No question so vexes New Yorkers as that of finding a place to live. For many, the cost of participation in the country’s most exciting city is to submit to conditions of exploitation that shock those unacquainted with the city’s housing scramble. While some New Yorkers enjoy comfort and security, a majority—enough, at least, to elect a political outsider as mayor—find themselves subject to a bewildering cocktail of competition, opaque but punishing costs, secret knowledge, informal segregation, inadequate maintenance, and ever-present fear of displacement. Exacerbating these challenges is a political class that has seemed content to nibble around the edges, even as out-of-control housing costs drive the middle class, and anyone who wants to pursue a lifestyle devoted to anything but untrammeled money-making, out of New York. How did things get this way, and to what extent can they be different—not just in New York, but in urban areas across the country?
In this class, we will undertake a historical and theoretical survey of the problem of housing in New York City, with an eye toward grasping both what is distinct about New York and the ways in which the city embodies, in a starkly intensified form, the problem of housing in capitalist societies in general. Beginning with broad questions—What is housing? What is housing in a capitalist economy?—we will move on to chart the history of housing in New York City since the late nineteenth century. We will explore the factors that have made New York disproportionately a city of renters, examine the role of the private homebuilding industry, and trace the impact of state action in shaping the city’s unique housing landscape. We will ask: How have workers and tenants organized to take control of their housing, whether through organizing, rent strikes, or the cooperative movement? Why is New York’s public housing program the biggest, and, despite its challenges, the most successful in the United States? What happened to New York in the era of suburbanization, white flight, disinvestment, abandonment, and arson? Why has the city courted gentrification and committed to relentlessly rising property values? What avenues exist for lowering housing costs, whether through rent freezes, new construction, a revived Mitchell-Lama program, or even a recommitment to public housing itself? And finally, how can grasping the forces—economic, political, cultural, racial, emotional—that structure the provision of housing bolster our attempts to shape a more equitable future?
“Tenements, Co-ops, and Brownstones: Housing in New York City” will also run in person.
