Urban Displacements

Governing Surplus and Survival in Global Capitalism

Susanne Soederberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367236175
• eBook ISBN: 9781000327519
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Real Estate
• Index: Business

WINNER of the BISA IPEG Book Prize 2021

https://www.bisa.ac.uk/members/working-groups/ipeg/articles/ipeg-2021-book-prize-winner-announced

With an eye to further our understanding of everyday life in global capitalism, Urban Displacements provides the first systemic critical political economy analysis of low-income rental housing and social dislocations, combining both theoretical advancements and detailed empirical studies, centering on Berlin, Dublin and Vienna.

Soederberg pushes beyond dominant debates by treating low-rent housing as a unique commodity that provides a necessary place for the societal reproduction of labour power whilst being integrated into the global dynamics of capitalism. She argues that historical and geographical configurations of monetized governance, including landlords, employers and inter-scalar state practices, have served to reproduce urban displacements and obfuscate their gendered, class and racialized underpinnings. The outcome is the everyday facilitation and normalization of urban poverty and social marginalization on one side, and capital accumulation on the other.

Building on Soederberg's previous book Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry, this accessible and interdisciplinary text will be useful to academics and students in political science, sociology, geography, urban studies, labour studies, European studies and gender studies.

PART I
Framing displacements

1
DISRUPTING THE HOUSING CRISIS

A prominent pan-European housing justice organization, Housing Europe, noted, ‘in 2017, 10.2 percent of households in the EU spent over 40 percent of their disposable income on housing costs, but this share increases to 37.8 percent when considering households at-risk of poverty’. Housing Europe went on to observe that when housing costs are taken into consideration, 156 million people – out of a total population of 446 million – are at risk of poverty’ (Housing Europe, 2019: 6).¹ With almost a quarter of EU inhabitants experiencing housing poverty, many observers – ranging from academics to policymakers to the media – have designated this phenomenon as Europe’s housing affordability crisis (Alexandri and Janoschka, 2018; FEANTSA, 2018; White and Nandedkar, 2019). This narrative is best captured by the mayor of Leipzig who, in an attempt to interrupt another European crisis trope, famously stated that ‘we don’t have a refugee crisis. We have a housing crisis’.²

This notion of a European-wide housing crisis is far from new. As Engels (1872) insisted in The Housing Question, shortages of adequate housing for the urban working poor are neither a new nor natural social phenomenon. Instead, they represent an essential feature in capitalism (Aalbers and Christophers, 2014; Charnock et al., 2014; Madden and Marcuse, 2016). By this, Engels meant that housing shortages for the labouring poor are an integral feature of capitalism’s incessant and singular drive to accumulate for accumulation’s sake without regard for the social consequences (Harvey, 1989, 1999). Engels captures this neglect well when he notes that ‘one thing is certain: there are already in existence sufficient buildings for dwellings in the big towns to remedy immediately any real housing shortage, given rational utilization of them. This can naturally only take place by the expropriation of the present owners and by quartering in their houses the homeless or those workers excessively overcrowded in their former houses’ (1872, emphasis in the original).

The hallmarks of surplus and scarcity in capitalism are brought into sharp relief in the quote furnished by Engels. In many ways, displacements of disposable yet indispensable labour power in 21st-century Europe mirror the abject conditions in which a good number of urban poor lived in the 1800s, notably expensive rent for substandard living conditions (overcrowded, mould-infested, cold dwellings), tenure insecurity and homelessness. Describing the context in which European cities experience the destructive and fast-paced processes of industrialization in the late 1800s, Engels writes:

what is meant today by housing shortage is the peculiar intensification of the bad housing conditions of the workers as the result of the sudden rush of population to, the big towns; a colossal increase in rents, a still further aggravation of overcrowding in the individual houses, and, for some, the impossibility of finding a place to live at all. And this housing shortage gets talked of so much only because it does not limit itself to the working class but has affected the petty bourgeoisie also. The housing shortage from which the workers and part of the petty bourgeoisie suffer in our modern big cities is one of the numerous smaller, secondary evils, which result from the present-day capitalist mode of production.

(Engels, 1872: URL)

Engels’ depiction draws our attention to the class dynamics of capitalism often missing in the discussions of present-day housing crisis and leading debates on housing policy. Capitalism is populated not only by capitalists but also by workers. The latter are vital, although often neglected in conceptualizations of financialization, as they represent the low-wage tenants who experience displacements. Due to their inability to earn living wages or access sufficient social wages (welfare provisioning), an increasing number of households have become embroiled in a vicious cycle of precariousness marked by overindebtedness (rental arrears), evictions and homelessness. Since the 1990s, more and more people in the European Union (EU) – especially low-skilled workers, migrants, refugees and single parents – have been displaced from their rental homes due to insufficient or irregular income.

Towards a new housing question

As Engels’ analysis reveals, housing has long been seen as a special commodity under capitalism. Marxist scholars in the 1970s and 1980s began to query the tensions of the housing commodity under capitalism (Berry, 1979; Clarke and Ginsburg, 1975). As Berry noted, housing is ‘a necessary element in the social reproduction of labour power and hence the reproduction of capitalism itself; workers need houses to live in and capitalists need live workers to exploit!’ (Berry, 1981: 3).³ Harvey (1989: 19), too, echoed this claim when he stated that unlike other commodities, labour power ‘has to go home every night and reproduce itself before coming back to work the next morning’.

Building upon this, my renewed housing question is as follows: how might we understand the class dynamics involved in reproducing displaced low-wage workers, who neither own their homes nor are directly and/or fully exploited by capitalists as wage labour; but instead are linked to contemporary capitalism as renters, debtors and, more generally, surplus populations? Put another way, how might we comprehend the role of rental housing as a site of societal reproduction of an ever-growing number of displaced surplus workers, who are made disposable through the accumulation processes of contemporary capitalism and yet provide essential services for its continued expansion?

The significance of my revised housing question lies in its ability to advance the debates about urban displacements in four distinct ways. First and foremost, it allows us to move away from a fetishized perspective of housing to a more dynamic and complex understanding of rental housing as a commodity under global capitalism. In this view, rental housing is a historical social relation entailing two contradictory features: a place of survival of low-wage tenants and a site of social accumulation. Two other commodities are vital to our understanding of housing, too: unwaged and waged labour power and money (private money in the form of credit and public money in the form of social surplus). As I discuss in the next chapter, the credit system and surplus populations (under- and unemployed labour power) represent levers for the continued expansion of capitalism (Harvey, 1999; Marx, 1993: 535). Seen from this angle, we can view the commodity of rental housing as a place of interplay between these two levers (and commodities) involved in the expansion of global capitalism. These two levers also represent two (labour power and money) of the three commodities (commodity-triad) underpinning displacements, which I discuss in Chapter 2.

Second, and related, my renewed housing question reorients our understanding of displacements away from the sole realm of consumption (commodity exchange), which dominates many housing debates under the rubric of financialization. As such, this query encourages us to situate our thinking in the dynamics of credit-led accumulation, including questions of societal reproduction of the total capital relation involving both capital and disposable labour power, with many labourers suffering from in-work poverty toiling in the service sector, which represents a key site for employment in Berlin, Vienna and Dublin.

Third, the renewed housing question draws our attention to the capitalist nature of state power in mediating and reproducing displacements at various scales of intervention and the role of monetized power therein. Broadly, monetized state power applies to both private money flows (credit) as well as public money in the form of social surplus (see Chapter 2). Grasping the social power of money in the renewed housing question entails an understanding of secondary, or indirect, forms of exploitation between debtor and creditor as well as between tenant and landlord (Soederberg, 2014). Theorizing the social power of public money (social surplus) requires us to comprehend the role of the state – at its various scales of intervention – in global capitalism. As I discuss in Chapter 2, monetized governance and the power relations therein reflect the fail forward strategies of privatization, marketization and individualization in the market-led approach to housing outlined earlier. As Peck and Tickell (2002) argue, ‘fail forward’ describes state strategies that are predicated on the belief that the only viable solution advanced to the problems caused by neoliberal policies is a neoliberal response. And, fourth, the renewed housing question invites us to think about the racialized and gendered landscape of displaced low-wage tenants in urban spaces of global capitalism.

Together, all four analytical bearings assist us in making legible the less visible features and dynamics of urban displacement of disposable, yet indispensable, labour power in global capitalism. This approach is essential to help us move past the dominant framing of the housing-as-a-market approach that is intrinsically embroiled in the current European housing crisis.

Housing as market

Proponents of the market-led view include capitalist states at all scales of governance, international organizations (European Commission, 2017; McKinsey and Company, 2014; UN-Habitat, 2011; World Bank, 1993) and the majority of landlords, both private and public. The market-led approach captures the prevailing diagnosis of, and solution to, the lack of sufficient supply of affordable housing (Bourdieu, 2005). As Peck and Tickell (2002: 382) explain, this discourse is strong in part because of its ‘self-actualizing nature and in part because of their self-evident alignment with the primary contours of contemporary political-economic power’.

Deeply suspicious of state intervention, including public investment in social housing, those advocating a market-led approach believe that suitably liberalized housing markets will equilibrate supply and demand, thereby establishing a natural market price that reconciles supply with demand (World Bank, 1993). The reasoning behind this perspective is that markets are economically more efficient, rational and innovative than states (Bourdieu, 2005). On this view, private, for-profit actors should be granted the responsibility for planning, building and managing rental housing (McKinsey and Company, 2014; cf. Bruun, 2018; August, 2020).

Aside from its role in protecting private property and providing market incentives such as subsidized use of public land and tax reductions, state intervention into rental housing markets is shunned on the basis that it will only serve to distort price information, thereby making social housing more expensive than its so-called natural market price (World Bank, 1993). In this market-based paradigm, housing is taken as given, a neutral object in which people live and which can be purchased on the market. Questions of class, power and struggle are thus side-stepped in favour of focusing on getting the price right through market forces characterized by individual self-interest and rationality (Friedman, 2002; cf. Keen, 2011).

Since the 1990s, many EU member states have, to varying degrees, heede...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Displacements – an introduction
• Part I Framing displacements
• Part II Regional displacements
• Part III Urban displacements
• Displacements – a conclusion
• Index