Housing Neoliberalism And The Archive

From the mid-1940s, state housing authorities in Australia built large housing estates to enable home ownership by working-class families, but the public housing system they created is now regarded as broken. Contemporary problems with the sustainability, effectiveness and reputation of the Australian public housing system are usually attributed to the influence of neoliberalism. Housing, Neoliberalism and the Archive offers a challenge to this established ‘rise and fall’ narrative of post-war housing policy. Kathleen Flanagan uses Foucauldian ‘archaeology’ to analyse archival evidence from the Australian state of Tasmania. Through this, she reveals that the difference between past and present knowledge about the value, role and purpose of public housing results from a significant discontinuity in the way we think and act in relation to housing policy. Flanagan describes the complex system of ideas and events that underpinned policy change in Tasmania while telling a story about state housing policy, neoliberalism and history that has resonance for many other places and times. In the process, she shows that the story of public housing is more complicated than the taken-for-granted neoliberal narrative and that this finding has real significance for the dilemmas in public housing policy that face us in the here and now.

Neoliberal Housing Policy considers some of the most significant housing issues facing the West today, including the increasing commodification of housing; the political economy surrounding homeownership; the role of public housing; the problem of homelessness; the ways that housing accentuates social and economic inequality; and how suburban housing has transformed city life. The empirical focus of the book draws mainly from the US, UK and Australia, with examples to illustrate some of the most important features and trajectories of late capitalism, including the commodification of welfare provision and financialisation, while the examples from other nations serve to highlight the influence of housing policy on more regional- and place-specific processes. The book shows that developments in housing provision are being shaped by global financial markets and the circuits of capital that transcend the borders of nation states. Whilst considerable differences within nation states exist, many government interventions to improve housing often fall short. Adopting a structuralist approach, the book provides a critical account of the way housing policy accentuates social and economic inequalities and identifies some of the significant convergences in policy across nations states, ultimately offering an explanation as to why so many ‘inequalities’ endure. It will be useful for anyone in professional housing management/social housing programmes as well as planning, sociology (social policy), human geography, urban studies and housing studies programmes.

The twenty-first century has so far been characterized by ongoing realignments in the organization of the economy around housing and real estate. Markets have boomed and bust and boomed again with residential property increasingly a focus of wealth accumulation practices. While analyses have largely focussed on global flows of capital and large institutions, families have served as critical actors. Housing properties are family goods that shape how members interact, organise themselves, and deal with the vicissitudes of everyday economic life. Families have, moreover, increasingly mobilized around their homes as assets, aligning household transitions and practices towards the accumulation of property wealth. The capacities of different families to realise this, however, are highly uneven with housing conditions becoming increasingly central to growing inequalities and processes of social stratification. This book addresses changing relationships between families and their homes over the latest period of neo-liberalization. The book confronts how transformations in households, life-course transitions, kinship and intergenerational relations shape, and are being shaped by, the shifting role of property markets in social and economic processes. The chapters explore this in terms of different aspects of home, family life and socioeconomic change across varied national contexts.

This book provides a rich synthesis of research and theory of nascent and emergent critically engaged work examining changing welfare structures, regimes and technologies and the social suffering that is generated in everyday lives. By rigorously examining social security restructuring with the turn to austerity governance and its daily practices of managing, regulating and subordinating individuals, peoples and communities, this collection delineates the machinery of state power and logics designed to manage, contain and control the lives of some of the most poorest and marginalised citizens who are reliant on social welfare income payments. A core strength of the book is, first, its unpacking of austerity governance across diverse communities and, second, the elevation of community resistance and mobilisation against the very measures of austerity. Combined, the work maps out the logics of state power and everyday practices of embedded contestation and confrontation. Using the case study of Australia to discuss sociolegal recategorisations, automation of welfare governance, technologies of policy design and delivery, conditionality and systems of penalisation, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students of sociology, critical theory, social policy, social work and disability studies, Indigenous studies and settler-colonialism.

Affordable Housing Preservation in Washington, DC uses the case of Washington, DC to examine the past, present, and future of subsidized and unsubsidized affordable housing through the lenses of history, governance, and affordable housing policy and planning. Affordable housing policy in the US has often been focused at the federal level where the laws and funding to build new affordable housing historically have been determined. However, as federal housing subsidies from the 1960s expire and federal funding continues to decline, local governments, tenants and advocates face the difficult challenge of trying to retain affordability amid increasing demand for housing in many American cities. Now, instead of amassing land, financing and sponsors, affordable housing stakeholders must understand the existing resident needs and have access to the market for affordable housing. Arguing for preservation as a way of acknowledging a basic right to the city, this book examines the ways that the broad range of stakeholders engage at the building and city levels. This book identifies the underlying challenges that enable or constrain preservation to demonstrate that effective preservation requires long-term relationships that engage residents, build trust and demonstrate a willingness to share power among residents, advocates and the government. It is of great interest to academics and students as well as policy makers and practitioners internationally in the fields of housing studies and policy, urban studies, social policy, sociology and political economy.

"Examines the role of cultural production within social justice struggles and within archives. Contains reproductions of political ephemera, including zines, banners, stickers, posters, and memes, alongside 15 interviews with artists and activists who have worked across a range of movements including: women's liberation, disability rights, housing justice, Black liberation, anti-war, Indigenous sovereignty, immigrant rights, and prisoner abolition, among others."--Provided by publisher.

Migrant Homelessness and the Crimmigration Control System offers new insights into the drivers of homelessness following migration by unpacking the housing consequences of ‘crimmigration’ control systems in the US and the UK. The book advances ‘housing sacrifice’ as a concept to understand journeys in and out of homelessness and the coping strategies migrants employ. Undergirded by persuasive empirical research, it offers a compelling case for a ‘social citizenship’ right to housing guaranteed across social, political and civil realms of society. The book is structured around the 30 life stories of people who have migrated to the capital cities of Boston and Edinburgh from Central America and Eastern Europe. The narratives are complemented by interviews with a range of stakeholders (including frontline caseworkers, activists and policymakers). Guided by the tenets of critical realist theory, this book offers a biographical inquiry into the intersections of race, class and gender and provides insight into the everyday precarity homeless migrants face, by listening to them directly. It will be of interest to students, scholars, and policymakers across a range of fields including housing, immigration, criminology, sociology, and human geography.

Based on extended fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2019, this book aims to answer a simple question: What is the meaning of home for people living in vernacular settlements in rural China? This question is particularly potent since rural China has experienced rapid and fundamental changes in the twenty-first century under the influences of national policies such as "Building a New Socialist Countryside" enacted in 2006 and "Rural Revitalization" announced in 2018. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, building surveys, archival research, and over 600 photographs taken by residents along with their life stories, this book uncovers the meanings of home from rural residents’ perspectives, who belong to a social group that is underrepresented in scholarship and underserved in modern China. In other words, this study empowers rural residents by giving them voice. This book links the concepts of place, home, and tradition into an overarching argument: The meaning of home rests on the ideas of tradition, including identity, consanguinity, collectivity, social relations, land ownership, and rural lifestyle.