Housing Assets and Its Discontents: Contradictory Class Locations within Housing Relations

• In Event: Housing as an Asset

Abstract

Housing is the dominant asset in U.S. household wealth, making the politics of housing inseparable from assetization, debt, and racialized inequality. Decommodifying reforms like social housing, limited-equity ownership, and rent regulation aim to reduce market influence and its negative effects, but face a core political constraint. Commodified housing produces wealth, stability, and constituencies invested in it. In this paper we develop a theory of contradictory class locations within housing relations to explain why support for decommodification is often ambivalent and coalition-dependent. We conceptualize “housing classes” along two dimensions: tenure and market power. The framework predicts strong support for decommodification among low-market-power renters and strong opposition among high-market-power owners, while identifying two movable locations with temporally contradictory interests in assetization: low-market-power owners (who face barriers to entry but may depend on appreciation after acquisition) and high-market-power renters (who can outbid in rental markets but seek protection from future rent inflation). We evaluate the theory through two empirical tests. First, an original nationally representative survey measures preferences for decommodifying reforms, and second, precinct-level voting returns from three ballot cases (Seattle’s social housing developer initiative, Los Angeles’s Measure ULA, and St. Paul’s rent stabilization ordinance). We argue the data shows that support for housing decommodification depends on organizing strategies that can reframe the home from a private appreciating asset into a social good.

Authors

• H. Jacob Carlson, Kean University

• Gianpaolo Baiocchi, New York University