Questioning the crisis: Narratives of housing in Oakland

Keywords: crisis, housing justice, the housing crisis
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 42

Abstract

Crisis has become virtually unquestioned as a way of describing contemporary housing; however, crisis claims are necessarily social, historical, and geographical. Thus, for this talk, I am interested in the political work of crisis. I ask, is the housing crisis, the discourse through which media texts contextualize housing events, at odds with struggles for housing justice? I look to texts describing Moms 4 Housing, a group of previously homeless Black mothers who moved into a vacant investor-owned building in Oakland, California to shelter their families, launch a moral critique of housing under capitalism, and collectively organize around housing as a human right. My aim is to explore the tensions between the messages and actions of these women struggling for housing as a human right, and the housing crisis as the discourse at work in media descriptions of their movement. I find that crisis does not describe housing as much as crisis constructs housing in at least two ways. First, normatively: each claim that housing is in crisis is structured by conceptions of housing not in crisis—how housing ought to be—with implications for what counts as housing and who counts as residents; and second, physically: shaped by economistic debates around land use regulations and development incentives, the housing crisis is mobilized to build more houses instead of addressing the roots of housing injustice. I argue these constructions of housing in crisis stand in the way of Moms 4 Housing’s movement for housing justice, they truncate their message and domesticate their resistance.