Housing Movements

Housing movements have varied greatly in their choice of tactics, effectiveness, and durability. Their political orientations, and that of their main organizers have spanned the spectrum of political thought ranging from far-left anarchist, communist, and reformist to the occasional far-right segregationist. These movements can be most easily classified according to four main organizing strategies, which often overlap: market-intervention, community control, construction of social housing, and autonomous movements. These categories are fluid, as housing movements have changed their strategies to respond to a variety of pressures and opportunities.

Housing movements represent an important area of social justice organizing: the area of social consumption. Social consumption refers to the goods and services that all workers must purchase in order to provide a decent standard of living for themselves and their families. Transportation, health care, child care, and housing are examples. With the deindustrialization of developed countries and the privatization of essential services in the global South, social consumption struggles continue to generate activism.

Housing movements confront the crisis of displacement that has two main components: The word gentrification refers to the market-driven process of working-class renters being pushed from a neighborhood and replaced by more affluent residents. Activists use the term urban removal (a variation of urban renewal) to describe government-funded demolition of working-class neighborhoods. Because the two forces commonly are at work at the same time, the term displacement is often used to describe the effects of the combination.

Most housing movements involve some sort of demand for government intervention in the market place. This strategy pursues rent regulations as a method for stabilizing housing prices and preserving working-class communities. Such intervention is favored by many activists simply because it can potentially control housing prices in wide areas of existing housing stock at once through the legal system, instead of requiring additional construction of social housing. Almost all local rent control ordinances operate by setting a price ceiling, or a formula, commonly attached to the rate of inflation, which determines that maximum amount of rent that can be charged for a given dwelling. Many also define basic habitability standards as well as “just causes” for eviction.

During the Great Depression, the unemployed workers' movements confronted the housing crisis in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada with tightly organized anti-eviction campaigns. These campaigns were based in simple logic of direct action. If a family were to be evicted, then hundreds of neighbors would react by militantly “unevicting” them, returning belongings to the dwellings and often engaging in combat with police. This was made possible by a network of block councils organized for rapid response. In the United States, the Communist Party USA was instrumental in instigating this movement and providing key organizers to the campaigns, particularly in Harlem. This era was depicted in the writings of many Harlem Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes's poem “Ballad of the Landlord” and Richard Wright's novel Invisible Man.

The extra-electoral push greatly added to political pressure for wartime and municipal rent controls, as New York legislators enacted the War Emergency Tenant Protection Act, a template that has survived until this day. Throughout the 20th century, rent regulations have found shifted from federal to state to local jurisdictions.

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