be marginalised within sort of vastly growing and transforming urban regions. And struggling to become agents of…of urbanisation, struggling to become people who are shaping the city to meet human needs and to meet social needs, as opposed to being people who are producing value in an urban space that they don’t control, whether that’s owned by other people who are exploiting them. So it’s a sort of complicated political narrative but it sort of invokes this idea of the movements that are struggling for a place in an urban world.

And one of the interesting things about it is that it sort of bounces back and forth between academic and activists’ usages and I mean, as much as it’s most commonly associated with Lefebvre, it’s also something that was circulating in Paris in the late 60s when he’s writing and that circulates through movements and you really do see social movements asserting something like a right to the city. They say, if you go to housing protests you really do see people saying, ‘We have a claim to this place and we’re not going to be pushed out, our community is not going to be erased, as workers in the city, as working class communities, as inhabitants,’ I mean that gets to this idea of the sort of subjectivity connected to the right to the city, that it’s not a claim based upon citizenship. It’s not a claim based on position in the social hierarchy, it is a claim as a city dweller to…to a place in the world and to certain forms of right and and power. So I mean you absolutely can see all the time social movements not only housing movements, social movements more broadly, and movements for health, protests around public space, transportation, I mean a lot of urban movements speaking in this register that we can call the right to the city.

Ana: in the context of the grass roots and activist housing movements that you’re talking about I’d just like to ask you about a particular one that’s ongoing at the moment and that also uses this word union, it’s the London Renters’ Union, based in London that instigated the ‘Can’t pay, Won’t pay,’ campaign.  And about 3,000 people have already joined this campaign which demands suspending rents for the duration of the COVID crisis, the cancellation of all rent debts, permanent ban on evictions, rent controls, and also to tackle racism in housing. So I wonder just as a very contemporary example of mobilising, you’ve mentioned there’s a lot that’s going on elsewhere but if you have something to comment on how London Renters’ Union in the context of other mobilisations are proceeding with this campaign?

David: Well this is a really important campaign because a lot of the harm that’s being caused by the pandemic is connected to the existence of rent as an institution.  And a lot of the economic as well as the medical and corporeal suffering that is happening and is going to happen in the future is tied to the fact that people still have to pay their rents. I mean in many places there has been a temporary moratorium on evictions, some people have been able to negotiate temporary rent reductions or some sort of temporary suspension of rent. But the fact of the matter is that even while a lot of people have been unable to work they still have to pay rent and this is putting people in a really difficult situation.

I mean it is actually shocking, if not surprising, but still shocking that nothing has been done to just try to put real estate capitalism on hold during this global pandemic. and people who really are not able to work still have to…still have to pay their rent every month or, you know after a certain period will have to…have to start paying again or paying back rent. It is a real crisis. So I mean I think these campaigns are …in many ways they are emergency responses to an emergency but you know they’re also helping us understand that a lot of the…a lot of the harmful consequences of this pandemic are due to socio-economic institutions and politico-economic institutions like rent and not just to the coronavirus

Ana: Yes and I guess if we think also about the way in which this intersects with, other systemic institutionalised inequalities, if we think of racism and how that also translates into the housing system in terms of unequal levels of access to affordable housing, overcrowding, I mean that is also quite another big issue isn’t it? So I don’t know if there’s something that you want to say on that, also in how these housing struggles are being broadened and linked to other kinds of activism that might be say anti-racist activism?

David: Yeah I mean and partly it’s the racialisation of health inequalities and a lot of…you know a lot of movements are drawing attention to the ways in which black and brown communities have been just suffering massively and experiencing this pandemic in completely different ways than privileged white communities.  But another part of the intersecting crises that are shaping our world is the crisis of racialised state violence of…of police brutality, of racism in the broader sense. I mean you can see the global anti-racist protests that have emerged following the murder of George Floyd have… I mean they’re not, they’re not principally about housing but a lot of them are sort of engaging with housing problems and housing struggles in a direct way I mean because I think it’s directly related to this question.

I mean a lot of police violence against racialised households; I mean something that happens within housing and it, and certainly within communities. And housing has always been one of the ways in which white supremacist housing structures have tried to control black communities, and a lot of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles have also been struggles against landlordism, which has obviously long been a racialised economic institution. So…it’s part of the mix right now where you have this intensely racialised pandemic that is unfolding within the housing system. Also this, I mean in many ways unprecedented global uprising against racism and against racialised capitalism that’s also engaging with housing issues, you know so there’s a lot there right now.

David: This is a really interesting time for housing movements and housing activists, partly the sort of global leviathan of real estate capital is more powerful than ever before and, you know the stakes are incredibly high and I mean there are absolutely huge amounts of residential injustice and suffering. But they are winning victories in some places. I mean in cities like Berlin and Barcelona housing movements are quite influential and have been able to push through a number of different policies and I mean even in places like London, New York, Vancouver, housing movements have been winning small victories and in some cases sort of medium sized victories.

And I think in a sort of almost more important way they’re changing the ideological sort of assumptions that underpin housing politics and, you can see just the whole sort of language and terminology and that have sort of taken for granted assumptions around housing. They really are changing before our eyes and I mean I think the sort of sanctity of private property and the sort of respectability and unassailability of banks, all of this it really is being chipped away at. There’s a lot of really healthy cynicism towards a lot of the sort of classic planks of housing ideology. I mean no one believes in the American Dream anymore. Just to give you some idea of…of sort of private housing ownership and, you know owning a suburban house as the sort of key to wealth. I mean if you talk to young people today no one thinks that that’s a plausible way forward and they sort see it as…as the ideological fiction as it always was.

And in the UK there’s a similar sort of consciousness, I mean all guff you hear about the housing ladder and…and you know the sort of centrality of…of private home ownership for British society. People see through that now and they are asking why housing is so inaccessible, why housing is so expensive, why they need to be, you know working three jobs and killing themselves just to have a place in this incredibly unequal housing hierarchy. And I think we can trace this to the efforts of housing movements that have been really bringing a lot of attention to these issues, I mean day after day, year after year, highlighting the growth of precarity, the spread of all sorts of shelter poverty and housing injustice. And obviously changing political opinions doesn’t change everything on its own but I think that, you know this is creating something that can be built upon by housing movements to come. And I think that this…this is a significant sort of change that a lot of the sort of classic bits of housing ideology just no longer have the power that they once did.

Ana: We’ve been talking about change, and it strikes me that there can be changes in policy that are system maintaining and don’t bring about real change, and then those reforms that are actually system changing. It seems like a pretty important distinction in terms of how to intervene in housing politics. What’s your view on this?

David: Well I think people are demanding real changes in the housing system. So I mean this is a…obviously a sort of long debate in critical theory and critical politics about sort of reformism and social change that Peter and I are engaging with towards the end of the book. But I think this is an important thing to sort of see in…in housing projects, in housing policy because if you look at…just look at the political leadership of London and of New York where you have two mayors who, I mean their election campaigns really were in a lot of ways about housing reform and about changing the housing system. And I mean both Sadiq Khan and Bill de Blasio have been real disappointments to housing activists purely because they have stuck to the level of reformist reforms and of, you know tweaking things on the surface, making big announcements but not really changing anything. But people want to see transformative reforms. They want to see proper changes, things like actual rent control, actual building of residential alternatives, like social housing and…and cooperative housing and other…other communal or partially decommodified tenures. They want to see things actually change. They don’t want to see landlords and developers and real estate capitalists getting rich while everyone else is suffering.

So I mean I think understanding the difference between, you know you can call them non-reformist or transformative reforms but, changes, proper changes to the housing system as opposed to superficial ones is really important and very…you know for a long time I think somehow superficial changes had sort of mollified people but I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I don’t think that small changes to housing policy are really going to speak to the level of anger that people have about the housing crisis today

Ana: Yeah and in that sense I wanted to ask you, what do you see the role of the state, as something that might be seen as…as the enemy, we can say, but also essential in some ways to providing some of the solutions. So I wonder how, I mean this is quite a big question but what do you see the role of the state in the current conjuncture in providing more large scale, systemic change?

David: All housing movements in a sense are struggling with and against the state because the state is, I mean for better or worse it’s the only institution that can actually provide some sort of traction against real estate capital right now. A lot of the things that housing reformers and radicals want to see are changes in state policy. And I think there is a tendency in some circles in housing politics to understand this question as a sort of zero sum game; you know do you want more state or less state in the housing system?

But one of the things we try to argue in our book is that this is not a helpful way to see it, the question is what does the state do not is the state involved in housing or not. I mean the states have always been involved with housing and even, you know the sort of process of deregulation that made the hyper-commodification of housing possible has involved states at every step. The state hasn’t subtracted itself from the housing system it’s just started acting in ways that facilitate the commodification of housing and assetisation and financialisation of housing.

So it’s not a matter of, you know should the state be involved in housing or not.  It’s, you know what should the state do with regards to housing? And it can do a lot. It can build the housing itself, it can…it can lend money to build housing. It can regulate housing in different ways. It can create all sorts of interfaces between social services and social welfare and housing it can…it can provide housing or provide a sort of place in the housing system for non-citizens or for undocumented migrants or people who are in many ways excluded from other political institutions in that states, you know and I…I use the term the state as a shorthand for many different levels and layers and agencies of the government. But, you know states are deeply involved in housing and it’s not a matter of just trying to get more state involvements it’s really a matter of trying to get them to do specific things.

Ana: So there’s the question that you ask towards the end of the book David, which is, is housing for all a hopelessly utopian goal? So I just wanted to ask if you could expand on that question and how you see the role of reimagining and that sort of utopian dimension of housing movements and housing struggles in the context that you’ve been describing?

David: Peter and I ask that question because in a world where the threat of homelessness really does play an important role in our economy, it can seem like a utopian proposition, housing for all. I mean, you know it is the threat of homelessness that keeps people working, that keeps people paying their bills and I mean, an eviction moratorium or sort of ends to the power that some people have to make others homeless, I mean if it’s sort of made permanent really carried through would require total political economic transformation. Or at least transformation of the housing system. I mean it is sort of built on the idea that people can be dispossessed from their housing. So it can seem like, you know some sort of utopian fantasy to suggest that everyone could have housing, or that this would be a sort of fundamental aspect of social and political life.

The thing is that there are many countries in the world, including the UK and including the US that have officially committed themselves to housing for all. And this is not…it is not in fact a utopian idea because I mean it’s part of our basic sort of set of assumptions about what human rights are is that people do have a right to shelter. It’s part of the International Declaration of Human Rights, it’s part of many different international treaties, it’s part of many national constitutions. And so one of the questions where…we’re sort of struggling with here is, I mean how do you have on the one hand the sort of stated goal that everyone should have housing and many countries with an official right to housing, how do you have that coexisting with housing injustice, housing insecurity, homelessness? And so that’s why we argue that a right to housing needs to be…needs to be sort of fleshed out and sort of made substantial in a lot of different dimensions. I mean we say that the idea of a radical right to housing it really needs to be the name of a movement to transform the housing system.

So it’s I mean sort of thinking with Lefebvre’s idea about sort of claiming rights, or making demands that sort of exceed the limits of formal legality. That’s the sort of radical right to housing that we’re saying is necessary. So I mean it really is a sort of direction or a process more so than saying, you know states merely need to declare a right to housing.  Which is not to say that legalistic rights to housing are not important, I mean they certainly are and they certainly are, you know a route towards a more substantial and deeper right to housing. But we’re really thinking more about a sort of broad political direction and as something that movements can demand and work towards

Ana: Yeah and I’m just thinking of how a couple of months ago the Minister of Housing then, Luke Hall, announced that local authorities would provide temporary accommodation to house homeless people and I wonder in the context of your describing and the sort of…the broad direction do you think that announcement and the extent to which those measures have been actualised or not, do you think that can serve as a precedent for some more fundamental change that will be sustained into the future? It won’t mean that there’ll be a going back to business as usual?

David: Well a lot of cities, I mean sort of right after the pandemic started a lot of cities did pass these measures that said, okay any homeless person has a right to housing and we will house them, and, you know they didn’t reach a lot of people for various reasons. But they did sort of establish an emergency right to housing in a lot of ways. I mean similarly a lot of cities passed eviction moratoriums that didn’t stop landlords from trying to evict tenants, which you know has continued despite it being temporarily against the rules. But, I mean you did see in many different cities all of a sudden these measures that were trying to establish some sort of emergency claim to housing.

And it shows the the lack of necessity for these things, I mean the housing system doesn’t have to be the way that it. You know when you see…when you see cities just saying, okay we’re just going to end homelessness and end evictions during this pandemic. And they could have done that at any point. And so I mean I don’t think that there is going to be some kind of post-COVID socialism sort of coming from these things, you know I think a lot of cities are already, you know sort of recreating the conditions for widespread evictions, widespread homelessness, widespread shelter poverty. But they do show that it is not that hard. this is something that really could happen. The blockages to a better housing system are political, they’re not really practical, it’s not a matter of trying to solve an unsolvable problem; it is a matter of struggling against political interests and economic interests.

Ana: Yeah so on that note of the shifting of that political will I just wanted to ask you a final question about the future of housing and what transformations do you hope for and how could these be achieved?

David: I don’t think it’s a matter of sort of dreaming up exotic solutions to the housing problem; we sort of know what the solution would be which would be decommodifying housing, definancialising the systems that produce and distribute housing, building social alternatives and collective alternatives, you know we have sort of all the pieces in place already, I mean there are models in terms of public housing, social housing community land trusts, cooperatives. We don’t need to dream up an alternative world of housing, I mean there are fragments of it all over the place that, you know were created by radical movements of the past and experiments and reformist movements of the past, there are living examples that we can look to. So you know to some extent it really isn’t a sort of problem of the imagination, so you know we can sort of dream of an alternative world but the tools are there.

So I don’t know I mean …I’m simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic, about this. There really are sources of transformation, there really are movements and mobilisations across the world trying to change the housing system but at the same time the institutions that seek to maintain the system and profit off of it are also…I mean they’re also innovating and they’re also mobilising. You can sort of see with this…with this pandemic all of the different forces that are trying to seize this opportunity, I mean on the one hand companies like Blackstone and other global real estate companies are just waiting for all of these distressed assets to come on the market so, you know they can…they can own more of the global housing stock, you know and they really do see this as an opportunity to sort of expand their already large footprint.

On the other hand you can see a lot of housing movements trying to capitalise on this moment as well and trying to use the sort of unprecedented focus that the pandemic has brought. And just, I mean the sort of ways in which the pandemic reveals the interconnections between different social and political problems it is really powerful and, you know there has been this, you know real moments of solidarity that people have had with one another and, this is something that has potential as well. So it is a contradictory moment and it is a moment when you know you can on a Monday read the news and fall into utter despair and on Tuesday see all sorts of signs that change might be on the horizon. So I don’t know I…I guess I don’t have any…any broad prediction for the future but I know that the potential to deeply change the housing system is definitely there.

Ana: Many thanks to David Madden, from the London School of Economics, for joining us in this conversation. In this episode you also heard the voice of Carly Guest, who lent her experiences of living across multiple homes during lockdown, thanks Carly. I’m Ana Baeza and this podcast is brought to you by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University. We’ll be back again with more episodes, touching yet more aspects of home life and the everyday under Covid. Stay tuned.

Further Reading

Engels, Friedrich. 1936 [1872]. The Housing Question, ed. C. P. Dutt. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Harvey, D., 2012. Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution. Verso books.

Harvey, D., 2008. The right to the city. The City Reader, 6(1), pp.23-40.

Hubbard, P. and Lees, L., 2018. The right to community? Legal geographies of resistance on London’s gentrification frontiers. City, 22(1), pp.8-25.

Lefebvre, H., 2003. The urban revolution. University of Minnesota Press.

Lefebvre, H., Kofman, E. and Lebas, E., 1996. Writings on cities (Vol. 63). Oxford: Blackwell.

Madden, D. 2020. Housing and the Crisis of Social Reproduction, e-flux, 25 June. Available online at https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/housing/333718/housing-and-the-crisis-of-social-reproduction/

Madden, D. and Marcuse, P., 2016. In defense of housing. The politics of crisis.

Madden, D. and Marcuse, P., 2016. The Permanent Crisis of Housing. adaptation from In Defense of Housing, Jacobin Online, viewed, 2.

Madden, D., 2012. City becoming world: Nancy, Lefebvre, and the global—urban imagination. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(5), pp.772-787.

Minton, A., 2017. Big capital: Who is London for?. Penguin UK.

See also Living Well: health, wellbeing and the built environment  – This one-day conference for student nurses and health practitioners was organised by MoDA in collaboration with the School of Health, Middlesex University.  The conference touched on a variety of topics including the unhealthy city and homelessness, experiences of mental distress and housing, representations of council housing in the media, community-centred design of the built environment, and smart homes for ageing populations.

Show Notes

Produced by Ana Baeza Ruiz, with guest David Madden

Editing by Ana Baeza, Zoë Hendon and Paul Ford Sound

Contributions from Carly Guest

Music Credits

Say It Again, I’m Listening by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License

Let that Sink In by Lee Rosevere is licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Would You Change the World by Min-Y-Llan is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

Phase 5 by Xylo-Ziko is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.