Barnard-Columbia Urban Review Spring 2022 Issue 3

BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW

SPRING 2022 ISSUE 3.

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW

THE SPRING 2022 ISSUE

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Contents Masthead

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Letter from the Associate Director of Urban Studies

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Letter from the Managing Editor

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Letter from the Editor 8 …………………………………………………………….

Articles + Art Submissions

Cover Art By Taylor Yingshi …………………………………………………………….

Proof of life NYC: A photo series

By Lauren Lee

Prostitution, Labor, and & Modernity: How Sex Work Shaped Buenos Aires

By Bella Barnes

Collaborative Community

By Naomi Fox

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The De-financialization of Housing: A human rights-based approach from London to Oakland

By Benjamin Jesse Pacho

Human Rights or Mutual Aid: Comparing Possible Remedies to Mass Houselessness

By Lola Rael

It’s a Bike’s World and We’re Just Living in it!

By Danielle Eregie

Photos

By Micaela Hecht

Vitrahaus

By Geoffrey Giller

Painting and Erasing

By Celia Ziliak

Urban Ecosystems: A Photo Essay

By Assorted Photographers

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MASTHEAD

EXECUTIVE BOARD

Editor-in-Chief: Madeline Liberman, BC ‘23 Managing Editor: Margaret Barnsley, BC ‘24 Layout Editor: Samuel George, GS ‘23 Publicity Director: Brooke McCormick, BC ‘22 Events Coordinator: Julia Hyman, BC ‘22 Treasurer: Ellie George, BC ‘23

ART DIRECTOR

Alice Warden, BC ‘23

STAFF WRITERS Giselle Silla, BC ‘24

PEER REVIEWERS

Megan Chew, BC ‘22 Yuki Mitsuda, BC ‘21 Ava Morouse, BC ‘23 Lola Rael, BC ‘23 Celeste Ramirez, BC ‘24 Victoria Tse, BC ‘24

PUBLICITY STAFF Victoria Tse, BC ‘24

EVENTS STAFF Ian Choo, GS ‘23

GENERAL BODY

Yumtsokyi Bhum, BC ’23 Kim Sun, BC ‘24 Jae Grace, BC ’23 Lauren Kahme, BC ‘23 Lily Clurman, BC ‘22

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Letter from the Associate Director of Urban Studies

I am excited to introduce the third issue of the Barnard Columbia Urban Review.

The review remains true to its original conception as a forum for student research and interventions in our understanding of urban spaces and places, New York foremost. It is my privilege to work with a group of students who are above all curious, interested, and critical. That they are also collaborative, organized, and dedicated is clearly shown by another excellent issue of BCUR. It may be too easy or too obvious to characterize the contents of this issue in terms of a broad conception of (human) rights to the city and the production of urban space – that risks encompassing nearly everything we do. But I challenge you to find a better one. Bella Barnes’ examination of the historiography of sex work in Buenos Aires points to the ways that bodies moving through urban spaces and regulations that govern them constitute the understandings of those places. Benjamin Pacho and Lola Rael examine housing and houselessness from the perspective of rights discourses in light of different kinds of epidemics, one viral, the other political-economic (both political-economic?), that both reveal the depths of systemic failures to guarantee shelter in advanced economies like the UK and USA. Moreover, the work of various photographers, artists, and architects complements these intellectual interventions by showing us the city as it is and could be.

My congratulations to the contributors to this issue and to the staff of the review for all of their work in assembling it. As we wind up another strange year at Barnard and Columbia, in New York, and in the world, the appearance of the BCUR should remind us of the ways that we can work together to make new knowledge and how much that matters.

Aaron Passell Associate Director Urban Studies Barnard College | Columbia University April 25, 2022

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Letter From the Managing Editor

I am delighted to present the Spring 2022 edition of the Barnard-Columbia Urban Review. As someone more newly involved in the publication, the chance to see the review come to life each semester, first as a peer reviewer and contributor, and now as the managing editor, has been incredibly humbling and rewarding. Each issue is a testament to the talent and dedication of many students on this campus, and this issue particularly so. Brimming with art, this issue brings the journal in a new direction by uniquely showcasing undergraduate urban scholarship and study in deeply creative and visual ways. This array of art beautifully captures both mundane and grand aspects of our current urban environment, as well as prompts us to visualize particular urban futures or possibilities.

As Maddy Liberman steps down as Editor-in-Chief and BCUR looks ahead to another school year, I am honored and incredibly excited to take on the role of CoEditor-in-Chief along with Victoria Tse. With a clear—if newly established— legacy to carry on, I am excited to continue BCUR’s cherished traditions of quality student scholarship, collaboration,, and intellectual curiosity. Time and time again, I have found myself amazed at the talent present in every aspect of this publication—from the incredible submissions, to the intellect required in every step of the editing process, to the stunning layout of the review, to the wonderful events put on by BCUR members. As one of many entirely student run publications on campus, BCUR exemplifies the commitment its students have to eachother and to the production of quality scholarship.

Now, thanks to those peoples’ hard work, the Spring 2022 issue stands before us. I sincerely hope you enjoy it.

Margaret Barnsley Managing Editor | Barnard College ‘24

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Letter from the Editor

I am honored and incredibly proud to present the third issue of the Barnard-Columbia Urban Review, marking the two-year anniversary of the founding of BCUR. During this semester, our club experimented with new forms of Urban Studies research while providing a friendly and supportive community for all interested in the field. A highlight of the semester was our first ever BCUR Zine Night in partnership with the Zine Library at the Milstein Center, where we gathered to craft (loosely) urban-inspired zines. Our collaborative zine and playlist will be distributed at the launch of this issue.

Taylor Yingshi’s stunning cover artwork speaks to one of this issue’s themes: the ecology of cities. The issue features an exciting collaboration with the Urban Ecosystems course at Barnard, taught by Professor Elizabeth Cook. Students walked through New York or their home city and photographed examples of the social, ecological, and technological systems that make up cities. You’ll find their submissions at the end of this issue.

This artistic work also serves as a reminder of what we may or may not notice in our urban environment. Trash cans with unexpected treasures; a tree melding with an iron fence; a bird in the cracks of the pavement: what else do we fail to appreciate in our cities? Bella Barnes gives us an insightful history of perceptions of sex work in Buenos Aires and highlights how historians have begun to see prostitution as a form of labor rather than a social ill. Barnes’ article is immediately followed by Naomi Fox’s Collaborative Community series, which literally re-envisions various New York spaces with a series of colorful and interactive structures. The way that we view the city is in itself incredibly powerful, as these scholars and artists demonstrate.

Benjamin Pacho and Lola Rael turn the issue toward questions of housing, with powerful arguments for viewing housing through a human rights-based lens. Both authors consider the effects of mutual aid movements and how they interact with human rights-based housing frameworks. In another example of re-envisioning the city, the authors propose bold ideas for improving the shortages and failures of housing, working both “inside” and “outside” the state.

They are followed by more artists’ unique renderings and re-visions of New York architecture and transportation, including Danielle Eregie’s whimsical print suggesting that “It’s A Bike’s World and We’re Just Living In It!” BCUR owes our third issue to the hard work of many within and outside the Urban Studies program. We would especially like to thank the authors and peer reviewers, the staff and board of the journal, all of the BCUR club members, and the faculty, staff, and teaching assistants of the Urban Studies program, including associate director Aaron Passell and department assistant Valerie Coates. Additionally, this issue would not be possible without the work of faculty and teaching assistants of the various other departments that support undergraduate urban research. As my time as Editor-in-Chief of BCUR comes to a close, I cannot thank this club and all of its supporters enough. I look forward to passing on this role to Margaret Barnsley and Victoria Tse, who will undoubtedly take BCUR in fantastic new directions.

We hope that you enjoy this issue, and as always, we welcome your feedback and participation in the future of BCUR. Sincerely,

Madeline Liberman Editor-in-Chief | Barnard College, ‘23

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Proof of Life NYC: A photo series by Lauren Lee SPRING 2022 ISSUE 3

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Prostitution, Labor, and Modernity: How Sex Work Shaped Buenos Aires

By Bella Barnes

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW What is deemed labor and who determines its validity or centrality to the formation of a city? In this historiographical essay, I am interested in how public authorities and society came to recognize sex work as labor in metropolitan cities, and how this validation shaped urban life. Moreover, I am interested in how the gendered bodies in these spaces determine the enforced laws. Interactions between women and authorities undoubtedly influenced the mobility of citizens in public spaces, and in spaces deemed private. Yet, where does the demarcation of public and private begin and end?

Historians of Buenos Aires have paid special attention to the history of prostitution and sex work as forms of labor. Thus, my essay will survey the work of scholars whose studies of these cities have portrayed sex work as a part of various aspects of urban development—as a valid form of making money, attracting tourists, or being detrimental to the health of Argentinian society.

Historians have highlighted the relationship between sex workers and the law. My work is particularly interested in the formation of city centers as they relate to labor economies.

When was sex work deemed favorable for the evolving urban center, Buenos Aires? Was there ever a distinction between the casual sex trade and upscale brothels, mimicking the redlight districts of Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin? Donna Guy’s Sex & Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina recounts the breadth and prevalence of the sex industry within Buenos Aires and how the sex trade became regulated—whether in the form of registering workers or health inspections, portraying sex work as both as a medical and moral crisis.

Moreover, Guy highlights the exacerbating influence of social factors such as disenfranchisement, lack of education, and access to lucrative and sustainable job opportunities that drove over thirty percent of Buenos Aires’ young adult women to engage in sex work by 1910 (42). I am interested in how systems of patronage, class, and propriety affected housing and neighborhood development within Buenos Aires.

Furthermore, I seek to understand how a body of work regarding prostitution formed. The formation of such scholarship and its importance to the creation of both cities not only ideologically, but physically, appointing specific parts of the city to be red-light districts is also of note to me. Most importantly, I want to understand how and when historians come to understand sex workers as laborers—not as criminal or wayward women subject to the moralizing gaze of society.

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW The transformation of the arid lands of Patagonia to the bustling metropolis of Buenos Aires owes its beginning to widespread immigration, both legal and otherwise. Multiple aspects of the ever-evolving Buenos Aires made the city a desirable destination for European immigrant women. At the turn of the 20th century, the importation of “desirable” European bodies became a key part of Argentina’s national improvement project. Guy’s use of “desirable” is particularly of note with the cheap steamship fees and the lure of Buenos Aires as a rapidly growing, predominantly male, port city that made it easier for single women to migrate to the city.

The gender imbalance of Buenos Aires, coupled with the late nineteenth-century immigration incentivizing efforts of the Argentine government, brought European women to the capital in droves. Guy’s rhetoric surrounding “desirable bodies'' also lends itself to the Argentinian government’s promotion of rural settlement. Her point about desirability politics makes the Argentine government’s dedication to the process of “pacification” of the interior’s indigenous population and “colonization of the desert” quite clear (Yarfitz 2019, 33).

While the majority of immigrants came from Italy and Spain in search of manual labor, many Eastern European Jews fleeing poverty and persecution in the late 19th century were also invited to assist in the rural colonization of Argentina.

Yet the discrimination Jewish laborers encountered followed them to their new homes. Although they were, as Guy suggests, “invited to assist '' in the urbanization of the Argentinian coast, Jewish laborers were seen as “others” and different from Argentinian women. Perception of difference among the immigrant and local women further impacted labor and housing opportunities for newly arrived women (Schettini 2017, 3). In response to discrimination faced both abroad and now as “foreign interlopers” in traditional labor markets, many immigrant women turned to prostitution as a response to their poverty, for a community of fellow immigrant women, and for a dependable income (Yarfitz 2019, 42). Continuing Schettini’s rhetoric of otherness, historian Mir Yarfitz indicates that the “othered” nature of Jewish prostitutes concentrated their labor in specific districts of Buenos Aires, particularly in a concentration of registered brothels in the Once neighborhood. In 1908, this region became the exclusive zone of prostitution within the city, as local officials refused to establish new bordellos outside of the boundaries of the Barrio. In response to this, local public health officials established outposts throughout the Barrio. As a result of the exoticization of Jewish women’s bodies and laws regulating

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW bordello establishment, Jewish laborers settled often near where they could get work, establishing a predominantly Jewish community in the eastern region of the city. Yarfitz’s recounting of neighborhood change within Balvanera, Buenos Aires elucidates the link between prostitution and other types of business. Guy also draws attention to the legalization of prostitution through condoning bordellos as legal businesses, but adds that authorities granted certain neighborhoods “special rulings for politically powerful groups,” giving them the ability to own bordellos a mere block away from schools instead. Furthermore, the legalization of prostitution had a social impact in the manner that it prevented women, both foreign and local, to occupy jobs and roles—particularly in commercial areas—that were historically deemed only for men.

Public health physicians, also known as higienistas, wreaked havoc on the lives of working women in Argentina, calling for the containment of women in the home, and encouraging women to embrace and identify with the domestic sphere as equitable labor. In response to the legalization of prostitution, public health officials blamed the increase of syphilis and venereal disease on the lack of interest in reform of prostitution ordinances, calling for a registration of laborers, specifically of women working in the sex industry, to quell rising cases of venereal disease and bring order to these “wayward” women (Guy 1995, 12). Moreover, the public health officials served as an extension of the police force, calling for the removal of registered women from public spaces, such as cafes and busy streets, and even preventing working women, most of whom lived in the same neighborhood in downtown Esmeralda 76, from keeping their windows open at certain times of the day (Guy 1995, 18). The criminalization of women deemed prostitutes served as another way to regulate labor within Buenos Aires, while still ensuring maximum profit for the local government. Yet, many historians differ on the potential legality of women who work as prostitutes, regardless of the laws endorsed by the Argentinian government. As historian Eusebio Gómez asserts, one could argue that prostitution has the same origin of crime: “prostitutes and criminals have the same character in being unproductive and antisocial...prostitution is a form of impotent criminality that could free the woman, more often men, from crime that is more violent or destructive” (1908, 24). However, the legalization of crime, coupled with the overall misogyny of labor regulation in Argentina may give one pause in reading

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW Gómez’s thoughts. How could women make money for their families without being considered de facto criminals?

Reacting to Gómez's concerns, Cristiana Schettini’s assertion regarding the types of prostitution, including various positions within the service industry, frames prostitution ultimately as a broad field of labor, not contained solely to sex work. During the turn of the 20th century, the lack of jobs spurred men and women alike to participate in the sex trade as means of steady pay. Authorities had an ambivalent perspective on sex work overall, and its necessity to the economic wellbeing of the city (Schettini, 2017, 28). According to Schettini in the anthology Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s, public officials and doctors resorted to “a broader category of ‘clandestine prostitution’ which included various types of occupations, such as actresses, waitresses in cafes and taverns, and a multitude of other types of activities carried out by female workers who went about their business in the city” (García et. al 2017, 83). Often, as Schettini clarifies, women’s labor classification as “prostitutes'” had more to do with who was in their immediate proximity, rather than the actual labor they undertook. Women working in public-facing spaces that required conversation with men outside of their families or marriages were deemed “clandestine prostitutes,” stigmatizing a range of women who worked in places where men socialized in contexts loaded with class and gender tensions, such as bars, brothels, and even restaurants where women worked as waitresses (Quiroga and Gayol 2000, 196).

Thus, one must ask whether or not the true function of the establishments where these women worked was even considered by most historians, or solely the gender of the laborers themselves.

Furthermore, Schettini’s insight into the labor of women deemed prostitutes, clandestine or otherwise, is two-fold, as women deemed prostitutes were also seen as muses, occupying an integral role in literature, plays, and the narratives that were dramatized and documented in the lyric of nationally broadcasted tangos (Casadevall 1968). These tangos acted as cultural exports, furthering the impact of women involved in prostitution not only as local figures worthy of their own lore but as caricatures of Argentinian culture. One can only imagine what a tourist would think of South America, let alone Argentina, if this was their only exposure. As a result, the tango, particularly Pascual Contursi’s “Mi noche triste'” and “Flor de fango,” became wildly popular both nationally and globally in the late 1910s. Yet, as Schettini laments,

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW historians have neglected to focus on the social organization of the sex trade, the social lives of prostitutes, and their relationships with other types of workers and social groups throughout Argentina (Young 2012, 465-67). Without the context of these social relations, one cannot grapple with the implications of immigration on the shifting relationship of sex work, labor, and national identity.

Greatly influenced by European immigration, Buenos Aires’ sex workers were a heterogeneous blend of newly arrived Jewish immigrants and others deemed racially different than the criollo elite of Argentinian society. There are many references to Argentinian men having a predilection for French women, as they were seen as “civilized” sex, while Jewish women were seen for their sexual and racial “otherness” (McGee Deutsch 2010, 106). In his dissertation turned novel, Impure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina, Dr. Mir Yarfitz describes the effects immigration and prostitution had on the colloquial Spanish language itself, shaping not only physical urban space, but theoretical and interpersonal relationships throughout the city.

For instance, Yarfitz found that the term polaco or polaca (Polish man and Polish woman) became synonymous with the many Jewish immigrants from Poland to the countries along the east coast of South America at the turn of the 20th century.

“Polaca'' became vernacular for “prostitute,” and has been used to refer to any prostitute whether or not of Jewish or Eastern European descent. A Polish university graduate and decorated Red Cross nurse found it such a handicap to be known as a Pol that she Latinized her name: she told the investigator that “to own yourself as a Pol in Rio was to brand yourself as a prostitute.” In response to antisemitic discrimination, many women often claimed other nationalities if they wished to be viewed as respectable. Often, working women falsified their names, pretending to be French for the higher status and price French women garnered in the sex work industry (Yarfitz 2019, 93).

Although they made up most of the labor force, foreign women were not owners of the lucrative brothels where they worked. Discrepancies within the number of foreign-born prostitutes working often confounded records, yet most of the brothels were owned by Argentinians and employed a majority of immigrant women. Moreover, in her brilliant work, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires, Guy contends that the brothel licensing system, which came into force in 1875, appears to have encouraged the development of regulated brothels with numerous working women (1995, 35). The

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW multitude of women, booming business, and quantity of brothels made it less of a hassle for brothel owners, many Argentinian middle-class men, to pay the fees requested by the municipality the brothel was located in. Thus, regulating prostitution became a way to transfer funds generated by prostitution into municipal coffers (Schettini 2017, 15).

Moreover, provincial capitals and cities, like the capital of Corrientes, that did not legalize prostitution, tended to draw fewer women and in turn experienced large-scale male migration to more economically active areas, including prostitution, factory work, and other forms of labor to bolster its economy (Guy 1994, 5).

As Guy stipulates in her ground-breaking work, El Sexo Peligroso, the differences between clandestine prostitution and registered prostitutes mainly contrasted in their treatment by local labor authorities. In Buenos Aires, Guy argues that registered prostitutes' labor was strictly regulated as a performance or an act of physical labor itself. Operating within the scope of authoritative standards, Guy suggests that registered prostitutes had to define meet-up locations for their clients in terms of their proximity to educational institutions and places of worship (1995, 23). Similar to the theatre, certain days were deemed dark, or unavailable for women to work. These included Christian holidays and feast days, yet one must wonder how authorities enforced these laws.

Furthermore, Guy’s rhetoric surrounding the prostitutes as laborers suggests that the women were able to solely toil during set working hours on the streets. For instance, Guy remarks that clandestine prostitutes were required to pay monthly fines to municipalities, but were not required to register as prostitutes or sex workers. Yet, registered women were forced to pay taxes in addition to submitting to regular medical examinations to prove their labor (1994, 18).

Interestingly, Guy’s findings act in direct contrast to the views of more medically-based historians who argue that the rise of prostitution, the pervasiveness of brothels, and the human trafficking of young women to fulfill the local desire for foreign prostitutes, led to the economic downfall and decay of the city (Yarfitz 2019, 90). Furthermore, as Guy asserts through her evidence of the convergence of prostitution, public space, and economic prosperity, multiple interests relied on the regulation of prostitution in Buenos Aires. The interconnectivity of the sex trade to the profit of many within the urban landscape subsequently aids readers in understanding why the regulation of prostitution was one of the main causes of conflicts between the municipal

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW authorities, the police, brothel owners, and the prostitutes themselves.

Additionally, the legal implications of prostitution and its ability to shape social relations within the city fascinate me as it relates to the enforcement of appropriate labor. There were significant challenges in determining what labor was truly deemed sex work, “backed up by the code of contraventions and police edicts, the police created a sphere of legitimacy for moralizing measures in public spaces, which coexisted with a veiled acceptance of cabarets, night clubs, and hotels that rent out rooms by the hour (Código de Faltas y Edictos Contravencionales, Guy 1994, 22). However, the legitimization of prostitution no doubt had consequences, not only for the city as a whole but for those affected most directly: the working women.

In response to the legitimization of prostitution as labor, Guy interestingly concludes that employed women sought the right to continue garnering employment outside of roles deemed clandestine prostitution and organized in reaction to authoritative dismay. Women went on strike to protest unfair wages and their prevention from working in factories, for factory work was portrayed as dangerous due to the possibility of women interacting with men outside the home and exposing themselves to substances that could render them barren. Therefore, only widows were able to legally work in factories (Código de Faltas y Edictos Contravencionales).

Guy’s account fails to take into consideration unwed mothers and other women needing to support children and other family members. Guy points to anti-waitressing campaigns as the linchpin of labor organizing among women, yet one could argue that the true source of the unrest had been boiling since the rhetoric surrounding women’s right to work began with widespread immigration decades before (1994, 20). The centralization of Jewish women in the Once neighborhood led to increased ability to organize and strike in response to discriminatory labor laws and practices, spreading working women’s rights throughout various industries, specifically in factory work, throughout Argentina.

Various historical lenses help us ponder how the legalization of sex work allowed Buenos Aires, and subsequently Argentina, to thrive at the turn of the 19th century. Cristiana Schettini’s research in her chapter, "A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires,” grants invaluable insight into how the regulation of prostitution, categorization of clandestine and registered laborers, and social mores influenced the physical landscape of Buenos

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW Aires. Moreover, her insight demonstrates that women becoming registered prostitutes was not a reaction to gendered immoral values, nor as castaways of industrial capitalism at the turn of the 20th century. Rather, they were laborers who refused the ability to work in the manufacturing industry or outside of the home, due to gendered misconceptions of skill, sexism, and desire on behalf of the Argentinian government to continue income revenue—in both clandestine ways and otherwise. The success and establishment of Buenos Aires, albeit contentiously, was largely due to the profits and immigration associated with prostitution, a key fact that cannot be taken away from the city’s past, present, or future.

Bibliography Bliss, Katherine Elaine. Compromised Positions : Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City. University Park: Pennsylvania State R. University Press, 2001.

Casadevall, Domingo. El Tema de La Mala Vida En El Teatro Nacional (Buenos Aires, 1970); José Sebastián Tallón, El Tango En Sus Etapas de Música Prohibida (Buenos Aires, 1959); Sirena Pellarolo, Sainetes, Cabaret, Minas y Tangos (Buenos Aires, 2010). n.d.

Gómez, Eusebio. La Mala Vida En Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires, 1908. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101075697639.

Guy, Donna Jay. El sexo peligroso: la prostitución legal en Buenos Aires 1875 - 1955. Colección Historia y cultura. Buenos Aires: Ed. Sudamericana, 1994—— —. Sex & Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family and Nation in Argentina. 1. paperback print.

Engendering Latin America 1. Lincoln, Neb.: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1995.

Quiroga, Marcial. “‘Aspecto Actual de La Prostitución’, Semana Médica, 3 (1962), p. 1785; Carretero, La Prostitución En Buenos Aires, p. 196; Sandra Gayol, Sociabilidad

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En Buenos Aires: Hombres, Honor y Cafés, 1862– 1910 (Buenos Aires, 2000),” n.d Rodríguez García, Magaly, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk. Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s.

Boston, UNITED STATES: BRILL, 2017. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/columbia/detail.a ction?docID=5013638.

Schettini, Cristiana. “A Social History of Prostitution in Buenos Aires.” In Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s, n.d. Accessed April 21, 2021.

Yarfitz, Mir. Impure Migration : Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina. Jewish Cultures of the World.

New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2019. https://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?qurl=https%3a %2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect %3dtrue%26db%3de025xna%26AN%3d2275722%26 site%3dehost-live%26scope%3dsite.

Young, Richard. “Sirena Pellarolo. Sainetes, Cabaret, Minas y Tangos. Una Antología. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2010.” Revista Iberoamericana 78, no.

238 (2012): 465–67. https://doi.org/10.5195/reviberoamer.2012.6915.

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Collaborative Community

By Naomi Fox

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The De-financialization of Housing: A human rights-based approach from London to Oakland

By Benjamin Jesse Pacho

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Covid-19 has exacerbated the housing crisis and revealed it for what it truly is: a human rights calamity, decades in the making. Never before has access to an adequate and affordable home been such a stark matter of life or death —Leilani Farha

Introduction The disruption of the global pandemic to urban housing markets has opened new frontiers for the reimagination of institutions via processes of de-financialization. Such efforts are rooted in social movement praxis, which posits a theory of change seeking to elevate the treatment of the home as an essential public good rather than a market commodity (Rudiger, 2016). An extreme example of the latter in recent memory is the 2008 Great Recession, when the housing question was most contested over the role of market forces and state intervention. As such, financialization scholarship gained considerable traction in the aughts amid the rampant use of predatory practices by mortgage lenders and the securitization of mortgage debt into tradable assets. If the past is prologue, large financial firms and institutional investors may look to capitalize on similar profiles of volatility and destabilization in global housing markets. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, in a bid to head off potential market speculation, cautioned policymakers against allowing financial actors to “use the pandemic and the

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW misfortunes of many to dominate housing markets without regard for human rights standards” (Farha, 2020).

This paper analyses the ways in which evoking human rights through social movement praxis may set about challenging the dominance of free-market economics to determine access to housing. Currently, significant gaps exist in the housing financialization literature on the possibilities of human rights to transform institutions and structures, let alone challenge the hegemony of neoliberalism (Aalbers, 2013).

The antecedents of neoliberalism can be traced to 1970s market reforms that focused on the privatization of state assets, deep social spending cuts, and deregulation of capital markets. These reforms have been internalized by the state to become sacrosanct, with the exception of the 2008 Great Recession, which revealed the impacts of housing financialization and the shortcomings of neoliberal policies.

Following the first wave of Covid-19 lockdowns, academics put out calls for new scholarships on the definancialization of housing. This may suggest a disjuncture between earlier research on financialization and a period of post-financialization marked by the pandemic. As such, the nascent research agenda includes the study of “changing modes of urban governances and ‘anti-political’ social movements which can contest housing financialization locally” (Wijburg, 2020). However, given the international scope of human rights standards, an open question looms over how such frameworks could be “internalized” domestically, as a pre-condition for de-financializing housing at the local, regional, or national level.

One principal way this could be achieved is by what human rights scholars refer to as the “transnational legal process.” From abstraction to enforcement, human rights can be woven structurally by “transnational norm entrepreneurs, governmental norm sponsors, transnational issue networks, interpretive communities, and law-declaring fora, bureaucratic compliance procedures, and issue linkages among issue areas” (Addison & Koh, 2017). To that end, this paper considers two case studies of urban social movements in London and Oakland that had established a transnational issue network to effectively de-financialize housing locally via a human rights approach. The research intentions herein hope to contribute to the timely set of questions around the promise of “progressive urban politics to contest financialization of urban space and housing”—as well as the extent that “de-financializing housing initiatives [could] become ‘world forming’” (Wijburg, 2020).

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW Where internalizing the human right to adequate housing comes up short, “many local initiatives may be challenged by neoliberal hegemony” (Jessop, 2007; Ibid). The theory of hegemony is further developed to discuss the interaction of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces that “fight for control” in the marketplace of ideas (Kaufman, 2020).

In this case, the hegemony of neoliberalism is represented by the former, in which the financialization of housing operates, whereas human rights discourse is situated antagonistically in the latter position. Framing housing as a human right offers one important way to conceptualize housing not as a commodity or asset, but as “the first of the social services,” as quoted by Sir Winston Churchill. The former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom also said, in the lead-up to forming the United Nations, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” In a world irrevocably transformed, global crises present an opportunity to envision new possibilities for institutions, as well as jettison what no longer serves social, economic, or political interests. To set about charting a new vision of housing—with universal access at the center—this paper suggests that the human rights framework can be a means of undoing the neoliberal underpinnings of housing financialization. For example, since the start of the pandemic, social movements have taken up the mantle of housing as a human right to disabuse shelter from its economic frame in lieu of its social value.

It is important to note that human rights historically have served to unite the global community around a common understanding of our collective humanity. From the devastation of WWII to the global pandemic, human rights standards are once again being asserted into public consciousness with renewed vigor, especially as the US and UK governments evoke the platitude of “Build Back Better.”

But what will ‘Building Back Better’ look like for the right to housing? Will it be more in the vein of “Build Back Better as Before”? Or perhaps, “Build Back Better like Never Before”?

Will policymakers borrow from the same 2008-crisis playbook laden with neoliberal solutions? This paper offers an alternative vision for institutions premised in social movements, which catalyze a “collective emancipatory project” toward realizing the right to adequate housing (Rudiger, 2016).

Literature Review The Underpinnings of Financialization

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW The discontents of modern-day housing financialization can be traced back to the late 1970s neoliberal period. At this juncture, member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) adopted sweeping market reforms to usher in what the Washington Consensus heralded as the next phase of global wealth and prosperity. Raquel Rolnik, the former UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing from 2008 to 2014, considered multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank as key actors in widely disseminating free-market hegemony. In 1993, the World Bank published what would then be a watershed report entitled Housing: Enabling Markets to Work, in which it strategically positioned housing as a function of financial markets, to be integrated into globalized circuits of finance. As such, the World Bank attempted to set clear directives and legitimize “the belief that markets could better regulate the allocation of housing, combined with the development of experimental and ‘creative financial products’” (Rolnik, 2019).

On this re-brand of housing, national governments embarked on a neoliberal project of unmooring the state from traditional pillars of the economy. One need look no further than the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively, that had famously staked their political careers on transforming the state. This was effectively achieved by the pursuit of GDP growth and profits “through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production” (Krippner, 2005; Christophers, 2019). Additional market reforms mirrored across OECD countries had established financial channels by which housing would effectively become a new asset class primed for international trade.

As such, the liberalization of trade barriers and capital controls assisted in setting up the scaffolding of financial markets. To ease the flow of investments across national borders, guidance was put forward by the Bretton Woods institutions to encourage the harmonization of domestic policy with international rules on trade. The neoliberal rationale undergirding the effort was premised on the notion that closer economic relations between states were to act as a necessary buffer against future transnational conflict and wars. However, this novel search for profits abroad via global finance capital effectively ushered in a new urban warfare on housing (Ibid).

But more importantly, it signaled a fundamental shift in “the centre of gravity of the global economy from the ‘real economy’ of the production of goods and the delivery of

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW services towards the financial economy” (Gupta, 2019). Like a levee breaking, new actors and institutions—such as banks and non-banking—fanned out to explore new frontiers of investment capital and in turn, promulgated innovative processes of financialization. Consequently, this neoliberal project of state-led financialization resulted in a “long systematic process of destruction of housing as a social good, and its transformation into a commodity and a financial asset” (Rolnik, 2019).

To address how processes of financialization specifically transgress the right to adequate housing—as codified in international human rights law—this paper has narrowed its focus to the following definition of financialization. To articulate a taxonomy, Manuel Aalbers operationalized the popular term as “the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements, and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states, and households” (Aalbers, 2019). The next section discusses how these modalities of finance are applied in practice to housing, and how they concomitantly impact the right to housing.

Financialization in practice The outgrowth of neoliberal-era reforms witnessed the rise and increasing dominance of financial actors, such as mortgage companies, pension funds, hedge funds, and private equity firms. To realize the promise of unfettered market capitalism, such actors were emboldened to roll out newfangled products in conjunction with the rollback of government regulation. For example, “deregulation and liberalization of mortgage finance enabled households to borrow against the increasing rise in the value of their homes to fund consumption (Crouch, 2009; Watson, 2010), which enabled the boom [in housing demand] of the 1990s and 2000s” (Ryan-Collins, 2019). Historically, the post-war consensus on Keynesian policies that saw increased government spending after the Second World War “singled out the housing sector as a prime beneficiary of governmentinduced economic growth” (Aalbers, 2017). However, under neoliberalism, private banking and non-banking institutions became the main purveyors of housing finance for aspiring owner-occupiers. This transition led households, instead of the government, to take on mortgage debt “to stimulate the economy”—also referred to as “Privatized Keynesianism” (Ibid). In this case, the state saw its role recede—as did

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW classic Keynesianism’s consensus on providing robust social programs—leaving in its place the market to provide a privatized welfare system.

In turn, ‘asset-based welfare’ in the form of homeownership was there to fill the gap left by welfare retrenchment, which evinced the collapse of social and economic policy into market-based practices (Doling & Ronald, 2010; Watson, 2009). Asset-based welfare in lieu of social welfare is facilitated by “state withdrawal from the provision of economic support for the under-employed and unemployed and pensioners, with (liquid) property wealth taking its place as a new, but rather uneven, safety net” (Ryan-Collins, 2019). As such, citizens who once received state support would now look to homeownership as the primary means for securing individual-based welfare and wealth. Together, market finance and the demand for homeownership brought about the economic growth set out under the neoliberal state by effectively transforming housing into an asset.

At its nadir, finance-led economic growth resulted in the widespread practice of predatory mortgage lending in the early 2000s, which witnessed the massive repossession of single-family homes in 2008 by institutional investors.

Moreover, these same actors had developed instruments to securitize the risk stemming from high loan-to-value mortgages. Tranches of mortgage loans were bundled and traded as securities, which had the effect of lessening the exposure of risk posed to institutional investors who sought to remove toxic “assets” off their books. In turn, this diluted prospects for accountability, as some foreclosed homeowners were unable to track down the financial actor who held the title to their home. Some scholars argue these financial products/securities worked as intended, not by increasing access to homeownership, but by their intended outcome to “take ownership (‘repossession’) and withdraw equity. Indeed, ‘the magic of finance is its ability to take by giving’” (Martin, 2002; Aalbers, 2017).

Yet the magic of finance is also its ability to socialize systemic risk while privatizing profits. This was evidenced by the publicly funded bailouts of large corporate banks and the taxpayers who fronted the costs of their distressed housing portfolios and toxic assets. Amidst these bailouts, in the US, “more than 13 million households lost their homes in the period between 2006 and 2010,” leading to “9 million evictions, and affecting about 30 million people” (Leijten & Bel, 2020). In the late aughts, hard lessons were learned by

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW policymakers and housing advocates alike, but few substantive curbs on financial actors followed the 2008 crisis.

If anything, they have continued to profit from ongoing monetary and fiscal policies that seek to stimulate finance-led economic growth via housing commodification.

Since 2008, financial institutions have purchased distressed real estate assets at deep discounts as a result of asset purchasing programs managed by central banks around the world (Beswick et al., 2016; Blakeley, 2020). Additionally, governments set up similar schemes with private equity firms to incentivize them to purchase billions of dollars worth of publicly held high-risk mortgages at steep discounts. This has only served to “increase rather than decrease the role and power of corporate finance in national housing systems” (Farha, 2017). For example, Blackstone Group grew to become the world’s largest real estate company after buying thousands of distressed homes in which it rented to homeowners who were previously foreclosed on during the 2008 financial crisis; after selling its stake in such assets, Blackstone turned a profit of $1.7 billion in 2022 (Oguh, 2022). Political economists note that housing financialization not only traverses residential mortgage debt and securitization, “but also includes the financialization of social and private rental housing and of construction firms and social housing companies” (Aalbers, 2020). The next section discusses the encroachment of investment finance into private rental housing.

Frontiers of Financialization Interest in the UK’s Private Rental Sector (PRS) has gained momentum among institutional investors during the pandemic. This is at a time when rising home prices have placed owner-occupier tenancies out of reach for many in the country. Zooming out, a re-alignment across tenures appears to be taking shape, “reflected in the continuing growth of the absolute number and proportion of households renting and the continued decline of homeownership, leading some UK commentators to argue that we are witnessing a transition to a ‘post-homeownership’ society (Ronald & Kadi, 2017; Byrne, 2020; Wijburg, 2020). Taking such comments seriously, could these trends portend the emergence of a private rental democracy, one that has been borne out of the excesses of a property-owning democracy? How might the finance-led economic growth model adjust in the wake of Covid-19?

Given the shrinking demand among would-be home buyers, the strategy of investors appears to be converging

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW around alternative housing arrangements and key demographics. Like the 2008 housing market crash, the logics of finance capital appear to be adapting to the current crisis by hedging risk, as well as accelerating the previous trend of using different types of housing as collateral (as a more resilient asset for stable returns). Scholars of housing financialization note that “the exhaustion of the mortgage market (due to the financial crisis as well as declining homeownership) is leading financial actors to pursue new asset classes” (Fields, 2018; Byrne, 2020; Ibid). Since the pandemic, purpose-built rental housing—or Build to Rent (BtR)—“investment has accelerated, as property investors bet that purpose-built flats will provide more reliable returns than shops, offices, or an unpredictable equity market” (Hammond, 2022).

Aalbers (2017) puts a fine point on what he calls “High Quality Collateral (HQC)” , as types of investments that generate stable returns for the shareholders of private equity firms, hedge funds, and asset managers. According to recent reporting by the Financial Times, “investors ploughed £4.1bn into the UK’s fast-growing ‘build-to-rent' sector last year” (Ibid). In a larger context, “the total national BtR pipeline has grown by 478% since 2013, with some £2.7 billion traded in 2017, including volume acquisitions of properties for conversion to multi-unit rental (Savills, 2018; Nethercote, 2019). To the extent BtR bears the attributes of HQC, the rate of investment is likely to gain momentum during the pandemic as private equity appears poised to double down on a PRSled investment strategy. Industry insiders, such as the global commercial real estate conglomerate CBRE, describe how BtR became the new darling of finance capital: “There’s been a changing of the guard in terms of what’s regarded as a secure asset class. Beds and sheds [warehouses] were certainly the themes of last year for investors – some have changed direction and are putting investment primarily into those asset classes” (Hammond, 2022).

This paper seeks to contribute to the nascent academic literature on BtR within the context of PRS representing an important front in housing financialization in the UK housing market. Moreover, critical analysis of the burgeoning sector is scant, which may help explain why academic searches for it primarily returned studies from financial services firms and property management companies. This raises questions as to the capacity of regulators and academics alike to hold accountable the management and operational practices of Global Corporate Landlords (GCLs). Specifically, future

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW research focusing on GCLs will need to identify the ways in which “the combination of light-touch regulation and low transparency can make private equity firms far less accountable to both investors and people on the ground, such as tenants” (J. Beswick; G. Alexandri; M. Byrne, 2016; Wiburg, 2020).

Whilst it is still early days in the pandemic, further inroads of financial actors in the PRS may lead to an unprecedented level of precarity, especially among those who are less able to navigate market fluctuations. Such disruptions, as seen in 2008 and 2020, are critical for understanding housing financialization and the ways in which finance capital mobilizes in response to crises. For example, housing researchers elucidated on what they viewed as a post-crisis playbook for investors after 2008. This can be seen in “the vulture-like moves by private equity firms and other institutional investors to accumulate wealth from the dispossession experienced by millions of people through foreclosures (repossessions) of distressed residential real estate and mortgages” (J. Beswick; G. Alexandri; M. Byrne, 2016; Ibid). In similar ways to 2008, private equity seems poised to reap the benefits from their investments in housing.

This may be evident by the expansive BtR pipelines delivered through institutional financing—to the extent demand will only grow for the sector due to wider declines in homeownership and demographic stagnation in PRS. Such societal and economic trends in the housing market have “particularly effected younger households, who are today half as likely to be homeowners by the age of 30 as those born in the post-war ‘baby boomer’ generation” (Corlett & Judge, 2017; Nethercote, 2019). For those caught between a lack of social housing options and the elusive property ladder, BtR products are evidently an emerging answer to the housing question for “Generation Rent,” as it is being called in the UK. As such, investor-backed-BtR products are being marketed to “younger couples and single sharers, and the standard building typology reflects that” (Scanlon, 2017). Yet where do we situate the BtR sector and growing PRS in the wider context of neoliberalism and housing financialization?

Based on the pace and scope of investment in the sector, we may see a similar push as in the 1970s for the housing sector to be a key driver of finance-led economic growth. Except for this time, expansion of the economy may depend on profits bolstered by private rent collection rather than excessive private mortgage borrowing—from which a revamped Privatized Keynesianism 2.0. may emerge. This phase could

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW potentially see the dominance of Global Corporate Landlords (GCLs) via their capacity to deliver wider shareholder margins. While at the same time, renters would see diminished protections, “who have in turn faced the loss of rent subsidies, unwarranted eviction notices, and exorbitant rent increases and additional charges” (Call, Powell, and Heck, 2014; Beswick, Alexandri, Byrne, Vives-Miró and Fields, 2016).

While the BtR sector is still quite new—making up only a small proportion of the private rental market—the US does provide an illustrative case study on GCLs, as it is more entrenched in the PRS there. The study of institutional investors in regional housing markets has been ongoing since 2008, especially in areas that saw high rates of foreclosed homes, like in the sunbelt and Southern California. One study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta “found that corporate landlords, especially large institutional investors, were far likelier than other owners to evict their tenants” (Ferrer, 2022).

Additionally, studies out of Georgia State University support similar conclusions. Immergluck et al. delve into how “such landlords are also more likely to use threats of eviction—and serial court filings that deepen tenants’ financial woes—as a routine business practice” (Immergluck et al., 2019). This could result from the power imbalance between GCLs and tenants, where the former possess extensive legal teams that know how to wield influence and lobby in support of GCLcentric policies. Other findings have suggested certain ways GCLs attempt to increase shareholder returns are via deferred maintenance and excessive fee-charging—quality of life issues that tenants must confront. As such, BtR is an area that necessitates further research, especially focusing on tenant challenges to GCL practices. However, growing awareness among these renters is leading tenant rights organizations to leverage human rights discourse to effectively challenge GCL policy on the ground.

Financialization and Housing as a Human Right Over the last decade, the UN Special Rapporteurs on the Right to Adequate Housing have sought to raise global awareness on the impacts of financialization on urban policies and housing. Raquel Rolnik—who held the post from 2008 to 2014—produced thematic country reports to elucidate the dire state of housing insecurity from the global south to “hedge cities” like London. At the close of her tenure, Rolnik reflected on what she saw as a core theme emerging from her in-depth reporting: “No longer was housing conceived of as a common

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW good that a society agrees to share, by providing for those with less resources. Instead, it became a mechanism of rent extraction, financial gain and wealth accumulation” (Rolnik, 2019). Where Rolnik is an architect and urban planner by trade, her successor—Leilani Farha—brought her experience as a human rights lawyer to the Rapporteurship.

Building on the solid evidence and fact-finding missions of her predecessor, Farha took a more aggressive approach as rapporteur to call out specific financial actors. For example, Farha attempted (in a way) to subpoena Blackstone —a private equity firm she charged as a bad actor—who had profited from the dispossession of foreclosed homeowners in 2008 (Birchall, 2019). Perhaps Farha’s greatest achievement is the tactic employed to “name and shame” financial firms— as well as provide governments with policy guidance to implement the human right to housing. Beyond writing reports, Farha has produced guidelines, films, podcasts, and grassroots organizing pamphlets. All told, such an array of content serves to provide multiscalar approaches for how interested parties may go about internalizing the human right to adequate housing—be it in political, social, or legalistic spheres, and whether from the bottom-up or top-down (Farha, 2020).

As such, the contributions from both Rolnik and Farha are timely, given the effects of the pandemic on urban housing markets. This paper seeks to borrow from their expertise, with Rolnik’s in-depth understanding of land use, finance and housing policy, as well as Farha’s legal experience with enforcement of international human rights law. Combined, we begin to see a pathway toward the de-financialization of housing via a human rights framework. Still a nascent idea, this agenda was initially proposed by housing scholar Gertjan Wijburg, who at the height of the first Covid-19 lockdown in April 2020, asked the following probing questions: “How can the financialization of urban space and housing be contested?

How can progressive urban politics challenge neoliberal urbanism from within and outside? And what can cities from different stature and geographical backgrounds learn from each other? (Wijburg, 2020). I contend that international human rights can be a productive force in emancipating housing policy from state-led neoliberal financialization.

Additionally, this paper also aims to articulate the ways in which this could be achieved, principally via a social movement praxis that “contests financializing pressures on urban housing markets” (Fields, 2017; Wijburg, 2020). While Wijburg makes passing reference to these two processes as

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW potential means of de-financialization, this paper attempts to explore them further; and in so doing, narrow the gaps in the human rights and political economy literature, where few academic bridges between the two exist.

Research and Methodology This paper enlists a comparative analysis of financialization to answer timely questions as to how social movements may set about to de-financialize housing locally, to the extent human rights discourse features prominently. As such, the following research questions provided the focus for this paper: • How will global corporate landlords—who enter new relationships with developers, local government, housing associations, and housing operators— balance the needs of shareholders and private renting tenants?

• As schools shuddered, demand at food pantries skyrocketed, and women dropped out of the “productive economy” to bolster the family unit on the heels of shelter-in-place orders in 2020. How important is it to understand the social implications of housing provision as an economic imperative?

• What are some challenges and opportunities of establishing the right to housing locally as part of a human rights framework?

Research Design Given its interdisciplinary approach to human rights and international political economy, this paper leverages the rich tradition of qualitative inquiry. Historically, both works of literature have been problematized due to the lack of agency attributed to their subjects, where the collapse of subjectivity occurs at the point of their conceptualization as rational selfinterested actors in pursuit of maximal utility. As such, a qualitative—rather than quantitative—approach seems warranted due to the complexity and descriptive qualities of urban social movements (Cloke et al., 2004). In using qualitative methods, several inputs are key for gathering data and conducting analysis. They include 1) comparative case study analysis; 2) discourse analysis; 3) in-depth interviews.

Throughout the paper, all three inputs are used to interrogate the veracity of empirically gathered data, as it relates to the forces of financialization, social movements, and human rights practices. This could also be understood as a form of

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW triangulation by confirming the results and findings of the data (Bryman, 2004). Additionally, this project seeks to fill existing gaps not only in the relevant literature but also in what may be emerging frontiers of research by undertaking a comparative lens to housing (de-)financialization. The true measure of this research, thus, rests on its explanatory power to draw inferences and generalizable patterns across two countries from its application of consistent, qualitative methodologies.

In taking an unconventional approach, the mixed methodologies seek to achieve a level of agility and adaptability in response to the rapidly changing circumstances of the global pandemic. Like investment capital, events are quite fluid to the extent that processes of housing financialization and social movements could look very different from what has been presented here. With that caveat, this research attempts to shine a light on what is a fast-moving target: the emergence of a transnational emancipatory project to de-financialize housing—spurred on by its elevation in the public imagination amid the pandemic.

Case study selection and interviews The US and UK feature prominently in both housing financialization and human rights literature. For the “special relationship” between both countries over time has proven useful as a lens for analyzing patterns of social, economic, and political development. Specifically, the leaders of both countries had brought about transformative changes in the state’s relationship with market capitalism during the late 1970s. Still today, Conservative axioms and slogans possess deep resonance among the polity: like vestigial cremains, they outlived the heroes of neoliberalism, such as Thatcher and Reagan. For example, refrains like “Government isn’t the solution, Government is the problem;” or “I want a capitalowning democracy,” continue to dampen counter-hegemonic forces. As such, these countries were selected due to how embedded neoliberalism is institutionally, economically, politically, and psychologically. Also, it is my belief that examining social movement praxis in furtherance of human rights could provide ways of isolating variable conditions across countries, which may or may not correlate with radical change. Quasi-structured interviews are used to bolster the existing research method. A total of 11 interviews were conducted. The participants were carefully selected to round out the research and provide interdisciplinary insights on the case studies and areas of interest/expertise. The sample of respondents is composed of international human rights lawyers, social justice activists, community and civic

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW engagement scholars, political economists, urban planners, and human rights researchers. Each interview was held virtually over Zoom for approximately one hour. These were largely unstructured interviews where participants were asked open-ended questions. Additionally, the informal setting was chosen to allow interlocutors “to share their experiences and understandings” (King & Horrocks, 2010).

Housing movement case studies: Focus E15 and Moms4Housing This paper draws on two case studies to elucidate the potential of urban social movements to challenge state-led financialization and the hegemony of neoliberalism.

Moms4Housing—based in Oakland, California—is a campaign that mobilized in 2019 in response to the vacant single-family homes owned by a private equity firm who had deployed speculative land practices. The second case study has its roots in the London borough of Newham, where the Focus E15 campaign began in earnest in 2013 following the wave of finance capital that flowed into the borough amid the 2012 London Olympics inaEastaLondon Moms4Housing In January 2020, the Moms4Housing group gained national attention in the US after organizing grassroots efforts in opposition to the outsized role of institutional investors in Oakland, California. In the years preceding the pandemic, homes owned by real-estate firm Wedgewood had been kept vacant in order to accumulate exchange value on the market.

As such, large swaths of Oakland’s housing stock remained unoccupied at a time of acute need and when initial stay-athome orders went into effect. However, the pandemic exposed how institutional investors and their growing presence in the San Francisco Bay Area were exacerbating the existing housing crisis. For example, Hahn reports that “each year Wedgewood buys hundreds of Bay Area foreclosed homes, renovates them, and sells them for profit.

It’s one of a number of speculative real estate companies operating in the area, and their practices at large are accelerating gentrification and driving up rent and home prices astronomically” (Hahn, 2020).

As such, the combination of these finance-led interventions and the dire lack of accessible housing options proved to be the clarion call for local social justice organizations such as the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). With the help of ACCE, a

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW group of mothers-turned-community organizers set out to problematize the linkages between the egregious practices of Wedgewood and the lived reality of those facing chronic housing insecurity in the local area. As housing scholars have shown, like a gold rush for private equity firms, institutional investors began buying up large swaths of single-family homes to rent out after the 2008 financial crisis. As a result, “the number of single-family rentals jumped 67 percent between 2005 and 2015 [in the US], from 10.5 million homes to 17.5 million.” The rental market for single-family homes in Oakland and Berkeley has been a boon for real estate investors like Wedgewood, which holds a sizable share of the rental stock. In the East Bay alone, “more than a third of rental units are now single-family homes—a category exempt from rent control under California law.” As such, Moms4Housing sought to politicize the ways in which real estate-driven speculation continues to disproportionately impact housing policy and homelessness—where “seventy percent of homeless residents are black [in Oakland].” Targeted messaging was also used to challenge assumptions of a housing supply shortage after audits conducted by ACCE revealed that “there were more vacant properties than people living in tents and cars in Oakland” (Kim 2020).

In November 2019, the core founders of Moms4Housing executed a direct action to occupy one of Wedgewood’s vacant homes in Oakland. Headlines on local newspapers led with: “They declared that housing is a ‘human right’—and that they were ‘using that right’” (Ibid). The assertion of ‘Housing as a Human Right’ was a bold statement, even revolutionary; in particular, it had the force of unsettling and questioning what housing and homes had been used for. But more so, the mere utterance of the phrase was an affront to the hegemony of neoliberalism and state-led housing financialization, which Moms4Housing had claimed was at the crux of the housing crisis. “We want speculators out of our community,” said Carroll Fife, the lead organizer of the occupation and director of the Oakland chapter of ACCE. “They’re coming in, they’re profiting off harm that’s done in our community and we want them out” (Cowan 2020).

Furthermore, the handful of core members were specific in framing their occupation of the Oakland home at 2928 Magnolia Street as an act of civil disobedience, evoking the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s. For historical context, Fife emphasizes “the actions that Moms 4 Housing took were bold and courageous like the lunch counters in the South, like the marches in Selma, like the lone protestor in

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW Tiananmen.” Moreover, Moms4Housing showed the occupation of the Wedgewood home not as the ultimate end goal, but rather as the means to shift the normative social relationship with housing in the wider context of a basic human right to shelter. For example, the moms’ evocation of housing as a human right served to be a clarion call, for it “added fuel to an already simmering fire among activists who were demanding a different vision for housing in this country” (Solomon 2020). While the Moms4Housing action galvanized significant social support in the public sphere, further internalization of the human right to housing was seen across political, legislative, and legal spaces.

As a major political win, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf intervened to secure the occupied home on behalf of the single mothers. Schaaf achieved this by facilitating negotiations between Wedgewood and the Oakland Community Land Trust (CLT). The latter’s express purpose as a non-profit, “like other land trusts and cooperatives around the country, aims to take properties off the speculative market and make them permanently affordable” (Kim 2020). As such, the CLT has agreed to purchase “Moms House” and either rent or sell it to the previous occupiers. Local political leadership has also vowed to pass public policy in support of giving tenants and the broader community the option to purchase property before institutional investors—also referred to as the right of first refusal or the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act. From Oakland to the state capital, Governor Gavin Newsom soon after signed a new law prohibiting the bulk-buying of residential properties, instead requiring them “to be sold individually, which, in theory, gives families and individuals a better shot at buying a home” (Solomon 2020).

Although the pandemic has somewhat slowed momentum for institutional change, the horizon appears promising with the Housing is a Human Right Act, which would amend California’s constitution should it be adopted by the legislature and approved by voters. “We need to be looking at housing differently than we are now. Because it’s not working right now, and it’s a fundamental need for every single human being” said Assemblyman Rob Bonta, the bill’s sponsor (Ibid).

Immense change has followed since the two-month occupation of Moms House. As housing continues to remain a central focus in the pandemic, future researchers will look to analyze the efficacy of political and legal changes as they take effect. Yet this Oakland-based social movement helps to articulate what a human rights-led housing approach could look like. But more importantly, it contributes to a social praxis

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW rooted in the de-financialization of housing through specific issue linkages (social reproduction) and human rights discourse.

Focus E15 The Focus E15 social movement has emerged as one of the foremost housing advocacy groups based in the UK. Much like Moms 4 Housing, a group of single moms-turnedactivists organized a grassroots campaign to disrupt the long arm of housing financialization administered by the state. In 2013, the local authority in the London Borough of Newham issued eviction notices to 29 mothers temporarily housed at the Focus E15 hostel. This accommodation site was outfitted with a ‘mother and baby unit’ and facilitated a safe space for women with past histories of domestic violence and chronic housing insecurity. Unfortunately, the hostel and its critical services were unable to sustain the £40,000 in spending cuts imposed by the local council, which in the wider societal context largely stemmed from what political economist Jamie Peck refers to as austerity urbanism. Peck situates this period in “the post-2008 round of public service cuts and welfare retrenchment” in the UK, which resulted in the devolution of state budgetary responsibilities and smaller government (Peck 2012; Gillespie et at. 2018).

Furthermore, the housing insecurity faced by the Focus E15 mothers was exacerbated by the severe lack of social homes, of which “the numbers on London’s local authority waiting lists went up by over 80% from 1997 to 2006 to 331,000, or 10% of all households” (Watt 2009a; Watt & Minton 2016). As previously discussed, the 1970s neoliberal era saw a political consensus form around government welfare retrenchment and the free-market orientation of public sector goods. Where the UK witnessed a post-World War II housing boom under Keynesian government, neoliberal resentment would characterize such provision of council homes as public sector inefficiency—and in turn, advise government’s immediate exit from the housing business altogether. This came to fruition via Margaret Thatcher’s conservative-led government in 1979. For example, “the UK’s housing sector began to be dramatically transformed as privatization, deregulation, and speculation became central pillars of government policy” (Wilde 2017).

As such, Thatcher’s signature Right-to-Buy (RTB) scheme in 1980 was considered the hallmark of her approach to ushering in a “property-owning democracy.” This effectively enabled the mass transfer of social housing stock to owner-

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW occupier and private rental sectors (through buy-to-let landlords). In a bid to consolidate political power, council tenants—who were strong supporters of the Labour party— benefited from the Conservatives’ RTB policy by being able to purchase their council flat below market rates. Yet the revenues from initial RTB sales were not put towards rebuilding or replenishing the social housing stock. UK government statistics note that London alone lost nearly 85,000 council homes due to RTB from 1999 to 2010 (DCLG 2015; Ibid). In more recent years, efforts across political parties to deliver regeneration and modernization projects of derelict council estates were also seen as “an important weapon in combating the housing crisis via its capacity to provide new homes through densification” (Adonis & Davie 2015; Watt & Minto 2016). However, UK housing researchers point to the adverse impacts that such regeneration schemes can have on the wider social housing stock, as captured in the 2015 London Assembly Housing Committee report. The contents cite the outcome of regeneration schemes across 50 estates, which “witnessed a net loss of around 8,300 social rental homes,” while the number of market-rate homes doubled through densification (Watt & Minto, 2016). To understand the Focus E15 movement is, in part, to connect their struggles with the ways in which “London’s housing has been subject to prolonged neo-liberal reforms under the twin lodestars of ‘privatisation’ by conservative and Coalition governments and ‘modernisation’ by New Labour” (Hodkinson & Robbins 2013; Hodkinson, Watt, & Mooney 2013; Ibid).

In this context, the Focus E15 moms had few options to stave off their eviction. They either had to accept being rehoused outside of London—somewhere hundreds of miles away in Hastings, Manchester, or Birmingham—or turn to private renting. Both were seen as untenable, given the lack of wages to cover market rents and their community-based support networks rooted in Newham. Nevertheless, the band of young mothers petitioned to stay in the Borough and, in a plea of desperation, even sought the support of Robin Wales—the Mayor of Newham—who showed a profound disregard for their housing plight. After Wales said “if you can’t afford to live in Newham, you can’t afford to live in Newham,’” the group became politicized; and subsequently, they began articulating a campaign of resistance and transformative change. They closed ranks and built solidarity with other activist groups, as well as tightening their messaging around the poignant slogan: “Social housing, not cleansing” (Gillespie et al. 2018). Core members of Focus

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW E15 strategically positioned the campaign in an adversarial relationship with the local authority, who they found complicit in “the transformation of the city’s real estate market into a hub for footloose global capital in search of risk-free investments and high returns” (Heywood 2012; Dorling 2014; Watt & Minton 2016). As such, Focus E15 organized a series of direct actions to call attention to the local financialization of housing in Newham. On the heels of the 2012 London Olympics, the group chose to focus on the intersection of speculative land values and vacant council estates, which after 2012 could have resulted in further gentrification and displacement of the local community via regeneration.

The group’s occupation of the Carpenters Estate in East London generated significant political momentum and social support for Focus E15. In attracting local media attention, the moms displayed a disciplined message to ensure the occupation was problematizing the vulnerability of council estates to finance capital via processes of “accumulation by dispossession” and “displacement” (Harvey 2003; Beswick et. al 2016; Gillespie et al. 2018). To that end, the Carpenters’ occupation focused “attention on the fact that people are being forced out of London due to a lack of affordable housing while huge numbers of perfectly good social housing units sit empty” (Sandra and Fitzpatrick, 2020).

After succumbing to social pressure, the Borough relented and offered the 29 Focus E15 moms re-housing options to stay in Newham. In their defense of social housing, other campaign wins include the repopulation of 40 homes on the Carpenters estate, as well as establishing a safe harbor for other housing advocacy groups fighting for the right to housing and the city. Amid the current pandemic, the Focus E15 group and the Oakland-based Moms4Housing sought to establish a transnational link via a rights-based approach to housing. Connecting virtually, the campaign organizers shared what strategies and resources they had found useful in social movement praxis to de-financialize housing locally.

Findings, Analysis and Discussion This section considers the main results following qualitative interviews, comparative case studies, and discourse analysis. Two key themes emerged, and each one will be taken in turn.

Hegemony From qualitative interviews, a consensus emerged among human rights practitioners and community activists alike that in order to successfully de-financialize essential

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW public goods, there needs to be an equal or greater force to challenge more dominant hegemonic forces. In this case, Dr. Kaufman, director of the Vasconcellos Institute for Democracy in Action at De Anza College and author of Challenging Power: Democracy and Accountability in a Fractured World, emphasized the “need to flip the script” on common perceptions of who holds power. Kaufman referenced the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci who sought to destabilize the cultural dominance of fascists in the 1930s. For Gramsci, the assumptions of existing power dynamics were to be problematized to the extent that consent of the governed is needed by systems of domination to remain in power (Kaufman 2016).

In this vein, Gramsci’s work can be extrapolated to financialization based on any individual (housed or unhoused) who has consented to a second party (property owner, landlord, lender etc.) by tendering payment of rent, mortgage, or non-payment. The terms may vary to the extent that rent increases may fluctuate or interest rates change, but nevertheless, we have come to understand that the power is typically vested in the land or property owner, rather than a tenant. However, human rights can serve as a counterhegemonic force by questioning the very means by which systems of oppression derive their legitimacy. As gleaned from the case studies, both Moms4Housing and Focus E15 effectively undermined notions of property ownership by occupying homes of functional use, which had been kept vacant to gain exchange value on the market. Furthermore, both social movements succeeded in wielding social power against market logic by disrupting “the way that idea systems come to legitimize, or support, the interests of ruling groups in society” (Ibid). By asserting a human right to housing, the moms were able to de-legitimize the property claims of nondescript corporate entities. Additionally, the dynamics of hegemony appear to be a function of how claims and rights are constructed and communicated, whether with political or economic salience, etc. Rudiger notes a hegemonic operation can be understood as creating “a shared identity and a universalized frame or goal through an alignment of many different but equivalent elements confronting an antagonistic force...It is a practice of political construction” (Rudiger 2016).

Internalization of Human Rights Through extensive comparative case study analysis, findings reveal the possible ways in which international human rights can be “internalized” at the regional, state, and

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW local level via vertical processes. As mentioned previously, this could be achieved by what Harold Koh describes as a transnational process via “transnational norm entrepreneurs, governmental norm sponsors, transnational norm sponsors, transnational issue networks...and linkages among issue areas” (Addison and Koh 2017). In April 2020, the Focus E15 advocacy group based in the London Borough of Newham, in coordination with Moms4Housing in Oakland, California, held an international virtual solidarity event titled ‘Reclam Homes from the US to the UK. The event came at a critical time, on the heels of lockdowns and sweeping job losses. In a bid to build transnational solidarity, organizers of both social movements shared critical best practices for advancing the human right to housing amid the pandemic. Previous tactics of occupation had brought about significant social, political, and institutional changes; however, uncertainty loomed as to how to proceed with similar direct actions. As it turned out, to continue highlighting the social value of housing, both social movements doubled down on using occupation-as-message amid the pandemic. Joe Hoover, an associate professor at Queen Mary University of London, discusses how such actions help to facilitate the politicization process.

First, it raises the issue of housing in a dramatic and public way, forcing the public and government officials to confront the reality of the housing crisis. Second, it politicizes what is often seen as a private matter, turning the personal catastrophe of homelessness, eviction, and foreclosure into public discussions about housing policy, government responsibility, and the injustice created by treating housing as a commodity. (Hoover 2016) The joint Focus E15 and Moms4Housing solidarity event proved several key points: 1) creating transnational connections via issue linkages can be an important way to internalize international human rights at the local level; 2) issue linkages can involve sharing tactics/strategies for mobilizing/organizing, as well as politicizing private matters– such as the crisis of social reproduction–that are indicative of wider systemic problems; 3) case study analysis has shown how social internalization of human rights norms can be more effective than political or legal internalization. For example, “when everyone in a community follows certain social norms out of felt internal normativity, order can be maintained without rigid systems of external legal enforcement, because self-

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW enforcement is both more effective and more efficient than third-party controls” (Addison & Koh 2017).

Conclusion The social internalization of human rights shows promise as a potential means to counter the hegemony of state-led housing financialization locally. Where certain groups may be more vulnerable to market volatility and economic crises, campaign organizers can establish linkages across differences by creating a shared identity under a universalized goal. For example, Hoover notes that “realizing a radical human rights claim is deeply pollical and requires profound and sustained resistance through organizing and mobilization.” To that end, social internalization of human rights has also been revealed to be more effective over legal or political pathways, as it signals a normative shift in one’s own understanding of a fundamental right (and wrong), leading to ‘self-enforcement.’ Additionally, such framing of housing as a public good, in the case of Moms4Housing and Focus E15, had acted as a counter-hegemonic force against market logics of finance based in exchange value. Direct action in the form of building occupation emancipated notions of private property to show that such rights are “not absolute.”

These radical social movements offer but one way to definancialize housing in a local context. In closing, I put forward the prospect of what a human rights-led housing policy can be, and in particular, its promise to unsettle the neoliberal hegemony that continues to unfairly mediate housing access in favor of large financial firms.

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Human Rights or Mutual Aid: Comparing Possible Remedies to Mass Houselessness

By Lola Rael

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW As many as 15% of American families are housinginsecure. The United States has reached a point of crisis, as the population of people without options to attain viable housing, the houseless and houseless-adjacent, has exploded since 2000. In recent years, panic over the rising cost of housing has erupted across the globe. Houselessness has proliferated particularly within the United States, one of the world’s wealthiest nations. This impending crisis most acutely impacts those seeking housing immediately and unable to afford it, but given that the housing and rental markets are embedded within the economy, its effects are actually diffuse. In this essay, I will explore two different frameworks for understanding and finding solutions to the housing crisis. One approach is based in human rights language and seeks to use the human rights apparatus to rectify the lack of housing access. The other addresses the housing crisis with direct action and a mutual aid framework, seeking housing justice without the state and the human rights apparatus as intermediary. Ultimately, I conclude that to combat the housing crisis and pursue housing for all, a combination of these two approaches will be necessary.

The housing crisis has crept up on the nation over the past few decades. As of 2020, there are over 550,000 individuals living in the United States without a home ("State of Homelessness” 2020). To young people who belong to “Generation Z,” a statistic like this might sound horrific but not surprising; we don’t know a world without mass houselessness. However, as a phenomenon, mass houselessness is actually relatively recent. Housing advocates Molly Beckhardt, Paul Boden and June JS note that “before the early 1980s…far too many lived in poverty, but people were not forced to live in the streets” (Beckhardt and Boden 2020). In the past 40 years, this issue has rapidly increased in visibility and launched into the public consciousness.

How did the situation become so dire? Rather than the result of a single failed policy, affordable housing options dried up gradually over the second half of the 20th century. Through the late 1930s, the New Deal spurred heavy investment in improving housing conditions. Many “slum clearance” programs established new public housing buildings, a significant number of which fell into disrepair and were eventually razed. Building complexes to house the poor proved to be expensive and troublesome, and in the 1940s, the Federal Housing Association instead began providing highly subsidized loans to buy houses in the suburbs, finding

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW this strategy to be more cost-effective and in line with urban mobility patterns (Zuegel 2017). As federal money bolstered the homeownership program, public housing faced cyclical disinvestment from the government and public housing projects began to fail. In the postwar years, the US was a nation of homeowners (Ibid). Since then, homeownership rates have been in steady decline with renting on the rise, spiking particularly after the housing bubble burst in 2005.

Owning a home is now out of reach for people at middle income levels, leaving them no choice but to rent. In 1950, if a young family wanted to find a home, they would choose to buy a house, as this was the financially responsible option made possible by the government. Today, no such option exists for people without extensive savings.

The economic state of the present feels bleak; income equality is widening, employment opportunities are few, and even those with jobs are being made to choose between paying housing costs and buying groceries. For many residents of the US, taking on debt is the only way to put a roof over their heads. John Bowe’s groundbreaking New Yorker article, “Nobodies,” follows the stories of agricultural workers migrating from Mexico and Central America in search of livelihood (Bowe 2003). This piece exposes the system of continued indebtedness used by contractors in the agricultural industry to keep workers in perpetual poverty, impelling them to remain in an abusive work environment. The manipulation of the Immokalee workers is a synecdoche of systemic poverty. Insufficient income necessitates buying on credit and taking on loans, which often leaves people trapped and unable to pay off more money that they didn’t have in the first place. This is what makes it nearly impossible to afford a house or even to rent long-term for Americans who don’t have a safety net or inherited wealth.

What systems are in place to address such a crisis?

Supposedly, housing is a human right. A United Nations fact sheet sheds some light on the current status of housing within the formal human rights apparatus. A right to adequate housing has been in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights since 1948, and it is explicitly recognized in 12 different documents adopted by the United Nations, including the International Bill of Rights ("Fact Sheet No.21"). This document stipulates that “housing-related costs for individuals, families and households are commensurate with income levels.” It later elaborates that “to protect effectively the housing rights of a population, Governments must ensure that any possible violations of these rights by ‘third parties’

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW such as landlords or property developers are prevented” ("Fact Sheet No.21"). This is supposed protection from the very situation that so many Americans are victims of at present—even those who are able to secure housing are at the whim of predatory individuals and corporations. The United Nations dictates that it is the responsibility of the government to protect the population from landlords or developers who make housing inaccessible and violate individuals' right to secure housing.

The United Nations implores all nation-states to create legislation that will house all. Although the UN’s documents are utopian and idealistic, implementing a right to housing is a step that many national governments have recently undertaken, namely Scotland, South Africa, and France. The United States does not name a right to housing in either its Constitution or federal law, and it does not recognize these rights stipulated by the United Nations in any enforceable capacity. We have federal and state programs that address houselessness and subsidies available with the goal of making housing accessible for all, like Section 8 housing choice vouchers, but these programs are failing to address the full need.

One tactic to potentially manifest housing for all is invocation of the human rights apparatus. Our government is not sufficiently meeting the standard of international human rights, and we are entitled to hold it accountable. Molly Beckhardt, Paul Boden and June LS of the Appeal, a journal dedicated to criminal law, laid out the argument that the US government has failed to provide adequate housing access, applying a language of human rights: “There are certain universal human needs that any governing structure—from local to federal—is responsible for.” According to the authors, needs such as housing “do not belong on the open market.”

This perspective emphasizes where the state has failed to protect a universal human right. These authors implore the state to take responsibility as “the right to a house should not be predicated on the money in one’s pocket and the government’s role must be to secure this right” (Beckhardt and Boden 2020).

In “On The Jewish Question,” Karl Marx discusses the right to private property among other rights treated as universally ensured. Marx sees a right to private property as a right to “self-interest”; those who exercise it opt out of participation in the collective flourishing. In his view, the right to private property, among the rights to liberty, security, and quality, “ensure egoism.” If these are the rights our society

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW guarantees, egoistic “need and private interest” and the “preservation of their property” bind individuals together rather than a shared concern for all (Marx 1844).

While the framework of a human right to housing, right to private property, and a system of law can back up the argument for accessible housing, Marx envisions a world with housing for all that does not predicate upon property and rights. This viewpoint is shared by mutual aid groups and radical housing justice movements, who use a framework of community, sharing, and equality to create housing that is accessible to all and dominated by none. Unlike the global and national scale of the human right apparatus, mutual aid operates at the local level, based in communities uniting around a common struggle, looking out for one another and acting directly to meet needs. In “Solidarity Not Charity,” mutual aid expert Dean Spade lists as a quality of effective liberation, “sharing things rather than hoarding and protecting private property.” He says of occupying homes following a disaster that mutual aid can “generate boldness and a willingness to defy illegitimate authority” and that breaking the law to care for the community “can be a reparative experience when we have been trained to follow rules” (Spade 2020).

An example of a mutual aid-inspired approach to housing justice can be found at the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, a nonprofit gallery in New York City dedicated to sharing the radical history of New York’s Lower East Side.

The narrative put forth by the museum is an example of successful direct-action housing activism. The gallery is located in an active squat on Avenue C and provides photographs and information on a dozen other squats around the East Village. These buildings were abandoned and repossessed by the City of New York. In 2002, the City made a deal to sell the buildings to the Urban Homesteading Alliance Board for $1, on the condition that the squats would be brought up to fire code. Now they live on as limited equity co-operatives, where democratically approved memberresidents have full control of all decisions made regarding the building (“Reclaiming”) The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space pays tribute to direct-action housing justice in response to New York’s rapidly dropping rate of affordable housing. The squatters had no interest in engaging the state or fighting for their space using a human rights framework. Instead, they attempted to evade interaction with law enforcement and address their needs by occupying the space without requesting permission.

This action began back in the 1990s. While American cities

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW have “cleaned up” and made urban poverty less visible, economic conditions have not improved to lower the rate of houselessness. Compounded by heightened police surveillance and other recent conditions that threaten makeshift housing, the necessity for such action has only increased over the past thirty years.

The squatting movement in the East Village resulted in successful permanent housing and a sustainable solution when the squatters collaborated with the city government to legitimize the situation. However, not all squatters are so lucky. Limited equity co-ops are a progressive housing tool that adds diversity to the rental market, but for some they are still prohibitively expensive. While the squatters met their immediate needs for shelter and the state acknowledged the community’s need for housing, the action stopped there.

Direct action and a mutual aid framework work well to bridge a gap and provide communities with resources withheld by the government. But is squatting any sort of viable solution to combat a crisis at this scale?

Amongst these two schools of thought on the best path to housing justice, there are a few instances of overlap. One organization, Moms 4 Housing, based in Oakland, CA, draws upon both a human rights approach as well as a more radical one. Founder Dominique Walker, an Oakland native and single mother, moved back to California after fleeing an abusive situation. Once home, she realized how much rent had soared and struggled to find a place for her family to stay.

Eventually, they and another family began occupying a home that had been vacant for two years but was owned by a real estate company known for flipping houses (“Housing is a Human Right” 2020).

These women are solving an immediate need for shelter by occupying the vacant home. They are acting on a basis of care for their families and set a precedent that will make it easier for the next family to occupy a vacant home, also an act of community care. The mutual aid approach is evident in Walker’s concern for the well-being of her family and her community as justification for moving in. Now, Walker and her organization advocate for guaranteed housing for all using a human rights platform. The group has been meeting with California Assemblyman Rob Bonta to discuss the possibility of establishing legislation that would “establish a fundamental human right to housing” (Solomon 2020).

Moms 4 Housing understood the limitations of the human rights apparatus in meeting their immediate needs.

They needed a place to sleep immediately and realized that

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BARNARD/COLUMBIA URBAN REVIEW demanding their human rights to housing be addressed was a marathon rather than a sprint. This pragmatic navigation between two schools of thought again recalls the Immokalee workers, who fought for rights as workers, but who also went beyond the human rights framework with a mutual aid ethos of care for one another. After comparing these two methods of attaining housing and addressing the crisis of houselessness in the United States, I conclude that we need to employ a combination of these two approaches to secure short-term shelter and long-term housing solutions. The federal government has failed to provide adequate housing for all. To survive, we need to hold the government responsible using the human rights framework to advocate for expansive new housing policy. We also need to engage with our communities, to check in with them and to be willing to take risks with them, to see if we can meet housing needs without involving the state.

Bibliography Beckhardt, Molly; Boden, Paul; LS, June. “HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT.” The Appeal. Apr. 24, 2020.https://theappeal.org/housing-is-ahuman-right/ Bowe, John. “Nobodies” The New Yorker Magazine.

April 13th, 2003. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/ 04/21/nobodies

Zuegel, Devon Marisa. “Financing Suburbia: How government mortgage policy determined where you live.” Strong Towns. Aug. 16, 2017. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/1 5/financing-suburbia-how-governmentmortgage-policy-determined-where-youlive “Fact Sheet No.21, The Human Right to Adequate Housing” United Nations. n.d. https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/files/FactSheet2 1en.pdf

Marx, Karl. “On the Jewish Question” Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. pp. 146-174 (1975 (1844))

“Housing as a Human Right” Radical Imagination Podcast.

2020.https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ housing-as-a-humanright/id1479782630?i=10004 67028293

Solomon, Molly. “What Would 'Housing as a Human Right' Look Like in California?” KQED. Feb. 12, 2020. https://www.kqed.org/news/11801176/whatwould-housing-as-a-human-right-look-like-incalifornia

“Reclaiming Space Squats” Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space Website. http://www.morusnyc.org/reclaiming-spacesquats/

Spade, Dean. “Solidarity Not Charity” Social Text.

Duke University Press. 2020.

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“State of Homelessness: 2020 Edition” National Alliance to End Homelessness.

2020.https://endhomelessness.org/homeless ness-in-america/homelessnessstatistics/state-of-homelessness-2020/

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It’s a Bike’s World and We’re Just Living in it!

By Danielle Eregie

Silkscreen print featuring some very happy bikes

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Photos by Micaela Hecht

Around the Neighbourhood #1(Riverside Church): Riverside Church's design was inspired by 13th century Gothic cathedrals in France and is the tallest church in the United States.

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Bodies Like Water: There is a bit of feminist and queer history tied to Bethesda Fountain Angel. It was designed by sculptor Emma Stebbins, who was the first woman commissioned to create a public art piece in New York City. Stebbins’ had her partner, actress Charlotte Cushman, model for the piece. The sculpture, titled Angel of the Waters, has been watching over the residents and visitors of New York since 1873.

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Vitrahaus by Geoffrey Giller

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Painting and Erasing by Celia Ziliak

VitraHaus, the showroom on the Vitra campus in Germany, by Herzog & de Meuron. Shot on Kodak Portra 400, August 2020.

Urban street artists in Brooklyn, Fall 2021 SPRING 2022 ISSUE 3

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Urban Ecosystems: A Photo Essay By: Assorted Photographers This spring Professor Elizabeth Cook’s Urban Ecosystems class at Barnard College captured images to identify the evidence of Social-Ecological-Technological Systems in their individual cities and communities. These images convey the diversity of urban ecosystems and their past, current, and futures.

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Izzy Pacenza

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Iz Amos-Landgraf

Brooke McCormick

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Eveline Mol

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Maddie Breeden Alice Warden

Faith Helms Ruby Bleskacek

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Ruby Bleskacek

Eveline Mol

Nora Gmelch

Gigi Silla

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Eliana Gilbert-Trachtman

Lauren Kahme

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Amiziah Vaughn

Amiziah Vaughn

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