In this multi-part series, we join an analysis of a novel database of municipal zoning reform efforts across the United States with a deconstructive treatment of the housing political infrastructure, and those movements that contest the desideratum of land-use and zoning reform therein. Part 2: Against Pro-Housing Hauteur, takes the pro-housing collective as an object of critical analysis and problematizes this movement, its development and its logical assumptions. Commensurate with this deconstructive project is the generation of a historical and racially-critical schema for radical municipal land-use politics, and the outline of a future articulatory space for this invocation.
The Occlusion of Certain Minds
It seems to me that any movement constituted by the white psyche is necessarily coeval with a certain array of occlusions. Whether we examine the labor movement, technologist thought or the feminist movement – those beings who find themselves of the South or derived from the South can legibly predict time and time again, with an almost metaphysical presentiment, that they or we will be what is cast off to the side. One could even say that our ‘hands are hot’ when it comes to predictions of these kinds. All the same, it may be that this phrase may not quite fully fit with its supposed contents, since this is no gamble, and since these are not predictions as such, but rather empirical judgments made from the basis of our present observation, and empirical judgments that are so predictably true that they take their form as a priori (pure reasoning) and are perhaps indeed a direct offshoot of the very basis of our reason. Such observers of this kind are rather accustomed to this territory, and they have been trained in this occlusive expectation following the continued sequential playing of whatever aggregations have arisen across epochs and regions for any given social issue. The very fact that accustoms us in our understanding is principally our observation and our having lived. Yet there are some words which, when aligned with particular uses, disguise their shame – and in this case ‘aggregation’ is one of them, followed both by words like ‘generalization’ and ‘universalization.’ For us, the mainstream is almost always the entity and discourse of whiteness as the unannounced aggregate, and the aggregation of white demography as ‘mainstream’ – that which is normal and must be responded to, which is taken as a stand in for the human whether it be in questions of suffering or in curiosity – is the very fact of what is disguised.
Moreover, we can know by our observations and presentiments that the claims of various white demographics and social milieus will always proliferate a set of humans whose existence exceeds the accommodative possibility of its terms. By this, I mean to say that such language and ideology associated with particular movements of this kind cannot speak upon certain people, no less speak towards them adequately, or in a way that is not merely ‘tacked on’ and is not at all disparaging. It is not that those unaccommodated humans are solely excluded subjects (this would significantly stifle us and make us mere accessory instruments), but rather, and we might frame the matter in the following way: it is that we are both our own beings, we have our separate worlds from this occlusion, but these occlusions nevertheless shape our being, and our being is thus shaped by the worlds that are made from them. It may be that in our biographies, and in the writing and expressive articles whereby we unconsciously reveal ourselves – that we who find ourselves covered by unaccommodation often end up responding to the occlusions that negate us either formally, through an explicit method, or instead through an indirect quietude and restive indifference that is only fully revealed in its true purpose later.
This general tendency of occlusion by the white aggregate is what we have seen arise in both social movements and social thought, in an iterative fashion – time and time again. Hence our confidence in our prediction. And so is this time any different? Or is this time one in which we should be worried about the veracity of our prediction: the heat of our hands? Yet mere prediction alone seems to be an insufficient term here. One can only predict that which is not directly before them, and that which is not the least bit sensible to their perceptive faculty may only possibly become the predictive object. Prediction is of the future, necessarily. It wouldn’t make too much sense to predict what stands before us, even if it was in a state of unspecified obscurity (– contingent on its nonmovement) because it would nevertheless be there and available for our judgment. So perhaps this is a case established upon present judgment and a ‘tracking’ of what is before us yet inephemerally changing; a case in which we continue to track that object with our plotting eyes, limbs and ears all through time: – the figure of the moving white psyche1 and its objectifications in the world.2
Atomistic (Internal) and Totalized (External) Modes of Occlusion
Any student of history in their particular method of ‘tracking’ may implicitly realize that at a dyadic site of discordance, or a site representing two poles of an involved asymmetrical power relation, whether it be the laborer-capitalist or the woman-man dyads – that within such a dyadic site there is almost always a necessarily simplified fiction within the mix, and there is almost undoubtedly an underside or shadow that is excluded from any given site of discordance. At its very kernel, the exclusion referenced here is only possible by means of our desire for the simplicity of a purely dyadic model of conflict. In another way of saying this, we crave the simplicity of a two-sided dynamic without any membership outside of these elements, and without a disaggregation that may tunnel into hidden specificities and complications, particularly of those on the maligned component of the dyad. The fact here is not one of denying or making light of the asymmetry that characterizes any given discordant site: rather, the very premise of this framing is that such an asymmetry veritably exists, perhaps even a violent asymmetry, and that even within the dyadic model and even given this asymmetry, there are assumptions carried out that themselves malign. So what is the problem here? Mainly that our conflicts must have two entities that are atomic, and also total – and that this assumed constitution supposedly lacks that occlusive end that is the very basis of its analytic object: a power asymmetry. But the problems this understanding of problems itself presents! – This is especially so for those of us who are outside whatever has been denoted as the (intersectional) hegemonic assumptive unit for any given ‘generalized’ social problem, and given this obstruction in others’ judgment about our being, are therefore cast about by at least two forms of problematic mechanisms of reasoning: the first blatantly though paradoxically ejects us through an atomistic (internal) occlusion, and the next castigates us through the false justification and faux-reasoning of a totalized (external) occlusion. What do I mean by these terms?
Both of these modes of occlusion represent certain kinds of errors, and in their own voice, they represent particular claims to truth. They are features of errors that are produced along with the assumptions and human tendencies associated with the purely dyadic model of conflict, and they are often counterposed and left implicit in many prima facie judgments of human conflict.3 Before I go further, I would like to establish these terms and what surrounds them a bit more.
To begin, I determine that atomistic occlusion is a form of nonrecognition that is internal to any given falsely assumed socially maligned unit. Let us take the field of 20th-century labor as an example. Within a dyadic conflictual model of labor, the two forces that are seemingly opposed are the capitalist entity on the empowered classification of the labor conflict, and the industrial (waged-labored) worker on the maligned class. Let us paint our conception of atomistic occlusion with the following outline: – Internally within certain forms of labor, the Black masculine industrial worker of the 20th century was kept out of white trade unions on account of Blackness alone.4 What was hidden though operant here were the racial subdivisions within formalized understandings of labor that were assumed by the definition of the generalization of the term of labor itself. In this instance, while there may be an overlap in definitive features (sharing the form and productive act of industrial wage-labor), the distinction of the unaccommodated status here is promoted by the false idea that there is no further disaggregation within a particular maligned category; no further specification to be attended to: it is just ‘labor’ on its face. More readily revealed is that ‘labor’ is not mere ‘labor’ as such, but rather a subtle façade that disguises the (intersectional) hegemonic assumptive unit for this given dynamic: the able-bodied white masculine industrial worker in the North of the world, and this is what entirely comprises the term ‘labor’ in its most assumptive and implicit fashion.
This is an atomistic form of occlusion, and I have given it the following terminology, because just as Democritus (that old Greek philosopher and theoretical physicist) posited the atom as the nonsubdivisible feature of material existence, as the substance which no one could go further than, deeper and smaller than, more specified or more elementary than5 – so is, in the case of the social milieu, quite the same contention implicitly posited by the idea of the nonsubdivisibility of the hegemonic assumptive unit: the assumed social unit for any given problem (usually white and many times masculine). Yet just as subatomic physics frustrates, incoheres and reveals as invalid that old Democretian notion of the atom as nonsubdivisible, so is the legitimacy of the social atom also frustrated. In atomistic occlusion there is a sharing of terms, the paradox of overlap but the nevertheless eventual nonrecognition that clouds out and occludes other assortments of somewhat definitionally internal forms of being. Most cunningly is that this occlusive mechanism is carried out all while the hegemonic maligned status resists another perhaps grievous political force, in our case here: the force of the capitalist. This leads some to pity the hegemonic unit and its efforts, to even be aware of its occlusion, but to will themselves to continually forget and forget, all to resist that even great onus, that threat, that great Master: whatever is on the socially empowered classification of the conflictual dyad.
On the other hand is the totalized mode of occlusion. Whereas the principle of nonsubdivisibility entailed in the atomic conception of identity argues that there is no further internal specification within a category (e.g., that there are no internal racial divisions with the category ‘wage-laborer’), the principle of totality is a bit different. It is not so much about internal divisions as much as it is concerned with definitional exclusions that are argued to be outside a given term, which might also be known as specifications from alternative human categories (the worker as distinct from the slave, as distinct from the wageless femme laborer) and the eminence or importance of the very reference of distinction over such excluded categories. The totalized mode of occlusion argues for the distinction and rank of one particular social category that is superseded above others, or in many cases it ignores that those other social classifications, which it is oftentimes linked to through chains of dependency, at all exists. While the frustration of the atomistic mode was the fact that definitional extension formally accommodated those shadowed others, the frustration here is that the categories that the hegemonic assumptive unit would deem as inferior and external to it are often actually coeval and co-constitutive of its own specified classification itself.
Again, to make this explanation readily available through example and to further detail what I have noted above: in taking the field of labor as a category, what is implied here is the definitional understanding of the laborer as solely the Global North white industrialist (in the textile factories of London or New England) and what is excluded is the Black slave in the American or Caribbean plantation. In this instance, wage-labor that seems unforced but is tacitly compulsory for survival was seen as being constitutive of the signifier of labor and greater than other forms of forced activity, whereas the materially forced labor of slavery and the plantation, buttressed by grotesque (though mundane) violence and routinized populational psychological conditioning, was treated as outside of labor and outside of the interest of class struggle. The Black being was not only outside of labor as a category, but was and perhaps still is outside of the category of the human itself. As such, this constitutes a racial instance of definitional exclusion emblematic of the distinction and categorical supersession that registers a given occlusion as sufficiently of a ‘totalized’ type. But beyond this, what has been unaddressed up to this point and in the general example that is taken here is: the labor of women, who have been subject to both unpaid and wageless housework as well as socially reproductive labor (a gendered external division).6 What is ‘totalized’ when it comes to labor is the specificity of industrial labor which, through the reasoning of its totality, is made as both eminent and solely important, as well as distinct from other social forms. From this source of exclusion and pride, the limited definition cannot therefore understand, allow for the conceptualization of, or accommodate those outside of its own category; – even though it is constituted and inseparable from what it negates and takes primacy and siphons singularity from. Totalized occlusion is thwarted insofar as the totality that it posits as sufficiently total is never truly all that there is, and in the space of what is not both a fiction and a remainder resides. These are only a subset of examples of the possible array of occlusions that are present merely in relation to the field of labor, yet one can already see how many problems of assumption spew up from the ground like pools of tar. In every generation, there are new movements spewing up from the very same pools, as well as distinct upstarts that spew up as well and surround what has already plagued us for so long . . . and it is often just these new products that we, until any given ‘now,’ will have failed to pay adequate heed.
What is most cunning about these dyadic sites of occlusion is perhaps that there really is just so much at stake. The capitalist and the global imperial order which buttresses it, and the hegemonically masculine structure of power and violence in the world,7 are true behemoths that must be resisted. But the power of the capitalist against the worker, or cisgender men against the femme subject, does not prevent the responses of those dispossessed yet internally hegemonic assumptive units of the maligned feature of these dyads (the white masculine worker, the white cisgender feminist) from proliferating new exclusions themselves. The very possibility of the proliferation of new recognitive hindrances, even by the maligned themselves, is never truly held at bay. Assuming otherwise is how we come to the dogmatic ground of the white marxist: a certain brand of inherently tired, uninventive, though still chugging along theorist of commodity-value, and one that always seems to sprout up in North America and Europe and who, for the last half-century, has had so many annoyances with what it has called ‘mere culture’ (i.e., anything that involves intellectual and critical thought around race, gender and sexuality) and its supposed distractions. In addition, the assumption outlined above is also how one comes toward the shameful grounds of the trans-exclusionary feminist – as if walking on a perilous yet overpopulated road with much of the crowd making a series of anxious, inflammatory and threat-inspired bad turns, until it is realized that they have all reached a state of phobic embarrassment. So it seems that any restive movement may already be caught and bound by themselves, on account of their own suppositions, even at the inception of recalcitrance to whatever forces or organized beings may veritably oppress them.
But we will go back to our student of history, who has seen this pattern that we have just mentioned: the pattern of the occlusion of the conflictual dyad, and upon bearing some form of perception of it, they can then not unsee it. This student will soon realize this rule, and then cognize in new ways and ask themself: “Are we not within history now, in this very moment?” And so, quite slowly, and more confidently as time passes, they will begin to pester about and poke their fingers through the social relations of their very own day, with a rustled brow, and ask themselves, now coming to a certain movement that has not been articulated for its occlusions, or whose malefactions have been too underplayed, too light in the public mind, and too daydream-like, and they will say: “Is this movement not captured within the rule? Is this the final and sole exception of the rule of white occlusion (of low chance as this is), or have we, like all those beings of the past, merely ‘been played’ in regards to our judgment? Have we merely been fooled into thinking that this movement is an exception to the occlusive tendency – this movement that I am referring to; this… ‘pro-housing’ movement?”
So one is finally starting, now, to see my point. I intend to make myself clear here, so I will return to the heart of what has been marked out and what I intend to say all the more.
The Cruxes of the Pro-Housing Movement
The pro-housing movement, or at most what calls itself by the name, is a contemporary housing movement that has organized as a response to the rise in the cost of housing (both multi-family and single-family ownership based) in the American municipality; it positions itself in relation to trends that establish a long-term reduction in the supply of housing, and a fall in the rate in which new residing units are added onto the market.8 It generally argues for the need to remove or ‘level’ the encumbrances of a zoning ordinance network that limits new private market-rate multi-family housing from being permitted, planned and developed, and thereby it resists the preemptive mechanisms by which such developmental ends would subsequently, according to their view, ease housing costs. The pro-housing movement is antithetically governed by opposition, and its problem opposition (not so much its subjective opposition) is the housing crisis.
The term ‘housing crisis’ is multifarious in meaning, but in our case, we can know it as a descriptive term with three components that interact, arise, and ebb and flow in the magnitude of their generalized severity through time and region. The first component denotes the social pain of many demographics and social sectors related to the matter of their being expropriated regarding housing prices, and in relation to those whom they pay to maintain their residency: to residential landlords. In addition, the next component of the term addresses the frustration associated with the dweller itself lacking all agency in building-institutionary logistics, which consist of, at least: what is built, as well as the quantity, price and location of residential buildings, and that all collectively constitute a great segment of what actually is the built environment. In the last regard, the term addresses the impossibilities of homeownership and being kept from the contingent stability of homeownership, if we are to think of the single-family home as a model of desire for both low-income and high-income populaces (and everyone in between) all throughout the productive American social fantasy. This is my more socially critical as well as deliberately magnanimous notion of the ‘housing crisis.’ For what I say is indeed generous on account of the fact that I do not cosign the term and am merely drawing out what is left critically, though implicitly, and readily available within the utilization of the term in the public mind. To be generous with something intellectually may imply for the pessimists at least that one is holding something back, and we find that such an implication is true in this case. As such, I will return to this phrase later, to trouble it more in a full treatment. For now, I will say that my own critical and first iterative notion of the ‘housing crisis’ is representative of three arms: rent expropriation from landlords (rent transfers), lack of agency in building-instituting logistics (development), and the prospect of having a home free from the specter of displacement and, additionally, for the purpose of value-appreciation (homeownership).
What the public calls a crisis is essentially and merely a scenario wherein these three conditions are exacerbated for a large segment of the general populace, or when these problems become a bristling possibility for more than a particular racial or economic social segment of the populace. Whenever the signifier ‘housing crisis’ arises in the modern world, it is usually a consequence of the circling about and intersection of these three features in the socius air of the experiential public – though in any given instance, the causal mechanisms are usually distinct. All the same, beyond our expectation of historically variegated distinctions, such iterations of housing crises through the history of the modern world usually involve housing destruction due to war or urban demolition; income and wealth maldistribution, population growth, intra-regional migration, insufficient edificial institution or landlord expropriation independent of the quantity of housing stock (through a mandated preemption of rent regulation, for instance). It is needless to say, though I have hinted towards it by distinguishing this general conception from the pro-housing movement, that the pro-housing movement’s understanding of the housing crisis does not come at all near this dynamic and recurring process that I have outlined. It is much more stale and unsatisfying.
The pro-housing movement understands housing through the logic of supply and demand, and this is the single, stubborn basis of all of their axioms. It must be said in brief that the pro-housing movement is not critical, and if it has not been said by many others, at all or enough, then let it be testified by us here. This movement suffers from a rather poor conception of power even though it wields its own power brusquely through the American political milieu. As a consequence of this, to merely begin, the pro-housing movement often doesn’t privilege thoughts regarding the residential displacement of poor Southern populaces, or the immediate burden of rent of such populaces. Altogether, one might say that if the aforementioned experiences of poor Southern populaces are in fact taken into consideration, then these are still not taken into account at least as they represent what is of primacy to the pro-housing movement. Any concessions here on housing problems related to poor tenants of color are almost always presented with the air of any concession. By this, I mean that they come before us with a disposition that is forced, unwillful, painfully restrained and half-believed.
The pro-housing movement itself is largely stationed and stationed readily, at that, against their particular diagnosis of the housing crisis – and their repeated self-truth, amongst many, is that to ‘unleash the market’ through zoning reform is a necessary logistical block removed to solve at least a large portion of this housing crisis.9 This movement, more than any before it, has identified and focused on the municipal governance of land-use as a contributing factor to housing affordability problems – and perhaps they should be credited for this. Even more rightly, and to not become too lax here, it may instead be that this essential feature of the movement: – its focus on modern technocratic land-use, should be delinked from it and from that troubled base that has so intently subjected it to an almost total discursive monopolization. Such a movement shrouds any orientation of land-use with a disguised necessity of deference to real-estate capitalism in its most detailed entirety, and it moreover belies that to critique low-density land-use is then equivalent to endorsing those features that mark the present cross section of the real-estate equilibrium. For instance, ‘zoning reform’ in light of the pro-housing movement’s efforts has often become a proxy for the subtle propagation of the terms of private real-estate capitalism. But one is left wondering now, what is the detailed entirety, at least a provisional one, of the pro-housing movement? What constitutes it?
To begin, the pro-housing movement is constituted largely by a white demography. They are oftentimes (white) millennial renters or progressive homeowners, municipal planning staff, university professors of the disciplines of planning and economics, think-tank policy analysts, journalists, fair-housing lawyers, and students. But this movement is politically multifarious and is also constituted by private developers, real-estate capitalists and investors. Also by landlord organizations and small landlords who see beneficium in the rent and property value increase associated with accessory rental units, and even the possibility of the expansion of the pool of urban landlords for their lobbying rolls through certain forms of zoning amendment. Lastly, there are libertarian-conservatives who want to reduce local government intervention in private land-use decisions, as well as expand individual private property rights so that the white proprietary subject could develop their parcels to their heart's content and as they see fit. “There is hope for bilateralism,” some say, “in this nation where such a thing has become impossible. Nearly unheard of! But only . . . with the pro-housing movement...”10 Others are left shaking their heads and doubtful as to the kind of synthetic chimera (like the Crime Bill)11 that will perhaps result from the different regional and eventual federal-level sputters that this vain mix of desires will produce: that desire infrastructure that links white progressives who care about redlining, and libertarian-conservatives who care about reducing big government and expanding private property rights. It is rather complicated beyond this point but this is my attempt at a general and early synthesis of the movement.
So what is my purpose here in addressing this movement? What is my argument?
My general argument is that the white psyche throughout our history has been coterminous with a set of occlusions and that the pro-housing movement, as a largely white movement, is then not free of such occlusions. If I am correct here that the pro-housing movement is largely constituted by white demography, and if my rule of white occlusion is a valid one in its design, then we would either have a license or at the very least a logical basis for a skeptical and polemical darting of eyes in the direction of this movement. And we would likely have a license for much more and much beyond this – would we not? Nevertheless, we will pause here and take a second to consider this more deeply. Even if my reasoning here were purely a logical exercise, this exercise, with all of the historical weight behind the violence and occlusion of white movements, would administer a form of incumbent check against any assumptions of the exceptatory nature of this particular movement from the rule of white occlusion. Yet, if we already have evidence at our side for this given collective, a trail of evidence and a propagation of evidence that is also continually expanding before us, then even this elementary incumbency against the exceptatory assumption: the assumption that the pro-housing movement is an exception to the rule of white occlusion – even this would need to vanish all the more intensely, all the more determinately, all the more unhesitantly, in response to such evidence. And so what position of the two are we in?
In any case, in regard to the pro-housing movement: the operations that it produces are rather curious. Whereas the tenants’ rights and land-use/housing justice movement (constituted by low-income and low-wealth tenants of color) predominantly articulate a critique of landlord and private development power, the pro-housing movement instead centers a critique of the economic limitations to private market-rate housing development. Incidentally to this, and within the pro-housing movement, there are some critiques of the recalcitrant homeowner (the avaricious white homeowner, though its whiteness is often left tacit – ) that has largely been responsible for the design and the historical institution of the restrictive/expulsory zoning codes that have artificially delimited the housing stock across America. The pro-housing movement resists the homeowner who strives through all their intention to keep zoning codes expulsive, intentionally politically finicky and burdensome. Yet it is almost this member alone whom they critique.12 It is almost as if they, upon their identification of this one agent of resistance to their agenda intent on the point of ‘freeing development,’ are then willing to partner up with every agent, every movement, every commercial entity, every rent-seeker: if only they are not homeowners. Again, I must raise this more formally. They critique homeowners, the whole of whom are white, and whose mode of occlusion has a particular mechanism that derives from the basis of their whiteness and their residential property,13 but they raise this critique in some cases while leaving tacit the white proprietary nature of what they critique.14 In a form of developmental abstraction that delivers as much of a grant to their own subjectivity as much as the one whom they relate to in an oppositional posture, one could even say that they absolve the racialized derivations of their opposition, and thus in doing so they almost carry out an allowance for a self-nonreflexivity that blots out their own racial constitution.15 What is characteristic of the movement, though, is their desire to partner with any force that is not this opposed yet absolved homeowner. This is the first crux of the pro-housing movement.
Step by step one realizes, if they do not realize it immediately, that the political spectrum opens up for the pro-houser, and they seem to lose all ideals of power and the racial coordinates and effluvia of it, as soon as they have identified that one social segment: the restrictive homeowner, that is against their interests of scaling private housing development. This restrictive and recalcitrant homeowner in the mind of a propitious segment of the pro-housing movement,16 is indeed a problem, mainly on account of its desire to limit density and multi-family development within certain parts or the entirety of their jurisdictions. The drive of the expulsory homeowner to limit multifamily housing development within their isolated little neighborhoods and council districts, when made aggregate by municipality, county, state, and region, essentially serves to limit the institution of market-rate housing across the entirety of the United States. Many have noted that the expulsory homeowner is the most predictable and determinant driver of local-municipal politics in America.17 This much is true. In turning towards the pro-housing movement, we can say that the pro-housing position opposes this restrictivity, but the particular manner in which it does so is quite telling of its priorities. Specifically, it is so that the particular form of housing (market-rate rental housing) that the restrictive homeowner limits is that same priced strata of housing that would otherwise primarily, accessibly and immediately – benefit the demographic base of the pro-housing movement, on the condition of its immediate institution.18 While it appears that the pro-housing movement’s critique of the restrictive homeowner is predicated on ownership, or on resisting the drives of those actors who limit housing production on account of a communally selfish protective mechanism that is constituted by the ownership of low-density real estate – one would be too quickly assuming that this is the case. Not only this, but one would be direly wrong to posit that the pro-housing movement is concerned with an actual critique of property from this basis.
Any appearance of a critique of property here is merely accidental and rather embarrassing for the pro-housing movement. They respond: “We are not critiquing property. We wouldn’t feint do that, and as a token of evidence, look no further than our actions: we actively find in our coalition both landlords and private developers in plenty… we are simply against the vain interests of a certain set of actors (the homeowners) who themselves desire to limit the propagation of more private housing – which affects our demographic so direly.” In addition to this, the pro-houser is only opposed to the interests of the white homeowner to the extent that it is not yet that which it opposes. What I mean by this is that the white millennial renter merely desires to be a white millennial homeowner, in many cases. It almost aches for property and desires in some form the proprietary content (a titled home) which is that very content its ancestry has as an asset. This is why I hold that there may be a selfish generational relationship at play here that disguises a critique of property but which yearns all the same for the object held by its opposition, and perhaps even the methods of its prior acquisition too. As such, there is no tangible critique of property at play in this dynamic: there is only a critique of which generation of white demography experiences the contextual proclivity of access to land titles and their associated low-density built types.
This is the main distinction between the land-use/housing justice movement and the pro-housing movement: the first has a truly substantial critique of property, rent and its racial intersections, while the latter has an accidentally appearing critique of ownership insofar as it prevents the logic of supply-and-demand from partially fulfilling itself and meeting the interests of tenants at the moderate and upper-income levels of any social gradation. Land ownership is not troubling to the pro-housing movement. They are not invested at all in indigenous discourses on the proprietarily transformed ground19 (which is the precondition for all modern housing), and they are merely concerned with ‘making things better pragmatically’ within the current private housing political infrastructure. To be sure, there are some moderations here with this analysis, as certain pro-housing organizations in California and New York either actively support or marginally embrace the idea of social housing.20 But on the whole, this limitation of the pro-housing movement’s questionable politics and equivocal partnerships are characterized, in some part, by their lack of a critique of property, and this limitation has presented itself to the movement consistently, even though it hasn’t been acknowledged by them. It is almost as if one has to be outside of the movement to see it, to describe it, and to tell it to them in earnest, and still, it may appear to them as if we are talking about wraiths. This is the second crux of the pro-housing movement.
The third crux of the pro-housing movement is its deferral. Let us take a look at the context of the matter: what America is experiencing now may be called a generalized housing affordability crisis, as the rents that people who are living in their leased units, currently, are inordinately high (especially in comparison to their income), and the addition of new units that would moderate, in part, these rents or at least those at the median and over time, has been stifled through a plethora of political and economic qualities. A quite difficult but nevertheless accurate contention is that the pro-housing movement is not necessarily concerned with people who live in their units now and may be paying high rents now: the first case which I have detailed here. They are rather concerned with how additional supply will affect median rents for the general renter in due time, over the course of generations, or what is implied in the matter: after time and a certain number of people (their lives and their suffering) have come to pass. When one looks closer it appears that the time that indexes the pro-housing movement’s interest is almost a future that never comes. What gives the pro-housing movement, or at least some of them, this quality of accepted deferral?
To say it in brisk: the pro-housing movement is market deferatory; they believe in earnest that reductions in stringent regulations, developmental fees, uncertainty, and zoning barriers, will allow the private real estate capitalist infrastructure to develop housing sufficiently, thereby closing the gap between present housing stock and the adequate supply that would be commensurate with conditions of affordability. They are not troubled by how the private rental market never creates immediately affordable units (barring some time-limited affordability associated with density bonuses) and they are rather accommodating of the private development rhetorical strategy that paints its actions as reasonable, clear and valid: how such a segment utilizes the principle of non-penciling-out to strike down the supposed unreasonability of producing immediately affordable housing. All this rhetorical principle is not merely tolerated by the pro-houser, no less merely accepted, but rather actively emboldened. In opposition to this, the pro-houser pities the private developers who are always ‘at risk’ of having their projects ‘not-pencil-out’ – and on the other hand, there is even no pity (the low quality that it is) or sufficient solidarity for the pro-houser to distribute to those lowest income tenants (often tenants of color) who strain in aggregate under the lack of immediate affordable housing institution. We are told that this poor distribution of affect is merely ‘pragmatism.’
In addition to this, the pro-houser often argues that market-rate units will ‘filter down’ to poor populaces given enough time. The principle that they reference here is called ‘filtering’ and it is common in the housing debate and urban studies annex of research. At once, this research demonstrates that many units that are affordable in local housing markets across the United States have been made affordable through a process of dilapidation. Market rate units are built at a certain point in time, and then they become affordable through aging, the process of being broken down, and the loss of their novelty. The generalizability of dilapidated housing almost alone seems implied to justify it. But even at this point, one can note that it is not enough: worries about substandard housing, the spatial distribution of now affordable and dilapidated units in the context of racial-residential segregation, and the human effects of deferral have been underemphasized in the debate surrounding the generalization of dilapidated housing as authoritatively ‘affordable.’ Along with my thoughts here, and in connection with the last point in particular, the research itself demonstrates that new market-rate units often need 15-50 years (multiple generations in some instances) to become affordable to certain low-income populaces.21
Yet even with this multi-generational filtering, the direction of this used-goods reduced-prices principle is not always realized: some units may filter up the market in intensely unaffordable regions (being redeveloped and marketed towards higher-income populaces), and along with this certain low-income stratum will never be satiated of their housing need through the filtering mechanism. Even in what would be argued as adequate conditions of downward filtering, if you are too poor then you won’t see the benefits of this mechanism of affordability. At the same time, the populaces who are both not likely to ever see the benefits of downwards filtering yet are subjected to waiting for it for generations: those low-income tenants of color, – they are the very ones who experience the worst of the generalized housing affordability crisis. Though some pro-housers surely express an understanding of these limitations,22 this has not changed the market deferatory feature of the movement as the whole; if anything it has become more ingrained, obscure and refined, augmented in recent years with an accessory social housing wing, that itself has problems and distracts from the deeper problems of its market deferatory nature. Taking all this into account, one would not even be too apt or esteemed to be the one to say that deferral is a great crux of the pro-housing movement. As much as certain actors would like to describe the matter and the debate as an economic one, a debate about strategy and ‘market reasonability,’ it is really about a preference for a mechanism of housing institution (private market rate housing) that delivers direct benefits for some (market urbanist millennials) and then fails to deliver at all or takes generations for a set of unaccommodated others.
The fourth crux of the pro-housing movement is its negation or ambiguous position with rent regulation. In general, all forms of material resource maldistribution maintain themselves and are sustained intertemporally on account of a justificatory ideology: a set of claims, a network of particular stances, passions, and beliefs that naturalize and grant a reserve to the reasonability of a given set of relations, and (if they do accept that social pain is invested to begin with –) which regularly proposes that the alternative/counterfactual of a preexistent set of relations would inevitably be constituted by failure and an even more aggravated social pain. A justificatory ideology marks out a positive set of reasons for its belief structure, and then a negative set of caustic imaginary fears for whatever represents its diminution or non-existence (the fear of what would happen were an asymmetry of relation to disappear). For the justificatory enactors of a relation of maldistribution, there can be no Graeber-Wengrowian attestation of human fomenting potential.23 Such an ideology puts a terminus on human sociocollective constructivity at a given point in time and, in doing so, puts an end to human development and human history itself, or at least implies this very end of history when it makes its judgments about its artificial terminus.
That relations of maldistribution have been justified by ideology has been known and privy to the human mind throughout our social history: both attested in the minds and actualizations of those who would seek to strategize regarding the propagation of their maldistribution, as well as by those who have attempted to resist the maldistribution through critique. In the restive subset, we might view Fanon’s critique of the psychic-material maldistributions attendant to colonialism,24 and Butler’s formalization of the maldistribution of the grievability of human life25 as examples here. So this much is known. But, as a way to distinguish ourselves from that which has already been given, we should ask particularly from the ground in which we stand: If the relationship attendant in the routinized rental transfers of the innards of tenants’ fiscal accounts to landlords might be viewed as a form of residential maldistribution, and likewise if a form of built-edificial maldistribution may be found in the unequal capacity of private developers to hold all of the stakes regarding the formation of the built environment – then what particular ideology has been instituted to justify these forms of maldistribution? And to make this chain of reasoning less abstrusely relevant to our thought here: How does the pro-housing movement relate to this totalized real-estate justificatory ideology? In looking at the matter closely, we can note that this landed institutionary-rentier ideology is operationalized in a particularly vehement fashion around the question of rent regulation.26
The reason why this operationalization occurs is because so much hangs on the question of rent. In the edificial rental relation, there is a direct opposition between the landlord and the tenant. The more that the landlord takes from the tenant, the faster they can pay off their mortgage (if is it not yet paid out), the more they can save, the more they can reap returns on fiscal investments (e.g., bonds, stocks and crypto), the more they can buy up additional properties and expand their portfolios, the more they can diversify their portfolios, all towards the end of gathering more of a fiscal surplus. It is no complication in this antagonistic relation to specify the obvious, in that landlords benefit entirely from the taking of tenants. This is why landlords have been known to be ‘leeches’ and ‘parasites’ at least through the descriptive and analytical language spanning from the 18th-century political economists,27 all the way to critical tenants in the contemporary internet forums: the digital Agora, wherein they express their lived frustration with rent and the edificial rental relation. Landlords entirely benefit from the extraction of a tenant base. It is their life and their purpose. Therefore, the landlord and the landlord collective (e.g., Apartment and Realtor Associations) have all the reasons to organize against tenants not being burdened with their rents: for any regulation of rent is void for the landlord, as any benefit to the tenant is a cut against their own living-extractive purse. Given this, they must oppose rent through all of the political and rhetorical registers that they have available to them, for this question is the crux of their income, their benefits and savings and all of their lives’ goals.
On the private development side, rent regulation is disagreeable to the developer insofar as the investors of a particular project (so the developer argues) are more flustered by the projection of lower yields following the completion of a given project, and insofar as the developer holds onto a project and rents it consequent to its completion: maintaining the valuation of the property, and also supplementing that with the routinized transfers of the prospective tenant base that will reside in such a property, the latter of which is relied upon at least until the property itself is transferred or sold to another.28 While the most common and advocated-for forms of rent regulation don’t decrease aggregate housing development, as the private developer and the purposively ill-trained though hypertrophied economist would argue, the developer is nevertheless burdened rhetorically at a deep emotional and existential level about the institutionary prospect of rent regulation. This they have in relation with landlords, but perhaps the matter is of more direct interest to landlords, since they will hold onto the property for a longer time and have the greater share of their fiscal prospects predicated on the routinized tenant transfers which, when reduced, means a reduction in the aggregate ‘benefit’ devoted to their coffers. Here is a note for any tracking soul: when any form of maldistribution is buttressed by a language of ‘maximum benefit’ and ‘economic efficiency’ then one must always beware! For one is then doubtlessly in the terrain of a justificatory ideology… (Try as its propagators might to parry this, and they surely will.) – Yet still, the domain of rent regulation is no alteration from this lead.
If we look at the pro-housing movement’s position on the matter, we can note that their market deferatory politics: which allies them with private developers almost as their raison d'être – makes them either negate rent regulation entirely or at least be quiet and ambiguous about the matter. This negation establishes their contradictions with a policy that directly prevents the displacement and social pain of low-income renters of color. But the pro-houser cannot side with the Southern tenant populace in this matter in a generalized way, because it would prevent that deseverance of their primary political camaraderie with the private development class, which they view as being the institutional salve for their own problem diagnostic. While there are some exceptions here, they are not considerably extended enough in the pro-housing populace to alter this delineation.29 Indeed, those who would have us merely trust the movement in its entirety, particularly due to California exemplars, must be listened to closely and considered carefully in our process of tracing the development of the movement and its current operations and fictions. For there are many falsities running around. We must be very careful, very assiduous and ask ourselves: But what is the unfolding and affecting nature of the movement at large? What are all of the exceptions that stand out from California, from New York (even barring the non-ideality of the pro-housing movement in these geographies), and what are the explanatory lines behind all of these exceptions, themselves general enough to dissuade us from viewing them as exceptions, – which we would have to be ignorant of in heeding just this trust? This is one purpose of my series of thoughts: to follow up on the leads left quieted by a too-blissful trust.30 In returning to the matter of rent regulation and the pro-housing movement: We might say that the landed institutionary-rentier ideology has been operationalized strongly upon the question of rent regulation by landlords and private developers, and that the general pro-houser has agreed with this operationalization inasmuch as the question of housing stock and future production is both the axis in which their thought turns and also the object that is put at a rhetorical and pseudo-empirical risk in the very question of rent regulation. While this risk may indeed be fallible and false, it is real enough in their minds that it causes political effects and a general character of negation or ambiguity to ensue. And rent regulation is often what is sacrificed: what is negated entirely or what is stilled by ambiguity or internal controversy.
In putting the pro-housing movement in a more direct relation with the idea of atomistic occlusion that I have spoken of earlier,31 we can note the following: the pro-housing movement principally enacts an atomistic occlusion that schematizes its (intersectional) hegemonic assumptive unit: the white millennial renter – as the assumptive subject of the contemporary housing crisis. Along with this, it occludes from its political vision the poor renter of color that, though more or less silent in their schematic, is that very subject that experiences the sharpest consequences of housing unaffordability and landlord arrogation: high-rent,32 high rates of formal eviction,33 high rates of extra-juridical eviction,34 as well as substandard housing35 and long commutes.36 This atomistic occlusion is one of the main reasons why, in my view, there has been a large, redoubtable and almost immemorial seeming disjuncture between the pro-housing movement and the tenants’ rights and housing justice movement. One can begin to find a supplement of the other reasons why this disjuncture exists in the cruxes that I have established above. Beyond this, I must respond to the following point: in the last set of years, there have surely been many debates and even strained thoughts within the pro-housing movement on questions surrounding just this atomistic occlusion (though not in these words: they would more so phrase things vaguely along the lines of ‘equity’). Some would argue that this marginally included debate justifies the movement, although its tenor, frequency, authenticity and quality remains unknown to us. In response to this, it must be said as a matter of observation that some movements have a way of justifying themselves externally merely on account of their internal debates, with debates that may extend for years and even lives-lengths, without otherwise having material features that could be used to more legitimately justify them and of all of their supposed efforts. It may be that the social collective we consider here: the pro-housing movement, is merely one of these internal debate justifying movements and that therefore such a status, conditional on its actual, earnest and well-formed existence, is of no relevance to us. As such, we can note in an untroubled and doubtless fashion that the atomistic mode of occlusion is active in the pro-housing movement and that it is largely characterized through a series of adjusting racialized coordinates.
At its best, the pro-housing movement may expand beyond its hegemonic representative base, decenter that base and then have its ideologies be answerable to those most subjectively imperiled in the rental housing market and the housing market as a whole. But even then one must note the distinction between a social collective that is merely for another, with one in opposition that is actually of that particular other. In the instance of the latter, a realization of just this kind would have the automatic function of instituting a decree for the language of the referent as ‘other’ to vanish entirely – that is: the ‘other’ would not be as ‘other,’ at least if this condition were to ideally be produced. This is the distinction between the ‘for’ and the ‘of’ when it comes to politics, and this distinction yields significantly different effects. It is the axis of divergence between merely incorporative and problematic forms of representation, and the legitimacy of a representation, on the other side, that actualizes social agency and demand-making within its problem space. The ‘for’ is usually constitutive of speaking for and representing another: it lacks the flexibility of accommodating demands and is symbolic and rather brittle, always coming to a point of controversy and internal dissension if another subject from the sensitively and recently incorporated status deems it suitable for themself to speak. On the other hand, the ‘of’ is exemplified by autonomous spaces, still heated with debate, disagreement, and the fervor of political emotion, still bound and not utopian in any regard – but less punitively monitored, less strange and externalized, and more cohesive around a set of terms (and more intertemporally accommodating when they eventually do break). This alternative feature of political space, this ‘of,’ bears the mark or the quality whereby the dispossessed or Southern populaces are not merely being spoken in absentia, but are rather present and shaping realities of their own volition, and have as the basis of those formative acts the derivations of their experiences and their agentic cognition for the future. In any case, in returning to our particular analysis, it is doubtful whether the pro-housing movement has even come to the level of insufficient incorporation regarding Southern tenant populaces. There is even a form of disregard that fails to meet the bar of this level of incorporation, as little as it is in our eyes, and it may be that the pro-housing movement finds itself merely hovering under this little bar of our conceptual establishment. To say this in another way, they may not even be at the level of a problematic and symbolic incorporation of the Southern tenant populace. Thus we critique the for but the pro-housing movement is, by some accounts, a step below the for.
Our Grave Distrust in Any New, Substitutionary Power
Contrary to the point of my critique, it must be noted that the pro-housing movement has indeed put pressure against their restrictive homeowner ( – which is our expulsory homeowner), perhaps to an extent that no other has before. They have almost made it their principal goal, and have devoted what is surely not an inconsiderable scope of political energy to this end. In the course of their efforts, they have generated a language: “Neighbors for More Neighbors,” “Abundant Housing,” “This City for Everyone,” and the like, all to oppose the narratives of the expulsory homeowner that seem to be their main political antithesis. There almost seems to be an Oedipal relation here and there is a part of us that wants to goad on this organic generational reaction. Indeed, there is movement on the ground and one would be off of it (the ground, that is) to not feel it, or one would at least have to be a bit dishonest. At the same time, as I have mentioned prior, there is a false distinction between these two movements and the new is not much better than the old. What frustrates the depictions of a large distinction between these two segments of white demography is the following point that one must always remember, that characterizes this dynamic: the old power of the white expulsory homeowner bloc is merely the white millennial class but with a distinguished factor of proprietary holding. An appearance of Oedipal overthrowing is just what it is: a sign of a desire for mere substitution that doesn’t lose the troubles of what was there prior.
If one believes that any new power that seems ready to replace another is sufficiently justified in its efforts of substitution merely on the basis of its attempted challenge, then one would be in grave error. The mere substitution of a domineering or hegemonic class does no better to the commoner or Southernized plebeian beneath them – as one ruler or another seems to merely be another iteration of control regardless of a change in name and perhaps a change in the particular manner of affecting control. Yet all the same, as I’ve said prior, any given substitutionary movement may create new opportunities to displace the old power because, for a broader section of the populace, such a substitutionary movement often denaturalizes the narratives of the old power – all at the cost of disguising that itself is sufficient. As such, the new movement: in this case, the pro-housing movement, has created new problems of its own which are a bit more obscure than the first: the expulsory homeowner bloc.
I will provide an example here to clarify my distrust for substitutionary new powers: We will take the transition from feudalism to capitalism as our particular case. Capitalism itself grew from the predecessory kernel of feudalism. Feudalism was represented by the subjective or institutional figure of the seigneurial lord (the agricultural landlord, the noble, the vassaled knight) on the one hand – the lord who extracted rents, corveé and valuation from the rural peasant serf.37 Then on the other hand we find the burghers of the towns and the burgeoning European metropoles. The burgher was the seed of the capitalist, perhaps the definitive proto-capitalist (besides the Italian merchant in the Mediterranean), who would usher in a new and historically specific problem for its epoch and those succeeding it.38 The ecological devastation of the current epoch is a product of what might have been viewed as a mechanism for the possibility of escape from an old form of dominion: agrarian feudalism – and surely a movement did occur. Yet we would be remiss if we believed that the principle of substitution at play in the transition from feudalism to capitalism was merely univocal and not transferable beyond this case. Rather, what was displayed in this instance was a social-structural phenomenon wherein a rising social segment, a new class, an ambiguous class, constituted the fall of an antecedent dominant one: the seigneurial lord of this historical example is replaced by the European burgher (the proto-capitalist). But was the ‘escape’ from feudalism truly a movement of freedom, when where we ended up was imperial anthropocenic capitalism?
The line in the Middle Ages was that “town air makes a [being/peasant] free”39 . . . But have we yet seen the fruit of this supposed freedom? The escape from feudalism to anthropocenic capitalism, instead of constituting a period of greater freedom,40 had rather necessitated the excess labor of Black subjectivity (made into nonsubjects) in the Caribbean and the Americas, and which were a necessary component of the cultivation of the base agrarian materials that were then processed in the European metropole, and then exported across the Earth.41 In addition, this transition, rather than assuring collective freedom, has as we know, brought about a general ecological state that has immiserated and will continue to torment us all (though not to the same degree at least at this moment). Rather than seeing the fruits of this substitutionary flight, we are instead bearing the aches of a planet that suffers from the technological features of such a substitution. And we should be clear: it is not that the prior state is justified merely on account of its being the state of the referential pre-transitory, for the feudal state that came before industrial capitalism was still a temporal environment of its own incontrovertible binds; rather, the purpose of critiquing the error of any posited sufficiency of a product of substitution on the mere grounds of that substitution, is to cast doubt on the method in which the succeeding object of the substitutionary act is (–in some instances) excessively valued following such an act. In the midst of these clarifications, one must remember that I am speaking of this error on behalf of its presence and relevance in our own historical case: with the American pro-housing movement. To be sure, I am not necessarily equating the pro-housing movement with terradestructive capitalists, though in one regard that may be quite fair given the pro-housing movement’s adherence to a form of real-estate capitalism and naïve confidence in nondistributive economic logics.42 So I may even be justified here with this comparison if I were to make it and stand behind it more explicitly, but this is not really my point. My central contention is a bit different in this case. In briefly referencing the feudal-capitalist transition, I mean to explicate a general principle that there is a kind of failure associated with a noncritical appreciation of a phenomenal substitution whereby a new power replaces one grown old. What this dynamic teaches us, perhaps, is that one shouldn’t trust just any new power on account of its mere substitutionary force.
To state it more formally once more, in the analogic to this exemplar, the old power in our case is just the expulsory homeowner bloc, which is truly no more than just an older demographic segment of a white American populace. Alternatively, the new power is the pro-housing movement (particularly with its YIMBY43 strain), which is just a demographic collection of younger white people,44 who were born in an age where rents were higher, homeownership was more unfeasible, their prospects more troubled and they found their interests – obstructed . . . and by whom? Only their most adjacent ancestors, their parents, their living kin.
Now for all my talk about the Opedipality of the white millennials and those who follow them when it comes to the question of housing (which I’ve already hinted towards earlier, then dissolved), it must be said once more that this demographic is not very distinct from that which they oppose. The main distinction between the white millennial and the white proprietary figure is just that the latter demographic subsection has a greater contextual proclivity for property. The historical condition of their ascendance, which they in part created, has made them on the whole more likely to bear property. The generation that is relatively deprived of property – in comparison, of course, to solely the white proprietary class45 – and the generation that is subjected to higher costs of living and rents, seeks to claw away at those who have secured for themself exactly what has been withheld somewhat from the former.46 The white millennial segment would like to have the material resources of its ancestry, and so it begets this restive act of ‘clawing away.’ What is characteristic of this ‘clawing away’ of the white millennial is that it is often done through a utilization of supply-side logics that are usually coterminous with an integrative rather than a conflictual perception of real-estate development capitalism. As such, all the noise of the white millennial and their coarse deferentialism to the private market model of housing development not only serves to oppose the parochial defenses of the white homeowners of the previous generation (whose proprietary content they aspire to as their existential teleology), but it also becomes clear that they don’t displace whiteness but merely displace the generation of whiteness.
In addition, we might ask: Who is furthermore implicated in all of this noise and attention grabbing? If we look away from this dyadic conflictual structure, which always hides and restricts as we have seen prior, then we can see that it is the low-asset bearing classes at the bottom of the American racial and economic chain who are also at times subjected to the brusque claws of the pro-housing movement. Such a class has been maligned by both generations of white demography and are, accordingly, not then convinced of an argument for the generational distinction of the new movement as it relates to matters of residence, the spatial distribution of rightful objects, and the human need for safe housing in an immediate and nondeferred fashion. Here is another pedagogical aid: a small narrative in which one might see my point: – One person of color appears to the scene, though a bit late to the party, and they are confused as to what to make of it. Nevertheless and to their great aid, someone else who has been there much longer and is jaded by it all and who wants to quickly enlighten the new arrival on the matter will end up saying to them, in confidence and only after walking over with them to the quiet side of the room, “Don’t make too much out of their words or their age, or their arguments of supposed distinction . . . They are all just emblems of the white psyche, surely of different forms, but imbued with the constitutions of their expected occlusions nevertheless.” Upon the saying of this, I would expect that many would understand the dynamic of what I’m describing here.
To return to the generalizations of these positions, both of these problem statements: that which privileges market rationality and that which privileges conceptions of individual (white) land freedom, are essentially overlapping, distinguished and mutually constituting ideologies of economic reason and land-use understanding, that represent different generations of white desire.47 The first, the market urbanist millennial position, wants to loosen up regulatory systems with the expectation that the market will generate sufficient outcomes to satiate human needs (this is none other than a form of real-estate market deferentialism); the latter, constituted by the white expulsory homeowner bloc, wants to limit certain forms of poor, Southern, and common-associated development, all to maintain their property values and avoid their illusory posited content of moral-economic infection by racialized subjects of variegated tenures (a negation of multi-family development through an intention to racially cart off neighborhoods, communities and space). In summation, both positions represent the problems of a movement, either a generally unaccountable expansion which is expressed in market urbanist rationality,48 or a perpetuated constriction which is represented in the white expulsory homeowner bloc, and which both clearly fail certain standards of justifiable development.49 What is common here between either of these modes of reasoning and their aporias, is that they center the subjectivity and interest of a certain generation of white demography that has necessarily, either through a supposed inadvertent error or through direct intention – generalized the claims of its own status as universal and attempted to displace the interests of poor people (or poor tenants) of color from the political terrain. So there is some form of an occlusive link here between the two generations. What confuses the matter is that the older generation has frustrated the newer one, in a kind of intergenerational act of sadism.
Indeed, the white homeowner populace of the 20th century has seemingly and incidentally stifled the residential possibilities of its succeeding generations through the governance tactic of expulsory zoning. In a Césaireian manner, the actions of the older generation have stifled the prospects of its young.50 In this case, the problem is prohibitive zoning ordinances and planning processes that have disavowed the needed institution of multi-family housing in many jurisdictions in urban areas across the United States, as well as many regions within particular jurisdictions. This prohibitive movement has had as its ambition the securement of white residential property values and communal-racial univocity/homogeneity, against the possibility of a residential racial pluralism. While an older white titled demographic benefits from this, those who incidentally suffer (beyond the Southern populaces most directly affected) are the children of these white expulsory demographics, and this is how we get to the population that we’ve called the white market-urbanist millennial. So one sees how a racialized movement of one generation has had an impact on the next of its own incidentally.51 What is more, when one realizes that it was only through the racialized utilization of zoning as a tactic of governance to suit the ends of value-propagation and a kind of communal racial and cultural protective effect against Southern demographics, then it becomes quickly apparent that part of the residential precarity felt by the young white demography is a product of the racialized intended consequences of their ancestors’ motives. The motive of the last generation must be viewed as a particularly causal factor that has had linked and unpredicted effects and that has indeterminately backfired on its future representatives: its kin and children. Though it certainly must be said that higher housing prices and rents are up as a consequence of increased costs in building materials and construction; as well as increases in population density, supply-distinct landlord arrogation, lacking rent regulation, and income inequality. After this, and even interlocked with some of these factors, we might also relate the problem to the governance of land-use and its consequences.
Housing stock reductions over time have been constituted and framed largely through the mechanism of expulsory zoning.52 Such a municipal tool has had more than demonstrable consequences on the local institution of multi-family housing and its national aggregate. In addition to this and in specifying a bit more, the problem of expulsory zoning isn’t merely delimited to private housing development and therefore isn’t just consequential for some actors’ intentions to heighten the gains of real-estate capitalism: whereby private developers gain from the institution of residential buildings, then landlords gain from the income or value transfers of tenants, and property managers gain from their adherent regulation of tenants and their share of the rents. Expulsory zoning seems to present problems even beyond the sphere of private housing institution. By this, I mean that the limitation of all forms of multi-family housing institution and the dominance of the low-density single-family form, also establishes a harsh ceiling for a coming social housing movement; in particular, such expulsory zoning stifles any prospective land-use capacity to accommodate something like a Bernie/AOC suggested federal social housing program.53 It will not be possible to expand housing that is distinct from the market and not subject to speculation unless this prohibitive and value-securing purposive land-use inheritance is cast away. But going back to the matter, my very point here is that the generalized unaffordability of rental housing has been prefigured and created by the historical congealment of expulsory land-use policy by 20th-century white homeowners, and these ordinances represent problems for the institution of market-rate housing, the institution of social housing, the housing precarity of Southern tenured populaces… and paradoxically, the very children and kin of those white titled demographics that have first instituted this expulsory zoning itself.
In general, we can summate that expulsory zoning was instituted on the grounds of a racial and aesthetic calculus whose products had largely accumulated throughout the 20th century.54 It might be said that the extent to which the white millennial and younger generations do face and will face qualms in the housing market, is a direct social correlate of the incidental directive of a racialized ancestral motive that had merely ricocheted towards them in a lagged manner.
To conclude, I do not argue that the market urbanist positionality is therefore at all distinct from its ancestry on account of the incidental and marginal distress it has received from its ancestry's racialized motives. I would argue against this idea of generational distinction and would chide anyone who believes that any new power is justifiable merely on the basis of its substitutionary force. On the other hand, in a vein of the complicated universalism of Frantz Fanon in his Black Skin,55 I would argue that any human suffering should be opposed. We should extend ourselves in opposition to human suffering, and we should not be restrained in the capacity of our doing so. This means that all forms of housing torment should be downcast, and this very fact cannot be doubted. In practice, what is implied here is that all forms of housing instability, rent burden, substandard housing, ecological poisoning, and the like – should be negated, regardless of whether or not the experiential populace is from a historically stigmatized or disinvested populace ( – though at the same time, it must be said that such disinvested populaces are on the whole most likely to feel and to feel the worst of all of these matters, which itself is an abject rejoinder to my concession here). Another way to say this is that the standard should be that to be human would alone be sufficient for one’s expectation of housing. Furthermore, one’s being human shouldn’t be evaluated or means-tested by any government agency nor put into doubt by phantasmic structures that disqualify certain humans from the ontological domain of the human. One can say what I have said here in a note of critical universalism, while also opposing the false centering of white aggregates in questions of suffering and reprieve, and in this case: particularly as it relates to housing and land-use.
The Racialized Exigency in Housing and its “Discovery”
In addition to what I have said prior, I will also say that I deeply doubt that the contemporary white ‘discovery’ of housing suffering (entombed in the language of the housing crisis)56 should be the index for our understanding of the generalization of this racialized housing exigency – which has existed all along, but as I emphasize here: has only been generalized to the white aggregate as a consequence of the congealment of many factors over the last hundred years. This is a dynamic that is no stranger to many of us. For instance, when a Black voice says one thing, it is at times heard as a whisper, and all this if it is even perceived and especially if one is distinct from the digital milieu.57 It should be said that even with this supposedly manifest digital milieu,58 we regard too highly the penchant of the digital for determined permeability: – so often, too much remains uncaptured, what is captured is only conditionally known, and what is indeed ‘known’ may only be known as such below the level of our critical reason (at the level of implicit understanding). In the last instance, we find that entertainment, humor and fleeting distraction are what constitute the diminutive treatment of the speech of certain subjective groups when they are distinct from the world’s intersectional hegemonic units. That is: in such cases, the speech of these unaccommodated populaces and their cultural artifacts are treated as mere entertainment and humor, something worthy of the most depoliticized meme, and all while a certain kind of attentive recognition is borne to this object, the material-structure that produced just that cultural product goes yet unassessed and especially unchallenged. To go further in specifying here than what is merely said, when one thing is experienced by any subjective antithesis to a hegemonic unit of recognition, it is oftentimes not perceived as a problematic experience: even if it represents a state of prolonged torment. There are some human experiences that only take on the acclaim of a real problem once they have spread to a broader populace. Silence about a subject matter greets us, in these instances, until something is generalized – to a wider demographic segment and a more geographically or symbolically North/white segment of the populace – or when something is aggravated in its condition (such as a string of instances of filmed state-murder that incites ephemeral revolt) so that the torment of its documented spread may reach that point in which it can’t reasonably be ignored. But what concerns us here is principally the matter of generalization on account of a quantitative demographic radiation or the radiation of a problem to those otherwise symbolic/geographic Northern populaces. How does this generalization and the accessory shifts that are associated with it, in fact often occur?
In its worst mechanism, a matter is generalized through a man claiming an idea that others have spoken of for a very long time prior. Quite similar to this but at the level of demography: something is picked up through a white demographic feeling the problem itself and supposedly feeling it for the first time, and then going on to make the errant judgment that it has discovered the problem and has therefore actually felt the problem for the first time as its very own and therefore for the world-aggregate. An error of judgment in this vein would be to position the late claim of ‘discovery’ of this feature as novel or an index or a valid conceptual schema of understanding for a given object. The human mind is subject to blunders and this error is no exception from this immemorial and constitutive limit of our capacity. A form of this very slip-up of judgment has happened in many cases and now happens in the case of our understanding of the pro-housing movement. And there are so many minds that make and fall on account of this judgment.
Regardless, we will go back to my major point in this section. A particular point of my critique is that the white millennial59 cohort and its demographic widening of the pro-housing movement have arguably created thus far the only alternative power yet to rival those particularly expressive features of the white expulsory homeowner segment. I do not mean to demote the tenants’ rights and housing justice organizing milieu in stating this: what I mean here is that such tenants organizing networks are clearly ideologically opposed to the white expulsory homeowner bloc, but in effect, its actions are oftentimes spatially distinct from the white homeowner bloc, and if they indeed exist as materio-politically antagonistic, then they are of a second-order or more marginal order than other political interests, ideals and oppositional stakeholders. In contrast, despite them signifying merely another form of generational occlusion, the pro-housing movement directly and routinely opposes the white expulsory homeowner bloc in action after action, and all throughout its narrative.60 On the basis of narrative it can be specified that the tenants’ rights and housing justice movement opposes the hydra of the landlord-developer, and the pro-housing movement opposes their restrictive homeowner. These are the principle oppositions that seem to define each movement. So why are we dissatisfied with the pro-housing movement if it critiques what they claim to be the restrictive homeowner and what we call the expulsory homeowner bloc? I will remind us of this once more so that we do not forget. The fact that limits any particular being’s satisfaction with the assumption of validity inherent in the pro-housing movement on the basis of its homeowner resistance, is the understanding that the white market-urbanist position is a mere generational distinction from that which it opposes, and not at all a legitimate racial distinction. In the words of our friend sharing their wisdom at the side of the aforementioned party: “They are all just white people, merely characterized by different ages and variants in their ownership or nonownership of real-estate titles.”
As such, I argue that the white millennial has made a claim of its discovery of housing precarity and has therefore occluded the long exigency and the populaces that have been subject to it for much longer and to a much greater degree: Black folks, and other Southern demographics in the classic and contemporary disinvested metropolitan clusters, going all the way from Du Bois’ Seventh Ward61 to South Chicago and Kansas City62 (or from beyond the American Empire: in São Paulo, Duran in the nation of Ecuador and Nairobi). The crisis in housing and in the matter of the edifice, what I would call its long racial exigency, has existed much longer than the white millennial has proffered it to be.
What might serve as a useful example in our case, the Cameroonian political theorist and philosopher Achille Mbembe has described a phenomenon that he calls the coming Africanization of the world.63 I would interpret this as more practically, and in part, referencing the extensibility of an existential ecological crisis that has first struck the Global South and then has and will generally continue to spread to the emissions producing Global North in a lagged but nevertheless determinate manner.64 What is particular and tormenting becomes generalizable, and the specter of that generalizability then serves to warrant a given phenomenon as indeed one definite of: – ‘a crisis’; whether this is a valid mechanism or not. Likewise, in our case, we can note that the rise in social parlousness as it relates to the residential edifice (the dwelling, the shelter) in the mind of white demography is just a generalization of the housing conditions that African descendant subjects have experienced prior. Black tenants (and perhaps Eastern Europeans before their white consolidation) have been subject to rent arrogation and housing uncertainty in various American cities at least since the first turns of the Great Migration from the South. If there has been an exigency at all it has not been temporal, merely related to problems instituted within certain eras and carried over merely in this recent generation, but such an exigency has in fact been racially subjective. This is why I believe the language of crisis is misleading and we remain too stuck to it – almost as if it is a pacifier we have become too dependent on in our old age to take us through hard times. We should note, and I say this to continue my point, that the true exigency has existed at the subjective level and what has occurred time over and again is that we end up calling the beginning of a generalization of this populationally dense but unacknowledged condition, towards a quantitatively wider and more Northern demographic base, the actual exigency. Again, involved here is the fact of error in the calling of the generalization of a state of torment a legitimate crisis, and leaving implicit or negating that what had come before it was not at all unestablished as its own definitive exigency, itself.
This is all to say: the ‘crisis in housing,’ is merely the populational generalization of a condition not historically strange to Black demography. This condition is none other than that wherein a populace faces residential uncertainty and rising vulnerability, in addition to cruel levels of rental expropriation constitutive of the transfer of what regularly incurring remunerations any people may have, into the hands of residential landlords. Lastly, it is constituted by a people’s lacking capacity to demand the makeup of the logistics and features of those edificial worlds that surround them, and the way in which the basis of this institutionary incapacity foments a predisposed string of torments for the most exposed of the dwelling species. In going back to the main thought, it should be stated here quite explicitly that what the white millennial does experience, and what younger white demographics will experience, with rising housing cost/insecurity in certain regions, is not at all an equivalence to the rentier experiences of poor people of color. It is just a hint and a sign of a generalization, whose condition will never truly close with that which it references.
“And so you claim your exception?…”
To return to the matter: If I am right that there has been a rule of white occlusion in the movements of peoples in the last hundreds of years, and that the American pro-housing movement is likely no exception, then what has been the quality that has enabled this movement to perceive itself as an exception? Through what mechanism has it allotted itself this exceptatory status? There is no complex thought here that distinguishes this movement from any other, so the factors that resolve this question are most likely: the pro-housing movement has granted itself an exceptatory status to the rule of white occlusion merely on account of its self-interested nature, its lack of self-consciousness, and its misunderstanding of itself in history. In addition, the pro-housing movement is simply constituted by many aggrieved white subjects and it is almost this demographic count alone that justifies it, and so it has become weakened by the source of its justification.
The few who are aware of these tendencies: – the lone scholar, the Black intellectual, or the rare tenants-union and pro-housing identified subject; – because of their rarity and marginalized position within the movement, likely won’t be able to effectively spread their political orientation to the entirety of the movement. At this, I would expect some to respond that the pro-housing movement has already recognized its occlusive status and made itself ‘accountable’ to low-asset communities of color. If this has indeed happened, outside of the About pages of a small count of landing sites that can be referenced online (and only here), then I have not seen nor heard of it and I have been looking in earnest for quite a while. “We have had a problem historically,” some of them say. There are two errors with this statement, and one is more apparent than the other. The first is that this statement assumes that the problem of racial occlusion is one that is relegated to the past – for this, we can look no further than the language of past possession (the ‘had’) which describes the temporal marker of its object. On account of this language, there is an implication that there has been a historical juncture in the problem, there is the now which is absent from it, and then there is the acknowledged past which is somehow captured by it; by the problem of the racially assumptive occlusions of the movement (if we can impute our language onto it).
And now this leads us towards and is related to the next problem: there is the assumption that the movement has conclusively and without a hair of a doubt legitimately interiorized those critiques of limitations directed against it, solely on the basis of the very low bar of the pronunciatory act of published acknowledgment of culpability. On account of this feat of public acknowledgment, if we were to hypothetically hold a status of accepting a despotic and culpable agent merely on account of the admission of their culpability, and even extend it to other places as some would argue that we should here, then we would commensurately seek to ingratiate ourselves to banks and financial institutions after their role in the racialized Great Recession, all on the mere condition of their invocation of any expressive act of self-culpability.65 Just as I wouldn’t trust banks that market themselves as racial justice institutions merely on account of an apology or diversity statement, nor would I trust a Fortune 500 corporation that would do the same. Consequently, as a certain kind of despotic collective agent, the same logic here should be extended to the pro-housing movement.
Regardless, this analysis will appear strange to some figures of white demography who identify with the pro-housing movement. They may even appear insulted by it, and may as a consequence have but not a few poor words for me; for they are the subjects who practice the disacknowledgement that I have spoken of and are the seat of that disacknowledgement that constitutes the movement’s understanding of the actual exigency. If this is so, then so be it. The rule of white occlusion, even amidst the recent multi-racial mobilizations, is quite strong in this age and these words may not be enough to buck the trend. Consequently – and one will understand this now if they have not understood it earlier and before – this is why I ask the question: “And so you claim your exception?...”
The Manifold Functions of Renominal Acts
“Impudent! How dare you! But how can you be against housing? How can you resist being ‘pro-housing’ when we suffer from a nexus of housing associated problems in this age? This fact is unavoidable and any position of resistance to it is disagreeable.” – Even now this is what I predict some will say, or something akin to it, upon hearing my recalcitrance to the term: ‘pro-housing,’ and perhaps this is rightly resisted and for the best. And so suppose that some did in fact have qualms with my treatment of the term? To this I would say that resistance may signify many things. It could signify the relevance of my argument, the fact that it represents a raw, caustically exposed and defensible guarded area in the minds of some, and perhaps in just those minds who proudly don the signifier ‘pro-housing’ themselves. Anything that goes halfway towards revealing the tangle of relations that already exists is claimed, at times, as being the very thing that has generated the snare or the tangle itself; the credit of the substance of the snare is given not to those who fomented it thoroughly themselves, but rather to the analytic that demonstrates it. Thus this analytic is castigated, murmured about and obscured, subjected to its own counter-polemics or made taboo and in short: resisted. On the other hand, the same resistance may have at its root and be a constitutive response to some hidden error on my part, the likes of which were silent to me all the while in the process of my life and my thoughts hitherto. Yet I truly doubt this last part. Regardless, I am fine letting words fly, and I formally assume that most instances of recalcitrance would be the result of the first pattern and I even have good reason to believe so. In addition, under the condition that others do believe that the causal feature of their prospective rhetorical resistance has been rightly established by the latter form, then it will be up to them to light a demonstrative path, in their own right, to elucidate such error.
At once, it must be said clearly that to be suspicious of the signifier of interest in this discourse is not at all the same as opposing the ethical principle that the provision of robust (i.e., safe, affordable/rent-free, accommodating) housing should be an unarguable and unconditional license for every living human being. To be against, to place last on one’s order of political priority, to preempt, to play games of mere words about, or to implicitly conspire against humans having housing and shelter is indeed a fault, though regardless of our identification of this fault, the lack of livable housing for many is nevertheless the outcome of an array of government policy and aggregate private behavior throughout our history – speaking particularly from the American context.66 What is at stake here is not necessarily an argument over the insignificance of the built shelter for human existence, but rather the contended content, or what I desire to contend, is the function of a disguised thesis behind a term. In other words, what is truly the object of thought in this instance is the disentanglement of a term from what it cloaks over.
The idea that a mere term can fail to represent or even hide the true object to which it is linked, if we can hold that this is a valid idea, seems to raise for us the problem of the flexibility between a term and its signified object (or what the object is meant to represent). More so than this we are presented with the problem of renaming. Any quibbles here may really be concerned with the practice of renaming and whether the object renamed should be taken on its face (i.e., in a prima facie manner) or whether it should be doubted, or at least run through a series of diagnostics to assess its coherence with what it purports to describe. To address this we should ask: What is the function of the act of renaming? What might be a brief catalog of the uses of renaming? And how do these functions address this particular case? By this, I mean to problematize the function of the yet unassessed and almost hidden procedure wherein the term ‘pro-housing’ came to be, specifically taking up the apotheosis of this term in its American context. This is an effort of tracking that very procedure of renaming to ‘pro-housing’ whatever had preceded it nominally and whatever represented object actually came before it. But first, let us address the question of the general function of renaming and its variegated kinds.
In some cases, a being is renamed through the manner of a series of jests and taunts that take on a peal of laughter by those around them, and a given lexical mass or proper noun encapsulated within the jests then becomes susceptible to repetition. It is this repetition of the first series of new terms which circles about a person, that ends up making the ‘pure jest act of renaming’ latch onto a person within a given social milieu. Though one ages, one can still be burdened by the renaming of youth. One can be renamed and renamed poorly in an interpersonal way. There are other cases wherein one is renamed lovingly and given a ‘nickname’ which takes predominance over one’s legal name in familial or close affective circles. In other cases still, a being is given a coarse name at their living onset that is too feminine, or too masculine, or too gendered, and whenever such a name is said it may feel as if someone else is being addressed. Someone is being addressed that is beyond you and this form of address is strange and may even cause a lapse in response, a sense of looking in from the outside, a sense of acting and perhaps even a bit of fuzziness about one’s physical corporeality. Such a being in this scenario must rename themself idiosyncratically and in a way that connotes their being, and this self-definitional renaming may face necessity for a given person to be able to rally by their actual address, and to not dread or scorn or be indifferent to it. In other cases, a body of land is renamed through colonial exploit; through its renaming and the decades and centuries that pass – with time serving as the greatest aid of collective self-forgetfulness – that colonial lexicon, at once new and unnatural, then takes on an apparent material reality for the demographic constructed upon the colonial state. It is this errant nominal naturality that has been the seat of so many propagating events of human vileness – both in times past and even now in a prolonged way that stretches out its arms of death into our future ( – but do not be mistaken: it is nothing but human collectives and their veneers of ‘diplomacy’ that are behind such present future-ongoing colonial death-drives). Despite all that presses against it, in some cases, in the form of a denaturalization and return, a long-stewarded ground may be renamed and lexically returned to that Indigenous name which it bore in the epoch before colonial exploitation (one can see this occur in Canada though not much in America).67
Each of the cases expressed herein presumes a kind of distinct function, whether it may be: youthful sadism, deep or at least subdermal conviviality, queer+trans self-definition, colonial power and forced forgetting, or the insurgent demand of a returned territorial nominalization (a renominalization that had never been lost, in fact, but instead had been silenced by the aggregate). We can view this as a particular orientation to the manifold nature of the functions of renaming, and these functions do not end with this experiment in itemization but can go on as long as the human desire for any given use would continually establish them in their particularity. For now, we will turn toward a section that is most relevant to our analysis of the pro-housing movement and broach the question of explaining the renamed product involved in this movement’s lineage.
There are times when an organization or a social collective changes its name as it finds itself politically embroiled and as it seeks a way out of its smoky maze. Under these conditions, it is burdened with how to find a way forward, and it must find a way forward (as a way of self-propagation) and it will therefore seek a method of escape and survival to realize this end. The new reflexive term: the renamed object, is a possibility and perhaps the only mechanism for its survival. The collective feels heavy, not ashamed as such but annoyed, by the weighted tenor of its old name in the social sphere and it becomes increasingly aware of the impossibility of the saturation of its name, and how this negative saturation becomes inescapable for it. A collective in this regard will then rename itself to escape the lexical saturation that characterizes its prior name. Moreover, the lexical saturation of the prior name can have at its thick root nothing other than the social critique of people who opposed some facet of the collective: their ideology, their falsity, their culpability to violence, or their entire purpose – and then waged, from the basis of this opposition, a public discourse against the domineering collective. Some examples of this act of the displacement of lexical saturation are Facebook changing its name to ‘Meta’68 and Valeant Pharmaceuticals changing its name to ‘Bausch Health.’69 An act of renaming by those in power is often a tactical effort of ‘escape’ and survival. It is a disguise; an artifice of mere appearance. A chance to displace the negative saturation collected at the site of a signifier for a collection of people held under a common banner: to give it the possibility of new life, and to more realistically disguise the continuity of what came before it and perhaps is likely still encapsulated within it. Those who enact such a disguise may desire to displace the collected knowledge and sentiment that was attached so closely and perhaps so rightly onto what had come before, by the knowing public.
My point here is that, particularly for this latter case, the pro-housing movement has done something quite similar to this particular renominal function: it has renamed itself to avoid the negative lexical saturation of its prior (yet contradictorily still utilized) nominal signifier; it is an act of disguise of its historical descent.70 My argument is that the pro-housing movement has utilized this latter case or type of renaming: the lexical shift of a collective (a shift in name) for the means of displacing a prior saturated object (a former name), in order to disguise itself and continue forward, to survive, and to bring to fruition the content of its will. Clearly, at this we should be asking ourselves: “So what was the former saturated name that the pro-housing movement was running away from?” and also, “What associations with the former name and character of the movement had constituted its negative saturation: and what capacity did it have, and still may yet have, in what has been carried over and inherited, beyond the nominal shift? If we are correct that this case is indeed a case of disguise, then despite this and over this disguise, what has changed throughout the historical development of that movement which seeks to obscure its lineage?” – Let us address these questions and close out some of my self deferred items in this account.
The YIMBY movement rests at the genesis of the pro-housing movement. At the same time, they are essentially for our purposes similitudinal though distinct terms; the entity behind the term is essentially the same while the term itself is different: like a landlord that uses one LLC (limited liability corporation)71 for a given property, and then coterminously uses another for a distinct site of extraction, perhaps a bit further away, but in the same metropole. Though the name of either LLC may be distinct, there is a common entity between them (the extractive landlord) that frustrates any expectation of legitimate distinction. This same pattern can be demonstrated, extended and veritably said to hold for the linked entity behind the one term ‘pro-housing’ and the other term ‘YIMBY.’ As anyone who has ever written about this development in housing politics has been required to draw out, the acronym YIMBY stands for “Yes In My Backyard” – to understand this movement one need only look towards my critical and incisive specifications in the section: “The Cruxes of the Pro-Housing Movement.” I despise this term (–the term YIMBY) in full and think that it is rather too coarse to continue to utilize determinately and more than I need to, so in breaking from the trend I will refer interchangeably to this movement as both YIMBY and market urbanist millennial, the latter of which I have been utilizing already in some sections of my series of thoughts. We can view the market urbanist millennial as both the largest and earliest-developing segment of the pro-housing movement.
To understand a movement, in the case of most movements, you may seek to understand its opposition. A standard and measure for the degree of consciousness of any movement is a collective’s capacity to understand its opposition yet not entirely become defined by its opposition – albeit appended with this I should add the clarification that such a ‘consciousness’ is internal to a collective’s efforts and absent of any external ethical evaluation. This means that this standard may extend to movements across manifold political domains and may seem to represent a kind of efficacy and power of a given movement: one that should either be encouraged and uplifted, or struck down and opposed (such as one would oppose fascism and even the most internally-conscious and organized fascism). But I return to my concept here: a movement’s consciousness relates to the extent of its oppositional knowledge yet commensurate oppositional nondetermination. On either side one runs into risks: not understanding one’s opposition would lead to being ignorant of one’s political environment and the forces that run against one’s own efforts, yet to define oneself entirely by one’s opposition means to grant the opposition a recognitive power that holds a defining character over your identification – because the mirror of that opposition, in this case, would at once entirely constitute you. The movement that has little consciousness is a movement that merely defines itself in terms of its opposition: it cannot think beyond its opposition and is its mere antithesis. It always looks beyond itself for its self-definition in the most quiet moments wherein it flutters, as if in a puzzled state, and becomes uncertain of itself. Contrarily, the movement that has great consciousness is one that understands its opposition, knows them thoroughly and plays their lives in their minds almost like literature. Such playing over is detailed, involved and even sympathetic, and yet with all this playing over such a movement doesn’t let that oppositional force define them. This conscious movement is independent from their mental characters and the conscious subject therefore bears their own imagination, and they are in fact their very own characters whose living myths they create with their lives – Now whether these myths are actualizations of horror or of justice is distinct to this matter.
In the case of the YIMBY movement, the fact that their opposition is merely – almost without a hair of a minimal difference – the NIMBY movement (for “Not in my Backyard”) is no more than a direct, plain and perhaps even embarrassing testament of the early simplicity of the YIMBY movement. They were essentially no other than their opposition. Upon its inception the movement lacked an internal consciousness to see in its own definition that which was more than merely antithetical to their (white) restrictive homeowner, and the fact that it was almost on the whole constituted by its opposition: the great difference being only the small replacement of a ‘No’ with a ‘Yes’ – it itself representative of the degree to which the market urbanist millennial lacked agency and directive power as a social collective, at the very least, in its first steps. Yet to circle back: as I have stated before that the entity behind the YIMBY movement is similitudinal to the pro-housing movement, and is almost coterminous with its largest and earliest section: the market urbanist millennial, I will add here a clarification for the NIMBY movement. The NIMBY movement, emblematic of white homeowners who act to keep residential density low to reduce apartment institution in their municipalities and neighborhoods,72 is essentially the white expulsory homeowner bloc that I have detailed throughout this text. Given that the step-link between the pro-housing movement and the expulsory homeowner bloc is of a mere difference, this suggests that to understand the market urbanist millennial (the most significant base of the pro-housing movement), it is necessary to understand that subjective base which it is linked with: the white expulsory homeowner bloc. I have already detailed this co-constitutive link between the two generations of white desire for land-use, and one can look towards my section “Our Grave Distrust in Any New, Substitutionary Power” for this. Added onto this, one should realize that this codetermined and oppositional link is not only emblematic of an intergenerational frustration and a series of acts of racialized sadism that had generalized to its descendants, on the agentic part of the white expulsory homeowner bloc; – for what is also indicated on top of this is that the white market-urbanist millennial has largely been caught in a limited understanding of itself, a definition of itself predicated on what has frustrated it so (its opposition to the white expulsory homeowner bloc), and that thus it has lacked a veritable internal-consciousness. Generally one finds that with a simple opposition such as that practiced by the market urbanist millennials, a movement will almost automatically, easily or purposively become flustered, as it always looks externally to itself for its own gratification and definition. In the case of the YIMBY movement, we can see both a movement that is now clawing for its internal consciousness and a movement that is also trying to escape the lexical saturation of its prior name, what it once was and perhaps still is. On top of this, the pro-housing movement has expanded its base ever more beyond the market urbanist millennial (though it still remains most characteristic of it as a whole) and the movement has changed and built itself from this core subject position. So what has all happened here?
To start, the YIMBY movement itself began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the second decade of this century. What initiated the movement and grounded its context was the rush of millennials to the Bay Area for technology labor positions during the Tech Boom of the period.73 The establishing political circumstances of this period are constituted by the following: first, there were limits to the housing stock imposed by expulsory zoning;74 second, there was a large demographic inshift of millennials, often associated with the technology sector;75 third, rents were higher as a product of the limitation of stock and the increase in seekers of housing;76 fourth, affordable housing and new market-rate housing were abysmal in their institution due to planning preferences for the white home-voting base.77 What was born here was the market urbanist millennial78 position and what it opposed, as I have said prior, was the white expulsory homeowner bloc.79
Now what has occurred since then?
From the early Bay Area period of genesis, two processes occurred in tandem: critique and spread/generalization. The movement spread. And the movement was critiqued – though it is likely that local critiques began first, and preceded the spread, as the market urbanist millennial began to overpower voices in the planning processes of San Francisco and those who were occluded were both representative of low-income communities of color and their political solidaristic network. What essentially occurred is that the movement, though locally derived from the millennial experience in the San Francisco Bay Area, came to proliferate through different regions in the United States. Perhaps a significant factor for this was the annual YIMBY convenings that represented both the propagation of the general ideology of the movement and then the opening up of a discursive space for new developments inflected by the nation’s different regions. This convening space was set off by the white millennial perturbations in one of the nation’s most unaffordable rental and homeowner housing markets, and then it generalized across America through a series of white millennial articulations of a common set of experiences, and a common set of causal factors – all conducted through both digital discursive spaces and through local organizing, deal brokering and action. However, these additional and generalized aggregations of YIMBYism were not at all merely millennial. Rather, these spaces were a combination of different actors: – private developers, fair-housing lawyers, housing policy researchers, journalists, the building trades, and planning department staff – that had been convinced at some point in time of the market urbanist diagnosis, and those who, along with this, had an intersecting interest with its prognostic fruition.
In these national convening spaces, it became clear that there were actors marked by different reasoning for their advocacy of zoning reform and expanded private market-rate housing development. Some were Bay Area market urbanist millennials who kept their coarse supply-side reasoning, and desired unrestricted land-use regulations so that they could ‘unlock the power of the market’ to solve the generalized housing crisis; others were libertarian-conservatives who wanted to limit local government’s power in land-use, and expand the liberty, land developmental freedom, and private property rights of white single-family homeowners, so that they might develop their parcels in suit of their full, racialist agency. Others were private developers excited for the atmosphere of building market-rate as the principal salve; others still were post-Rothsteinian (influenced by The Color of Law) common level urbanists in liberal municipalities across the varying geographical and political regions of the United States, who viewed the history of zoning through a liberal racial consciousness and who sought to combine both private development with an understanding of such history. Then there were some representatives from the racial-justice and tenants’ movement in attendance at these spaces, but this was a far minority.80
As these different facets of the movement were developing, it was also being critiqued from the outside – critiques which carried on from the original Bay Area tenant and racial-justice response to the market urbanist millennial – because regardless of the additive feature of these different classes, those cruxes which characterized the movement had not veritably shifted and still constituted the movement as a whole. The particular content of this critique was none other than the claim of white assumption and exclusion of the interests of low-income and low-wealth tenants and tenant communities of color. The major conflict here was that for the market urbanist, more units: regardless of their initial affordability, was the primary salve – and this was pursued against the provision of guaranteed affordability, rent regulation (which was argued as a limitation of private development power), and any worry about the displacement of low-income communities of color. In this context, it had made the dynamic and ongoing, responsive, thoughtful and evolutionary decision to change its once-saturated name – following this whole assortment of incisive critique.
As I have mentioned once before but will say now more thoroughly, this lexical change from YIMBY to pro-housing accomplished at least three ends. First, it allowed the movement to displace the racial-economic associated saturation of its prior name – itself predicated on a series of racialized occlusions – with another model of self nominality. Next, it allowed the movement to make an appeal towards a new political vision by overcoming the lack of internal-consciousness that had characterized its past; what signified this most significantly was that its name was almost a direct nominal inheritance from its main political opposition (the white expulsory homeowner bloc). Then lastly, it sought to create another common label for itself as its movement expanded from a local San Francisco Bay Area geography and political environment to a national and regionally distinct movement that spanned nearly all of the United States. In summary, what constituted this lexical shift was largely an intention to displace a saturated object, but then a search for internal consciousness and an expanded register for an ongoing and imminently expanding movement. What troubles the assumption of this lexical shift as sufficient is the reality that the entity behind the earlier nominal saturation is none other than that same entity that we see today in the pro-housing movement, though it claims itself as distinct from what preceded it. While internal subclasses indeed may have been added, there is nevertheless a demographic, organizational and ideological inheritance at play – and such an inheritance constitutes the dogged and perhaps irremediable cruxes of the pro-housing movement.
Regardless, I expect that some would argue that the movement has indeed shifted its political orientation in recent years. Those who make this case oftentimes point to the pro-housing movement’s position on social housing as a main point of evidence here – so this is what we will address next in brief, and detangle in such a way as we’ve detangled the other chords of this movement (and left other knots revealed along the way).
Deferral and Illusion in the Social Housing of the Market Urbanist Millennial
In short, while some would now claim that the pro-housing movement is distinct from early YIMBYism because it supports a new generation of social housing, this also seems doubtful. To begin, the segment of the pro-housing movement that is concerned with housing outside of the private market is mostly grouped in a subset of geographies in the United States. Moreover, it may merely be a response to the long-argued decommodification of housing by the tenants’ movement and a kind of rearticulation of this long-promoted policy but just taken up by white millennials and is, therefore, an amended product that reflects their political desires and ends. Just as the community land trust (CLT) movement in the United States was instituted by Black women in the South,81 and then taken up by others in the decades after, it seems that similarly, the decommodified basis of the Southern-led tenants’ movement seems to have been taken up by the pro-housing movement in a lagged manner, only after having been articulated for a long time prior by the tenants’ rights/housing justice movement. But I want to emphasize here that the pro-housing movement’s focus on multifamily social housing is really only predominantly found in states like California and New York – I would argue that the reason for this is that these geographies are where the tenants’ rights movement is quite strong, and so the pro-housing movement, in order to go about in the same political environment as another powerful social collective, would then have to respond to the contentions put forward by that other movement.
In addition to this, though some segments of the pro-housing space support social or decommodified housing, their policy designs are quite different from those that are supported by or advocated by community-of-color-led movements.82 Principally, the pro-housing policy designs seek to primarily serve a ‘general’ renter base (an upper- or moderate-income white base of prospective tenants), and such policy designs are often built on a revenue neutrality model. Such a financial model for social housing is oftentimes detailed by the process of cross-subsidization, whereby moderate/upper-income renters subsidize the administrative building upkeep payments (formerly rents) of lower-income tenants. In many designs, this is not a funding mechanism that is additive to broader state subsidies but constitutes the whole mechanism of funding itself. The benefit of such a design is that it is more attractive (and therefore passable) to state legislatures who may be less likely to subsequently see social housing as a fiscal burden, and may instead be more likely to view it in a positive and high regard, due to the fact that it is internally funded. The limit of this policy design is that it doesn’t seem to be interested in repairing or intensively absolving the housing insecurity of those subjects who experience the worst of rental unaffordability: low-income people of color. Rather, in this policy design, low-income tenants of color may be given a smaller fraction of units in a prospective build than the white moderate- or higher-income prospective tenants, and so to some this policy constitution seems like another contemporary propagation of resource maldistribution. Though what complicates this matter is that this maldistribution of affordability conditions would be one internal to the tenant populace (a kind of atomistic occlusion in the immediate reduction of housing aggrievement) and not necessarily between landlords/developers and tenants.
We should spend a bit of time here, though, and give the question of social housing and the pro-housing movement more consideration. The context in the United States is that the generalized affordable rental housing crisis exists because the private market is an insufficient mechanism for the provision of people’s need for shelter. Yet in this context, federal level funding for housing has faltered83 and the primary mechanism for affordable housing production is Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) funds that grant developers an exchangeable system of credits if they build units that are only affordable for around two generations.84 Federal funding is essentially nonexistent. The LIHTC model is insufficient – though at the same time, it is sufficiently market deferential for certain dependent developers and the corporations (mainly banks) that end up benefiting greatly from their uptake of the end-of-day revenue increasing program tax credits. On top of this, we are approaching an impending aggravation of affordability in the coming years in the midst of LIHTC units phasing out of their time-bound affordability periods.85 When LIHTC units begin to lose their affordability, what will occur is that the predominantly poor tenants of color base that reside in such units will be subjected to likely hidden and iterative waves of displacement overtime due to rent increases, higher rents and property turnovers.
In the context of federal level divestment in housing, and definitional limitations to the terms of the most common method of instituting affordable housing in the nation, many are pointing towards decommodified, nonspeculative or community-stewarded housing as the future. Along with this, states and localities are also considering their options. The fiscal problem at the state level is that budget deficits and surpluses may be arbitrarily contingent on annual circumstances and tax windfalls – so this creates tough conditions for consistent funding towards a policy domain that needs a large and elongated funding stream over time to underwrite its success. Regardless, even considering these limitations, there is much that the state bursary can do to further social housing, especially with progressive tax reform. To continue to the level of the municipality, the problem of fiscal revenue volatility is perhaps even further exacerbated at the local level, as municipal finances seem to be more volatile than other levels of governance, and the United States has experienced a municipal debt crisis in recent years.86
In returning to the revenue neutrality model, while this model is surely financially viable, especially in conditions of budget deficit or otherwise dried-out program funding at lower levels of governance, it is unquestionably lacking from a framework of racial redistribution. What causes a stop and a pause for us, and which we should clearly address, is the fact that the cross-subsidization of higher-income tenants to those of lower-income seems, paradoxically, to constitute some form of redistribution, at the interior to building level – but this apparent redistributive mechanism is elided in its sufficiency by the little carve out that represents those units deliberately allotted to low-income tenants internal to a given building. Such social housing units will mostly house the relatively nonstrapped (white) aggregate demography, while they will only add a morsel for those low-income tenants and tenants of color that could possibly be subsidized by such a funding mechanism. What it makes up for in a rhetorical flair of apparent mechanistic redistribution, this method lacks effective adequacy when considering the practical share of units in a given building for the low-income, and therefore it places the ceiling for all projects for such units across the entirety of that governance scale wherein it is enacted (be it: municipal, county, state or federal).
The problem is not the mere presence of cross-subsidization as a mechanism of redistribution (and perhaps this mechanism is indeed innovative), but the dependence on cross-subsidization as an austerity response that seeks to market itself as a sufficient source of fiscal independence, outside of any required extra-edificial societal redistribution. It may be that the sole dependence on cross-subsidization would make the fulfillment of deep affordability almost impossible in the institution of any new social housing development that would prospectively be limited by this funding system. Whereas this funding mechanism argues itself adept for its method of redistribution at the level of the tenant, what is needed is redistribution of the dense economic markets and those actors connected to them, who have so forcefully risen in this era of income and wealth inequality.87 On top of this, it is unlikely that any social housing program could possibly be racially reparatory (which implies deep social redistribution), without itself being sufficiently redistributionary at the level of the aggregate society. Even when the cross-subsidization requirement has been removed from the language of drafted legislation it is likely that the principle of revenue neutrality and the ambiguous affordability requirements that are associated with it, will – conditional on its passing – end up realizing another form of racial maldistribution in its implementation. In this matter as much as any other, it becomes abruptly clear that the pro-houser doesn’t care too much about targeted affordability for housing insecure populaces in their model of social housing, but rather the object of greatest primacy to them is the circulation of social housing through a white aggregate demography and the moral normalization and realism that this circulation would grant to social housing as a political object. These pro-housers are surely ‘strategists’ – I will give them that; – but this term is remarkably vague, wide and ethically concave… and indeed, the pro-houser seems to represent the most vain and misguided, though incisive and studiously rehearsed set of stratagems that one can observe in the housing political infrastructure today, and it is likely that we will see this character develop and mature even in the days to come.
Hence, there are some qualms with the concept of a social housing program in the United States that is not truly reparative – for America is marred by a racially demarcated history in the institution of housing, and the commensurate present consequences of such policy furthermore make a general and prospective social housing policy that is not responsive to this encompassing context seem racially vain, to say the least. Indeed, there are some who furthermore have strong doubts as to whether the pro-housing movement understands land and housing reparations in the context of a genealogy of racial violence and maldistribution in housing in the United States, particularly for Black populaces, and generally for other Southern demographies.
At the same time, it must be said that the policy design (at least part of it) of the pro-housers’ model for social housing seems somewhat equipped to face the problem of racial disinvestment that occurs when housing is primarily devoted and instituted for low-income people of color in America. We cannot quite easily forget how racial-residential segregation and spatial disinvestment have occurred all throughout the 20th century.88 I would argue that we should think through different phases of history and the problems they teach us: such as the reifying methods of American racialized divestment. Yet I also believe that we should bear with this the complications and occlusions of perhaps vain policy designs that are the consequential establishments of an assumed hegemonic position. These questions arise most assuredly when one considers racial distributions of resources, social housing and the pro-housing movement all in tandem.
Yet, if we take a step back, what may be an issue here is the end of trying to secure a future where all can have social housing, but where rent-burdened low-income people of color don’t have to wait generations to experience it. The social housing model of the pro-houser, in some instances, to the extent that it is framed and hawked as being designed particularly for the ‘general populace,’ seems to be none other than a coded language for the fact that is designed for a white demography. Given this, we can read that plans designed in certain ways for this aggregation are in effect marked by a deferred and illusory character for those negatively racialized populaces currently maligned in the housing market.
Finally, I’ll end on a last note concerning some identified problems of the pro-housing reasoning for social housing. While some in the pro-housing movement may support social housing, at the basis of their ideology is support for the conception of market-rate multifamily production as a salve for the rental unaffordability dynamics that are present in many metro regions in the United States. If anything, the social housing of the pro-houser is seen as being essential solely in ‘counter-cyclical’ economies – wherein the nation is in a state of recession and private market housing production slows down. In this case, newly instituted multifamily social housing would replace the private market production of housing, principally – as it is framed – when it is in a state of causally induced disrepair and insufficiency and not able to produce adequately at all. So what is the problem here? In my mind, the issue is that the pro-houser seems to imply, though they will likely reject it formally, that the private market is sufficient or principal in its method of affordable housing production absent conditions of recession, and that only on the condition of an extensible recession (with dire impacts on the housing market) would the social housing model then act as a substitutionary effect.89 Without recession, they seem to imply the adequacy or necessary dependence of the private market to generate, or at the very least veer towards, the generation of affordable housing. Even where there is an opening for social housing in the pro-houser’s analytic, it is appalling how they thread the needle and, as they do best, fail to have a structural critique of what frames the production of housing, of property itself and of inequality in the demand making in the production of the edifice. All of those interests that work against that end which they in some instances have been seen to recently tout: – ‘Housing for all, housing for everyone’ – seem again and again to delude them.
This private market form of development, even against appearances, is the pro-housing movement’s raison d'être in which they either persist or perish by. What bolsters up this conception of the private market rate as the predominant salve is a strict adherence to economic logics and perhaps a selfishness of policy design: while market-rate housing indeed slows down rent, and perhaps meets the immediate housing needs of moderate to upper-income tenants, it is insufficient for the creation of immediate affordability for people facing rent burden, displacement, and grave risk in becoming unhoused, at any given present and oncoming historical juncture. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the base of the demographic that is advocating for this policy measure (market-rate housing) as the principal salve, is the one who is primarily and immediately the beneficiary of it. As such, one might say that there is a principle of deferral in the logic of the pro-housing movement: they privilege a policy design that will grant it definite benefits at the nearest present temporal junction, while commensurately and inversely deferring the resolution of the housing exigency of those negatively racialized populaces (Black, Latine, etc.) that face the greatest degree of social vulnerability in the housing market. There is a question of time at play here and a question of deferring some and then crafting policy design for others, and this is what characterizes much pro-housing discourse.
What this means is that the demographic behind the pro-housing movement: the white millennial renter, is the implied agent that is the universal ‘renter,’ it is the invisible subjective definition of the renter, and all salves or solutions that follow forth constitute what will satiate this demographic bloc. In another way of saying this: the white millennial renter is esteemed discursively and strategically, and then all others come after it or are not even mentioned, as merely additional variables in an already determined model. Can one not fail to see the racialized occlusion in this matter? If so, if one has indeed been able to perceive it, and if such distinction of feat has spread beyond a few in the occlusive enacting classification itself (the pro-housing movement), then I myself have yet to see this change. So there is much trouble here, at this point this much might be surmised. If such trouble has remained a constant despite the shift in first- to second-generation market urbanist ideology, then one would note here why there is a doubt on my part that a mere lexical displacement: from ‘Yes in my Backyard’ to ‘pro-housing’ would satiate this biting sense of unease. For, as I have said, there is much to be uneasy about.
Regardless, I will engage in a bit of generosity here and extend the following, as a hint for snooping and tracking thoughts that may proceed after me. In my mind, a model for a white movement that has engaged in a kind of solidaristic conferral with people of color who are maligned by different features of violence or social vulnerability, can be seen in the case of both White People 4 Black Lives90 and Jewish Voice for Peace.91 The first base has partnered in grassroots movement efforts to resist the anti-black negative valuation of life and structural violence in America, and the latter has worked, in partnership with Arab peoples from the South of the world, to resist the forces of occupation and genocide. If one were to compare either movement with the ideology and working of the moderated pro-housing movement that has had its roots in the racially assumptive and market deferatory position of Bay Area YIMBYism, then one would clearly regard the latter as falling heavily short.92
So what do we learn from this? It is perhaps that any movement from the underside of a dyadic conflict, which is internally empowered within its pole, should see its raison d'être as tangent and facilitative of some other movement of the intersectionally maligned, whose interests and framework it cannot and should not succeed. The laborer can no longer be content in being ‘the laborer’ while disguised through the cloak of assumptive fallacies, it is merely a white masculine industrial worker of the Global North that has excluded other ontologies of the worker on lines of race, gender and nation. Furthermore, the woman can no longer be content with her status as the untroubled woman, all while she suffers from heteronormative, transphobic and racial assumptions in her classification of the woman, which all cause others to torment in consequence of her occlusions. Likewise, and in our case, the pro-housing movement should disband the aggregation of itself as the renter and as the subject that is principally burdened in this generalization of housing exigency. In addition, it should drop the economic logic that rests at its inflexible core, which is now and will be entirely insufficient for the realization of a racially distributive model for housing politics in the future. The pro-housing movement, along with this, should lose any hauteur or pride that it may have, whether such pride is the result of its recent numerical policy gains: the rise in municipal zoning reforms, or whether such pride derives from the still growing demographic of its movement, its heightening demographic density. All these should be done and more. Perhaps there is a possibility for this mode of multiracial solidaristic conferral in the case of housing, and it only waits to be offered a possibility of its being, as such, for others to subsequently have the freedom to realize it and to realize what will exceed it in time. Yet all our lives we have rested on too many ‘perhaps’ and there are some particular perhaps that may even ruin us, should we trust and wait upon their fruition.
An Articulatory Future of Radical Land-Use Politics
The conundrum in land-use politics is that though zoning and land-use is doubtlessly consequential, for too long it has seemed like an issue that has been somewhat monopolized by the judgments of the two factions of this particular dyadic conflict in housing. It is either the terrain of the white expulsory homeowner bloc or it is the terrain of the white market-urbanist millennial and its other associated subjective positions, or at least this is how it has seemed to certain agents of left housing politics in recent years. In more detail to this, I mean that the white expulsory homeowner bloc wants to constrict land-use allowances to stifle any kind of multi-family housing in the geographies where they have their land titles. They are primarily concerned with keeping their real estate asset-valuation as high as possible, and they are primarily motivated by racialized and tenure-associated anxieties.93 In the case of the pro-housing movement, they desire to release land-use allowances through municipal, state or federal zoning reform, as a way to expand the potential of the private market to sufficiently meet the human demand in housing; moreover, the drive to pull this lever has historically been unconcerned with displacement and immediate affordability for low-income populaces. As such, the pro-housing movement’s policies and the preceding movement itself have a cultural saturation of being out of touch with the on-the-ground interests of low-income renter communities of color. The first is the old white power that has seemed to be almost impossible to resist, and the second is the new power that is too centered on itself in its articulations of salve. Both have implied that they are the sole possibilities of thought on zoning, and thus they have tended to make zoning a place where discourse has truly been stifled for radical thought.
In response to this conundrum of problematic white appropriation of land-use, there have been serious hesitations about dealing with land-use in a comprehensive manner by the tenants’ movement and those invested in housing justice politics.94 Yet even as such hesitancies occur, it is all but impossible to deny that the state of land-use policy across America is not a product of a neutral or natural occurrence of governance, but is itself the product of the congealed efforts of a white organizing base that has been projected over time. In particular, the land-use and zoning policies that we inherit contemporarily are a product of the organizing efforts of the white expulsory homeowner bloc. The tenants’ movement understands this quite deeply, but it is also deterred from participating in reversing whole-heartedly the white proprietary and low-density land-use dominance of the American municipality because of distinguished political efforts: the tenants’ movement seems to naturally place more emphasis on the defense of disinvested geographies, and has not necessarily moved beyond this end, towards the possibility of a totalized reshifting of regional land-use politics. The latter may perhaps seem to be too ambitious (for white homeowners and all homeowners have much power in city councils), or too associated with market urbanist millennial policy agendas, or it may seem too dangerous because it exposes disinvested geographies to new mechanisms of speculation, population loss, and displacement. There are many risks here, and this I do not deny. Any lack of seriousness on this point will surely lead to social pain, and my thoughts here shouldn’t be taken as a logical substantiation to encourage just that form of restriction-reduction and private market optimism that I have tried to so thoroughly critique, and which, up until now, has defined most zoning amendments in America. In a review of all of this, we should find that the hesitancy of the tenants’ movement on widespread zoning shifts are not at all unfounded.
Yet in a needed response, it must be said that we have inherited the congealed effects of a white organization of land-use. The white expulsory homeowner bloc has utilized zoning and land-use as a implement of racial governance, and as our unchosen inheritance, it is such that in every day that we live, this carried over product remains with us, festering madly and growing all the same – and it will continue to remain with us in the future, especially if we do not we make to it a denunciatory address. It is only through this restive address and through no other action that we will ever buck off the effects of this inheritance. This is what confronts us so direly.
Indeed, despite any specter of risk, it may be held that nonaction on zoning merely sediments, freezes, and holds in place the negative effects of single-family zoning predominance. Nonaction on zoning/land-use, in this case, is a mere informal acceptance of the land-use inheritance of the former generation, which is only the product of 20th-century and ongoing white proprietary organizing efforts. It cannot be objected that zoning is dangerous. Zoning as it moves and changes: which is the definitive means of the status of its reform, can indeed be harmful.95 But commensurately, leaving zoning as it is cannot be said otherwise to be the perpetuation of a toxic inheritance that has harmful but more insidious and hidden impacts. If it might be said that zoning is indeed important but incredibly sensitive, veering between both concession towards white expulsory homeowners and concession towards real estate development capital – then it is imperative that tenants, low-income people, and tenant-of-color-oriented approaches lead the way on considerations about zoning shifts, their design and their modes of implementation. It is always on the horizon as a kind of possibility for the tenants’ rights and housing justice space to expand its orientations of protection and preservation efforts of vulnerable tenant communities, to keep the necessity of its directive, and to then more comprehensively resist the congealed effects of white expulsory land-use policies, which are the inherited products of the built environment of the American municipality.
This may in fact be the future of a consolidated and radical land-use politics articulated by an historically grounded movement that is simultaneously defensive (preventing displacement), and regionally operative (affronting white single-family geography). This movement would be constituted by low-income and low-wealth tenant communities of color and their political allies: those who have practiced a solidaristic conferral with this political base that in its being represents an alternative and nonhegemonic index, an alternative to what has dominated in disguise for too long. The future of land-use politics is a future wherein the atomistic occlusion that has marked it so heavily will fall off like scales, and a critical reception of the housing political infrastructure will be on the brow of every tenant, and every guardian of every child forced to move too young, and everyone who feels a sense of lacking power when they posture in examination towards the sky and regard those hidden edificial logistics that have for so long neglected their own segment, as a part of those who are insecure within the dwelling species. The precondition for the future that we must create is not entirely dependent on land-use, but land-use is an inevitable hindrance to the realization of such a future, and as such we must run through it. Regardless, you will say to me: “Your romanticism is impossible” – I would then respond that you should let me live through my romanticism, my unrealism and my imaginative appeals: for the content of the world is none other than the randomness of material nature,96 the randomness derived from prior human institutions, and the outcomes of directed will. The last is what we control and the last is what we cartographize through the faculty of our imagination. So at least my image here might comprise some feature of the vision of direction for any radical movement for land-use and housing in the future. To be sure, this future is a vulnerable one and as a contingent possibility, the scope of its realization is yet unclear. It is unknown whether this articulation will indeed be made in a practical manner outside of my thoughts, less still do I know of its determination for being materially realized . . . Though the ground is surely arable for such possibilities as these.
Endnotes
1 Some may retort that in my conception of the ‘white psyche’ or the ‘mind’ as such, I may be at risk of privileging the mind to the body, and engaging in an untimely (as it has been in all times) – dualism. This is neither my intention nor what I believe I am actually doing here. The noncognitive body is the modality through which we interface with the world, and it is the particularly material feature of our being, our personality and our specific variances; – mainly: our surfaces, forms and externalized interiorities, and the social meaning imputed to them. Though, in a direct turn, the mind as it is strictly and neurologically understood may also be the seat of just these same qualities, though operationalized distinctly and tethered in communication to the noncognitive body. In addition, the mind has a particular eminence over the noncognitive body in that it affects and wills the body to action (outside of particular muscular reflexes), as well as understands and interprets the sensory acclaims that some phenomenologists would abstractly and otherwise entirely claim to be devoted to the noncognitive body itself. Regardless, the very condition of our interfacing with the world is our noncognitive morphology (with their variances in sense perception and mobility) and the mind alone could shape no world as that which is shaped by the being that unites the mind and the noncognitive body: the living (human) subject.
2 Any collection of lexical signifiers (i.e., words, terms, or claims) may suffer from a practice of productive exclusion. Any claim, upon its being expressed, may find itself at risk of being critiqued, and in most cases this is perhaps rightly so. That no statement is final; that no claim is final – this is surely something that contributes possibility and takes away closed certainty in our lives, and hence it’s a reason for the interest in our lives. There are many reasons, moreover, for social or rhetorical critique and the apposite precondition for such critique is that all speech is marred by finitude and vulnerability. This feature is the very ground through which discourse is perpetuated. I make this point because I do not claim that the white psyche is the only occlusive force in the world; this text is an effort to detail the occlusive tendency of ‘certain minds’ and not ‘all,’ ‘every,’ the entire lot now and forevermore: – identity and the power of people in variegated historical, geographical and social milieus frustrates this tendency of a sole occlusive entity. Indeed, there is no single ‘enemy’ in this world. We should be humbled enough to note this. Intersectionality itself seems to speak against the idea of a singular occlusive force, and psychoanalytic theory on the other hands seems to trouble any idea of the psyche of the oppressed that is safe from the ambient influence of contradictory inputs of its social milieu (see Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks on this point). Amidst this context, my particular text makes an emphasis on the white psyche as it involves the housing political sphere, and it does so through a reasoning that the old and new generations of white demography have much power in shaping the actuality of things, and the compulsions of attention, effect and sympathy regarding suffering and desiring as it relates to the residential edifice. For my understanding of intersectionality, see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991); and for my reference of the complications of psychoanalytic theory, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2008 (1952)).
3 Such occlusions are often left latent though felt and understood, until they are articulated by those very subjects made unaccommodated by them; this articulation then creates an ebbing, though advancing and additive mass over time, and there comes a point wherein the unaccommodated can no longer be resolved to their prior occluded-unarticulated state. All effort of discourse and critique carried out by the maligned seem to lead the social register towards the ineffable and fantastic point where their discourse would produce a change in state that even goes beyond this low-bar.
4 Eric Arnesen, “Up from Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History,” Reviews in American History 26, no. 1 (1998): 146–174, https://hist75300gape.commons.gc.cuny.edu/files/2016/ 06/Arnesen-Up-from-Exclusion.pdf.
5 Sylvia Berryman, "Democritus," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, August 15, 2004 (Updated January 7, 2023), https://plato.stanford.edu/ENTRIES/democritus/.
6 Sylvia Federici, "Wages Against Housework” in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2020).
7 Yuchen Yang, “What’s Hegemonic about Hegemonic Masculinity? Legitimation and Beyond,” Sociological Theory 38, no. 4 (2020): 318–333, https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275120960792.
8 Cassidy Pearson and Jenny Schuetz, “Where pro-housing groups are emerging,” Brookings Institution, March 31, 2022, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/where-pro-housing-groups-are-emerging/.
9 This brusque economic logic has been moderated somewhat in the last several years. It is quite normal to hear from the pro-housing space that ‘zoning reform is a necessary but not sufficient policy’ to alter the housing landscape and to remediate the unaffordability of housing. Some even mention the need to subsidize units for the low-income whose need and capacity for payment the market wouldn’t otherwise meet. Yet this seems to be merely a response that is learned and is meant to buck off insecurity, as well as claims of credulity, following the earliest empirical doubts as to the immediate benefit of some forms of market-dependent single-family zoning reforms – one must have formed either collectively and formally or informally through a learned language a response to the slow and/or complicated changes from Minneapolis. A learned response always hides a more honest internal supposition. In conversation with the pro-housing subject one can note their fervor and dependence on the idea that more affordability through the market mechanism of housing merely succeeds the premise of greater allowances of density. ‘Allow for more density and affordability for all will follow,’ they always seem to say in the most limpid moments of their tenor. At their heart they likely truly believe that the problem is limits to density, and that the private market would suffice most thoroughly and remediably if such limits were abolished; additionally they tacitly believe that there is no form of maldistribution and quintessential problem at play in the way that housing is produced and allocated, that is: physically instituted and then subjected to compulsory transfers. What marks the pro-houser is the noncritical nature in which they view the private real-estate market. The language of abolition is strained here if not deadened, and its use complicates and represents a reappropriative deployment of a term that is usually denoted to thought objects and political efforts in the Black existential genealogy. But for the pro-houser? To ‘abolish single-family zoning’ always hides with it that hidden market deferentialistic assumption that characterizes so much their lattice of axioms, and which so often says to us: ‘It is on account of this “abolition” that the private market will satiate all human need.’ So does one not see this problem? Whereas the abolition of Black genealogy is one that indelibly sees capitalism as empirico-historically linked with an at least material racial hierarchy, the abolition (if one can even call it that) of the pro-houser is a white abolition, a ‘market abolition’ – and this is not at all, they would remind us, to ever be understood to mean an ‘abolition of the market’ or anything that even approaches that contention of a critique of its structurally ingrained limitations. As such, any form of deference and fervor of the pro-houser never stays hidden for long, despite their possible and practically well learned veneers of logical counter-response.
10 Jerusalem Demsas, “The Only Force Stronger Than Polarization? Rising Home Prices,” The Atlantic, March 10, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/yimby-housing-bipartisan-zoning/677704/.
11 Lauren-Brooke Eisen, “The 1994 Crime Bill and Beyond: How Federal Funding Shapes the Criminal Justice System,” Brennan Center for Justice, September 9, 2019, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ analysis-opinion/1994-crime-bill-and-beyond-how-federal-funding-shapes-criminal-justice.
12 To be fair, the second largest social segment that the pro-housing movement opposes, on the whole, are low-income and low-wealth tenants of color and those whom they organize alongside. This is again what I have referred to here as the tenants’ rights and housing/land-use justice movement. The latter term comes from ACT LA, a transit and housing justice organization in Los Angeles, CA. See ACT LA, n.d., https://www.act-la.org/.
13 Ananya Roy, “Undoing Property: Feminist Struggle in the Time of Abolition,” Society and Space, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/undoing-property-feminist-struggle-in-the-time-of-abolition.
14 Some articles have tried to dissolve the positional conflagration between the two movements, and such efforts are grounded on the premise that there is in fact a given wedge between these populaces (i.e., white homeowners and white millennial renters), furthermore that there are matters to dissolve, and that these are matters most worthy of attention and eminence to be addressed so formally time and time again. See Brian Balogh, “NIMBYs and YIMBYs Have More in Common Than It Might Seem,” Time, February 6, 2024, https://time.com/6565036/ nimbys-vs-yimbys/; and Reihan Salam, “Why YIMBY Righteousness Backfires,” The Atlantic, July 15, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/yimby-california-social-justice -kahlenberg/674714/.
15 Some would argue the alternative of this. To the extent that the white millennial cares about racial hierarchy in land-use and the medium of power that such a hierarchy necessarily involves, we can note that the pro-houser places an historical ‘pen’ or a particular corral of racial sympathy against white slights on an historical iteration of whiteness – the white populace of the prior generations – that is and will forevermore be remote from its own, untouched and unaddressed iteration. For the assumption of the alternative position, see Brian Balogh, “NIMBYs and YIMBYs Have More in Common Than It Might Seem.”
16 What we call the ‘restrictive and recalcitrant homeowner’ here, and the ‘white expulsory homeowner bloc’ in many other places following, is oftentimes mainly called the NIMBY in the major academic, journalistic and social discourse; the latter term is an acronym for “not-in-my-backyard.” The ‘restrictive homeowner’ of the pro-housing movement is different from my ‘expulsory homeowner.’ Why is this? Simply because the former sees the homeowner as a racially abstract symbol that is merely a disruptive block for the counterfactual flow of adequate private market development that would flood America, only if such an encumbering political group were to not exist (or lose that restrictive character that defines their definitional existence). The homeowner is only a problem for them insofar as they prevent an illusory counterfactual equilibrium of private market development. In contrast, my denotation of ‘expulsory homeowner’ emphasizes the fact that this white demographic has utilized land-use governance as a tool for racial expulsion, property value saturation, low-density predominance, heterogenous municipal revenue capture and expenditure, and racial-demographic homogeneity at the municipal or regional level. Therefore, such terms are different because, as given by these specifications, they are buttressed both by varied political visions as well as varied denotative concomitants.
17 Harvey Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place,” The American journal of Sociology 82, no. 2 (1976): 309–332, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/226311.
18 Market-rate housing institution can also slow down regional rents, and this is a very positive consequent of its institution. But the poorest tenants are likely to not feel the effect of market-rate housing development for a generation or two, if they even feel it at all. There is also a separate matter here. The actions of the expulsory homeowner bloc have also served, though in a more implicit and nonexpressed manner, to limit the possibility of the institution of social housing, and therefore such preemptive political action (i.e., expulsory land-use governance) is not just consequential for market-rate housing development. Anyone who darts their eyes away from the restrictive utilization of zoning by the titled white-proprietry segment and paints this problem as one that is solely relevant to market urbanists who are interested in real estate capitalism, and if such a being is also interested in a future for social housing in the United States – then they would be quite remiss to not acknowledge this very point. I will make this point more thoroughly later, but I will say now: – Any social housing program limits itself if it doesn’t address the question of contesting the land–use regulations that have congealed over time and that any movement for social housing in America will have unfortunately inherited upon its examination of any set of living infrastructures. For it is just these zoning regulations and the proprietary drives behind them that will stifle any comprehensive social housing project. On my first point about the insufficiency for the filtering of market rate units, see Miriam Zuk and Karen Chapple, Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, 2016), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ 7bx938fx; for the nondetermined distribution of benefits from changes in median rent across any populace of renters, see Terry Castleman, “Rents are finally falling in Los Angeles. But it’s still not enough for many,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 2024, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-03-12/rents-are-falling-in-los-angeles-see- where-the-rest-of-the-state-stacks-up.
19 Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
20 Galen Herz and Darrell Owens, “Parts of the YIMBY Movement Are Moving Left,” Jacobin, October 7, 2022, https://jacobin.com/2022/10/yimby-movement-social-public-housing-bill-california-darrell-owens-left.
21 Miriam Zuk and Karen Chapple, Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships.
22 Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine M. O'Regan, “Supply Skepticism Revisited,” NYU Law and Economics Research Paper No. 24-12 (2023), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4629628#.
23 David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything : A New History of Humanity (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
24 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; and Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1968 (1961)).
25 Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (London, UK: Verso, 2020).
26 Rent regulation often encapsulates a limitation on the legal reasons a landlord can use to evict a tenant, as well as the enforcement of a limit on how much rent can be increased annually for qualified properties. This policy end has been shown to have positive effects, like preserving affordable housing overtime, reducing rent burden, reducing displacement and to the extent that displacement is associated with unhoused status, it may reduce the likelihood of certain populaces to fall into being chronically unhoused. See Mark Paul, “Economists Hate Rent Control. Here’s Why They’re Wrong.,” The American Prospect, May 16, 2023, https://prospect.org/infrastructure/ housing/2023-05-16-economists-hate-rent-control/.
27 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York, NY: Knopf, 1991 (1776)).
28 Ian Carlton, Michelle Anderson, Renee Roy Elias, Carson Hartmann, James Kim and Emily Picha, “The Impact of Rent Control Policies on Bay Area Housing Supply: Developer Perceptions and Development Calculus,” Center for Community Innovation at UC Berkeley and ECONorthwest, 2021, https://www.urbandisplacement.org/wp-content/ uploads/2021/08/svcf_rentcontrol_policybrief_2021.pdf.
29 Darrell Owens, “What Economists Get Wrong About Rent Control,” September 21, 2022, https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/what-economists-get-wrong-about-rent.
30 Galen Herz and Darrell Owens, “Parts of the YIMBY Movement Are Moving Left.”
31 I do not address totalized occlusion here. By its nature, this text is not necessarily a universal system of the interlocking features of existence or being surrounding the question of dwelling, and all of the hierarchies and iterative acts that create such a network of relations, day in and day out. It would be doubtful that anything claiming to be universal would actually meet its self-definition as universal. Even if such a thing could occur (i.e., a legitimate universal attainment), that is not what I project in this effort. To specify what I have mentioned above, some examples of occluded domains regarding this line of inquiry which circles about the tenant are: the unhoused classification, the urban squatter, the foreclosure at-risk homeowner, and the informal tenure associated with dwellers in the Global South. All of these are occluded by the supposed focus of what may be implied as the totality or the universality of the tenant classification itself. Though I would argue that there are internal racialized divisions (an atomistic occlusion) that are functioning here within the classification of the tenant that specifically take root in the occlusions propagated by the pro-housing movement; – that does not commensurately mean or imply that that the tenant is then a universal subject. The tenant is not universal. To be a tenant is to be awash in a sea of invisible conditions: a tenant presupposes a landlord: a long or new occupier of property, a system of private property rights itself, the lease agreement between these asymmetrical subjects, and (oftentimes) an urban or urban-adjacent regional system. The squatter, the unhoused subject, the foreclosure disposed homeowner, and the informal tenures of the settlements at the periphery of certain urban spaces of the Global South (Ho Chi Minh, for example) – are what might be taken up in revealing the totalized occlusion of this question of the tenant alone. In reference to the informal tenures of the South that are left out in an internal focus on the ‘tenant,’ see Arthur Acolin and Annette M Kim, “Algorithmic Justice and Groundtruthing the Remote Mapping of Informal Settlements: The Example of Ho Chi Minh City’s Periphery, ” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science 49, no. 1 (2022): 151–168, https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808321998708.
32 Matthew Desmond and Nathan Wilmers, “Do the Poor Pay More for Housing? Exploitation, Profit, and Risk in Rental Markets,” American Journal of Sociology 124, no. 4 (2019): 1090–1124, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ doi/full/10.1086/701697.
33 Peter Hepburn, Renee Louis and Matthew Desmond, “Racial and Gender Disparities among Evicted Americans,” Sociological Science (2020), https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-v7-27-649/.
34 Cantong, “Landlord Harassment & Illegal Eviction,” USC Neighborhood Data for Neighborhood Change, February 28, 2022, https://la.myneighborhooddata.org/landlord-harassment-illegal-eviction/.
35 Christopher Muller, Robert J. Sampson and Alix S Winter, “Environmental Inequality: The Social Causes and Consequences of Lead Exposure,” Annual Review of Sociology 44, no. 1 (2018): 263–282, https://doi.org/10.1146/ annurev-soc-073117-041222.
36 Sara McLafferty and Valerie Preston. “Who Has Long Commutes to Low-Wage Jobs? Gender, Race, and Access to Work in the New York Region,” Urban Geography 40, no. 9 (2019): 1270–1290, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 02723638.2019.1577091.
37 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (New edition.) (England, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2014).
38 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000 (1983)).
39 Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London, UK: Verso, 1996).
40 In escaping one’s lord, who had bound one to the soil so inaugmentably, a given villein was able to erupt a disjuncture in their prior state of bind – a state of bind which was constitutive of agrarian villeinage. In such an escape, one would seek a ‘refuge’-in-flight to the burgeoning proto-metropole and in the wage-labor and vanished state that awaited one there: one would essentially replace, substitute or reconjure a seigneurial lord in exchange of a proto-capitalist burgher – that early industrial capitalist of the Middle Age town. See Christopher Chitty, Sexual Hegemony : Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
41 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism; and C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989).
42 I will say and acknowledge that the pro-housing movement is generally associated with building-ecological sustainability. While this is true, one should ask questions about the limits of green capitalism and a model of sustainability that is almost entirely delimited by their main developmental salve.
43 I will go into this in a further section. But for the time being, one should note that YIMBY is an acronym for “yes-in-my-backyard.”
44 Erin McCormick, “Rise of the yimbys: the angry millennials with a radical housing solution,” The Guardian, October 2, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/oct/02/rise-of-the-yimbys-angry-millennials-radical- housing-solution.
45 The white market-urbanist millennial, so much as it resists its deprivation of property, cannot compare its collective existential feature in this topic to the property deprivation of certain demographics of poor people of color: particularly Black subjects. This is why I stress the relativism of what is claimed by some as an undoubtedly objective form of generational proprietary deprivation, and why I furthermore highlight that such a deprivation depends on a referatory relation with the white expulsory homeowner bloc of the preceding generations. Everything falls apart if the referent shifts. Only in comparison to the white expulsory homeowner bloc are the white millennials in any sense ‘deprived’; the same cannot be said, that is: the deprived condition will not hold, if one were to look at the Southern populaces as another distinguished and more humbling referent. – Yet just this action is generally left undone in the pro-housing discourse, because a sustained referential shift of this kind would necessitate a consistent reflexive shift, and this shift (some interior to the movement fear) would siphon power from the white millennial atomism that has built the affectual weight of the movement.
46 Randy Shaw, Generation Priced out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020).
47 McElroy and Szeto emphasize a similar point in their article: “The Racial Contours of YIMBY/NIMBY Bay Area Gentrification.” Yet it must be mentioned that their work critiques the nexus of what I would call white millennial thought (or white market-urbanist millennialism) with the white expulsory homeowner bloc, particularly at the regional and temporal specificity of the pro-housing movement as it truly burgeoned: in the San Francisco Bay Area in the second decade of the 21st century. Though the white millennial thought of the Bay Area as it relates to housing was indeed an inception of some form, the movement has nevertheless extended beyond its early days and this extension must be addressed for what it now is and has become. Yet another purpose of my series of thoughts is to trace these developments, and theorize alongside them. See Erin McElroy and Andrew Szeto, "The Racial Contours of YIMBY/NIMBY Bay Area Gentrification," Berkeley Planning Journal 29, No. 1 (2017): 7-46, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sw2g485
48 Oscar Perry Abello, “Is Harris-Walz the First YIMBY Ticket in History?,” Next City, August 7, 2024, https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/is-kamala-harris-tim-walz-the-first-yimby-ticket-in-history-election.
49 Yonah Freemark, “Zoning Change: Upzonings, Downzonings, and Their Impacts on Residential Construction, Housing Costs, and Neighborhood Demographics,” Journal of Planning Literature 38, no. 4 (2023): 548–570, https://doi.org/10.1177/08854122231166961.
50 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
51 Ibid.
52 Yonah Freemark, “Zoning Change: Upzonings, Downzonings, and Their Impacts on Residential Construction, Housing Costs, and Neighborhood Demographics”; and Nathaniel Meyersohn, “The invisible laws that led to America’s housing crisis,” CNN, August 5, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/05/business/single-family- zoning-laws/index.html.
53 Bernie Sanders, “Housing for All,” n.d., https://berniesanders.com/issues/housing-all/#:~:text=End%20the%20 housing%20crisis%20by,to%20counsel%20in%20housing%20disputes; and Cortez, “Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, Ramirez Reintroduce The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act,” March 21, 2024, https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov /media/press-releases/ocasio-cortez-sanders-ramirez-reintroduce-green-new-deal-public-housing-act.
54 Cantong, “The Destabilization of American Zoning,” (Berkely, CA: Othering and Belonging Institute, May 15, 2024), https://belonging.berkeley.edu/destabilization-american-zoning.
55 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
56 In its most common usages.
57 We live in a complicated time, when dispossessed people have so much voice in the digital milieu, and we find that the cultural productions and artifacts of the dispossessed become the humor and culture for the society at large. It wafts up from the particular milieus of the dispossessed and in some cases becomes the terms for cultural aggregates: one merely has to think through hip-hop and Rap discourse; the dance genres that iteratively become popular in one’s youth; the humor propagated through the moving-image applications and the memes that are derived from Black humor. Alternatively, the individual Black subject in this world may have recognition in their own digital milieu, but that form of recognition and participation may never have the company of material benefit and world-amendment. A voice may become recognized digitally, but that same voice when requesting food or shelter may, in the corporeal world outside of screens and transmitted text and images, be castigated and ignored as a relegated and nonrecognized object. This is the paradox of culture and impoverishment in the digital age. Though it must be said that this is a mere moderation of the principle of the cultural proliferation and dominance of the oppressed in different regions and in earlier times – to be dominant in culture is not to not be impoverished. Though one can create culture, one can still be nonrecognized and relegated to material torment.
58 One great contradiction of our time: in regard to our understanding of discourse, representation and inequality, is the way in which discourse may have shifted in its autonomous capacity due to being influenced by the global digital infrastructure – all while structural, post-colonial and spatial inequality have remained sedimented. On the note about the contradiction between the global discursive digital terrain (social media and communication) and its incommensurability with spatial inequality, see Robert J. Sampson, Great American City : Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2012).
59 The white millennial is not the only demographic segment or the youngest segment of the pro-housing movement. There are Gen-Z pro-housers and there will be younger pro-housers, as they themselves age, begin to politically critique their settings, see the world in conflict, and then come to be inducted into the predominant ideology for their own subject class at a given time. I predict this, yet I hope it doesn’t happen. Regardless, what I mean here by ‘white millennial’ is that it is really the white millennial demographic that first felt the problem of rental unaffordability and the impossibility of homeownership in many regions: not for all people, but for their racial-generational intersection. They will not be the last to experience this problem, and yet they were the first to experience it for their intersection of identity. Accordingly, they were also the first to articulate an experience of it and a language against it. This language is bound to change over time, but its base was instituted first by the white millennial renter in the second decade of the 21st century.
60 Again, I have no agreement with the claims of this citational text. I rather see it to support the understanding of other actors that there is indeed a conflict between these two (implied) segments of white demography. See Reihan Salam, “Why YIMBY Righteousness Backfires.”
61 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996 (1889)).
62KC Tenants, “Could We End Evictions?,” Hammer and Hope No. 1, Winter 2023, https://hammerandhope.org/ article/kc-tenants-end-evictions.
63 This Africanization of the world is not a pessimistic conception. Nor is it about the universal precarity of the postcolonial Africa; it rather emphasizes the actuality and possibility of African innovation, a critical and cultural response, and a return to the ‘Sign of Africa’ that Mbembe predicts the world will make in coming years. In a way, Mbembe’s orientation grants the African and decolonial subject the same agency and dignity as Fanon did prior, when he called for the (critical) ‘innovation’ of the colonized in his penultimate words in Wretched. In this case, I would interpret Mbembe’s conception of world-processual Africanization as both a socio-ecological prediction of the propagation of climate-associated torment throughout the world, as well as a critical contention that the world will soon look towards Africa and that Africa will be the seat of some response to this Global though familiar problem (the problem of climate) – The perception and look towards Africa is not to be understood in Mbembe’s analytic as one delimited by an extractive cathexis emblematic of a glare (– though this too will likely persist), but it is implied that this look will appear more pedagogical seeking, more denotative of recognized agency and more directed than any other that came before. On this last point, one need only to examine the South African challenge to American supported genocide in the Arab world, and a challenge made at the highest world court, to see a formalized and beyond-nascent indication of this Mbembian metaphysical understanding transformed into concept. See Achille Mbembe, Brutalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024), xiii, 6; and United Nations, “South Africa institutes proceedings against Israel and requests the International Court of Justice to indicate provisional measures – ICJ Press Release,” International Court of Justice, Press Release, December 29, 2023, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/icj-southafrica-israel-genocide-29dec2023/.
64 Jason Hickel, “Quantifying National Responsibility for Climate Breakdown: An Equality-Based Attribution Approach for Carbon Dioxide Emissions in Excess of the Planetary Boundary,” The Lancet, Planetary Health 4, no. 9 (2020): e399–404, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(20)30196-0.
65 Erin Coghlan, Lisa McCorkell and Sara Hinkley, “What Really Caused the Great Recession?,” Institute for Research and Labor Employment, September 19, 2018, https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/irle-policy-brief/ what-really-caused-the-great-recession/.
66 While these thoughts are derived from the North American context, the same could be said here for many other places, and that is what makes these ideas that I express here somewhat transferable to other geographies – though this should be a transfer that benefits those who conduct it, and that is led by intellectuals who are staunchly rooted in their own geographies, histories and political contexts (particularly if they are of a Southern geography). All the same, it is likely that these ideas will be most relevant for Northern regions with certain kinds of property systems and a history of white expulsion as it relates to regional land-use, as well as an internal racial heterogeneity that shapes the calculus of white expulsory demographics and that establishes this very dynamic of racial sadism in municipal land-use.
67 Geographical Names Board of Canada, “Draft Best Practices for Indigenous Geographical Names of Canada,” United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, May 5, 2023, https://unstats.un.org/unsd/ ungegn/sessions/3rd_session_2023/documents/GEGN.2_2023_81_CRP81.pdf.
68 Mike Isaac, “Facebook Renames Itself Meta,” The New York Times, October 28, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/ 2021/10/28/technology/facebook-meta-name-change.html
69 PR Newswire, “Valeant Will Become Bausch Health Companies Inc.,” May 8, 2018, https://www.prnewswire.com/ news-releases/valeant-will-become-bausch-health-companies-inc-300644091.html.
70 Shelby R. King, “Have the YIMBYs Evolved?,” Shelterforce, November 4, 2022, https://shelterforce.org/ 2022/11/04/have-the-yimbys-evolved/.
71 An LLC is essentially a business form meant to disguise identity and limit the legal accountability of different business operations – in this case, the operations of landlords. Once the landlord has the limited liability business form, they are exempt in a de facto fashion from the errancies related to habitability, health, administrative legality and other expropriative-adjacent practices that they maintain throughout their rental portfolio and in their relations with tenants. LLC landlords are worse landlords just as anonymous internet users are oftentimes generative instances of the worst facets within people – namely: because they are anonymous and cannot be held to account. It is telling that small and large landlords can both be limited liability landlords; in fact, the small landlords often take the strategy and techniques from the larger ones, which they learn through their regional political groups. Given this, any use of rhetoric meaning to separate the terms ‘small landlord’ and ‘LLC landlord’ in regard to the landlord classification in general, is a failing project. But this is an intentional pillar of the landlord strategy: incite stirring, impassioned empathy for small landlords, then claim that all landlords are small landlords – even though that is not the case. Lastly, it should be noted that not having an LLC form doesn’t make a landlord ethically justified (as a political category), but rather, the institutional shield of the LLC makes all landlords empirically worse even beyond their base and already despairing, irreparable state. See Adam Travis, “The Organization of Neglect: Limited Liability Companies and Housing Disinvestment,” American Sociological Review 84, no. 1 (2019): 142–170, https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122418821339.
72 Some facets of the market urbanist millennial makeup argue that there is a Left NIMBY that may be associated with the same ends of the white expulsory homeowner bloc, and may therefore be grouped along with it. This is easiest understood as an argument from the (mainly) white millennial that collapses, and generates an equivalence between, white propertied racialism and displacement-fearing tenants – or likewise on the latter end, with poor homeowners of color who fear for their displacement through foreclosure. They would claim that the Left NIMBY is constitutive of low-income people of color and their political solidaristic network, who all care much, and care too much in their opinion, about displacement and the institution of immediate affordable housing for their political base. I will not engage with this idea too much but will address it briefly here. In connecting this fumbling though recurring contention with the framework that we have already laid out: – We can claim that the contention that the tenants’ movement constitutes a certain kind of paradoxical introjection that is in tandem with the white expulsory homeowner bloc is an argument, and a particular kind of argument, that is none other than a mechanism of disavowal flowing from atomistic occlusion. Anything that obstructs the (intersectional) hegemonic assumptive unit: in this case the white millennial renter of the pro-housing movement, is seen as being consolidated mechanistically with those other forces that oppose it (i.e., the white homeowner). Through the false consolidation of the occluded internal classification: the tenant of color, as the exteriorized political other, one can then confound its efforts, confuse the discourse and then (though in failed attempts) strive to isolate it politically. As I have said and will emphasize once more: this is just a strategic feature of atomistic or internal occlusion and its racialized forms as it relates to the American housing discourse.
73 Erin McElroy, “Postsocialism and the Tech Boom 2.0: Techno-Utopics of Racial/Spatial Dispossession,” Social Identities 24, no. 2 (2018): 206–221, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2017.1321718; and Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2020).
74 Stephen Menendian, Samir Gambhir, Karina French and Arthur Gailes, Single-Family Zoning in the San Francisco Bay Area: Characteristics of Exclusionary Communities (Berkeley, CA: Othering & Belonging Institute, October 7, 2020), https://belonging.berkeley.edu/single-family-zoning-san-francisco-bay-area.
75 Bay Area Equity Atlas, “How Has the Bay Area’s Population Changed Since 2010?,” October 27, 2023, https://bayareaequityatlas.org/population-change#:~:text=Between%202010%20and%202020%2C%20the, population%20grew%20by%205%20percent.
76 Bay Area Equity Atlas, “Market rent,” n.d., https://bayareaequityatlas.org/indicators/market-rent.
77 Sarah Klearman, “As Bay Area cities face tough new state housing targets, they haven't even met the old ones,” San Francisco Business Times, January 26, 2023, https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2023/ 01/26/sixth-rhna-abag-progress.html.
78 By ‘market urbanist millennial’ I refer to a nexus of at least three social axes: a racial axis, an ideological axis and a generational axis. The market urbanist position is one that views solutions to certain exigencies related to the real-estate market, or housing in general, as being problems that have, at their basis and core, a market-associated knot and therefore in turn a market-associated solution. The knot implies the solution: “Rental housing and real-estate ownership unaffordability have largely and solely at their root a limitation in the stock/supply of either type [this is the knot], and one must remediate this supply related limitation with housing of the most pragmatic, reasonable and dominant kind: market-rate house produced by private development [this is the solution]”. This ‘market urbanist’ phrase denotes the ideological component of the aggregate phrase, and the others are easier. Though not mentioned here in my rendition of the term, it is silent and implied that this aggregate demographic is white: this shapes the racial assumptions, distinctions and motivations of this subjective position. Naturally and clearly given, this is the racial component of the term. Lastly, the millennial basis of the term denotes that this movement is not solely occupied by (white) millennials, but that the millennial demographic is the originating demographic of this particular subjective position: both younger generations (Gen Z, Alpha, etc.) will surely be inducted into it, and older generations will similarly be inducted through the ideological influence of the base millennial position that had first articulated this subjective political orientation. While I may term someone a ‘white market-urbanist millennial’ they may in fact be of a younger or older generation, and I may mean that a given person is influenced by the ideological and subjective origin of this movement and that they intersect with it largely in subjective position and will.
79 The white expulsory homeowner bloc is a simpler term. In this term I refer to a white demographic of an older generation (Baby-Boomers or Gen X) that have land-titles to low-density residential dwellings, and have furthermore sought to protect their properties’ valuation through the utilization of the racialized tool of technically Euclidean use-zoning, along with other inequities of representation in the planning process. Beyond this, the often racialized safeguarding of valuation has intentionally borne implications for the siting and institution of the multi-family residential housing that would mediate rental prices, in particular. Not to mention that the zoning policy forwarded by this group has effectualized sprawl as a regional planning strategy, and this has moreover facilitated the production of transport derived climate pollutants. The effectualized will of this political segment has had determinate overlapping and negative material consequences – but the basis of all of these consequences is their racialized expulsion.
80 Conor Dougherty, “The Surprising Left-Right Alliance That Wants More Apartments in Suburbs,” The New York Times, March 9, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/business/economy/yimby-housing-conference.html.
81 Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004).
82 The Social Housing Act, Cal. Assemb. AB 309 (2023-2024), https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB309/id/2841601.
83 Douglas Rice, “Chart Book: Cuts in Federal Assistance Have Exacerbated Families’ Struggles to Afford Housing,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, April 12, 2016, https://www.cbpp.org/research/chart-book-cuts-in-federal- assistance-have-exacerbated-families-struggles-to-afford-housing.
84 Yonah Freemark and Corianne Payton Scally, “LIHTC Provides Much-Needed Affordable Housing, But Not Enough to Address Today’s Market Demands,” Urban Institute, July 11, 2023, https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/ lihtc-provides-much-needed-affordable-housing-not-enough-address-todays-market-demands.
85 Christine Serlin, “Nearly 500,000 LIHTC Units at Risk of Being Lost,” Affordable Housing Finance, October 18, 2018, https://www.housingfinance.com/news/nearly-500-000-lihtc-units-at-risk-of-being-lost_o.
86 Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotexte, 2015).
87 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
88 Loïc J. D. Wacquant, Urban Outcasts : A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008).
89 An exception here is Denvir and Freemark, who both critique the insufficiency of the private market for the production of affordable units, and then also argue for social housing as a counter-cyclical measure from a position of a radical bent of pragmatism. The failed logic that I contest here is not then devoted to these thinkers, but rather to the pro-houser that indeed leaves implicit behind the logos of the counter-cyclical reasoning for social housing the buried notion of a counterfactual market deferentialist necessity: that is, an expression of regard for private market development that views its perceptive object with glasses that are always a bit too rosy. One can note this symptom by those who always make excuses for their onlooked content, even though it never delivers. See Daniel Denvir and Yonah Freemark, “Just Build the Homes,” Slate, May 22, 2023, https://slate.com/business/2023/05/ public-housing-upzoning-yimby-affordability-crisis.html.
90 White People 4 Black Lives, “Who We Are,” n.d., https://www.awarela.org/white-people-4-black-lives.
91 Jewish Voice for Peace, “Our Approach to Zionism,” n.d., https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/ resource/zionism/.
92 Muhammad Alameldin, “The Housing Movement Failed Gaza – and Revealed Its Own Double Standards,” Next City, May 13, 2024, https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/the-housing-movement-failed-gaza-and-revealed-its-own -double-standards#:~:text=More%20than%2079%2C000%20housing%20units,housing%20since%20World% 20War%20II.
93 Cantong, “The Destabilization of American Zoning.”
94 The tenants’ movement does indeed have a position that has contested land-use. One cannot look at community land trusts (CLTs), the community benefits agreement (CBA) model, resistance to short-term rentals, or say Strategic Actions for a Just Economy’s (SAJE’s) People’s Planning School – and say otherwise. At the same time, all of these efforts, though stunning and precedent setting, seem to have in common that they take a risk of displacement as the impetus for a given effort or catalyzation of action. Two exceptions to this generalization are both United to House LA as well as Measure JJJ. Both of these latter policies are unique and serve as a stepping stone towards a more regional land-use contestation that pressures the landlocked geographies of the white expulsory homeowner bloc. Beyond these exceptatory measures, though, most political projects seeking to reshape land-use in the tenants’ movement across the United States have been predicated on defense, and not necessarily the reshaping of land-use governance across an entire region in a radical, positively expressive and generalized fashion. We need anti-displacement politics and this is not up for debate. Without the tenants’ and housing justice movement (constituted by tenants’ unions, tenants’ rights organizations, community-based housing lawyers, housing coalitions, etc.), there would be no one to fight alongside tenants facing displacement, substandard housing and rent grievances from the landlord class. The market urbanist millennial is surely not interested in this. Upon this, I should clarify the following: my point is to suggest that the future of land-use politics may be forging a kind of nexus between anti-displacement organizing and organizing against the regional congealment of land-use and zoning status from the 20th century, and living, white expulsory homeowner bloc.
95 Jenna Davis, “The Double-Edged Sword of Upzoning,” Brookings, July 15, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2021/07/15/ the-double-edged-sword-of-upzoning/.
96 This material nature is not at all distinct from either human will or human randomness, especially in the anthropocenic age.
Editor's note: The ideas expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of the Othering & Belonging Institute or UC Berkeley, but belong to the author.
