By paying greater attention to who files bankruptcy, we can learn a great deal about the social and economic disparities that plague our society. By reforming and expanding access to bankruptcy, we can chip away at some of these disparities.
In the housing context, a law to facilitate countervailing power must be geared toward encouraging tenant participation at the grassroots, building-by-building level, and it must be sufficiently robust so as to check the enormous power of corporate, financialized real estate.
we argue that to decommodify urban property, we need to fight not only for policy and funding which transfers land and housing to social ownership, but also for policies that make extractive and predatory housing models less viable and organizing more feasible. We need a strategy that incorporates both social housing and housing justice.
When vacant land and structures fall into the hands of the state, new possibilities emerge. How can local governments transform these assets into co-governed spaces?
Introducing a symposium on non-market approaches to governance over land and housing.
Shelter is one of the largest items in a person’s budget, and among the most rigid. How can the state ensure that renters don’t get crushed as workers during a recession, and then crushed again with housing costs as the economy recovers?
The annual ranking of the world’s richest highlights the often dramatic shifts, upwards and downwards, in the net wealth of elites. What do these fluctuations tell us about the nature of the things – the property – these elites own, and about the nature of property in contemporary capitalism?
In the United States, the rule of law has always had property rights as its lodestar, with private property serving as the central legal interest that requires protection. Attending to our history reveals the dangers and paradoxical nature of this property-first conception of the rule of law.
Last week, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden Administration’s most recent moratorium on evictions. The decision, along with an anemic federal rental assistance effort, has put millions of people at risk of being removed from their homes. To offer our readers different ways into this important ruling, we asked Amy Kapczynski, Nikolas Bowie, Tara…
Understanding the law’s role in the project of Israeli colonization requires examining how distinct legal frameworks applied across a legally fragmented space can nevertheless share a common defining logic. One manifestation of this shared logic becomes evident by scrutinizing claims to land adjudicated by Israeli courts: Israeli state agencies and Jewish settler groups are treated as presumptively proper claimants of property while non-Jewish Palestinians are treated, at best, as dwellers who are not entitled to claim property but merely inhabit the land at the sufferance of Israeli authorities.
To understand what’s at stake in the fight for rent cancellation, we first need to understand the significance of rent. In the US, rent is the vehicle for a wealth transfer from the poorest third of the population to a mere 7% of US residents and a relatively small number of corporate entities. The mom-and-pop landlords that make up that 7% face more precarity than their corporate counterparts, underlining the importance of COVID-19 mortgage cancellation. But many tenants live one paycheck away from homelessness, representing a far greater and more vulnerable segment of the population.
The argument goes that cash benefits, such as UBI, afford recipients the dignity to choose what they need, versus in-kind benefits which paternalistically define that need for them. By removing government restrictions on spending, they allow recipients the freedom to consume on their terms. However, this so-called choice is in name only without a guarantee that basic needs will be met. The context of housing provides one example of this. The reality of cash benefits is that even where choice is not restricted by the state, it remains restricted by the failures of the market.
The first of a two-part response, in which Dagan responds to the concern that liberal property is self-destructive.
Liberalism as the “Mansion on the Hill”
I want to suggest, however, that autonomy—even Dagan’s rehabilitated, communitarian conception of it—is a myth. Rather, the dependence and reliance (the vulnerability) against which autonomy is pitted is not pathogenic. It is not pathological. It is not an error to be fixed or a deficiency to be remedied.”
