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Curated Track: Economic Geography Specialty Group Highlights and Crisis, Inequality, and Left-Behind Places

Description:

The present historical conjuncture has brought once again to the fore the housing question, evident in the rapidly proliferating references to the housing crisis in scholarship and press. The dominant contemporary crisis discourse has been the neoclassically inflected ‘market urbanist’ approach, which has appropriated and (re)framed the housing crisis as shortage. Like the “so called housing shortage” of Engels’s day, this shortage is a political construction which obscures the root of the housing question in the historical relations of (racial) capitalist urbanization. This market urbanist reformulation of crisis, largely a project of free market think tanks and real estate funded para-academic research centers, has turned housing policy into a supply question. At a time of deepening housing insecurity for working-class communities of color, such an approach deliberately elides pressing questions of displacement, gentrification, eviction, and homelessness. Indeed, market urbanism mobilizes the housing crisis as justification for the elimination of regulations and tenant protections. Especially insidious is the appropriation of the language of fair housing by market urbanists, whereby they position deregulatory approaches as capable of fostering racial and economic justice and integration. The narrative and analytical simplicity of this celebratory vision of capitalist urbanization has been crucial to its growing influence. Market urbanist policy orthodoxy has found middle-class grassroots support in emerging YIMBY (yes in my backyard) organizations, and in prestigious journalistic outlets which have enthusiastically mobilized in support of the interests of capital.

We recognize the crucial work of tenant movements, community based anti-gentrification organizations, radical planners, and activists in challenging the assumptions and effects of market urbanism. This endeavor brings together academics who cast doubt on market urbanism, call into question its research claims, and refocus the housing question on the political economy of global racial capitalism.

The first session of this series interrogates the way the housing question has come to be reposed in the current historical conjuncture. Ananya Roy chairs this session and, and presents a paper considering the racialized construction of “the tenant as class enemy” within the market-urbanist accounting. Michael Storper foregrounds the enduring significance of frontier mythology in the economics and politics of urban expansion. Kian Goh troubles the uncritical morphological association of density and sustainability in favor of a focus on the processes which underpin urban change. Finally, Erin McElroy critiques the technocultural and techno-solutionist aspects of the market urbanist projet from a feminist and decolonial perspective.

The particular construction of the housing crisis as a social problem which predominates in the present also serves to decisively prescribe and circumscribe a set of policy interventions, and determines the conditions on which debate unfolds, with urgent political stakes.

The second session of this series chaired by Kian Goh responds to this. Anthony Damiano and Christopher Frenier present empirical findings which trouble the way housing researchers have posed the question in their research designs. Rich Schragger considers the rush to deregulatory and pre-emptive policy solutions and suggests that the public sector should not cede local authority to combat inequality. Ben Teresa employs a Kalcekian framing and engages with the Black Radical tradition to consider how domination, not profit, is the logic which propels landlordism. Alexander Ferrer presents work with Teresa which excavates the value theoretical and moral economic foundations which informs market urbanists’ misunderstanding of rent control policies.

Finally, panelists Rachel Brahinsky, Bob Lake, Renee Tapp, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, and Elvin Wyly, in discussion with Michael Storper, will hold a conversation about the political economic and ideological dimensions of the contemporary housing crisis, and the hegemonic market urbanist response.

Non-Presenting Participants