The Current Conjuncture of Housing: A re-interpretation of the housing crisis

The Current Conjuncture of Housing: A re-interpretation of the housing crisis Sneha Sumanth | GEOG 6000 | Final Review Essay Instructor: Professor Derek Smith Supervisors: Professor Jennifer Ridgley and Professor David Hugill

Part 1: Context Housing is in Crisis Housing around the world is in a state of crisis. Accelerating development consciously line the pockets of a select few, while pushing most into precarious conditions that affect all aspects of their lives. Decisions on the nature of housing development in a particular landscape are made elsewhere, by nameless entities interested purely in commodity (Marcuse and Madden 2016), taking on a placelessness that can only be attributed to the vagabond nature of capitalism (Katz 2001b). In certain parts of the world, displacement due to housing development rivals that of natural disasters and armed conflicts (Kothari 2015). Often these displacements are coupled, with environmental disasters and armed conflict wreaking havoc on already disinvested, frail systems of housing (Katz 2008; Kothari 2015). The symptoms of this are witnessed around the globe: stories of poverty, segregation, and homelessness plague urban, suburban and rural areas. While the housing crisis is widely recognized, there is no deep understanding as to why it occurs, or what can be done about it (Marcuse and Madden 2016).

The idea of crisis should then problematize the very nature of the contemporary housing system – as one that is unsustainable and oppressive. This calls for a close look at the inner workings of the housing system and the resulting material and spatial realities of people’s lives.

The resistance and mobilization of people and groups against this struggle also provides an opposing force, and the nature of the oscillation and collision of these two forces is the focus of my investigation. In this paper, I provide context on the history of the housing crisis and why geographical inquiry is well equipped to take on this research. I then look at a framework of conjunctural analysis to reinterpret the crisis as a conjuncture of economic, political, social, cultural, ideological, and historical topics that need to be looked at simultaneously. Next, I explore some contemporary literature on housing insecurity, aspects of the housing discourse that are overlooked and need closer examination. I then problematize the current conjuncture that housing operates within; the framework of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and the resulting damage this does on the lives of poor, racialized, gendered and class oppressed people. Once this tension is evident, I examine how the state has contributed to the crisis by systematically retreating from the responsibility of housing its citizens and instead disinvesting in all aspects of social reproduction within the home and its extended networks. I then explore three case studies of public housing projects in Toronto, Canada that tell stories of the different ways in which the opposing forces of housing oppression from the neoliberal state, and resistance of people and groups against this struggle have unfolded materially and spatially.

The History and Meaning of the Housing Crisis The wide perception of the housing crisis is that an otherwise well-functioning housing system occasionally fails and need fixing. In most cities the crisis is seen as new and temporary, compartmentalized into an economic, social, or political issue. Attempts to resolve it are similarly temporary and isolated and do not acknowledge the deeper, structural issues at play (Kothari 2015; Marcuse and Madden 2016). Often the ‘crisis’ in housing crisis tends to be another one entirely, be it excessive gentrification and uneven densification, unforeseen environmental and health disasters, or even on the people suffering the most from the crisis. In reality, housing crises are not a result of systems breaking down, but of the system working as it 2

intends to. Crisis is the predictable, default outcome of housing systems caught in the throes of capitalist spatial production. Its use in mainstream media and politics as a new, recent, and short-lived emergency is problematic. In reality, for the poor and working class, being in crisis with housing is the norm, and this crisis has a long history (Marcuse and Madden 2016).

Written in 1872, The Housing Question by Frederick Engels tied housing problematics to deeper structural issues. Engel’s sees the deplorable housing conditions of England’s working-class housing as the inner workings of the capitalist mode of production. His was also a material question: why working-class housing appeared so clearly unbearable and oppressive as it did (Kubey 2018). Writing a century later, Lefebvre (1996) also notes how the functioning of capitalism manifests spatially and materially in working-class housing. This material evidence of capitalism at work in housing is still present today and points to the timelessness of spatial manifestations of class, as well as race and gender struggles which I will explore further in this paper. Lefebvre (1996) also brings the housing question into an urban context, which the 20 th century has expanded to include most workers in urban settings, reflective of how housing struggles expanded alongside capitalist growth. Lefebvre (1996; 2003) imagines an urban realm where housing will be built on the principles of habiting, where social and cultural needs are at the forefront, and access to dis-alienated dwelling spaces are widely. He opens to us up the idea that merely political-economic analyses of housing are insufficient and instead, a focus on housing as a site of the ongoing production and reproduction of social processes needs deeper consideration for it to become a key catalyst for revolution (Marcuse and Madden 2016).

Today, Rolnik (2019) posits that housing has been re-colonized by global finance. She traces the disjointed puzzle pieces of housing policy around the world from 1980 to the 2007 market crash. Around the world, she sees one dominant paradigm of housing: privately owned homes bought through mortgage credit certificates (Rolnik 2019). But how does this paradigm translate in the socio-cultural variety and specificity of places around the world? In too many places, the sweep of privatized housing has caused the poorest and most vulnerable people to be displaced, and the line of who falls under that category is constantly rising rendering more and more people into the murky waters of housing precarity and insecurity (Kothari 2015; Marcuse and Madden 2016). The colonization by global finance is seen in private and public housing alike, and the real crisis at play is the attack of this system on the meaning of home through the means of real estate (Rolnik 2019; Kipfer and Petrunia 2009).

The Geographical Focus To dive into the knots of the topic, break through the layers of the housing system, and bring people into focus, critical realism is an approach that will best inform this research. One of my key goals is to argue against established methods of inquiry by reaching for new frameworks that can take on the changing complexity of the topic (Sayer 2015; Borras 2016). In the long term, I am interested in pursuing community engaged and participatory research, where the label of ‘subject’ changes to ‘collaborator’. This will mean immersing myself in the lives of people experiencing housing insecurity, developing partnerships, involving people and communities in research design, development and dissemination, and hopefully removing the othering boundary through a collaborative and reciprocal process (McGregor and Restoule 2018). People need to be at the heart of creating new housing processes and transforming 3

existing ones (Karakusevic 2018), and centralizing residents through a participatory research and design framework for all aspects from policy and zoning to planning and architecture is needed to equip residents with the power of being actors of their own situation (Pitter 2016).

Geography is a discipline that attracts thinking with the intention of affecting positive (Ferretti 2019). Human and physical geography alike mandate for a commitment to political, social, and environmental activism calling on geographers to tackle today’s greatest problems (Harden et al. 2020).

Coming from a background in architecture, I acknowledge the capacity of practical fields in design and planning to tackle housing issues. However they often operate in silos and I argue this topic requires an interdisciplinary approach with depth and theoretical grounding. Looking beyond one’s field and creating connections with other fields both in research and practice is an inherent trait of geography today (Baerwald 2010). Geographers have also pushed the boundaries of thinking to avoid false separations between economic, political, social and cultural discourse, which I will exhibit is crucial in studying this topic (Rankin 2003). This often occurs through the manner in which the geographer engages with space, scale, and place as both tools of analysis and concepts of their own. Following the uprisings of the 1960’s, space can be seen as a charged arena for social, political, and cultural activity. This is especially the case for how gender and race entered the picture of previous decentering and de-organizing of capitalist geographies undertaken by class (Smith 1992; Massey 1993).

The analysis of scale will also take some twists and turns in this topic, taking from (Katz 2001a) and Massey (1993)’s use of scale-jumping, where the local can represent the global and two places across the world are connected through a particular material experience. In this way, scale moves beyond methodology and becomes the concept itself. The scale of household, neighbourhood and state all become actors in the material and social realities of people’s lives (Sayre and Di Vittorio 2009). I would also like to draw from Relph's (1976) understanding of sense of place as concentric layers of lived space that shape experience. Understood through experiences of the body, home as a sense of place becomes this cone of concentric circles that transmits broader forces and processes through various scales into and out of bodily experiences. In this way, space, scale, and place are geographies I will continuously utilize and explore in this paper as key aspects of understanding experiences of housing insecurity.

Part 2: Understanding the Crisis as a Conjuncture Conjunctural Analysis The global housing crisis has many faces, framed at times as issues of displacement and gentrification, or mortgage crises and housing bubbles, or exponential densification and slum growth. The structural obstacles that block any progress or change in these issues are political, legal, socio-cultural, and ideological, and yet all of these are swallowed by the economic – due to the operation of neoliberal capitalism (Kothari 2015). Instead, Hall and Massey (2010) interpret the 2007 and 2008 financial crisis as a conjuncture, asking what these various structural and experiential specificities of the crisis are in order to challenge the ‘common sense’ economistic attitude of neoliberalism and market logic (Grayson and Little 2017). Stuart 4

Hall describes a conjuncture as “a period during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape” (Hall and Massey 2010).

Conjunctures undergo shifts and transformations, often due to ruptures such as the events of 2007 to 2008. These ruptures have great potential as moments of revolution. They can be an intervention that transforms the previous conjunctural path into a true paradigm shift for positive change. (Hall and Massey 2010) note that the first step to enabling this revolution is to look at the many different aspects that compose the conjuncture in its moments of crisis - to move the crisis from being a passive revolution that leads to another version of the same thing, into a real transformative revolution. Reframing the housing ‘crisis’ as an ongoing conjuncture will better equip us to be able to ask what is needed to make real change in its moments of crisis. It offers a new means of analysis of the present crisis and is open to bringing together longer trajectories of thinking from both the past and future (Grayson and Little 2017). It also enables reflection on the shifts in the socio-political history of the relationship between the state and its people and opens the discourse to the inherent resilience of people experiencing housing insecurity.

So, what are all these other conditions of existence – the social, political, cultural, historical, ideological, and the economic (which still remains a crucial part of the equation)? How and where do these many different crises condense into one? In this paper, I look at the current conjuncture of housing in the arena where the collision of its various conditions of existence are most succinct: in the lived experiences of housing insecurity.

Housing Insecurity Cox et al. (2019) outline how current understandings of housing insecurity are incomplete and insufficient and exclude a vast spectrum of experiences that compose its multidimensional nature. This often leads to disjointed or inadequate policy approaches which compartmentalize efforts on three aspects of housing insecurity: homelessness, affordability, and stability. The divisions seen between even this narrow perception of issues and the divisions in the way these are addressed by the state are exemplar of the deep lack of understanding on the nature of the current housing conjuncture. Cox et al. (2019) put forward a multifaceted measure of housing insecurity using a cross-field literature review of over a hundred quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods studies. While there is real merit in establishing a holistic manner of understanding the empirics of housing insecurity for the purposes of better informing housing policy and action, what I want to draw from their study for the purpose of this paper is how they factor in of hidden experiences of home and neighborhood that go beyond the dominant economic discourse on affordability and stability and the frequently publicized issue of homelessness.

Housing as a human right was established in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, providing a multidimensional framework to guide housing measures. While certain state moves such as the US Housing Act of 1949 have leaned in this direction of capturing social, cultural and psychological needs, actual working definitions that transpired in state-led action do not capture this multidimensionality, rendering humans rights codes as meaningless documents (Kothari 2015; Hulchanski 2002). Homelessness is one of the most visible effects of housing 5

issues and is often perceived publicly as a government’s failure to meet this human right – this is rightly so. However, it is then heavily addressed through dedicated infrastructure and funding routes (Cox et al. 2019) implemented in a reactionary, emergency need-based approach that results in the provision of bare minimum physical enclosures with basic access to food, water and sanitation (Erin, Gaetz, and Schwan 2020). Shelters are far from home and shelter infrastructure is entirely divorced from the housing system. Homelessness is in itself a spectrum of experiences that should be nested into a larger spectrum of housing insecurity (Erin, Gaetz, and Schwan 2020; Cox et al. 2019).

Housing affordability is the ability to reasonably be able to pay for the full costs of one’s home including relevant utilities, bills, and other expenses. Unaffordability would entail high cost-toincome ratios and any legal issues or difficulties arising from not consistently meeting housing costs (Cox et al. 2019). Housing stability is the ability to maintain a place of home without interruption and complication. Instability in this sense could consist of situations of overcrowding, forced eviction, or roommate or landlord harassment. Recently, a major factor in affordability and stability is seen in the divides of tenure, where the income gap between homeowners and renters has drastically increased. Racialized and gendered poverty and the social inequalities of housing tenure are also closely connected to affordability and stability (Hulchanski 2002).

It is often the more visible effects of the housing crisis that are given prominence both by the public and the state, leaving a majority of experiences of housing insecurity to go unaddressed.

Cox et al. (2019) bring into the picture what they have termed housing quality and housing safety, which are some of the more hidden, complex results of the housing crisis tied to the material and spatial conditions of the home that affect an individual’s physical, emotional, and psychological health and well-being. Unsafe housing can include such things like serious building damage, disrupted water access, pest infestations, contaminants and designated substances or inadequate heating in the winter months. Low-quality housing pertains to the visible and functional quality issues of the home including dilapidated interiors, failing or broken appliances and fixtures, and a general lack of quality that affect an individual’s perception of self. Attaining safe and good quality housing are often traded off in order to maintain a stable and affordable home, and so even an appearance of stability and affordability can hide the detriments of unsafe and low-quality living conditions (Cox et al. 2019; Hulchanski 2002).

As well, neighborhood quality and safety has barely been linked to housing insecurity. Another aspect that is often neglected for affordability and stability, the neighbourhood while not being a part of the ‘house’, is an extension of the experience home (Cox et al. 2019). Unsafe neighbourhoods include those with high crime, prevalence of environmental hazards, high noise, and traffic. Low quality neighbourhoods include poor services and infrastructure, lack of access to amenities, and poorly maintained public spaces. Drawing neighbourhoods into the conversation about housing insecurity is extremely important as turns the conversation towards the role of the state in perpetuating these experiences. The neighbourhood, though public space, is always an extension of one’s experience of home (Bélanger 2012) and bringing it into housing discourse places some onus on public services within a dominantly private realm, debunking the blame placed on residents for the conditions of their homes (Boudreau, 6

Keil, and Young 2009b). The aspects of housing insecurity caused by the state’s disinvestment and deprioritization in a neighbourhood are wide ranging, often exacerbated during crises (Katz 2008). This requires a close look at the functions of the state in the housing system.

Part 3: The People and the State Housing under globalized neoliberal capitalism I have discussed how the housing crisis is a long standing one, but the particular nature of the crisis faced today is unique to the conjuncture we find ourselves in – that of a housing system embedded in the operations of neoliberal capitalism functioning at a global scale (Marcuse and Madden 2016). All around the world, the neoliberal model has prioritized housing as an elite commodity as opposed to a fundamental right for all human beings (Kothari 2015). Similar to eighteenth century liberalism, twenty-first century neoliberalism is based on the principle of individualistic democratic self-interest and the idea that the free market is the best agent of this democracy. It also utilizes the accelerated mobilization of the state as a puppet of capitalism, a twofold power exercised simultaneously at multiple geographical scales (Smith 2010). For housing, this means that even if the housing crisis appears in many forms around the world, such as postwar high rises in North America, border migrant encampments, favelas in Brazil, or slums in India, they originate from the same root problem: that of the commodification of housing under globalized neoliberal capitalism. (Marcuse and Madden 2016; Rolnik 2019).

What Engels was observing in the mid-19 th century conditions of industrial working-class housing were the beginnings of the divides forming due to what we know today as the commodification of housing, where the economic value of a thing comes to dominate its other uses. In the 19th century, those with wealth sought to create a gap, geographically, culturally, and architecturally between their clean and pristine domestic world and the soot covered world of the market (Marcuse and Madden 2016). This led to the process of deconstructing housing as a social good and instead transforming it into a financial asset, which today has global hold (Rolnik 2019). The turn of the millennium saw a huge push in internationalizing investments, where giant walls of placeless floating capital are constantly landing in locations all over the world as a spatial fix for overaccumulation in the form of housing developments (Rolnik 2019; Marcuse and Madden 2016).

Katz (2008) notes that neoliberal capitalism operates most obviously and with the greatest strength on housing. The commodification of housing today has reached a height of ideological dominance, where public interest, common good, and the prevalence of poverty and inequality, are overlooked in the name of the market. Any major issues that arise from this are shrugged off and blamed on ‘market logic’, the naturalized language of a capitalist system (Hall and Massey 2010). We live in a world where the entrenched idea is that the housing market means freedom, choice, and liberty, and the associated language that goes with this logic has taken away the consciousness to question what might be going wrong on a global scale (Hall and Massey 2010). As for the role of globalization, the current conjuncture is not simply about capital and commodities going global (as this has been the case for a long time), but that this global scale is being rescaled into the metropolitan level; where cities are becoming platforms 7

of global production (Smith 2010). Whereas production used to occur at regional and national scales, deindustrialization in the 1970s and 1980s reworked the metropolitan scale to dominate the regional scale. This is causing a dramatic increase in value placed into the core of cities where capital lives, and an out-casting of workers to the disinvested margins of these cores through spatial, social, and political mechanisms (Smith 2010; Rolnik 2019).

The Brunt of the Crisis The postwar era of housing in the United States and Canada took on a model of state supported private ownership. The marriage between the state and capital had taken off in the form of homeownership becoming every American’s dream (Rolnik 2019; Marcuse and Madden 2016).

In reality, the commodification of housing did not adequately serve the social production and reproduction of the working class in terms of shelter and in response, municipalities and charities built the very first examples of social housing (Marcuse and Madden 2016). In this way, social housing was born out of the inadequacies of the commodification of housing. Or in another sense, it was born to support the continued presence of the commodification of housing, embodying the contradictory relationship between social reproduction and capitalism.

Housing today is in a state of hyper-commodification. The opposing pushes of polarization are stronger than they have ever been. State sanctioned mortgage practices such as redlining and racist patterns of land use employed in the 20th century having had their impact for close to a century (Lipsitz 2011). The repercussions of this are prevalent today with racialized people being ‘house poor’. Ongoing predatory lending and deregulations in home financing that still disproportionately and unequally affected Black and Latino populations continue, rippling through their homes, neighbourhoods, schools, and health care, all the way into their social identity (Lipsitz 2011; Marcuse and Madden 2016).

In Canada, neoliberalism made its presence in housing policy in the 1980s when governments moved away from the responsibility of housing provision through a series of privatizations, deregulations and disinvestments (Borras 2016). In 1986, public and social housing distribution was reassigned to provincial and territorial governments. In the 1990s, federal social housing was cancelled, and housing authorities were decentralized. This continuous decline of federally funded public and social housing projects under the operatives of neoliberalism has resulted in the deeply problematic experiences of housing insecurity disproportionately affecting marginalized populations today (Borras 2016). Over the many years of an ownership privileging housing system that is inaccessible for many Canadians, the gap between rich and poor due to housing has increasingly grown. The known demographics alone point to drastic overrepresentation amongst vulnerable people and groups. Indigenous peoples, black peoples, immigrants and minorities, youth, people identifying as 2SLGBTQ+, families and women are highly overrepresented in Canada’s homeless population (Hulchanski 2002). Often, intersecting aspects of precarity do not get captured or are less understood. For example, close to half of youth experiencing homelessness in Canada identify as 2SLGBTQ+. Women fleeing violence are at much greater risks for homelessness (Borras 2016). Racialized family homelessness is the fastest growing demographic in Canada. Landlord discrimination is at play towards families with children, single mothers, and those on social assistance (Hulchanski 2002). Poor, racialized, gendered and class oppressed peoples bear the brunt of the housing crisis.

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The State Retreats Marcuse and Madden (2016) note that the shape of the housing system in any given location is an outcome both of priorities of the neoliberal state, and of the struggles between different groups and classes in society. There is a push and pull in the power dynamics of the housing crisis, both between the neoliberal state and its people, as well as between various race, gender, and class groups, and all of these occur in interlocking matrices of power that are skewed to favor those with money and privilege (Lipsitz 2011; Ruddick 1996). The materializations of this power imbalance witnessed in the spatial and material qualities of the home are what I wish to highlight. The neoliberal housing policies that have placed access to housing so far out of reach for much of the world’s population successfully remove state intervention from the housing market through arguments for the need of speculation on land and property, and that the state’s project-based approach to public housing was inefficient for scaling up (Rolnik 2019, Kothari 2015). These arguments include removing public housing for lower income and marginalized populations and instead claim that a housing boom in the private sector would result in a filtering down of opportunities to house the poor (Kothari 2015, Karakusevic 2018) From around the 1990s when this argument picked up, global finance sources propelled money into the private housing sector, championing rapid development (Rolnik 2019). This has resulted in a severe decrease in public housing and has proven that the direct role of the state and municipality is crucial for the existence and sustenance of public housing (Karakusevic 2018). The global move for accelerated urbanization and resulting development led displacement, Kothari (2015) argues, is one of the biggest reasons for the ongoing undermining of housing as a human right and the resulting alarming statistics of slum growth, homelessness, and housing precarity. In this hostile environment, public and social housing is met with distaste from corporations and governments alike and is seen as a hindrance to growth and progress, a tune then echoed by the public (Kipfer and Petrunia 2009). As a result, across Canada and the US, there have been a series of structured disinvestments and retreats from public housing, and an offloading of responsibility for daily and generational social.

The Necessity of Social Reproduction Thus far, I have outlined the many calls for a comprehensive, conjunctural understanding of housing that problematizes the very structure of the housing system by looking at experiences of housing insecurity that are evidence of its failures. One such terrain of geographical research that continues to forge this tie between the bodily experiences of home, the meaning of community, and the political economy of housing, is social reproduction. Social reproduction is constituted by the everyday material, social practices that sustain broader production in capitalist societies. It is the life force of social formation, it occurs daily and generationally, in multiple spaces and places, through various scales of body, home, community, and state (Katz 2008). I am employing it in the context of housing insecurity as it exposes the contradictory and complex relationships between people and capital, home and real estate, community, and state, through an emphasis on how the vital ingredients of social sustenance are constantly thwarted and overlooked in these dichotomies. Social reproduction involves the struggle for all means of existence, including shelter, access to water, food, and health care, as well as 9

education, childcare, mental health, and social supports, all of which should be secured through a collaborative effort of resources from the state, civil society and households. In recent decades, the combined efforts of the state and capital under neoliberalism have offloaded the responsibility of social reproduction onto individuals, households, and civil society (Katz 2008), in continued disinvestments and targeted attacks, a central one of which is housing.

In the context of housing, this was seen in the structured leave of social and public housing as a nationwide initiative in Canada and United States, and also in deeper, intentional, yet obscured methods: 20th century redlining and predatory mortgage lending in black and other racialized neighborhoods, residential segregation then and today through urban planning and policy, targeted policing of racialized neighbourhoods, prioritization of white and upper class neighborhoods for basic resources, planned scarcity of transportation, health and education infrastructure, targeted displacement and recolonization through gentrification, and open gates to pointed attacks from media and public showcasing the prevalence of racism, gendered oppression and class based discrimination in the Canadian and US housing system today (Madden and Marcuse 2016, Rolnik 2019, Katz 2008, Lipsitz 2020, Pulido 2016).

All this and more point to the limited understanding of housing that misunderstands it as a site of consumption, instead of one as social production and reproduction (Madden and Marcuse 2016). Smith (1992) discusses forging connections between social production and reproduction through a focus on home and community. This entails engaging at once the scale of the body and the scale of the nation, and everything else in between. If there are hierarchies and boundaries of scale that seem implied here, it is important to keep in mind that they should not be dismissed, but instead deeply pondered and perhaps challenged. As we saw with the effects of a globalized neoliberalism heightening the scale of the city over that of the region, what has been called for by geographers such as Katz (2001a), Massey (1994) and Smith (1992) is a scalejumping between all these various constructed scales and boundaries, to conceive of them as various geographical resolutions of “contradictory social processes of competition and cooperation” (Smith 1992, 64). This acknowledges that various nested geographical scales are actively produced and reproduced through the current conjuncture of social, cultural, political, economic, and ideological elements.

In the context of social reproduction and housing insecurity, the body is the primary domain within which the effects of home are received and experienced (Smith 1992). The impacts of housing insecurity are visceral, a dramatic loss of power that attacks how one’s identity is constructed and experienced. The determination of these experiences are always racial, gendered and classed, as set forth through their boundaries established within home, in public space, and by the state (Lipsitz 2011). There is great porosity, in both directions, between the state and the individual through the context of home. Changes in the economy, investment, and disinvestment in various housing stocks and neighbourhoods, the planning of new transportation lines and the resulting property value fluctuations ripple down into the body through their impact on home (Smith 1992). Similarly, the home becomes the geographical scale and arena for struggle, resistance and mobilization, and no other modern commodity has been as important for organizing against the oppressive forces of capitalism and neoliberalism (Madden and Marcuse 2016).

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Home is a central nucleus from which patters of everyday life proceed. Without home, or when home is in danger, every hour becomes a struggle to rebuild that physical basis of survival.

Feeling unsafe, unstable, and insecure in one’s home setting disrupts physical, social, emotional, and psychological aspects of life. It means precarity in accessing water, food, cleanliness and being stripped of community and solidarity (Hulchanski 2003). Nowhere is this more evident than in public and social housing. There is broad distrust in towards social housing both from the inside and from the outside (Karakusevic 2018). Residents often do not understand the frameworks within which social housing operates and these have real effects on people’s lives through the oppressive material nature of housing projects (Pitter 2016). From the outside, numerous misunderstandings and stigmatizations about social housing relating to crime and poverty perpetuate their deprioritization and further rigidity (Pitter 2016).

Being in control of one’s housing extends to a feeling of autonomy over one’s time and labour and for this reason, struggles over housing are always struggles for autonomy (Madden and Marcuse 2016). Struggles in and against the neoliberal housing system are an arena for imagining alternative social and political orders. Katz (2008) notes how situations of crisis in social reproduction provide opportunity for the reinvention of everyday material social practices that can create long lasting and permanent structural change. The resilience, resistance and mobilization seen in housing struggles and the fight for social reproduction can be the revolutionary rupture that Hall and Massey (2010) imagined to transform the current conjuncture of housing caught in the thralls of neoliberal capitalism. To continue the path of gaining a deep understanding of the current housing conjuncture and explore its revolutionary capacity, I will next look at stories of housing struggles and lived experiences of housing insecurity in Toronto, Canada.

Part 4: Stories of Housing Insecurity, Struggle, and Resilience Situating Toronto In this section, I will examine three case studies conducted by geographers of neighborhoods in Toronto whose stories speak to the push and pull of social, political, economic, and ideological elements of the housing conjuncture the resulting power dynamics exercised between the neoliberal state and the people of Toronto. In order to contextualize what I have discussed thus far in the geography of Toronto, I will outline a brief history of the material processes of neoliberalism on the housing fabric of the city, as well as discuss two phenomena that have combined effects: gentrification and immigration.

In a study of Toronto neighbourhoods from 1970 to 2005, (Hulchanski 2010) describes how Toronto is divided into three distinct geographies which he identifies as three cities. City 1 is formed by the city center, where high income neighbourhoods close to subway lines undergo an increase in geographical area and income over the course of the study. City 3 is formed by marginalized lower income areas in the northeastern and northwestern parts of Toronto and sees a steep fall in income and large expansion of geographical area over the course of the study. City 2 is located between the two, a middle-income zone that substantially decreases in geographical area over the course of the study1. At the end of the study, Hulchanski projects a 11

scenario in 2025 where the three cities morph into two cities if current trends continue without any serious urban policy, planning, and transportation approaches. City 1 usurps the remaining north and east runs of the subways line, and the more isolated and disconnected portions of the City 2 fall into City.2 Hulchanski geographically documents fluctuations that lead to an intense income polarization in Toronto that is catalyzed by housing commodification, gentrification, and marginalization.

Gentrification Gentrification, which is simply the process of transforming an urban landscape into a format that is conducive to the continued rapid growth of capital, is crucial to the functioning of a metropolitan city in the competitive global mainstage of neoliberalism (Smith 2010). A driving force behind gentrification is the marriage of corporate and state power to such a degree that urban policy simply moves to meet market momentum for the highest returns as opposed to guiding or regulating economic growth (Smith 2010). It is often portrayed in a positive light, making a case for the transformation of working-class areas into middle class ones, and revitalization of neighbourhoods to close rent gaps (Bridge and Watson 2011). It is also often portrayed in a neutral light, discussed with the same shrug of the shoulders as market logic, taking on a ubiquitous presence in many global metropolises (Smith 2010).

Immigration Toronto is a transnational metropolis. It boasts an identity of diversity and over the years this has become a growing reflection of its position on the global mainstage of economic and cultural networks (Bourdreau et al. 2009). Since changes to immigration policies in 1967 that brought forward an increased focus on population diversity, the country has seen growing racial and social inequality (George 2012). Toronto attracts forty percent of Canada’s immigrants and of these a fifth of households are considered to live in unacceptable housing conditions, many of whom become part of the hidden homeless (Ghosh 2014). Paralleling the disadvantage most newcomers face in the labour market, their experiences in access to housing are marked with systemic discrimination and disadvantages (Boudreau, Keil, and Young 2009a; Ghosh 2014). The move for multicultural immigration and marketing Toronto as a welcoming, diverse city without actually providing equitable avenues in labour, housing, health and education has led to visible inequalities and racialized poverty (George 2012). This is exemplified in the relationship between Toronto’s colored immigrants and the city’s postwar high rise social housing projects.

The Ideal City of Inner Suburbs State-run social housing initiatives in North America that originated in the 1930s had an agenda for sanitation. Focused on ‘clearing out slums’ and quelling the public unrest emerging from the working class, these communities were modelled on Les Corbusier’s Ideal City or ‘towers in the park’ architectural typology where a sea of regimented concrete block towers were built with ample open green space that retreat from the street and stood as visible objects in the horizon 3 (Pitter 2016, Ghosh 2014). Sixty percent of Toronto’s postwar era high rise buildings are focused in Hulchanski’s (2010) City 3, the inner suburbs. These inner suburbs were planned on the principles of a Keynesian Welfare State (Boudreau, Keil, and Young 2009b; Ghosh 2014), 12

containing a mixture of high rises and low-density single-family homes along major arteries.

However, in the 1970s there was a growing distaste towards these high rises and no social housing has been constructed since the 1990s (Ghosh 2014). Still today, these relics of modernity and urban-suburban living house many of the city’s lower income, marginalized and racialized folk who make these buildings their home within the setting of growing exclusivity through the city’s commodification of housing.

Toronto’s inner suburbs draw a majority of immigrants in due to the affordability of the units, the family size 2 and 3-bed units and their proximity to work, community spaces and ethnic institutions. Over the 35-year period of Hulchanski’s (2010) report, the number of immigrants in City 3 increased dramatically from thirty-one percent to sixty-one percent of the population. By choice clustering in ethnic enclaves and ‘ethnoburbs’ are a key player too, where immigrants feel a sense of community in neighbourhoods occupied by their cultures (Kataure and WaltonRoberts 2014). This urban landscape showcases decades of abandonment and neglect. From 2005 to 2013, the City of Toronto partnered with the United Way of Greater Toronto to identify thirteen priority areas, all in City 3, that were officially labelled as neighbourhoods with extensive poverty, crime, and in need of social and community services. These have presently grown to 31 Neighbourhood Improvement Areas (NIA)4, a vast majority of which still lie in City 3. The following are three case studies that tell us fascinating stories of struggle and resilience during experiences of housing insecurity in some of these neighbourhoods.

Jane and Finch: Neighbourhood 24 & 25 of the NIA Boudreau, Keil, and Young (2009b) recapture Hulchanski’s (2010) City 3 as the in-between city, caught in the middle of the prioritized dense city center and the sprawling exurbs, home to the infamous postwar inner suburb housing projects. The 1960s saw a surge in the building of public housing in Canada due to amendments in the National Housing Act. In the Jane and Finch neighbourhood, close to a quarter of dwellings were public housing units, following the 1960s modernist vision of the Ideal City. The coinciding 1967 changes to Immigration Policy saw these newly built housing projects welcoming immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The coupling of the built environment and the neighbourhood’s demographic was a unique housing mixture in Toronto and became a target of various racial and cultural attacks. After a series of shootings in 2005, these attacks grew to a notorious level of racial and class branding of the neighbourhood as dangerous and unfit for occupation with ‘too much’ public housing and violent crime. This heightened policing, monitoring and surveillance in the neighbourhoods, specifically towards youth, but also galvanized a series of community initiatives and movements that have slowly merged with state support.

The amalgamation of the City of Toronto resulted in a rescaling of public housing responsibility.

In 2002, various public housing agencies merged into Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC), now one of the largest landlords in North America. TCHC operates locally through Community Housing Units (CHU). There are three CHUs in Jane and Finch, and each building elects a tenant representative for the CHU. The tenant represented CHU and TCHC navigate a push and pull of community efforts under tight fiscal allowances to better the neighbourhood.

Further to this, there are various community organizations that mobilized in the neighbourhood in their own responses to crime as well as need, with continuing efforts in targeted and general 13

initiatives and services. The support of the state in these, even if challenging and involving constant negotiation, can be seen as the ‘return of the state’, especially in the context of the Neighbourhood Improvement Area plans that aim to coordinate all three levels of government.

The jury is still out on whether these collaborations will yield positively for the people of Jane and Finch, as thus far, the state’s hand has still been controlled by commodification, including in the work of TCHC as the next case study will show us.

Regent Park: Neighbourhood 72 of the NIA The original Regent Park development of the 1950s and 1960s was seen as a model community that succeeded in achieving social control through built space and the allowance for moral policing. Typical of postwar modernism, Regent park was the perfect combination of homogenization and segregation - two block compounds that were visually distinct from its surroundings, each identically regimented with isolated units set away from the street for maximum spatial separation5 (Kipfer and Petrunia 2009). Impressions of this model community disintegrated with a series of women-led movements in the 1970s demanding better housing quality and safety. This coupled with the simultaneous withdrawal of federal level funding to public housing from the 1970s to 1990s resulted in the rise of public stigmatization of the neighbourhood as crime ridden and drug infested. The 1967 immigration reform also transformed Regent park from a mostly white population to an eighty percent immigrant population with a wide range of ethnic and racial backgrounds (Kipfer and Petrunia 2009, Ghosh 2014). Most were low income, welfare dependent and unemployed, and many families were led by single mothers. These combined factors and the swarm of urban developers championing gentrification and revitalization as slogans for ‘problematic’ ethnic enclaves (Ghosh 2014), resulted in redevelopment as the applied solution to Regent Park.

The redevelopment proposal included two times the number of housing units and employed an “economic, social and cultural recolonization strategy” (Kipfer and Petrunia 2009, 121) that recommodified the previously homogenous segregated public housing complex into a neighbourhood with ‘social mixing (normalizing language for gentrification) through a range of building types, tenures, incomes, uses, and activities. The recolonialization took place through a territorial strategy based on the management and control of residents, blatantly touting the idea that low income and racialized populations cannot live normally without external help (Kipfer and Petrunia 2009). While the initial plan was to maintain all existing public housing units, through the sway of developers TCHC settled for 40% of the original amount, stating they would relocate these units elsewhere in the city. Urban policy, gentrification and architecture transformed Regent Park from postwar public housing that was attuned to segregate and visibly demarcate the poor, to a culturally recolonized redevelopment that is meant to hide and submerge the poor – to the extent of displacement through gentrification.

Crescent Town and Scarborough Village: Neighbourhoods 61 & 139 of the NIA Ghosh (2014) explores two neighbourhoods where Bengali immigrants call postwar inner suburb high-rises their home. Similar to the homogenization of the original Regent Park from the exterior, the buildings’ design and operation are highly regimented, in an effort to suppress the social difference of people they were built for (Pitter 2016). Often in need of severe maintenance, they are considered eyesores and concentrations of neglect and poverty by the 14

surrounding city. However, beyond the exterior of the building is home – a complex relationship between people and spatial experiences – both lived and conceived. These building have faced the same threatening waves of gentrification disguised as revitalization but have prevailed. Residents of this tower face the contradictions of globalized neoliberal capitalism in their everyday lives. On one end they are expected to integrate economically and culturally to routine commodification, and on the other they are consistently denied access to shared resources such as public spaces on the grounds of race, class, and gender boundaries. Amidst these external threats however, their everyday lives unfold within the building in a series of collaborative and competitive social reproductions, developing a ‘sticky codependance’ through shared laundry times and exchanges of information on important resources.

Due to the alienation they faced in public spaces outside the building, common areas like the laundry room became important for social networks. For a lack of exercise, corridors were converted for children to play behind building supervisor’s backs. Music, dance, and language classes were informally organized in common spaces and the ground floor. A rented apartment was converted for prayers that the residents collectively paid for. A ground floor apartment in many buildings was converted into a grocery store and various other women run businesses were informally operating in apartments such as daycares and parlors, creating an organic infrastructure of social reproduction in a city that otherwise capitalizes and excludes in these services. For the residents, these buildings were transformed into neighbourhoods full of hope and reminiscent of their home city, while exterior public spaces felt like a foreign land, and the city a symbol of despair and hopelessness through the active experience of exclusion and discrimination. Within the Bengali communities and amongst other colored communities nearby, global, and national narratives of difference and social identity still took place in the microcosm of the neighbourhood-building. In this way, the boundaries, scales, and meaning of home are expanded and contracted through the transformation of these run down, militarized buildings using the informal and vibrant resilience of people living in insecure housing conditions.

Reflections These three cast studies are to me precedents on how lived experiences of housing insecurity can be studied. In The Housing Question, Engels points out that the problems of housing constantly get shifted and moved elsewhere (Kipfer and Petrunia 2009) and this is still seen today in the constant scattered, dislocated, piecemeal manner in which the problem is discussed and addressed. Like Ghosh (2014) and Kothari (2015) note, we have to start at local everyday experiences, not in terms of a scale, but in terms of the literal addresses and real places within which housing insecurity is experienced that demonstrate the clear, yet unknown ways in which the housing crisis materializes in people’s lives. In this way we cannot look away from the small yet miraculous details, such as how neighbourhood deemed failures from the outside are actually operating as successful micro cultural enterprises of a city halfway across the world. It shows us the unimaginable resilience and autonomy of communities in the face of crisis. It demonstrates that there is a critical mass in this push and pull – as seen in the first and last case studies, perhaps ‘too much social housing’ is actually where some of the success 15

stories lie. Finally, it demonstrates how daily and generational social reproduction no matter how beaten will prevail in organic, informal manners as the lifeforce of people and communities. These are all important avenues to continue to explore in order to understand the current housing conjuncture.

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Appendix 1

Hulchanski’s (2010) study of the three cities in Toronto

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2

Hulchanski’s (2010) projection of Toronto in 2025

3

Le Corbusier’s Ideal City

Retrieved from: http://theinnercity.blogspot.com/2006/01/le-corbusiers-radiant-cities-or-super.html.

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4

Toronto’s Neighbourhood Improvement Areas

Retrieved from City of Toronto: https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/data-researchmaps/neighbourhoods-communities/nia-profiles/

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