Contesting Market Hegemony in Local Housing Struggles

• In Event: 30206 - Agents and Structures of Urban Change

Abstract

A global right to the city movement is highlighting the contradictions between property rights and the right to basic needs for people around the world. As global inequality and housing insecurity become more pronounced, they fuel political polarization and obstruct the search for solutions. How do elite growth coalitions neutralize movements to de-commodify housing and how do local housing movements adapt their strategies to advance tenant protections and non-market alternatives to housing? Housing advocates are increasingly turning towards de-commodifying housing as a means to resist gentrification and displacement and expand access to permanently affordable housing. This agenda, however, faces substantial obstacles in implementation. Building on a growing body of literature in urban sociology and social movement studies, we argue that macro-structural transformations in the global economy are producing deeply entrenched elite ideological positions within local contexts, producing a “market hegemony.” In effect, this market hegemony represents a consolidated ideological position that has nearly fully co-opted housing policy discourses which leaves little discursive room for non-market alternatives while also deflecting challenges to market-based housing policy. We trace how this market hegemony became entrenched in housing policy in Pittsburgh, PA, and find that the policies rooted in austerity and privatization reduced the overall number of affordable units in the city. These policies forced out Black residents while widening the housing supply gap. We then discuss the implications of these findings for the organizational field and discuss implications for movement-building practice. Drawing on qualitative participatory research in a local housing justice coalition, the Pittsburgh Housing Justice Table (HJT), we highlight a few mechanisms that are shaping the organizational field in form and discourse: renewed interest in ‘dual power’ organizations, extending existing alliances, and the consolidation around a human rights frame and social housing agenda.

Authors

• Daniel G. McClymonds, University of Pittsburgh

• Connor M. Chapman, University of Pittsburgh

• Jackie Smith, University of Pittsburgh