In Defense of Housing, Review

Book Review, "In Defense of Housing" Peter Marcuse, David Madden

By Joseph Homer

In their recent book “In Defense of Housing,” Peter Marcuse and David Madden chart the history of housing in urban New York as a way to help us understand the social significance of housing as well as provide a critique of the currently-popular formulation of the problem of 'affordable housing crisis.'

Marcuse and Madden begin with an appreciation of the importance of housing in the everyday lives of people and its role as an anchor and as a sanctuary. On this view, “Housing is the precondition both for work and for leisure” (12). While the world outside might be contested and unequal, one's domicile might very well provide the kind of refuge that each of us needs. Moreover, the analysis considers the psychological consequences of having one's housing be under threat. The fear of housing insecurity may force people to stay together when they might like to part, people to stay in jobs they dislike and exacerbate anxieties experienced in other aspects of their lives (67) In this way, the fear of losing one's housing or the stress involved in having to keep it create dual traumas for many.

“For the oppressed, housing is always in crisis. The reappearance of the term 'housing crisis' in headlines represents the experiences of middle-class homeowners and investors” (10). Marcuse and Madden also assert that the “housing crisis is not a result of the system breaking down but of the system working as it is intended,” to drive up prices, create scarcity and discourage development if there isn't any economic incentive.

This book is primarily concerned with the treatment of housing as commodity, as 'real-estate' instead of as necessary place of refuge. On this critique, there is a “conflict between housing as lived, social space and housing as an instrument for profit-making – a conflict between housing as home and as real estate” (4) . We see this problem play out today in the affordability problem: developers seek to build high-end properties, but the market fails to create incentives for the development of solutions around low-income and affordable housing. For Marcuse and Madden (and for the rest of us), “what needs defending is the use of housing as home, not as real estate.” (11).

And yet, even state-sponsored building and building incentive creation has long been bound up with problematic housing practices and attempts to preserve the capitalist system. While creating the framework for widespread housing ownership, federal housing programs such as the Federal Housing Administration and laws like the Glass Steagall Act and other New Deal initiatives “ 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.” (24) Restrictions like this hardly disappeared in following years, and the lost wealth involved with not being able to own a home still plagues communities today. Aside from outright racism, most housing policies are driven by the demands of private developers, and this has been the case since the postwar boom years and led to a “state-supported system dominated by private ownership” (25). Importantly, the state is often depicted as a benign actor which acts on the behalf of the poorest and stands as a counterpoint to private development, that is the myth of the benevolent state (140). But an analysis like this is itself hollow: in so many cases, “the actual motivations for state action in the housing sector have more to do with maintaining the political and economic order than with solving the housing crisis” (120). That is, if the state did not act, it would have to deal with an even worse problem of social instability, and so the incentives for addressing the housing crisis may just as well be reformist as anything else.

While the tenant movement is nearly non-existent in Modesto, there is a long history of radical tenant organizing in older, urban places like New York. These tenant movements date back decades to overcrowded tenements in the late 19^th Century, the efforts of which created cooperative housing developments in New York as well as strong community organizing groups dispersed throughout the New York urban area (115). Moreover, housing movements such as these are made up of people of all walks of life, and in some cases, they have had great impact on city and state actions (147).

It is crucial that we come to some new consensus on how we think the significance, ownership and development of housing. This is crucial as “housing preeminently creates and reinforces connections between people, communities, and institutions, and thus it ultimately creates relationships of power” (89). And so, neglecting the relations of power bound up with the production, ownership and development of housing is akin to neglecting the realities of power. Marcuse and Madden suggest several palliatives for us, although some of these are a bit clouded and need testing. First, they encourage us to “decommodify and de-financialize the housing system” (201). They suggest we do so in many ways, some having to do with rent control and others with public housing. Importantly, they also recommend that we consider cultivating “community land trusts,” or ownership situations in which a “nonprofit corporation holds land in trust and offers permanently affordable limited-equity, long-term leases to residents (209). Other prescriptions involve democratizing housing management and housing policy and seeing the housing struggle as part of a larger political and economic struggle created by the depredations of Capitalism (211, 212, 213). Moreover, they criticize the all-too-easy action of creation housing rights which are not enforced or fail to have the impact they intended.

So what does this mean for us? Modesto can certainly learn from some of these lessons, and as it grows as a town, it must take care not to invite the kinds of development that would inhibit the fair sharing of public space and the ability even of the poorest to have a place to find their refuge and rest. Remember, there are people living downtown already, and building them out might very well reproduce the kinds of inequality of ownership and power described here. And now is the time to make sure it does not happen.

Joseph Homer is a local organizer, fundraiser and homeless advocate who was worked with several community-based organizations to call attention to and highlight inequalities. Please reach out to him if you are interested in our Friday political chats or getting involved in activism or organizing work Email - jhomer42@gmail.com.