The Politics of Housing Exploitation: Power, Resistance & Compliance in Florida's Post-COVID Affordable Housing Crisis

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Street Level Politics (Table 10)

Abstract

By the 2022 midterm elections, housing affordability had emerged as a central site of political conflict in Florida, as post-COVID economic conditions—rising rents, inflation, and intensified precarity—heightened public scrutiny of local housing governance. Two counties, Palm Beach and Orange County, became flashpoints in this struggle, each advancing a ballot referendum that articulated fundamentally different responses to the housing crisis. Palm Beach County adopted a market-oriented strategy, approving a $200 million housing bond designed to incentivize private-sector development. In contrast, Orange County pursued a regulatory intervention through a rent stabilization ordinance, directly challenging Florida’s entrenched pro-growth housing regime.

This paper examines the political, institutional, and ideological conditions that sustain growth coalition hegemony over local housing policy—and the moments of resistance and disruption that threaten it. Drawing on Growth Machine Theory, Engels’ critique of housing under capitalism, and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, the analysis traces how elite consensus, state-level preemption, and dominant policy narratives reproduce pro-development governance while constraining democratic alternatives. At the same time, the paper highlights how fractures within elite coalitions, shifts in political opportunity structures, and counter-hegemonic framing around housing as a social right can destabilize these arrangements.

Situating these cases within the broader political economy of neoliberal urban governance, this study demonstrates that challenges to growth-driven housing policy are neither linear nor secure. Rather, counter-hegemonic housing reforms emerge through contested, uneven struggles and remain vulnerable to retrenchment absent sustained political organization and ideological work. The findings underscore that resistance in urban housing policy is not merely a matter of electoral success, but an ongoing struggle over meaning, power, and the governance of urban space.

Author

• Annabelle Erin Campbell, FC 100