Metropolitics

Massive Evictions and Housing Crisis in Chile

Santiago Castillo Braithwaite — 2025-04-15T05:00:00Z

In the midst of a deep housing crisis, more than 100,000 families in Chile are currently living in informal settlements. Santiago Castillo examines the rise of land occupations following a 2019 social uprising and the recent state responses that, far from providing solutions, have only deepened the conflict.
---- Series: Horizons in the Housing Struggle Starting in October 2019, amid the most intense protests since the end of Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, a wave of urban land occupations

A Crisis of Habitation in LA's Last Remaining Wetland

Deike Peters & Sam Lutzker — 2025-03-18T06:00:00Z

As housing crises become increasingly entangled with environmental crises, the question of just outcomes requires different ways of thinking. In their exploration of the politics of Los Angeles' Ballona Wetlands, Deike Peters and Sam Lutzker suggest the concept of multispecies justice may offer a pathway for negotiating these conflicts.
The Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve lies just south of famous Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Its 600 acres (240 ha) are all that remains of the once mighty

- From the Field / environmental justice, environment, ecology, urban ecology, housing crisis, housing, housing justice, habitat, wetlands, multispecies justice, United States, California, Los Angeles

Can the Market Solve Los Angeles' Housing and Homelessness Crisis?

Katherine Smock — 2025-02-27T06:00:00Z

Policymakers in Los Angeles hope that market-based solutions will solve the city's housing crisis. Data from the first years of the city's planning streamlining program show that inviting investment won't improve conditions for low-income renters.
---- Series: Horizons in the Housing Struggle The city of Los Angeles, like many cities across the US, is in dire need of much more affordable housing to alleviate and prevent homelessness. Despite the promise of alternative methods of creating

- Debates / United States, California, Los Angeles, homelessness, housing, housing crisis, housing markets, tenants

Horizons in the Housing Struggle

Jaime Jover & Kristen Hackett — 2025-02-14T06:00:00Z

We are living through a polycrisis, a multidimensional, interlinked series of capitalism's structural problems emerging worldwide. Unfolding genocides, wars and armed conflicts, Western democratic models in crisis and fascism on the rise, labor struggles increasing, climate change and related disasters growing, and the looming environmental collapse… The list is long and illustrates the ongoing and irresoluble conflict between capital and life. Even though it might not have attracted much

- Series / housing, right to housing, affordable housing, housing crisis, housing policy, housing justice, public housing, rental housing, social housing

When Rising Expectations Meet Rising Reaction: New York's 2024 Housing Policy Fight and the Prospects for the Future

Oksana Mironova & Samuel Stein — 2024-09-10T05:00:00Z

How did New York housing policy fare with Democratic control of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government? Oksana Mironova and Samuel Stein review the 2024 housing policy fight and the stakes going forward for the housing movement.
A few years ago, the New York tenant movement forced the state government to strengthen and expand its rent regulation system. This was the greatest expansion of renters' rights New York had seen in decades. In the years since, the movement has

- Debates / housing, real estate, real-estate industry, tenants, homelessness, New York, affordable housing, housing crisis, housing policy, housing justice, social housing

A Global Right-to-Housing Movement Versus Financialization

Jaime Jover — 2021-06-23T15:38:01Z

Financialization enables a wealthy transnational class to accumulate capital through land, enhances inequalities through housing, and denies and deprives human rights. Housing activists must articulate an internationalist response to this global conflict, setting aside political and cultural differences and looking beyond the local scale of every housing conflict.
In February 2021, the Gittell Collective at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) hosted a workshop on

- Essays / affordable housing, housing, real estate, right to housing, housing crisis, housing justice, financialization

A Social Portrait of the Subprime Crisis

Camille François & translated by Oliver Waine — 2021-05-14T05:00:00Z

What have been the social and urban consequences of the subprime mortgage crisis, and what lessons can be learned and applied to the current health and economic crisis? Isaac Martin and Christopher Niedt's 2015 work, Foreclosed America, paints a sociological portrait of households evicted from their homes in the United States.
The economic consequences of the Covid‑19 pandemic invite comparisons with previous global economic crises, not least the recent subprime crisis. This crisis, which

- Reviews / subprime, crisis, financial crisis, housing crisis, Covid-19, coronavirus, pandemic, United States, foreclosure, evictions, inequalities

Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research

Joshua Akers — 2021-03-12T07:00:00Z

In this series, Metropolitics focuses on the intersection of organizing, technology, politics, and policy in urban rental housing struggles. It seeks to place the increasing salience of contemporary housing struggles in the context of the transformation of urban housing markets following the financial crisis and the additional precarity induced by Covid‑19.
---- ▼ Jump to the list of articles ▼ The US federal eviction moratorium will expire at the end of March. The original moratorium, issued

- Series / housing, activism, community organizing, Covid-19, crisis, financial crisis, housing crisis, coronavirus

The Limits of the Accepted Orthodoxy on Rent Control

Loïc Bonneval & François Robert & translated by Oliver Waine — 2019-03-22T06:00:00Z

In response to a recent critique of their work, Loïc Bonneval and François Robert defend their method and results. In their view, not only should the idea of the unwanted effects of rent control be qualified, but the negative effects of the lack of regulation of the private rental market, which characterizes the current situation, should also be highlighted.
Robert C. Ellickson and David Le Bris's criticism of an article on rent control published in Métropolitiques in 2011 (and translated in

- Debates / rent, rent control, rental, rental housing, affordable housing, housing, housing crisis, housing policy, real estate, real-estate industry, history, France, Lyon

The Damage Inflicted by French Rent Controls between 1914 and 1948

Robert C. Ellickson & David Le Bris — 2019-02-26T06:00:00Z

In an essay in Metropolitics, Loïc Bonneval questioned the consensus among economists that strict rent controls have perverse effects. Bonneval based his analysis on a study of apartment buildings in Lyon between the two world wars. Robert Ellickson and David Le Bris challenge Bonneval's interpretation, and marshal evidence of the damage that rent controls inflicted in Lyon and France between 1914 and 1948.
In an article originally published in 2011 in Métropolitiques (in French) and recently

- Debates / rent, rent control, rental, rental housing, housing markets, housing policy, inequalities, Lyon, France, housing, housing crisis