Metropolitics

“Build Canada Homes” Will Fail Without Confronting Anti-Black Racism

Prentiss Dantzler — 2026-04-28T05:00:00Z

Canada's new housing agency risks repeating the same injustices that produced today's uneven housing crisis unless it embeds anti-racist frameworks in its development plans.
When the federal government launched Build Canada Homes (BCH) in the fall of 2025, it promised a bold solution to the housing shortage: build faster, build smarter, and finally close the supply gap. The urgency is clear. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Canada must double new housing starts from

- Essays / housing, affordable housing, housing policy, racism, Canada, North America, housing crisis, inequalities

Producing Affordable Housing in West Africa: How States Respond to Demand and Local Realities

Mathilde Mouton & translated by Oliver Waine — 2025-10-10T05:00:00Z

Based on her consulting work in West Africa, Mathilde Mouton highlights the limitations of state-led social housing programs. She calls for greater consideration of initiatives in the informal sector to produce housing that is adapted to the needs and resources of local populations.
A plan for 100,000 new homes in Senegal, a plan for 150,000 social housing units in Côte d'Ivoire, a plan for 40,000 dwellings in Burkina Faso, a plan to build 20,000 homes in Benin… Over the past decade, many

- From the Field / Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa, Senegal, housing, affordable housing, informal housing, social housing

The Uruguayan Housing Cooperatives: The Miracle of the “Commons” | Las cooperativas de vivienda uruguayas. El milagro de los “comunes”

Benjamín Nahoum — 2025-04-08T05:00:00Z

Benjamín Nahoum presents the case of the Uruguayan cooperative movement that started in the 1960s. Through the years, the movement has shifted—as have other South American housing movements—but the principles of mutual aid and self-management have remained clear, and it has become one of the primary housing tenures in Uruguay.
---- Series: Horizons in the Housing Struggle ▼ Pulse aquí para leer en español ▼
Fifteen years ago, the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, which annually awards the

- From the Field / Uruguay, South America, Latin America, Global South, housing, affordable housing, cooperative housing, commons, alternative housing, cooperation

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

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

Fighting for Housing Justice: An Interview with Two Youth Organizers in Curtis Bay, Baltimore

Nicole Fabricant & Carlos Sanchez & Terriq Thompson — 2021-03-16T06:00:00Z

Two Baltimore youth organizers discuss the importance of community land trusts, for housing and beyond.
---- Series: Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research Free Your Voice began as an informal after-school program inside Baltimore's Benjamin Franklin High School. It has evolved into a powerful youth-led movement to end incineration, build community land trusts, and push for zero waste and just transition in Baltimore.
The group organized between 2012 and

- Interviews / community land trusts, community organizing, activism, mobilization, youth, youth organizing, housing, affordable housing, housing justice, Baltimore, United States, Maryland, land use, land rights

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

The House is Ours: How Moms 4 Housing Challenged the Private-Property Paradigm

Lauren Everett — 2020-10-06T05:00:00Z

In the midst of a global housing affordability crisis that has been heightened by the Covid‑19 pandemic, it is time to reconsider how the right to profit from property ownership is privileged in policy, funding, and ideology in the United States. Oakland-based Moms 4 Housing's bold direct action presented a concrete challenge to the status quo.
On November 18, 2019, in west Oakland, California, Dominique Walker and Sameerah Karim started moving their families into the vacant three-bedroom

- Essays / housing, affordable housing, community land trusts, property ownership, property, homeownership, private property, real estate, speculation, California, United States, Oakland