Urban Financialization; Green Gentrification; 'Housing for, of, and by Workers'
Upcoming on Market Failure
Unlike a lot of online writing on “urbanism,” Market Failure engages with the actual complexity of current US urban politics, offering polemics from architects, geographers and critics of urban policy. A major question animating each installment is: how do we realize alternatives to or understand the contradictions of the current market-based provision of housing and urban infrastructure? While many are excited by the possibilities of left coalitions in US cities working to decommodify housing, there are almost no examples from the US context of this actually happening to draw upon, often leading to decontextualized comparisons with European cities. Though admirable as a model for a political alternative to the present dystopian in US cities, these visions often fail to engage the realities and the strangeness of the US context.
As one example of a useable past from US history, progressive economists and “housers,” such as Elizabeth Wood and Catherine Bauer, railed against “market failure.” Their argument that the market was unable to produce adequate housing within reach of the working class served as the basis for public housing legislation. In an echo of the situation today, ‘housers’ were alarmed by the inclination toward technocratic fixes and market-based solutions. Rather, they believed the “housing problem” could not be fixed by the same forces undermining social reproduction. Their experiences can serve as one inspiration for politicizing and reconceptualizing contemporary urban conditions beyond the current political-economic regimes driving the status quo. Like the housers, we start from the assumption of a pressing need to build political consensus for a break from the current situation. We aim to address and engage the wider publics invested in working for new outcomes through a freely accessible and collaboratively produced online publication.
Here are some upcoming essays which give a sense of what you can expect:
“Housing Beyond and Within the Market, Part 3: Cooperatives in Boston,” the final installment of Susanne Shindler’s series co-published with PLATFORM space
“The transformation of the working-class home, from family security to financially securitized,” Kate Derickson, Michael Goldman, Kevin Ehrman-Solberg, Sydney Shelstad (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities)
“‘Housing for, of, and by Workers’: Revisiting Catherine Bauer, the Labor Housing Conference, and the fight for Modern (Public) Housing,” Arielle Lawson
“Green Gentrification: Long Beach, NY and Urban Redevelopment for a Drowning Century,” Andrew Schustek & Avi Garelick
“From Tlatelolco to Co-Op City: Resident organizing and the restoration of ‘failed’ public housing in Mexico City and NYC,” Eric Peterson
“A Manifesto on Housing,” Alice Armstrong, Ashton Hamm and Meghan McAllister (The Architecture Lobby - Bay Area Chapter)
“Against LIHTC: the Affordable Housing industry and the foreclosure of a mass low-income housing politics in the US,” by Issac Harris & Eric Peterson