Decommodifying Housing: Critique and Real Utopian Vision

• In Event: 40803 - New Directions in Critical Theory: Racial Capitalism, Du Boisian Sociology, and Decolonial Perspectives

Abstract

This essay is a thought exercise in critical sociology, exploring how housing might be reorganized beyond the constraints of capitalist markets. Rather than diagnosing the failures of contemporary housing systems or showing the limits of commodified housing provision, we ask: What would it take to decommodify housing at scale? How might we institutionalize non-market housing in ways that are both politically viable and structurally transformative? Scholars have shown how capitalist urbanization has turned housing into a primary site of financial speculation, racial exclusion, and ecological destruction. This trajectory, while deeply entrenched, is not inevitable. Drawing from the Real Utopias tradition of Erik Olin Wright, we engage in a speculative but grounded exercise in institutional design. We propose the Social Housing Development Authority (SHDA)—a public entity that expands decommodified housing through both new construction and market conversions, embedding democratic governance, anti-racism, and climate justice into its core mission. Rather than a utopian blueprint, this proposal is an interstitial intervention—a strategy for building new institutional logics within and against the existing housing market. The SHDA operates through institutional bootstrapping, expanding state capacity for non-market housing while fostering grassroots control through resident councils and participatory governance. This approach reflects a dialogic method: moving from critique to radical yet feasible institutional design, incrementally eroding the power of speculative real estate and shifting the housing system toward a socialized, just, and ecologically sustainable future. In the tradition of critical sociology, this essay challenges the assumption that markets must structure housing provision. Instead, it reclaims utopian thinking as a necessary political exercise—a means of expanding the limits of the possible. By situating housing decommodification within long-term social transformation, we seek not just to imagine a better world but to illuminate plausible pathways to get there.

Authors

• Gianpaolo Baiocchi, New York University

• H. Jacob Carlson, Kean University