Metropolitics

Life, Loss, and Cooperative Housing in New York

Christian Anderson — 2025-03-11T06:00:00Z

What forms of urban living, sociality, and security are enabled by social housing? At once memoir and counter-history, Just City offers an evocative answer to this question based on experiences growing up in collective housing in 1970s New York.
At a moment when selective nostalgia is being channeled to potent political effect, Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right offers a compelling counterpoint. The book is a memoir detailing the author's upbringing in

- Reviews / housing, right to housing, affordable housing, cooperative housing, public housing, social housing, sociality, urbanity, New York, Upper West Side, Manhattan

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

Policing Social Housing in Paris: The Role of GPIS

Virginie Malochet & translated by Oliver Waine — 2021-05-28T05:00:00Z

Social landlords in France recently obtained the right to organize surveillance and security operations themselves within their properties. Virginie Malochet studies the case of GPIS, a social-housing security force founded in 2004 in Paris, and explores the rationale and nature of this kind of policing, which reflects both the rise of security concerns and the increased involvement of social-housing organizations in the process of ensuring urban security.
In social-housing neighborhoods in

- From the Field / policing, surveillance, social housing, Paris, public housing, profession, housing projects, night, security, public order, France

The Contestations and Contradictions of the New York City Housing Authority's Plan for Mixed-Income Redevelopment

Valerie E. Stahl — 2020-11-10T06:00:00Z

The New York City Housing Authority, faced with a capital shortfall of nearly $40 billion, is pursuing a series of privatization plans. Its residents are resisting. As Valerie Stahl asks, when public housing is seen as an avenue for profit, is it actually being preserved?
Resident resistance to infill: competing ideas for the future of NYCHA
On a frigid evening in January 2019, the meeting room at the Stanley M. Isaacs Center, the community center for the public housing development of

- From the Field / housing, housing justice, affordable housing, public housing, social housing, New York City housing policy, public-housing redevelopment, privatization, New York, United States

Social Housing in Postcolonial Contexts

Clémence Léobal & translated by Oliver Waine — 2020-09-25T05:00:00Z

What happens when national social-housing policies developed in mainland France are transposed in overseas territories resulting from former colonies? Taking as her starting point an ethnographic study conducted among Bushinengue minorities in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, in French Guiana, Clémence Léobal demonstrates that the administration of social housing—from the displacement of these populations to “adapted” housing in the 1980s to the occupation standards imposed in new-build dwellings—is

- From the Field / Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, French Guiana, Guyane, overseas territories, housing, public housing, social housing, ethnography

Educating Tenants: A Historic Remit of Social Housing

Danièle Voldman & translated by Oliver Waine — 2020-04-17T05:00:00Z

In France, the professions of social worker and concierge both emerged in the early 20th century, and both responded to a central concern of social landlords: educating their tenants in the standards of “good living.” Danièle Voldman retraces the history of these community-based professions, and the role they played in supervising the working classes in social housing.
From the beginning of the 20th century, when the first social-housing tenants started to move into their new homes, both

- Essays / history, housing, social housing, public housing, tenants, profession, France, Paris

Organizing Against Projet Gentrification: Housing Activism in a White-Supremacist Landscape in Montreal

Pierce Nettling — 2018-11-27T06:00:00Z

Housing activists in Montreal and Quebec have successfully sought to secure tenant rights and social housing for over 50 years at neighborhood, city and provincial level. Here, Pierce Nettling discusses how the continued reliance of left-wing parties on a white francophone political base mirrors the long-standing and systemic problems of racism in the province.
---- Series: Progressive Mayors and Urban Social Movements Montreal's left-based housing movements are rather unique in North

- Essays / gentrification, housing, racism, social housing, Montreal, public housing, Canada, affordable housing, progressive urban politics, race, mayors, progressive mayors, Quebec

Estate Regeneration in London: Politics and Protest

Gerald Koessl — 2017-01-31T07:00:00Z

Gerald Koessl describes dilemmas facing social-housing providers in London, where social housing often serves as the only affordable housing in gentrifying, high-cost neighbourhoods, but is also increasingly in disrepair. He critically assesses the emphasis on densification as a solution, and describes recent resident-led protest movements. The situation has strong parallels with the HOPE VI program in the US, which we hope to explore in a future article.
The regeneration of social-housing

- From the Field / gentrification, housing policy, social housing, London, public housing, protest, HOPE VI program

On Our Own: Protecting and Developing Social Housing in the Trump Era

John Krinsky — 2017-01-13T06:00:00Z

In response to a tense post-election moment in the US, the Metropolitics editorial committee has initiated Rapid-Response Peer Review, with a commitment to quickly reviewing and publishing articles that examine organizing and activism around crucial urban issues. Our second call was for papers related to housing policy. John Krinsky argues for a sustained public commitment to housing at the state and local level—a “progressive federalism”—in order to prevent the worsening of New York City's

- Debates / housing, housing policy, social housing, New York, public housing, Donald Trump, federalism

The Intimate Politics of Public Housing's Demise

Dory Thrasher — 2016-04-12T05:00:00Z

Many ethnographies have documented the physical and institutional fragility of America's public housing. Writing in a different idiom, anthropologist Catherine Fennell opens a line of inquiry into how encounters with physical things—buildings and building systems—forge bonds of sympathy between and among housing residents, bureaucrats, and members of the broader public. Registering and interpreting these sympathetic encounters, Fennell's study of Chicago's Henry Horner Homes, the “last project

- Reviews / Chicago, social housing, public housing, welfare state, public-housing redevelopment