#peter marcuse

[woundgallery]

from In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis, authors David Madden and Peter Marcuse

[whosecityisthis]

Whether we dwell in caves or in condominiums, housing is a universal human practice. Home is an extension and expression of our capacity to create. It takes an infinite variety of forms, but making a home for ourselves is an essential and universal activity. Residential alienation is what happens when a capitalist class captures the housing process and exploits it for its own ends. Hyper-commodified housing is alienated housing. It is dominated by people who see dwellings through the eyes of an investor interested in profit or a technocrat interested in control, instead of seeing it as a social right. Commodified dwelling space is not an expression of the residential needs of those who live in it. It is determined by landlords, sublessors, management companies, real estate developers, banks, bailiffs, and bureaucrats–by the ensemble of social roles and institutions that prop up the seemingly inhuman laws of housing markets in contemporary society.

David Madden & Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The Politics Of Crisis

[leftpress]

Capitalism’s Housing Crisis

George Martin Fell Brown | May 21st 2017 | Socialist Alternative Big business is increasingly taking over the housing sector – social rented as well as private ownership. The results have been devastating as tenants face sky-high rents, fewer rights, worsening conditions, and government policies of aggressive deregulation. PAUL KERSHAW reviews two books linking the current housing crisis with globalisation and the financial markets. Originally published […]

→READ MORE←

Get your Latest News From The Leftist Front on LeftPress.news → Support Us On Patreon! ←

[anniekoh]

I. There are two cardinal forms of spatial injustice:   A.The involuntary confinement of any group to a limited space – segregation, ghettoization – the unfreedom argument.   B. The allocation of resources unequally over space –the unfair resources argument. II. Spatial injustice is derivative of broader social injustice –the derivative argument. III. Social injustices always have a spatial aspect, and social injustices cannot be addressed without also addressing their spatial aspect – the spatial remedies argument. IV. Spatial remedies are necessary but not sufficient to remedy spatial injustices – let alone social injustice – the partial remedy argument. V. The role of spatial injustice relative to social injustice is dependent on changing social, political, and economic conditions, and today there are trends that tend both to decrease and to increase the importance of the spatial – the historical embeddedness argument.

Peter Marcuse, “ Spatial Justice: Derivative but Causal of Social Injustice” (pdf) at Justice Spatiale Spatial Justice

[whosecityisthis]

The solution to the housing problem, then, is not moralism, but the creation of an alternative residential logic. Exhorting for-profit real estate companies to act differently in the name of creating a less vicious housing system is pointless. Housing problems are not the result of greed or dishonesty. They result from the structural logic of the current housing system. Alternative, decommodified models of residential development must therefore be created. Far from stopping new construction, cities need more new decommodified dwellings, such as public or cooperative housing. A proper understanding of the housing crisis today requires an account of its commodification. Making real progress on housing problems requires developing concrete alternatives to it.

David Madden & Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The Politics Of Crisis

[whosecityisthis]

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi demonstrated that "the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society." The idea of a self-adjusting housing market is similarly utopian. In unequal contexts where the logic of commodification rules, some people will always be forced into uninhabitable dwelling spaces. Some will live in sheds, some in closets. Some will live amid toxic pollution. Some will be packed with twenty-five other people, including children, into a single home. These are not market failures--they are how the market works.

David Madden & Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The Politics Of Crisis

[whosecityisthis]

The idea of crisis implies that inadequate or unaffordable housing is abnormal, a temporary departure from a well-functioning standard. But for working-class and poor communities, housing crisis is the norm. Insufficient housing has been the mark of dominated groups throughout history … The reappearance of the term “housing crisis” in headlines represents the experiences of middle-class homeowners and investors, who faced unexpected residential instability following the 2008 financial implosion.

David Madden & Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis

[whosecityisthis]

There is a world of a difference between economic demand and social need. Many people, especially poor and working-class households, need more housing than they can afford. But this form of need does not register with purely profit-oriented developers. Far from responding efficiently to residential needs, investors can turn a profit by squeezing more money out of existing spaces while adding nothing to the general housing stock. Developers routinely engage in land hoarding and other strategies centered on speculation and scarcity. Even some economists recognize that housing markets are structurally incapable of being efficient. It is easy to inflate price bubbles and difficult to deflate them. The history of real estate is replete with speculation. Despite how it appears in abstract models, the actual market in housing is neither efficient nor rational.

David Madden & Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis