Housing Justice in Unequal Cities

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities is a global research network funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS 1758774) and housed at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. This open-access volume, co-edited by Ananya Roy and Hilary Malson, brings together movement-based and university-based scholars to build a shared field of inquiry focused on housing justice. Based on a convening that took place in Los Angeles in January 2019, at the LA Community Action Network and at the University of California, Los Angeles, the essays and interventions situate housing justice in the long struggle for freedom on stolen land. Embedded in the stark inequalities of Los Angeles, our work is necessarily global, connecting the city’s Skid Row to the indebted and evicted in Spain and Greece, to black women’s resistance in Brazil, to the rights asserted by squatters in India and South Africa. Learning from radical social movements, we argue that housing justice also requires a commitment to research justice. With this in mind, our effort to build a field of inquiry is also necessarily an endeavor to build epistemologies and methodologies that are accountable to communities that are on the frontlines of banishment and displacement

‘Mortgaged lives’: the biopolitics of debt and housing financialisation

The paper expands the conceptual framework within which we examine mortgage debt by reconceptualising mortgages as a biotechnology: a technology of power over life that forges an intimate relationship between global financial markets, everyday life and human labour. Taking seriously the materiality of mortgage contracts as a means of forging new embodied practices of financialisation, we urge for the need to move beyond a policy‐ and macroeconomics‐based analysis of housing financialisation. We argue that more attention needs to be paid to how funnelling land‐related capital flows goes hand in hand with signing off significant parts of future labour, decisionmaking capacity and well‐being to mortgage debt repayments. The paper offers two key insights. First, it exemplifies how macroeconomic and policy changes could not have led to the financialisation of housing markets without a parallel biopolitical process that mobilised mortgage contracts to integrate the social reproduction of the workforce into speculative global real‐estate practices. Second, it expands the framework of analysis of emerging literature on financialisation and subjectification. Focusing on the mortgage defaults and evictions crisis in Spain, we document how during Spain's 1997–2007 real‐estate boom the promise of mortgages as a means to optimise income and wealth enrolled livelihoods into cycles of global financial and real‐estate speculation, as home security and future wealth became directly dependent on the fluctuations of financial products, interest rates and capital accumulation strategies rooted in the built environment. When, after 2008 unemployment escalated and housing prices collapsed, mortgages became a punitive technology that led to at least 500 000 foreclosures and over 250 000 evictions in Spain

Are green cities healthy and equitable? Unpacking the relationship between health, green space and gentrification

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552Digital object identifier for the 'European Research Council' (http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000781) - Digital object identifier for 'Horizon 2020' (http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100007601).While access and exposure to green spaces has been shown to be beneficial for the health of urban residents, interventions focused on augmenting such access may also catalyze gentrification processes, also known as green gentrification. Drawing from the fields of public health, urban planning and environmental justice, we argue that public health and epidemiology researchers should rely on a more dynamic model of community that accounts for the potential unintended social consequences of upstream health interventions. In our example of green gentrification, the health benefits of greening can only be fully understood relative to the social and political environments in which inequities persist. We point to two key questions regarding the health benefits of newly added green space: Who benefits in the short and long term from greening interventions in lower-income or minority neighborhoods undergoing processes of revitalization? And, can green cities be both healthy and just? We propose the Green Gentrification and Health Equity model which provides a framework for understanding and testing whether gentrification associated with green space may modify the effect of exposure to green space on health