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LPE Originals

What the UK Student Rent Strikes Reveal about Financialization

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The Bristol Rent Strike, which now has over 1900 students pledging to withhold rent, is one of the many ongoing student strikes across the UK. Over the past few months, students at roughly 20 universities including Manchester, Oxford, and Cambridge have organized mass rent strikes, demanding overall reductions in rent, no-penalty contract releases, and better accommodation conditions. But one significant obstacle stands in their way: Many of these students live in financialized student housing—in buildings owned not by universities but by multi-million-dollar corporations. The financialization of student housing has fundamentally altered the relationship between universities and students and, in so doing, has complicated student resistance against housing injustice.
LPE Originals

Privatized “Affordable Housing” Is A Scam

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You hear it everywhere: we need more “affordable housing.” It’s a seemingly uncontroversial call, and yet… a group of members of the LA Tenants Union were compelled to document the many and profound problems with the dominant model of privatized “affordable housing” in the United States.
LPE Originals

Rent Cancellation: Social Protection in Uncertain Times

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With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, interlocking structural inequities in health, employment, and racial justice have buffeted vulnerable populations. The looming “eviction apocalypse” sits at the nexus of these three ills. Black and Latinx people have the highest COVID infection, death, and unemployment rates nationwide. Mass evictions would only worsen this situation, preventing these households from sheltering in…
LPE Originals

Slumlord Capitalism v. Global Pandemic: LPE on Covid (vol 3)

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As part of our ongoing effort to bring you the best LPE work on COVID-19, today we bring you this piece from John Whitlow, followed by a roundup of LPE COVID writing published elsewhere.  The poet Langston Hughes once wrote, “I wish the rent was heaven sent.” With a record 10 million Americans filing for…
LPE Originals

Moving Beyond Liberal Legal Rights: An Expansive Vision of Right to Counsel

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This week, we’re sharing two discussions on John Whitlow’s recently published article reflecting on New York’s right to counsel in evictions proceedings. Our contributors share visions of right to counsel that move beyond due process rights. The contributors show that right to counsel campaigns are part of broader movements that seek to address the material deprivation underlying the…
LPE Originals

LPE on COVID (vol 2)

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Today, as part of our ongoing effort to bring you the best LPE work on COVID-19, we’re reposting a letter from Professor Noah Zatz to his City Counsel regarding evictions during the pandemic.
LPE Originals

In Defense of Rent Control and Rent Caps (Part II of II)

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Yesterday, we posted the beginning of Duncan Kennedy’s testimony before the Massachusetts State Legislature’s Joint Committee on Housing. Below is the second half of the testimony. Claim 3: State provision of more section 8 certificates and subsidized affordable projects can resolve the housing crisis. More section 8s and more rent-restricted affordable subsidized units could in…
LPE Originals

In Defense of Rent Control and Rent Caps (Part I of II)

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The Massachusetts State Legislature’s Joint Committee on Housing is currently considering two bills that would revive rent control in the state. The first bill caps rent increases for not-owner-occupied residential housing at the CPI not to exceed 5%, with an income eligibility proviso. The second much more ambitious bill authorizes localities to choose among a…
LPE Originals

The Deregulatory Takings Are Coming!

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Laws take. It’s what they’re for. Taxes take dollars from some people and distribute them to other people. Traffic laws take away drivers’ opportunity to speed through intersections. Zoning restrictions take from neighbors their ability to build apartments in their backyards. Talk to me about a law’s requirements and you’ll be talking about a taking.…
LPE Originals

Black Proprietorship and Crises of Value

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The history of black banking, even for its many failures, holds a unique perspective on property and its contradictions of value. It also contains a deep lesson about how economic strategies generate and are reinforced by affective practices—and how racist economic laws rested on public feelings of their own.
LPE Originals

It’s Mine, and Yours

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I teach in a law school where most students and faculty pride themselves on falling somewhere along a spectrum of progressive, extremely progressive, socialist, and left anarchist. Thus, every year, usually within the first month of starting my first-semester property law course, I find myself surprised that the vast majority of my students appear to…